Julius could occasionally demonstrate a bit of pride and tiny bit of ego. He felt none of it at that moment. He was exhausted and desperately needed sleep, and he needed answers for his colleagues. His world had collapsed around him and somewhere in his conflicted mind there was a slowly growing sense of awful guilt. All he could do at the moment was nod in return.
Five days earlier, the morning after his murky and uncomfortable dinner with Marc Dominican, Julius had literally been gleeful. He’d fought with his conscience the entire night after that dinner. He hadn’t slept for so much as a single minute. His conscience lost the fight, though. He was deeply in debt with the wrong kind of people, and it overrode the friendship that had grown between himself and John Logan. It had overridden every ethical bone in his body. He’d delivered the files on the USB stick as instructed, and not more than three hours later the money to cover his legal debts had shown up in the form of a very large wire transfer to his personal bank account, along with an emailed copy of an invoice for his services. Julius had called his bank, explained his windfall and arranged to pay the mortgage debt, his credit cards and everything else he could think. Paid in full. Bins had phoned a short time later to say thanks for the cash and tried to find out the name of Julius’ mysterious benefactor who’d shown up at the bar with a brown manila envelope. Julius had hung up on him. He never wanted to see or hear from Bins or anyone like him ever again. Cured the hard way, Julius had said after he tapped off the call. Cold turkey and scared straight.
Julius had an absolutely silent way of getting around his own logging system in order to copy the required files from one of the servers to the USB stick Dominican had given him. There’d been no trace anywhere of the file copy activity. He’d checked the logs himself during a routine query a few hours later. No trace at all. Julius Coppola was the best. Everybody knew it, even if Julius refused to ever accept a compliment about such things.
Salim Abood knew it, too. In fact, Abood was counting on Julius’ skills. Abood knew that Julius, like every good IT genius who’d ever lived, had ways around his own security and especially around something as straightforward as activity logging. Abood had even bet on his guess—the real risk in the bet—that Julius would use a special and very personal login not only to prevent activity logging but also to temporarily prevent the university network’s malware detection routines from scanning the USB stick in order to avoid leaving a trace somewhere in an anti-malware log. That’s exactly what Julius had done. Abood’s code embedded on the USB stick had launched silently and swiftly while the file copying was completing. The code was about as malicious as anyone could devise and it went about its work, continuing to avoid logging queries, hitting master boot records, permanently erasing drives, and all while masking the activity as integrity checking and at the same time redirecting the firmware in each hard drive it was ruining. There wouldn’t be much left.
***
Two hours into a series of checks and re-checks on the server logs, correlating the results of usage interviews from various departments, Bogdan Chilikov was scratching his head in confusion. Born and raised in Bulgaria to professional parents, both of them doctors, he had hacked and battled his way through his first year of university in Sofia. He was a careful and rational thinker with a flair for insight, and his efforts had resulted in an invitation and grant to continue his studies at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland. It was a rare opportunity that he leapt to accept. Two years at Polyféd, a lot of solid math and computer science in the process, and Columbia came calling with an enticement to work with John Logan on the deeply interesting research projects being dangled in front of Bogdan’s eyes. For all the right reasons, the offer had been impossible to resist. He’d packed his bags and left Switzerland without a backward glance. He hadn’t regretted the decision.
Right at that moment he was looking at a list of names and he didn’t like what he was seeing because it didn’t make sense. He had a printout generated by an ancient test bed, specifically a creaky old 1993 VAX-BSD mainframe. It was a useful old thing because he’d previously been doing some research on older Bell Labs telecommunications protocols dating back to the late ’80s. The server was sitting on a network node that was behind one of THG’s internal network security appliances and seemed to have been completely immune to whatever had massively wrecked the rest of the server system. The printout of the VAX log was long—there were a lot of staff and students at Columbia using the network at any given time. The problem Bogdan was having boiled down to one name in particular, along with the location of that user’s login.
The old VAX-BSD machine had been running one of Bogdan’s test routines that was querying individual machines on the network, mainly workstations, to see if they were busy. The idea was to use only workstations logged in as a prime number based on the overall count of logged in machines at any given time, and to use that as a basis for encrypting the query traffic between the busy or non-busy machines on the network and Bogdan’s VAX machine. The point was to use a snapshot of the state of the network at a particular moment in time as a key to decrypt based on a header containing the prime numbered machine list. The problem with the log was that one machine was busy and working hard at a time when the sole user of the machine had claimed to be working elsewhere in the complex.
What was creeping Bogdan out, to the point where he was fidgeting in his chair, was that the workstation in question was located in Julius Coppola’s private office. Nobody else in the world, let alone the university, had access to that computer.
The log times recorded by the VAX machine also seemed to correspond to times immediately preceding the time estimates of the first reports of data corruption on a server used by the Biology department. To Bogdan, it look exactly like someone in Julius’ office—certainly it was unlikely to be anyone other than Julius himself—had directly inserted malware into a network backdoor via Julius’ own workstation. It just didn’t make sense.
