Chapter Seventeen
(Tuesday, Noon—Owen)
Owen called Johnny from inside Snoopy’s, and shook his head at the sheer volume of food the programmer wanted him to order. It was almost as if Martina had coached him, to get back at Owen for breakfast…but that was ridiculous. Wasn’t it?
Martina hurried to grab an outside table, where they’d be able to watch boats passing along the Intracoastal Waterway. Owen stood in line at the counter to place their order. The restaurant, tucked up beside the JFK Causeway stretching from the mainland to Padre Island, was one of his favorite hangouts—but timing was everything. Excellent food, low prices, and friendly atmosphere had won Snoopy’s a devoted clientele.
Monofilament fishing line strung around the outer dining area discouraged seagulls from approaching the customers. Signs bearing the legend “Please Don’t Feed the Birds” were posted in several places. Owen grinned, watching a small boy standing under one of the signs throw pieces of a hamburger bun to a hovering cluster of gulls.
Johnny showed up as Owen was retrieving their food from the counter, and grabbed a tray to carry back to the table. Owen made introductions as they passed everything around.
Johnny glanced at Martina, then turned to Owen. “Uh…have you heard anything about Shawna?”
“No,” Owen said. Did Johnny know about her disappearance from TV, or from water-cooler conversation at CyberLook? “Martina is Shawna’s business partner. We’re both trying to figure out what’s going on.”
Johnny nodded, appearing both relieved to discover Martina’s status and concerned about another topic. “I don’t know what’s up with all that. I wish I could help you out, dude, but I’m clueless.”
Owen shrugged. He didn’t really want to talk about it. “Yeah, well. We’re doing what we can.” Martina nodded but said nothing.
“I ought to apologize,” Johnny said. “I realized on the way here that you might think I knew something that would help you with something important, and all I actually wanted was to talk about business. If I’d been thinking at all, I’d have given you a hint.”
Owen grinned. “That didn’t even occur to me. But what the heck, you can owe me a favor for being so damn inconsiderate. Next time, either you do better or we start talking about a case or two of beer.”
Johnny laughed. “Okay. So anyway, here’s the first thing. Are you coming back to CyberLook?”
Martina suddenly gave Owen a merry look that said she had a secret. What was that about? He’d have to find out later.
“No,” he said to Johnny. When would people stop asking? “I’m a little confused by what’s happening there, and I guess I’d like to be sure my five percent of the company is worth something, but I really don’t want that kind of job again.”
Johnny sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that. I just hoped, after I saw you there. We could really use you, man. I’m in charge of the developers now, you saw that, but I don’t get included in the big decisions.”
He looked directly at Owen. “It was different when you were there. You let us know what to expect. I try to do the same, but if nobody tells me anything there’s not much I can do.”
“Might have to push your way in.” If he was up to it.
Johnny’s lip curled. “I tried. NDA problems, they tell me, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense.” He saw Martina’s blank expression. “NDA stands for non-disclosure agreement. Normally it means you’ve agreed not to talk about a client’s business, but it’s really weird not to tell the guys who’re building software how it’s supposed to be used.”
Owen leaned back in his chair. “Yeah. It’d be a great way to waste a lot of time and money.” What had Junior been up to?
Martina spoke up. “Sounds like you guys are going through some growing pains.”
“Sure.” Johnny nodded, giving her a surprised smile. Owen suspected Martina had just won some respect from him. That was sort of interesting. He didn’t remember Johnny ever bringing a date when people got together after work. Something to think about.
Johnny went on, still looking at her. “That’s part of it. We used to be a completely different kind of shop. Anyway, I tried to finesse my way around it all by telling them we need professional project management staff on board. It was true, and would tend to get my team more information sooner, but Danny and Junior wouldn’t go for it.” He turned to Owen. “We’ve redesigned the software several times to meet new requirements. Some of the changes were pretty drastic.”
Owen looked at him carefully. “Johnny, I don’t work there. But I do own a little chunk of the company, and sometimes I can be reasonably discreet. Can you tell me what this new project is?”
“Oh, hell yeah.” Johnny shook his head. “Or I can tell you what I think it is, anyway. Sorry, I forgot you didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. Just don’t tell anybody you got it from me.” He looked at Martina. “Okay?”
“Deal,” Owen said. Martina nodded.
