A Sense of Justice

by Jack Davis

  Alvaro wrote back that it certainly would be a surprise. He agreed to keep the visit secret but said they would have to conduct the exchanges as normal. He explained he and Maria would be in the Bahamas that week on vacation.

  The next email from Miguel came late the same day and would have raised more of a concern if not for the personal nature of the subject. In the email Miguel told Alvaro he was engaged, and he wanted the family, and especially his favorite sister and brother-in-law, to meet her. Then, in what should have alerted Alvaro, Miguel asked if he minded if they met them in the Bahamas prior to his trip back to Mexico. Miguel wrote that when he told his fiancée they wouldn’t be able to meet Maria and Alvaro because they were going on a vacation, she had gone on and on about how romantic that was. She finally asked if they could go too. He looked into flights, and they were cheap from Newark. He said he couldn’t tell her no.

  Miguel said if Alvaro told him where they were staying, he would make sure they didn’t stay in the same hotel. He promised they wouldn’t bother them except for a dinner or two.

  Miguel didn’t know it but that was the one area where Alvaro was blind to any type of setup. His love for his wife clouded his opinion of others’ relationships. It seemed perfectly natural to Alvaro that Miguel would want to surprise his family with this type of news, and while it seemed a little unusual that they would want to come to the Bahamas, at the same time he realized that in the early stage in his relationship with Maria, he would have done anything she had asked. That mindset, piled on top of not being able to conceive of a family member betraying him, and watching his wife pack new lingerie and bikinis in her suitcase, made Alvaro as vulnerable as a lost tourist in a bad Mexico City neighborhood.

  In an uncharacteristically long email—four lines—he congratulated Miguel and said he hoped his fiancée made him as happy as Maria made him. He added he was sure Maria would be excited to meet her. He told Miguel they would be arriving the following Monday and staying for five days at the Atlantis Hotel and Casino.

  In his response email, Miguel told him they would be flying in Tuesday night. He indicated he didn’t know exactly where they were going to stay but said he would call Alvaro’s cell when he did. Miguel gave a new cell number and explained how he was following Alvaro’s advice about changing phones regularly. He also suggested they should meet without the women one morning to exchange the items. Alvaro agreed to coffee.

  33 | Transformation

  New York, New York, 09/25/09

  The late Ted Blair had agreed to meet for coffee too. That had been Friday. Later that same day, Dr. Peter Kranston had traveled business class from Savannah to New York’s LaGuardia airport. He was at the baggage claim within thirty-five minutes of the plane touching down. It took another fifteen minutes for his two large bags to emerge through the wall onto the Delta baggage carousel. Once he had his bags rolling behind him, Kranston headed away from the cab stand area. Within a minute he heard, “Need a taxi?”

  “You take plastic?”

  “Yeah, sure,” said the cabbie.

  Dr. Kranston turned over his bags and climbed into the car.

  “Where to?”

  “Sheraton Hotel, 790 7th Ave.”

  Once checked into his smoking room, he immediately set to work. He took every piece of clothing worn on the trip to Savannah and put them in a large plastic bag. He showered and put on new clothes before grabbing the plastic bag, going downstairs, and hailing another cab. He had this driver take him to West 77th Street. From there, he walked two blocks to the Goodwill store on 79th Street and dumped the bag in the donations bin. Walking back to 6th Avenue, he hailed another cab to return to the Sheraton.

  Back in his room, he relaxed and ordered dinner, one last meal on Dr. Kranston. While waiting for room service, he logged into his multiple internet accounts. The first order of business was to access the back door he’d set up into the Savannah Airport video system. The system, like most at the smaller airports, was antiquated and had been patched together by TSA after 9/11. It took longer to find the video of his arrival and departure and delete them than it had to compromise the system.

  Once that was done, the former Dr. Kranston moved onto his real job. As usual, reading his work emails aggravated him. One email in particular set him off. He had specifically left instructions with the System Change Control Board that they should not make any configuration changes to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server security settings until he had a chance to evaluate them. He had explained that due to other more-pressing network issues, he wouldn’t be able to get to it until the following week—this week. The SCCB had gone ahead and done a “test group” anyway, without his authorization. Now the idiots had “a few” problems with the devices and they needed him to fix them. He wrote back,

  All,

  Due to your impatience, ignorance and incompetence, the users have suffered. It is not my responsibility to clean up your shoddy work within your timeframe. As I had indicated to you in the email that told you NOT TO CHANGE ANYTHING until I had a chance to look at it, I have my own work to do. The users will have to wait, and you will have to tell them why they cannot have service until next week. Honestly, I do not know how many times I am supposed to fix the *&^$#$ that you mess up. This is the type of incompetence that gets people fired in private industry. YOU ARE LUCKY YOU WORK FOR THE STATE!

  M!