Bogdan fidgeted for a few minutes, rolling the timing sequence over and over in his head. Finally, he pulled out his phone and texted John.
‘I’ve got something you need to see RSN.’ John replied in less than twenty seconds.
‘K . . . where are you?’
‘VAX-BSD machine on other side of lab.’
‘What’s up?’
‘I need to show you. Can you get here now?’
There was an agonizing wait of almost two minutes, then . . .
‘On my way.’
Five minutes later, John was scrutinizing the logs with a deep frown on his face.
“Bo, this isn’t possible,” John said faintly. “The correlation is just coincident with a antivirus or backup routine running on Jules’ workstation.”
“No way,” Bogdan said in his heavily accented English. “Julius is friend and respected colleague. I wouldn’t bring this up otherwise. Somebody was logged in. My query routines know difference between background process and active, logged in user.”
“That would mean we’ve got a major vandal inside the university?” John said, his voice rising. “Possible, but unlikely. I mean, it can’t be Julius. That’s crazy and senseless and, well, it just doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“S’why I give this information to you, John. Nobody else knows this yet. You have to talk to Julius before anybody else trips on this.”
John stared back at his team member for almost a full minute before he turned on his heel and left the VAX computer room. He thought of something, suddenly, then turned back to Bogdan.
“Not a word of this, I mean, not a single word, Bo,” John said quietly. “Not to anyone.”
He was determined to track down Julius and ask him some pointed questions about the workstation in question. No accusations; just questions. Julius would not lie to him.
***
“Julius… Jules! Wake up!” John was leaning over his friend trying to rouse him from a deep, exhausted sleep. Julius had set up a cot, no
t for the first time, to crash in his own office. “Julius, please!” John said, louder.
He’d been asleep less than two hours. He was gummy and slow and felt nauseated as he came to. John poured some water from a plastic bottle into a cup, brought it over to his friend, and waited as patiently as he could for Julius to get it together.
“Jules,” John said, “are you with me?”
“I am,” Julius replied hoarsely. “What time is it? I mean, what’s up?”
“You better get up and splash some water on your face or something. I’ve got a couple of things to discuss with you. They can’t wait. I’m sorry to wake you, but this can’t wait.”
Julius shakily stood up, grabbed the edge of a work table for balance, then left his office for the washroom down the hall. John turned on the ceiling light in the office and waited patiently. When Julius returned a few minutes later, he was awake enough but his face looked grey and drawn. It was not a pretty sight.
“Okay… what’s up? I’ve been down for only about two hours. So this better be good.”
Wordlessly, John handed over the VAX log notes that Bogdan had made. He let Julius review everything for a few minutes.
“You need me to explain this, Jules? I mean, who else has access to your gear?”
Julius looked away from the printout for a moment. His elation about having all the debts cleared—about having a new start on life—had been relegated to a back seat in the face of the IT disaster. This was another matter altogether. I should have used the server rack directly, as I was told, he thought bitterly. I fucked myself by trying to outsmart that evil bastard Dominican.
There was only one way to steer the situation. Dammit, Julius thought to himself, gritting his teeth, clear your goddamned head! This has to sound real!
“We’ve got a mole, John,” Julius said carefully, almost hesitantly after a brief pause. “Somebody has broken into my private access and logins. There’s no other explanation. We’ve got a mole, a vandal, whatever you want to call him. Or her. They’ve fucked up your research, along with work of half a dozen other groups. Somebody or some group or entity is targeting your group or one of the other groups, and messed up a bunch of them in order to help cover his tracks.”
John sighed in relief. On the way over to Julius’ office all sorts of grave thoughts had been going through his head, but Julius’ explanation made perfect sense. John’s work was sought after, the security around his work and the work of several other well paid groups at the university was serious and expensive. That could easily bring enough money to the table to underwrite the cost of a really brilliant cracker. One way or another, a competitor had cracked them and then either stolen everything or just slashed and burned it all, or both.
John had developed a lancing headache. Despite his anxiety over the mess, he was deeply concerned about what Julius was enduring.
“John,” Julius said for the third time, finally catching John’s attention. “I have to get some sleep. Please. I’m dead on my feet.” His eyes were half closed.
“Okay, I mean, sorry Jules. I’ll see you in the morning. I need some sleep too, I think. Um, later.”
Chapter Eight
Several miles south of Morningside Heights and the fraught mess at Columbia, Salim Abood knocked on Marc Dominican’s office door.
“It’s done, Marc,” Abood stated flatly. “And I told you it would work.”
“We’ve got the only copy of the code now?” Marc replied quietly.
“You are correct,” Abood said, smiling. “I killed it all. Original files, sources, multigenerational backups, cloud backups dating back several months. Everything. The rest of the Columbia network isn’t doing too well, either.” Abood was positively gleeful.
