Read Online Huston, James W. -2003- Secret Justice (com v4.0)(html) by Secret Justice (com v4.0) - Free Book Online Page B

the
Belleau Wood
could be a problem. He’s screaming hard and loud. He has a hard-on about one of the captured terrorists. Claims you tortured him.”
    Rat didn’t respond.
    “So?”
    “What?”
    “Did you?”
    “Did I what?”
    “Torture him?”
    “I interrogated him. He’s the one who told us where Duar was. Without him, we wouldn’t have found Duar. He’d still be out there plotting to kill a few hundred thousand Americans.”
    “I’m not accusing you of anything, but if this is going to get ugly, I need to know now how big a fight we’re going to have.” He looked at Rat’s face. “I’m on your side.”
    “I appreciate it,” Rat said. “I’ve got to get going.”
    “That’s it?” Jacobs stood in amazement as Rat walked out of his office and closed the door behind him. “Rat!”
     
     
    John Johnson twirled a pencil in his left hand as he moved the laser mouse deftly with his right. He had wasted enough time already looking at news sites. He spent the first half hour of work every day in his job at the NSA, the National Security Agency, reading the latest news on-line. He read the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post, USA Today
, CNN.com, the
London Times
, even his hometown newspaper, the
Albuquerque Journal
, and the student newspaper at his alma mater, the New Mexico Military Institute, where he had completed his two-year degree. He kept track of everything he wanted to on the Internet. He was a master of the Internet in part because it was now his job. He spent most of every day on-line, looking for one thing—terrorists.
    He closed the window for the
New York Times
, took a deep breath and a deep gulp of coffee as he prepared to descend into the pits, into the seedy side of his job. Much to his dismay, he had discovered that one of the favorite places for terrorists to communicate with anonymity was in chat rooms on pornography sites. He closed his eyes momentarily and logged on to one of the many pornography sites to which he subscribed. He generally liked his job, but having to search pornography sites every day disgusted him. It was corrosive, debasing. The first images quickly came onto his screen. He gritted his teeth. He could be as moved as the next man by the sight of a beautiful woman scantily clothed. But this stuff was horrendous. Terrorists used these sites because they apparently didn’t expect governments to look for them there.
    Two years ago Johnson had been asked to participate in a newly formed group to decide how best to capitalize on the Internet, how to best use it to their advantage. The Internet had made the NSA’s work much more difficult. The volume of electronic traffic had gone up exponentially every year since the Internet had become commonplace. It enabled people to communicate in ways that were difficult to discover.
    He tried to focus on the side of the screen as he clicked through the pages to the chat room. He had almost gotten to the point where he didn’t notice the images anymore but some of them were so jarring that he couldn’t ignore them. It seemed to him that the more perverse, the more disgusting the site, the more likely it was that the people he was looking for were there. They seemed to think that the government wouldn’t go to places where child pornography or bestiality was featured. They were almost right.
    He finally made it to the chat room. There were pages of comments, some trying to be humorous, some by those for whom English was clearly not their first language. He adjusted his glasses as he read. He had come to recognize people, even those who tried to disguise themselves with several different names or identities. They misspelled or misused the same words or jammed hints or clues into their messages for their intended readers that were obvious to a cryptologist like Johnson, trained for years in the caverns of Navy cryptology. He was sure he could recognize a large number of the participants, much like a third grade teacher might