“Okay, then. It’s based on that software we were working on to transfer data to and from oil rigs. Um, Martina, the idea was that a lot of the rigs and remote sites all over the world have only satellite-based connectivity to the Internet. The connections are pretty unreliable in some places because of weather, so our customers needed something that would keep resending or requesting data until it all got through.”
“Makes sense,” Martina said, smiling at him. Owen was beginning to wonder if he should leave them alone for a while.
Johnny grinned back. “It had to be really simple to set up and use. We couldn’t count on any network engineers being around to fix things, either. To make it work everywhere, we generalized the software so it didn’t matter which Internet service provider you used or what particular network you plugged your computer into.”
Johnny thought for a moment. “Look at it this way. Sometimes a company has rules against downloading things from the Internet, and they block a lot of sites. But it’s an even bigger deal if an employee somewhere wants to make information available online. Normally you have to have a server, which is basically a computer that stores data and makes it available, and a room to put the server in, and…well, it’s not something just anybody can do casually. You can hire people to do it for you, to ‘host’ your server, but then you lose some control and it’s still pretty complicated security-wise.”
He paused to eat some fish. “You know, I hate plastic silverware. But man, this is tasty. Good call, Owen. Anyway, there are things called peer-to-peer network programs that people use to swap music and other files online, and our software is sort of like that. The basic differences are that we have much tighter control over the machines and users that are allowed to participate, and we have that retry-and-resend logic that guarantees information delivery.” He looked frustrated. “I wish I had a whiteboard so I could draw all this. It’s a lot simpler that way.”
Martina laughed and touched his hand. “I think I get it. But if I miss something, Owen can explain it to me later. Don’t twist yourself inside-out for my sake.”
Uh huh, Owen thought. He could explain later. Good to know he was still useful.
Johnny nodded seriously. “The main point is that you can use it anywhere. Users can in effect post information as if their machines were directly available on the Internet without having to worry about security issues or becoming network engineers. Anyway, it works.”
“So far,” Owen said, “that sounds pretty much like what we were playing with before I left.”
“Yeah, with some tweaks. But then it got interesting. We had something that worked over low-bandwidth or noisy connections. So far, so good. But then it had to work with multiple servers, each with its own secure database and access controls for its own group of users. The servers still had to share data with each other. But not just any data. There had to be a thing we called a ‘data-sharing agreement’ between any two servers before anything would be sent in either direction, and the administrator of each server could specify ex
actly what data got shared, when, and with whom. Then they wanted client software that would work on handhelds.”
He grinned at Martina again. “Smartphones, tablets, and so forth. So you could take a picture, say, and send it anywhere in the world with whatever sort of Internet connection you had. Dial-up, satellite, cable, DSL, microwave, whatever. And it works from inside anybody’s network, as long as the network is connected to the Internet and allows users to browse web pages. To the firewalls and other network security devices, our stuff always looks just like a normal web browser. And everything’s encrypted. Sometimes an organization blocks access to encrypted websites, but we get around that by using the standard HTTP protocol and encrypting everything at a higher level.”
His face turned pink. “I’m getting too far into the details again. It’s like email as far as the user’s concerned, only it’s more reliable, more secure without requiring a lot of user sophistication, and it allows for some fancy management of what information can go where. It’s especially nice that you don’t have to allow your network administrator techie-types to see the actual data.”
He shoved more fish into his mouth and talked through it. Owen checked, but Martina didn’t appear to notice. Huh. “Then they wanted utilities that could take data from our system and push it into other databases. Old, basically outdated databases. And then they wanted it to work in both directions.”
“Jesus,” Owen said. He’d only been half-listening, but he’d suddenly seen the implications. “Put it all together, and that’s huge. You’ve just described software that moves data between different computer systems, anywhere in the world, with distributed access control so each organization can decide which employees see what information—and also what they want to share externally, and it’s all rolled up into one system. Better yet, it works over the Internet. If people actually used this…this kind of flexibility has been information technology’s Holy Grail for the last thirty years.”
“Right. Exactly. And the user interface is always the same regardless of where the data comes from, so it cuts down on training costs. The software also encrypts data when it’s stored on the user’s machine. The security built into all this is a few steps beyond ridiculous. You can set the level you want to use, but no matter what it’s all encrypted somehow. Sometimes, because of network topology or availability issues, a server has to relay data between two others, or pass a client connection on to its own server. When that happens the server in between can’t read any of the data it’s relaying because it doesn’t have the recipient’s private key.”
