Alex Rider: Luck of the Goddess

Sisterly Love

They took a lift down to the basement. This was where the technical section of Jihaz Amn al Daoula operated. As the doors slid open, Alex found himself in a corridor that stretched into the distance, with doorways and plate-glass windows looking onto a series of laboratories and workshops. The area extended well beyond the house. As Alex followed Colonel Manzour, he guessed they must be walking underneath the garden. He glimpsed scientists and technicians in white coats, bent over computer screens, talking in low voices. An armed soldier passed them, going the other way, followed by two men he recognized. They were the agents who had been sent to the Hotel Neheb and who had missed Alex as he walked past them, disguised, in the corridor. Now they briefly made eye contact but said nothing.

The Colonel arrived at an office and went in without knocking. A young woman was sitting at a desk talking on the telephone, but she hung up as soon as she saw him. She was in her twenties, slim and dark- haired, wearing a blue silk suit and a headscarf. She had very soft, gentle features and it immediately struck Alex that she was a little out of place, working here. She alone in the compound actually looked friendly.

"This is Shadia," Manzour said – and the strange thing was that he had suddenly become a little uncomfortable. "She is the head of our technical section. Give her your computer."

Alex was reluctant to hand over his laptop but he did as he was told. As she took it from him, she met his eyes and smiled. "So you're the famous Alex Rider. I watched you arrive on the garden cameras." Alex remembered the statue with the swivelling head. "How are you enjoying Cairo?"

"It's been interesting so far," Alex said.

"And the sooner he's out of Cairo, the happier I'll be," Manzour cut in. "He has received an email which seems to have come from Peru. I suspect it has been rerouted..." He added a few words in Arabic and Shadia opened the laptop.

"Do you want my password?" Alex asked.

Manzour let out a bark of laughter. "Shadia has hacked into the computers of almost every world leader," he said. "The White House, the Kremlin, Downing Street, the Elysée Palace... If she asked for your password, I would fire her on the spot!"

Alex watched as Shadia's fingers swept lightly over his keyboard. He had a screen saver – a view of the River Thames – but it disappeared almost at once to be replaced by a mass of text. She worked for about fifteen seconds then looked up with mischief in her eyes. Alex saw that she had opened his email page. "You should change your password," she said. "It's far too easy."

She pulled up the email that he had received from Lima and went through the same procedure as Sabina's friend in San Francisco. That had been just days ago but to Alex it felt much longer. He wondered what time it was in California. He hadn't spoken to Sabina or her parents since he had left and suddenly he felt bad about it. He would contact them as soon as he had the opportunity. "Whoever sent this used Guerrilla Mail," Shadia said. "And you're right, Colonel. The message was routed through TOR network."

TOR stands for The Onion Router. Alex vaguely understood how it worked. Johnny Feldman had already told him that the message had been bounced around the world. In fact, it would have been sent through a network of proxy servers – computers that might not even know they were being used. The alpaca business in Lima would have been one of them. To make things more complicated, the message would have been encrypted every step of the way. It was the worst news he could have heard. As far as he could see, it would be impossible to find out where the email had begun.

Shadia must have seen the look on his face. "Don't worry," she said. "TOR network is very hard to crack. It's like a huge maze with the messenger changing his identity at every turning. It's almost completely secure but it has two weak spots: the point you go in and the point you come out. In order to send the message in the first place, they'll have had to access a wireless network. I can run a special program – it's called a correlation program – and it'll look at all the Internet traffic being sent at exactly that time. That way, I should be able to find out where this thing started."