[Canonically Buck is with the admitted murderer Michael and plans to smuggle Tsion out of Israel into Egypt but is so helplessly inept He doesn't realize the Jordan River doesn't go to Egypt. Here, well here Cameron calls for help.]
Cameron got out her satellite phone and prayed --not to God, just in that vague sense one prays-- that even though those who had given it to her were dead it was still secure.
"How many favors do I owe you?" she asked when she heard the other end pick up.
The answer was too quiet for Tsion to hear, which made Cameron feel somewhat less embarrassed about the call.
"You realize I could live a thousand years and still never repay that many."
The, "What do you need?" was definitely loud enough for Tsion to hear.
"I need to smuggle someone out of the country." There was only one country left on earth, hopefully that would be enough to tell her friend where she was. She didn't want to set off any keywords, though as soon as she had said it she realized "smuggle" might have done just that.
Codes were so much easier when worked out in advance.
"Where are you hoping to go?"
"To the things that laugh at time," she said. Time laughs at all things, the saying went, but the pyramids laugh at time. Hopefully this indicated that she and Tsion were near the Egyptian border and looking to cross it. Possibly it was too obscure a reference. At least it didn't have any keywords likely to trip surveillance software.
"I see."
There was a pause.
"This isn't exactly prime," strange usage of the word, Cameron noted, probably an attempt to created a code on the fly, "but if you can get to," a series of numbers was rattled off. Cameron jotted them down. All primes. "... then I think I can help."
It took her a moment. A much longer moment than she would have liked given how simple the code was, but she worked it out. The code was perhaps too simple: each digit N was represented by the Nth prime and when translated it was simple longitude and latitude.
If the other side had intercepted the call and cracked the code as she did, then going there might be walking into a trap. Still, it was a best option
The meet location was a fair distance off, but it stayed within borders and there were no real checkpoints in the way. A couple hastily erected roadblocks, but the problem with such hasty measures was that they could be circumvented.
She told her friend she'd try to make it, and told Tsion where they were going. They began the journey.
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Using neutral keyword substitutes is probably the best option if you've got automatic surveillance going on. Human surveillance is trickier. Depends on how many rebels there are versus how many monitors.
ReplyDeleteOf course if they were both geo geeks or amateur radio operators they could use the Maidenhead Locator System. Then they could say "KM70fo89", or something that encoded that, and have a reasonably precise position.