Johnny blushed again, turning to Martina. “Uh . . .”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, smiling. “I don’t need to understand the details of how it works. It’s the implications of this that are interesting to me.”
Owen grunted. Something was interesting her, anyway. They even blushed alike.
“It gets worse,” Johnny said darkly. “We use standard algorithms for encryption, but we’ve had to modify the software so other stuff can be plugged in. I heard Junior saying something about steganography—uh, that’s encryption algorithms that hide data in what looks like plain text or maybe images, to use when transmitting or receiving data in organizations that monitor web browsing too closely for even our stuff to get by unnoticed.” He looked at Owen. “We don’t get samples of those algorithms, we just provide the interface so other people can plug ‘em in. But, dude, who would need that?”
Owen shook his head. Come to think of it, that was kind of a scary question. But…“How much of this is real, and how much is just a wish list?”
“The basics are done. Things like a version for handheld computers and the conversion routines to talk to other databases haven’t really even gotten started. Though a lot of that would be pretty easy. But lately we’ve gotten a lot of new requirements for creating ‘business rules’ on the fly about what data gets moved and when. It’s a huge amount of work, and I don’t think Junior, or, well, just Danny now, understands the difference between what we have and what it could be, or what the cost is of choosing one set of features over another. It’s just not his field.”
“So you think the top brass at CyberLook are expecting too much too soon?” Martina asked.
“I don’t know. Probably. It’s hard to know what they’re actually expecting—or promising. Sometimes I think even they don’t know. Lately we’ve had a bigger budget thrown at us, and that’s good, but there’s a lot of pressure to produce prototypes very quickly, and the whole place is starting to feel very strange.”
“This doesn’t sound,” Owen said slowly, “as if we’re talking about an oil company, or even a group of oil companies, anymore.”
“No, it sounds like the government,” Johnny said, “maybe even multiple agencies. And I’m not sure I want to make it easier for whoever this is to exchange and protect information.”
“But,” Martina asked, “can’t government agencies already exchange information between their networks? I mean,” she said, blushing, “they have to, I know that. But this sounds like just more of the same.”
“Sure,” Johnny said. “It’s the same thing, only different. They have to set up individual connections between their networks to do it, even if they’re what we call VPN’s, or virtual private networks that actually use the Internet. It involves a lot of time and trouble. There are security policies at several levels that can take a long time to work through. Governments and large organizations are just not very quick to get that sort of thing going.”
He was smiling into her eyes. Again. “And when they do get it all set up, remember, it’s only one connection at a time, with one other organization. And probably only to one physical location. Our stuff mostly bypasses all that. With our system, once they get a server going—which in principle somebody could put under his desk and plug into the wall—that server ‘talks’ to an upstream server the same way the users’ software talks to it. There aren’t any firewall issues, and our customers are in business the same day, talking to anybody, anywhere. No individual labor- and money-intensive connections anymore, just one giant pseudo-network. And the client software, which runs on individual PC’s, is always irrevocably tied to a particular server, so whoever sets it up can still control access to their own information.”
Martina looked troubled. “But if it’s so convenient and secure, why isn’t the Internet used this way already?”
“It is, almost. A lot of what we’re doing is duplicating some of the Internet’s functionality at a higher level, where we can control it. We’re taking advantage of what’s already there, sort of building a hierarchical structured network on top of the existing Internet. If you’re asking why governments and large corporations didn’t think of it first,” he shrugged, “maybe it’s because they’re just not as good as we are?” He grinned at Owen.
Owen grinned back. “Look at it this way,” he said to Martina. “A mechanic knows a lot about a car and how it works. But you don’t have to be a mechanic to drive a car. Right now, for a lot of reasons, you probably have to hire the equivalent of a mechanic if you want to share a lot of information on the Internet. If you belong to a big company or work for the government, you probably also have to deal with bureaucracy like you’d find in an auto insurance company, only worse, because the people in charge usually don’t understand their own data or where it’s going.” He tried to hide his grin. “So you’re stuck. But you still have to shift the information. So…think of this software as an automatic transmission.”
