Page 108 of Clive Cussler's Quantum Tempest

The Steghide program would align the jumbled colors of the unsolved Rubik’s Cube and solve it perfectly, and finally reveal the code.

Eric ran the keyboard, typing in the command:

steghide extract -sf orchid.jpg

Steghide prompted back: “Passkey? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _”

Both men looked at each other, completely flummoxed.

Eidolon had protected his file.

“Now what?” Murph asked.

Eric rechecked Steghide’s prompt and counted the number of underscores—nine, as it turned out. He grinned, and snatched up Eidolon’s phony driver’s license.

The Panamanian license featured several pieces of personal data including Eidolon’s nine-digite-cédulanational identity number. He handed it to Murphy.

“Read that to me.”

As Murphy read out the numbers, Stone keyboarded: “316825265.”

Steghide instantly extracted the LSB data and generated a file:

saladus.message.txt

Murphy opened up the text file. All it showed was a long string of 1’s and 0’s. It reminded Murph of his exchange with Linlin earlier.

“Gotta be an ASCII code.”

“This takes Russian nesting dolls to a whole new level,” Stone said.

“I’ll script something in Python.” Murphy banged out several lines of programming code to convert the binary numbers into human-readable words.

Moments later, Eidolon’s message appeared in plain English.

The twoOregoncomputer whiz kids stared open-mouthed at the screen like a couple of dorky gargoyles. Murph was the first to break the trance.

“We need to call the Chairman.Now.”

59

Juan dashed into the research lab, where he was greeted by his two enthusiastic techno-wonders standing by the oversize computer monitor. They insisted he come down to the lab rather than give him the results over the phone.

“We got it, Chairman,” Eric said, grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

“How?”

“Steganography!” Murph blurted out. “Dang clever. Embedding LSBs into a matrix of—”

Cabrillo raised his palm to Murphy like a traffic cop, cutting him off mid-sentence.

“Forget the sizzle. Just give me the steak.”

For years Juan tried to discipline his young techno-turks to cut to the chase in their briefs. He understood their youthful enthusiasm helped fuel their intense and relentless curiosities, which, in turn, produced actionable results. But there wasn’t time for any of their nonsense today.

Eric held up the camera’s memory card.

“Bottom line, Eidolon embedded his coded message on this. We’re sure it’s what he wanted to trade Overholt for his life.”