  After he had finished his meal and answered all his other emails, he checked Dr. Kranston’s room account on the TV. He confirmed the meal had been included in the bill and closed out the account. Knowing the bill would be slipped under his door the following morning, and he would not have to check out or use Dr. Kranston’s credit cards ever again, he took the next step. He put on gloves and, careful not to set off the smoke detector, melted all the credit cards in the name of Kranston. Once the credit cards were soft, he rolled them into small balls and flushed them one by one down the toilet. Next, with the exception of what he would need the following morning for his flight, he destroyed all the other documents and ID that he possessed with the name Kranston.

  With the physical aspects of the doctor gone, all that was left was to eliminate the logical Dr. Kranston. Using an “anonymizer” to mask the source of the connection, all three accounts set up for the trip were accessed and closed. Within forty minutes, the logical Dr. Peter Kranston ceased to exist. Prior to canceling the accounts, he sent the remaining funds to the Blairs’ bank account. He had gotten the password while the couple still thought he was after money. Now the money could be used to look after their child. After all, it had always been for the children.

  Leaving NYC (09/26/09 0745 hours)

  In the morning, after wiping clean every surface, an almost-deleted Dr. Kranston took a cab to Newark Airport. His flight to Syracuse took off at 7:40 a.m. and landed forty-eight minutes later. After fifteen minutes at baggage claim, he collected his bags and wheeled them to long-term parking. Eleven days of dust covered the car.

  He paid in cash and drove northeast. An hour later he reached the picturesque shores of Lake Erie and the State University of New York campus at Oswego. He immediately went to the data center, ignored the greetings of a coworker, and began working on a SUNY-wide systems audit. It was just after ten a.m., about the time that it should have taken him to drive from his house in Endwell, New York, to SUNY, Oswego.

  A Full Day’s Work (Oswego, NY 09/26-27/09)

  If he had thought about it, the killer would have realized he was as angry now at his backup sys admins as he had been at the man he had tortured to death the previous day.

  It never ceased to amaze him how people could screw up simple things. In his mind computers were quite simple, and much easier to deal with than people. They did exactly what they were expected to do, every time. If they were programmed to execute a line of code, they would execute the same line of code—forever. They wouldn’t just decide one day to do something else because they felt like it or because they “didn’t like coffee.�
�� With computers there was no projectile vomiting when a loved one’s body parts were sliced off. There were no uncontrollable bowel movements when genitalia were seared with a torch. With machines you knew what you would get each and every time: no mess, no smell, and no high-pitched screaming that made his ears ring for hours. Yes, a world with more computers and less people was a world where he wanted to live.

  But the world the killer lived in had people, all too many people. People who were only trying to do a limited pilot on the Test Dev boxes. People who wrote, We never thought it could affect the whole subnet, in the vain hope of keeping their administrative privileges and therefore their jobs. He snapped back electronically: You could have just stopped after, ‘we never thought.’ I know you can read English, because I see all the stupid &#*^ing, letters after your name in your email footer. How is it you were not able to read my email explaining that absolutely no testing was to be conducted until I returned? It seemed to him that he alone had the whole SUNY computer network to worry about.

  Fuming, he worked to correct his coworkers’ screw-up. Repairing the problem didn’t take too long, but he wanted to give the impression it did, so he went in and adjusted other programs he had been meaning to update. It gave the appearance to anyone watching or reviewing his work logs that the man was working feverishly to get his users and the network back up and running. From about midnight until two a.m., when he finally hit enter for the last time, he wrote a justification for restricting network access for five assistant system administrators. That letter went to his boss.

  Then he drafted the email he had looked forward to more than an orgasm. It was the edict telling each of the offending parties they no longer had admin rights to anything other than their own lousy laptops. I hope you like working at the student union or at The Stand, because you will never touch another system on this network again. Please use me as a reference for any future job applications so that I can save other users from your incompetence.

  With that, the man finished and packed up his laptop case. It was just after three a.m. The entire time he had ignored all attempts at small talk from others in the Hewitt Union Data Center. Fueled by Jolt soda and pizza, his ability to work without letup was legendary throughout the SUNY system. His abilities to stay awake and concentrate while bone-tired were born in the 1980s with long nights developing code using punch cards and only having access to the machines after everyone but the computer science majors were fast asleep…or drunk. Now even in late-middle age, he could outlast any college student. Those he couldn’t outlast he could cut off from network services and beat just the same. Leaving his trash for someone else to pick up, he got up from his chair for only the fourth time since sitting down and went to his car.

  The drive from Oswego to Endwell took him on average two and a half hours. It was about a hundred miles, and most was on the interstate, but the killer was a cautious driver. He utilized caution in all aspects of his adult life, but this was for a different reason. The former Dr. Kranston didn’t want to get pulled over anywhere near the Syracuse airport around the time of one of his trips. He had the bags in the trunk and that made him slightly nervous, even though he knew there was no remaining evidence. He had taken care of the last pieces of Dr. Kranston just outside the Syracuse airport.