Martina groaned. “Oh, come on. Did you have to go there? All that was just for your punch line, wasn’t it? I don’t think I want you to explain anymore.” She covered Owen’s mouth with her hand. “Johnny, you were doing just fine.”
Johnny nodded, looking away from them. “You know,” he said, “the whole thing makes a lot of sense. Maybe these peer-to-peer networks really are the future of the Internet. Except that ours is too controlled for my taste.”
&nbs
p; Yeah. But. “The devil is in the details,” Owen said. “If you guys don’t get that professional project management you asked for, it’s going to fall apart. Projects like this can’t be run without a lot of structure, especially as they get bigger. And don’t government contractors have to use ISO-9001 or some similar quality management system?”
Johnny wiped his mouth, eyeing Martina’s hand. “That bothers me, too. I swear, nobody at CyberLook who’s senior to me even knows what that means. They’d have to reorganize the company to do it, and project managers would be just the beginning. Right now we can barely manage a to-do list, and everybody does everything. Job descriptions are a joke. Besides, shouldn’t somebody be worried about security clearances, if this is for the government? We’re trying to design the perfect software product, so in principle it wouldn’t matter if someone got access to our code, but that’s always been an impossible dream. I just don’t get it.” He looked sadly at his empty plate. “But if it’s not government, who is it?”
“Some other government?” Martina asked.
“I don’t know,” Johnny said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you, Owen. I thought you might be able to find something out, and maybe help with the project management side of things.” He shrugged, blushing again. “It would be good if you were coming back.”
“Can’t do it,” Owen said. “It sounds exciting, but I’d just want to play with it for a while and go on to something else. You need somebody there full-time. Maybe several somebodies.”
“Could you consult?” Johnny asked.
“Why? I don’t have anything you don’t have, except maybe some history with Danny. And that might not count for much anymore,” he said, remembering the conversation from that morning. “Tell you what, though, I’ll make him talk to me. Or to Junior’s dad, maybe. He’s curious about the company anyway. And he’s probably inherited Junior’s shares, those he didn’t actually own already, so Danny might get a surprise sometime soon.”
“Well,” Johnny said, pushing himself back from the table, “thanks for your time, and for looking into all this. And Martina, it’s been a pleasure meeting you.” He turned to Owen. “Tell Shawna I said hi when you see her.”
“Will do,” Owen promised. “I’ll call you in a couple of days, tell you what I’ve found out. If anything.”
“Great. Thanks again. See you guys later.”
Martina looked at Owen as Johnny walked away. “Well, that was interesting.”
“Sure was. I just wonder what to do about it.”
She smiled. “Probably not what he wants you to do.”
“Not if it means working there.” Though the idea tempted him a lot more than he wanted to admit….
“Oh come on, Owen. That’s not what I meant.”
“Huh? Did I miss something?”
She laughed. “I guess you did, though I don’t see how. Didn’t you see how he was looking at you? He wants you to come back to CyberLook, but believe me, that isn’t all he wants.”
Owen stared at her, then looked in the direction Johnny had gone. “Are you serious? You can’t be serious.”
She pursed her lips. “He’s a nice guy. Give him a kiss sometime,” she suggested. “You’ll see.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. You’re wrong. You’re just wrong.” He stood up. She picked up her purse, still smiling. They walked out to the car.
“What’s next?” Martina asked as they drove out of the parking lot.
“Two things, I guess. I want to talk to Viktor again, find out what he knows about all this. And tonight I want to follow Andrea to see if she leads me to Shawna. There’s a better reason to find her than just being sure she’s okay. She might know more about what’s been going on, if she was at Junior’s place last Saturday. And now that we know some things, maybe we can pool our information.”
“Hey,” Martina said. “We haven’t talked about it, and maybe I shouldn’t say anything, but…you should know, Shawna really wasn’t interested in Junior anymore. I’m surprised she went there at all, but believe me it was for something other than romance. You have nothing to worry about on that score.”
Owen shrugged. He hoped she was right, but Junior’s murder and Shawna’s disappearance had made the topic even more uncomfortable than it might have been otherwise. He would deal with that aspect of things later, if it turned out he had to.
After he dropped her off at Signs & Portraits, he leaned out the window and called to her. “Martina!”
“What?”
“About Johnny—I really think you’re wrong.”
She laughed and went inside.
Shaking his head, Owen drove away.
***
Shiver on the Sky Page 25
