As Chris watched, she seemed to be uploading something, not a lot of data, but she was definitely copying something to the remote server. The upload didn’t take long to complete and Chris wondered whether it was some sort of hacker’s tool to help her get more access. She ran her program and got an output file which she copied back to her own machine before deleting the files on the remote system. She was trying to tidy up after she’d visited, not wanting to leave digital footprints at the scene of the crime. She disconnected from the remote server and removed all connections that showed she had ever been there.
What the hell was she doing?
Chris continued to watch, fascinated, as Jasmine finally opened her output file in a graphics program. She must have been expecting an image, but the file was not compatible, it wouldn’t even open. Next, she opened the file in a text tool that showed a series of characters from “0” through to “F” repeated over and over. Chris recognized the characters as a hexadecimal dump of the file. She scanned through the jumbled characters as though she was trying to make some sense of it all. Chris thought it looked like a diagnostics trace of some sort although most of the text was unintelligible. Chris wondered if the file could be the results from the program she had run, but surely she would have designed the program to produce more readable output. Then at the end of the text was the phrase “SUBJECT CONFIRMED”. Chris couldn’t help himself and blurted out, ‘What the hell?’
He looked up and saw Bob, Susan, and Michelle staring at him.
‘Try to keep it down over there will ya?’ said Bob trying his damnedest not to laugh.
Chris apologized and decided he should probably stop for now. There was little more he could do; he’d gotten a good starting point and a small idea of what was going on, but he really needed a keyboard to do some serious work. This new technology was great for ordering pizza or helping to remember people’s names, but if you wanted to get some serious work done, you couldn’t beat a good old computer keyboard and monitor. He’d thought of writing a virtual keyboard projection that he could type on when sitting at a regular table, but he knew he’d miss the feel of the keys under his fingers. Michelle, Bob, and Susan were still chatting away, so Chris decided he’d watch TV. The Washington Nationals were playing the New York Mets and they were up 5-3. Chris settled back in the chair and put his arms behind his head. Michelle could probably tell he wasn’t working because he had a smile on his face.
Chris was really enjoying the game, when the heads-up display showed an incoming call. The system didn’t recognize the number so he decided he should probably take it. He excused himself and left the room. In the hallway, he answered the call.
‘Hi this is Chris.’
‘Sanders you old bugger, I hear you’re on the run.’
The accent was Welsh and Chris knew who it was straight away.
‘Wyn? What the hell are you doing calling? Don’t tell me you’re in D.C.?’
Wynyard Spicer was an old army buddy. They’d been through some rough times together, but also had a lot of fun, and drank a lot of beer too. Chris hadn’t seen Wyn for nearly eleven years, not since he’d left London to come to D.C.
‘I’m in New York, I shacked up with some bird I pulled last week. She wanted to show me her home town and, well, let’s just say it didn’t quite work out. I’m practically in your backyard, so I thought maybe I could come and see you?’
‘You need a place to stay don’t you?’
‘Chris, mate, why do you always see the worst in people?’
‘Well do you?’
Wynyard laughed. ‘I’m going to hitch my way over, see a bit of this bloody country you’ve made your home. I should be there in about a day. Unless I get murdered that is. Is it legal to hitchhike in this country?’
‘How the hell should I know?’
‘Anyway, I’ll give you a call when I get to D.C. Tell Michelle to make up the spare bed and get the beers in.’
The call ended and Chris ignored the option to store the number. It was probably a payphone anyway. Now he had to decide how to break the news to Michelle.
Chris decided Michelle could wait to hear the news about their guest, but he did manage to convince her to drop him back at his office. Michelle had told her dad about going to law school and Bob had been delighted. Chris had known for a while that was Bob’s secret wish, but he had never wanted to try to pressure Michelle into her career choice. She decided to start looking for courses and was quite excited about the whole new direction, which was good for Chris as it would give him a lot of time to spend on figuring out what had happened to Jasmine.
Little signs of Chris were starting to creep back in at his office, an empty soda can here, a few papers over there. Chris was not generally known for his tidiness but he liked to think that a messy office was the sign of a tidy mind. Or whatever other reason he could use to justify the state he generally left things in. Michelle, on the other hand, was painfully tidy. Sometimes he wondered whether she suffered from a mild form of obsessive compulsive disorder, if there was such a thing as a mild form.
He pulled a chair up to a computer terminal and moved some papers out of the way, tossing them onto the sofa. He turned the monitor on and unlocked the terminal with his password. Now it was time to do some real work. He was going hunting. The key would be to make sure his game didn’t see him coming. He had to be a sneaky bastard. He couldn’t simply knock on the front door, but there were ways and means of hiding your identity on the internet and sneaking round the back. He only hoped he could find a way in.
He started by reviewing the data captured from Jasmine’s terminal, not watching it on screen this time but rather searching through the raw commands to try to find the parts where she was gaining access. He watched as she stepped up links from one anonymous server to another and back again, until there was no way to trace her actions back. He would do the same. He knew of a few services that would disguise his digital ID and started to set things up. It took him a little over an hour to set up the complex array of routing points that would allow him to breach the target firewall without being traced back. Once he was in he would be able to find out what Jasmine had been looking for.