  In fact, there were no records of this man ever departing or arriving from the Syracuse airport. Doctors Watley, Nealon, Simpson, Simcox, Coomy, Phillips, Talbot, Peters, Davis, Eggelston, and now Kranston had all flown out of four upstate New York airports—Syracuse, Utica, Rochester, Watertown—over the past nine years. But no one by the killer’s name; he always flew out of the Greater Binghamton Regional Airport, Link Field, and there only seldom. The good part for the forty-eight-year-old senior systems administrator for the SUNY college system was that most of his job-related travel could be done via the computer network, or at worst, by car.

  He drove cautiously, not because he couldn’t outsmart any New York State Trooper who patrolled I-81. That would be child’s play. Making some moron who sat on his brain all day looking at a 1980s piece of technology to generate revenue for the state wouldn’t be hard at all. He likened them to the storm troopers from the original Star Wars movie. He thought back to one of his all-time favorite scenes. He saw himself as Obi-Wan Kenobi saying something to the storm troopers and having them repeat it back to him. Still, he didn’t want there to be any trace of evidence that he could have been at the Syracuse airport around the dates of his trips. For him it was just one more detail that would keep the police baffled. It was also one piece of proof he was smarter than all the people who were looking for him. It almost didn’t seem fair, but that was not his fault or concern.

  As he pulled into his driveway, he was getting tired. The first thing he did, even before taking anything out of the car, was to go to the refrigerator in the garage and grab a Mountain Dew. He could treat himself. Red Bull and 5-hour Energy were for staying awake; Mountain Dew was for enjoying, if not relaxing. He could just about relax now for the first time in two weeks. With the network fixes completed, he should have some time to relax. No more traveling, planning, torturing, or enlightening. No more thinking about idiotic users, clueless systems administrators, urgent emails, or asinine SUNY audits.

  The killer had been working for the SUNY system for the past eighteen years. He had more seniority than anyone in the university system, but it wasn’t just his tenure that earned him his job as senior systems administrator. The fact he was a hard worker and extremely thorough were two qualities that had been of benefit, but still not the most important. Most important was his willingness to work for wages far below that of his contemporaries in private industry.

  Anyone else competent who might have vied for the position had eventually been lured away by better-paying jobs. The killer had outlasted all those of his vintage and planned on outlasting all that came after them. Now the combination of seniority, ability, and unparalleled knowledge of the system ensured no one could challenge him for his spot. He had made himself irreplaceable.

  His seniority and intimate knowledge of the system had also earned him tremendous leeway in how he conducted his job. Over the years he was allowed to conduct most of the work from “remote” locations—his house. Since the network worked well and there were no complaints, supervisors avoided confrontations with the prickly systems administrator, and let well enough alone.

  As great a benefit as the flexibility to work from wherever he chose was, the intimate knowledge of the SUNY computer system was as crucial. The killer had been working on the network almost from its inception. He had been through the mainframe days and punch cards, through the Y2K scare, to service-oriented architecture and cloud computing. He had written code in Basic, Fortran, Cobol, C, C++, and Java. He had seen it all and knew the existing system from the ground up.

  He was protective of “his” network and vehement there be no changes to the system that he had not tested first. He had dual selfish motivations for enforcing his edict: one, he didn’t want anyone else to have any amount of control over any part of the network; and two, he was using the network for criminal purposes and didn’t want anyone to stumble onto that fact. He enforced strict guidelines about changes to the network.

  As needed, the killer took to his soapbox. “One day someone is going to screw something up on your network that I can’t fix. Then you can explain to the chancellors why you allowed other people to go around system policies and procedures.” He had long ago learned to cloak himself in documents. “The policies and procedures are in place to prevent people from making unauthorized changes to avoid these problems.”

  In the sheltered world he’d built, there was no one the killer didn’t view with a certain amount of disdain. But it was the potential usurpers for whom he reserved the most energy. The ones he hated were those who might know as much as he did. It was a personal affront to even ask questions about the possibility of doing things differently on his network. He would not stand
to be challenged, lest he be found to be wrong on something. That revelation might result in some loss of control, which could eventually cause him to lose his position at the top, or in computer terms, the bottom of the stack.

  He had made himself indispensable and someone knowing as much as he did would challenge that status…his only real status in life. He wasn’t there for the money or the challenge of the network architecture; he was there for power and status. It was who he was. Without that he would be just another network administrator with cissp, msse, and mcse on his business card. The killer could not—would not—allow that to happen.

  34 | Taskings

  NYFO, 09/25-28/09

  In New York City, the Nuuk Investigation—named after the capital of Greenland—was consuming the efforts of half of the ECTF. While officially it was assigned to Kruzerski and Murray, Morley knew that literally—technically—they would not be able to handle it, and definitely not as quickly as Mak needed it done.

  Swann and Greere had conducted the initial analysis of defendant’s machine out of necessity. After Miguel had agreed to cooperate, the immediacy of obtaining evidence against him took a back seat to the original goal of identifying the source of the pharmaceutical hack. Knowing the importance of the case and not knowing the capability of their next opponent, Morley wanted to make sure he had his resources well placed. He had Kruzerski and Murray work on the human aspects of the case. This included working with the cooperating suspect, the arraignment, dealing with the US Attorney, Miguel’s defense attorney, and things of that nature.