A-Sides
Page 52
**********
JB entered his office at precisely nine a.m. He worked on the second floor of the NSA building and had a security clearance and protocol that bordered on the absurd. Access to his work station was a three step process which had to be performed in a precise sequence. First, an RFID scanner read the frequency transmitted by a microchip implanted in his shoulder. On a prompt, JB had to enter a twelve character, case-sensitive ID code -made up of upper and lower case letters, numerals, and special characters- assigned to the chip. Upon acceptance of this pass-string, another scanner read a bar code tattooed in invisible ink on the inside of his right forearm. Upon acceptance of this bar code, a third prompt instructed him to submit a similar, but different bar code, tattooed on the inside of his left forearm. Only after all bar codes and pass phrases matched when presented in this precise sequence was JB allowed to boot his heavily encrypted work station.
He sat down at his terminal. The NSA’s acronym was fair fodder for the anti-government nut jobs. JB had heard them all from “Nothing’s Secret Anymore,” to “No-One’s Safe Anywhere.” JB thought the latter a little unfair, but that really wasn’t his orbit. He was a problem solver, not an operator. His newest problem had been dropped in his lap a week before his meeting this morning with Sandra.
The previous Monday an aide for the senate majority whip - one of the senators from Maryland- had presented himself at his office.
“I have,” he said, “a problem.”
JB commiserated. “Sit down,” he invited.
“There is,” the aide said, “a troublesome little apple farmer in Hamlet, Maryland. Name of Jack Benny Hicks. The senator needs his farm. A matter of national security. We tried buying it, he wouldn’t sell. We tried appealing to his patriotic spirit. He wouldn’t sell. So we brought out the big guns and sent the Bureau of Land Management down there to evict him for wetland destruction. He hired a lawyer who found a friendly judge to issue an injunction. He is, in short, a thorn in the senator’s paw.”
“I see,” JB said. “Might I ask what the National Security interest is?”
“That’s outside of your pay grade, soldier,” the pompous gadfly sitting across from him said, exercising all the puffery a lowly footling could muster up.
“Of course,” JB said, keeping a poker face. He felt no burning need to tell the self-important paper-pusher sitting across from him that, with just fifteen minutes at a keyboard, he -JB- could collect enough dirt to rocket him into legal and financial oblivion. It was advisable to hold some things close to the vest.
“There is a time issue,” the aide said carefully. “We unfortunately cannot go through due process. I’m told you can... move people from their positions. Is that true?”
“Sometimes,” JB said, “things just seem to fall my way. What do you need?”
“Political cover, for one. We can’t have the public seeing the senator as some evil bankster hustling the Joads off the back forty at bayonet point. But we need the land. How it comes into our possession, and how it looks to the press, I’ll leave to your judgment. But it needs to be soon.”
“Give me a week,” JB said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
The two men stood up and shook hands over JB’s work station.
“I’ll be in touch,” JB said.
In the intervening week, JB had gotten the skinny on the players involved. The shifty aide was Andrew Shoat, a disagreeable little parasite who would lick up his boss’s vomit like a dog if instructed to do so. A species as common in DC as leeches were in Miami, and just as bloodsucking. He wasn’t worth JB’s time, and even less of his effort.
His boss, however, the senate majority whip, was a more substantial kind of pig. Dean Savage had all the style-marks of a venal little pirate. Ambitious, greedy, and not overly bright. It took only a little data mining to discover that the farm he so earnestly desired was the last parcel in a block of real estate which a Canadian development firm wished to acquire. Being a foreign company, they needed to cultivate a high-ranking politico to smooth the way with the United States government and they had to do it in a manner that wasn’t seen as rent-seeking. So they had contacted Savage in a circumspect fashion and offered him a bargain which would better the congressman’s financial lot to the tune of a ten percent stake in the strip mall they planned to build, provided the senator could get clear title. But the Canadian firm’s patience wasn’t unlimited. Their investors had itchy palms who would be more than happy to drop their cash elsewhere if the deal couldn’t be consummated.
Savage, as clueless as he was greedy, failed to see through the transparent deal and jumped at the dangled bait. Eager to prove his political value, he was hooked immediately, but hadn’t counted on the obstinance of Jack Benny Hicks, a regular guy who just wanted to keep the orchard in his family. JB tutted to himself at this naiveté, but it wasn’t his place to judge. He had a job to do.
As presented, Jack Benny Hicks was a middle-aged orchardist whose family had lived peacefully and uneventfully on the same hundred acres for a century until this most recent dust-up with the Bureau of Land Management. He was probably totally bewildered over what had befallen him with goose-stepping government goons descending on his farm as well as packs of lawyers oozing out of the woodwork like slavering wolves. It was, regrettably, about to get much worse.
JB went to work. He had gathered the information he needed and recorded all the passwords and legal document ID numbers on the aforementioned Jack Benny Hicks during the previous week. All that was left was execution.
He inserted a flash drive into a USB port on his work station and booted his system from it. On the flash drive was a complete open source operating system with server and encrypted networking capabilities. The entire OS ran in RAM and any files, executables, or logs would only be saved, at JB’s discretion, on the encrypted flash drive which JB would pocket when he was finished. Nothing ever touched the internal hard drive. His work station was its own server and Internet connections would be made using a virtual IP address. As far as the network was concerned, the IP address was a real, physical machine, but, in fact, it existed only in the ether. Information packets would be routed anonymously from the virtual IP address to the OS running inside RAM and be processed there. Everything JB did was executed in real time, with only electrons streaming back and forth inside physical memory. Once JB logged off, all traces would simply vanish like vapor in an electronic gasp.
Regular as clockwork on April 8th of every year, according to Jack Benny Hicks’ credit card statements spread out on JB’s monitor, Hicks bought a thousand pounds of fertilizer and a thousand gallons of farm grade diesel fuel. It was a special, red-dyed fuel earmarked only for agricultural use. JB had seen the form Hicks had on file with the Dept. of Agriculture that allowed him to buy the fuel.
This April 8th seemed no different as Jack Hicks engaged the route finding service of the company that monitored his vehicle, a two ton, fairly new truck that was financed, according to the credit reporting agencies, through the vehicle manufacturer’s own credit arm, the financing arm itself subsidized by government-backed guarantees. As a matter of course, the financing company had taken out a life insurance policy in the amount of the vehicle’s purchase price. That was standard practice. What interested JB was a more recent policy in the amount of $100,000 which had been taken out only days before, the first premium already credited. That was a common practice for suicide bombers. Combine that with diesel oil and fertilizer and you had an interesting scenario developing.
In a separate frame on his monitor, JB saw the route marked out on the mapping service, with the notation that there was no new construction or detours on the route. Hicks had not opted for the black box info from his vehicle to be transmitted in real time to law enforcement authorities, a feature pushed by certain insurance companies as a fillip to gain lower rates. Still, the information was accessible. The vehicle monitoring companies were bound in true pay to play fashion by security agreements with t
he US government to allow access to their data streams. Play ball with Uncle Sam, or lose the frequency bandwidth for your service.
Jack Benny Hicks was already halfway to his destination, Marty’s Feed and Seed in Hobb’s Ferry, Maryland, when JB logged into his communications. The data for speed, braking habits, seconds at full stop, and acceleration curves displayed in a steady stream on JB’s monitor.
On the route map on JB’s screen, Hicks’ vehicle was indicated by a flashing, green vector arrow. Midways on the black line, an ominous circle of blue stayed stationary on the meandering mark, as if awaiting some fateful rendezvous.