He set up his own safety net, a program that monitored attempts to track him through the network he had set up. If someone found he was in and tried to trace their way back to him, he would know before they got anywhere near. He stood and stretched and walked over to the fridge near his desk. He was running low on sodas; he grabbed a Dr. Peppers. ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ he said to himself as he pulled the tab.
Chris sat back down and started his break in. It was tricky at first, he needed to try the most obvious ports, but he found that as soon as he worked his way through he would be shut out and would have to try a different approach. He wondered how Jasmine had made this look so easy. Then he realized he should probably just copy what she had done. As a programmer he found it hard to simply take someone else’s work and go with it. It seemed to be the nature of programmers that they were constantly looking for ways to improve or refactor code, but he didn’t have time to mess about and if something was working, there was no need to change it.
He carefully followed the steps and made it through the first firewall. He was getting there, he replayed the next few commands and set up his links through the routers until finally he was in. He was inside this place, whatever the hell it was. He started by hunting around for documents, policies, anything that might tell him where he was, but there was nothing of use.
He felt nervous, his heart was beating faster and he knew it wasn’t from the caffeine. He was breaking the law, but the chances of being caught were so slim as to not be worth thinking about. He made a hop on to a database server and started to try to find a way in through the security. Surely they wouldn’t have left the administrator password as the default. No, that didn’t work. Nearly everyone on this server had elevated privileges, which meant that either they were very lax with security or everyone in their organization had earned a high level of trust.
He took a look around on some of the networked computers for programs that might be accessing the database. He knew that some programmers would leave user names and passwords in config files, particular if they thought everyone within the organization had such a high level of access they could be trusted anyway. It was worth a try and Chris was surprised to find he hit jackpot on his third attempt.
He jumped back to the database server and used the username and password. He was in. He felt nervous suddenly and checked his safety net. No one knew he was there. He was safe. He went back to the database server and started to look through the various databases. If he could start to make sense of some of the data in the tables, maybe he could figure out what this place was. He was looking for names and addresses, financial transactions, anything that would give him a clue.
A loud sound made him practically jump from his chair, but it was only his phone ringing. He laughed at his own foolishness and picked up the receiver. It was Michelle on the phone.
‘I need your password,’ she said.
Chris sighed. One of the drawbacks of being a computer genius was people tended to come to him before using their own brains. It seemed to Chris that given a choice between reading a message and making an informed decision and calling him they, and for this he mostly thought Michelle, would call him.
‘Why do you think you need my password?’ he asked.
‘I’m trying to install some software for practice exams and it’s telling me I need the administrator’s password.’
‘You’re an administrator,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you put in your own password?’
‘You mean I just need to put in my normal password, the one I log in with?’
Another sigh.
‘Oh OK, never mind, I got it working. Thanks. How’s your work going by the way?’
‘It’s going well,’ said Chris, he glanced at the screen. ‘Holy shit.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing, I gotta go.’
Chris hung up the call and went straight back to the keyboard. He was being traced. He hadn’t noticed his safety net program had worked like a charm but he’d been too busy chatting. They’d traced him back through the first two servers. How were they doing that? These were supposed to be anonymous relays. Untraceable.
He started dumping data from the database, like a burglar trying to grab as much loot as he could, all the while the alarms blaring and the dogs barking. Except there were no alarms, or dogs, just a series of ones and zeros zipping through fiber networks and changing the state of memory on silicone chips. He started copying his files back from the remote server.
‘Come on, come on,’ he said. He knew the computer wouldn’t go any faster by shouting at it but it was human nature, he couldn’t help himself.
He kept one eye on the data copy and the other on the safety net. Another server cracked, they were nearly on him. Sixty seconds left to copy. Fifty seconds remaining.
Two minutes remaining.
‘What the fuck?’ he said. He contemplated pulling the plug there and then but next he saw the screen flash to forty seconds. He shook his head—damned computers.
The safety net showed they were down to the penultimate server. They’d be on him any time now. He stood and reached around the back of his computer for the network cable. As soon as the files had copied he would pull the cables so the path would be broken and the trace would fail to complete. Twenty seconds. ‘Come on goddammit!’ He slapped the side of the computer monitor.
They were on to the last server. Any time now.
Ten seconds.
‘Come on!’
Finished. He pulled the cable and dropped to his chair, staring at the screen. He was panting and his heart was running. He didn’t know how far they’d gotten and now he couldn’t tell. When he pulled the cable the connection was broken and it worked both ways. Had they found him? He copied the files to a thumb drive and switched off. Suddenly he didn’t feel so safe in this place. He’d take the Metro home. He locked his office and couldn’t help looking over his shoulder as he exited the building. He walked quickly to the Metro station. He just wanted to get home.
Maynard walked into Joshua’s office. Joshua was sitting in his chair, with his back to the door and only the top of his bald head was visible over the large black leather chair-back.
‘Our visitor’s been,’ said Maynard.
‘Good. Did he find what he was looking for?’
‘We made sure he did, just like you said.’