“And where have you stored the code?”
“Internal server here. Two heavily encrypted backups on two separately located storage servers,” Abood said, as he tossed a USB stick on Marc’s massive desk. “Everything is there, including the decryption passwords.”
“Any surprises on this USB stick?” Marc asked, looking up at Abood.
“Hah,” Abood burst out. “No. Nothing at all. My Trojan worked perfectly, but I really don’t use that sort of thing on myself. I mean we’re in this together, right?”
“I was kidding. Of course we are, Salim,” Dominican replied offhandedly. “Can we deploy the code throughout my corporate communications now, though? That’s what I want to know.”
“Well,” Abood said, with urgency and more than a little excitement, “I’d say it’s already done. That’s why I’ve been head-down for the past week. Not with the USB stick, but with the corporate network comms. I’ve got over thirty sat phones rigged now. We’ve been testing for the past two weeks actually. Your Director of Operations knows the whole routine now. The firmware patch, the way in which it avoids detection by the terrestrial carriers, the comms handshake event that triggers it, the algorithm. Everything.”
Salim Abood was smart. He was also inexperienced. He couldn’t tell a mark from a shill or a player if his life depended on it. He really believed that Marc Dominican, a billionaire in his own right, was somehow sympathetic enough to his oh-so-difficult situation that the coercion that got Salim back to New York had faded into the background. Salim thought he was in control merely because he’d done something brilliant.
For his part, Marc Dominican enjoyed Salim’s company to some extent if only because Salim’s youthful energy and genuine intelligence stood in stark contrast to the dour, sometimes fearful, always combative and deceitful business people he dealt with every day. What few suspected about Dominican, and what fewer still actually knew for a fact, was that he was driven more by his illicit dealings than he was by the legitimate business processes that had made him even wealthier than his family before him. Marc also was keenly aware of every vice, foible, bad habit and tendency in the people with whom he did business. He recognized the tendencies, the addictions, the ego and the vices almost empathically, and consciously used the weaknesses to manipulate the vulnerable into doing what he wanted. It was his strength and he revelled in it.
Throughout the exchange, Marc had a pleasant smile on his face or at least that’s how it appeared to Salim. If a casual observer had been in the room, he’d have described the benign look on Marc’s face as that of a biologist peering at a dead butterfly pinned to a sample board.
“You’ve done good work, Salim,” he said, stretching his arms in front of him as he got up out of his high-backed chair. “Time to call it a night. We’ll meet here again tomorrow, late in the day. I’m flying to Chicago in about three hours. I’ll be back by noon tomorrow.”
“Cool,” Salim said.
“How is our other project coming along? Any problem? Any alarms or detections I should know about?”
“No,” Salim replied. “Nothing at all. It’s generating the paperwork you want.”
“Good to hear. We’ll meet after six tomorrow,” Marc said seriously to Salim, “to review the progress that Operations is making on the next mobile phone switchover. Sound good?”
Marc normally never discussed his schedule with anyone outside his inner business circle. The whole point of his little speech was to put Salim at ease.
“Hey, no problem,” Salim replied quickly. “I’m outta here then. See you tomorrow.”
After the elevator had swallowed Salim, the back office door opened and David Trask stepped into Marc’s office.
“Are we clear?” Trask asked.
“We are, Dave,” Marc said as he shuffled some papers together and placed them in the lid compartment of a black Underwood biometric security briefcase. It was specially built to Marc’s specifications, with the locking mechanism fully integrated into the frame and inner security liner. It was on the heavy side, but nothing besides Marc’s fingerprint combined with a PIN code, or an explosive charge, could open it.
“There is a change of plan too, Dave,” Marc said causally. “Mr. Abood has outlived his usefuln
ess somewhat earlier than expected. He must be terminated tonight.” Marc paused for a moment to look up at Dave. “Will that be a problem, Dave?”
David Trask stood five feet nine inches tall in his traditional leather brogues. He looked innocuous. Fit but unmemorable. He was balding, seemed perpetually dressed in a beige windbreaker in mild weather or a lined, olive trench coat in cold weather. He always carried a shoulder bag, and he wore dark-colored tortoise shell glasses that didn’t really suit him. Trask had an ugly history that made him useful to Marc. Trask also had a special set of skills and a complete lack of conscience. He was a rare man, in Marc’s opinion, and as long as Trask was indebted to Marc there was no end of useful work he could do for him.
The two men had first met while Marc’s company was involved in the financing of weapons purchases for a trader doing business in West Africa. The guarantees and the collateral for the financing was tight and secure enough that Marc had asked very few questions beyond the obvious financial discussions, but he suspected a Liberian connection as well as a Liberian buyer at the far end of the line. Trask had been part of the security team that protected the cash transaction covering the first delivery of weapons to the legally registered distributor.
All The Big Ones Are Dead Page 12
