“I’m with the insurance company. How is she?”
“She was in surgery,” Lauren responded, checking him out.
“Who are you?” he asked, getting his clipboard ready to make a note.
“I work with Cathy. This is her manager. What insurance company? And how do you know about this so quickly?”
“State Farm. We monitor police communications. We’re here to see if we can do anything for our insured.” He stepped back and took out his cell phone.
“Did you just take my picture?” Lauren stood up; Jerry stood up.
“Let us know if there’s anything we can do.” The man turned and walked away.
“Jerry… Cathy has AAA insurance, same as me.”
They looked at each other, unsure of what they had just seen.
As the man walked purposefully down the hall, the ICU doors opened. A doctor in scrubs and a cap walked out. His roving eyes settled on Lauren. He stopped just in front of Lauren and Jerry and took off his cap. “You’re here for Cathy McAvoy?”
“Yes, we’re kind of her family,” Lauren offered.
“She’s going to be fine; she’s a real fighter. She will be here for a few days. You’ll be able to see her tomorrow, not tonight. She’s still out.”
Lauren and Jerry exhaled in unison.
* * *
The yoga class went well. Tomorrow would be my last in this series in Miami. Most of the students had come to all four classes, so I knew them in a limited way. They all were pursuing better health and wellness through their respective yoga practices, as well as more control over key aspects of their life. I felt privileged to be a yoga teacher and to be able to show them a few things that were maybe new to them, but mainly to form a collective energy and a unity of purpose and spirit. Yoga gave me such positive feelings. Helping people in my cyber business was nice, and it created some good results, but it was nothing compared to the feelings and life support I got from yoga.
I decided to stay at the center and work on the business at hand in my private room. I ate dinner quickly, thanked as many students and staff as I could, and retreated to my “office” at around eight-thirty. I set up at the desk. Linda answered immediately on the sat phone.
“Hey,” she said.
“Did you see James?” I asked.
“Yes. He refused at first, but then took the money. I think he was touched… That seemed to work. Hope he’s okay there.”
“Yeah, me too,” I agreed. We had never put James in a position where he might get in trouble at the lab. That would hurt—he was an important external component to my business. The Stanford Lab had more powerful computing power than almost every country and government and company in the world. He was valuable to me because they trusted him there and he had complete access. “I want to dive into Siroco now. Can you set it up so that we can do it now?”
“It’s ready. I thought you might want to go in tonight.”
“Run it down to me.”
“Okay. I’ve got the codes James gave me in place. I’ve used the same route we used on that Belgium job, except that I’ve augmented it considerably. We’ll go in and out through TOR twice; we’ll use the servers we used before, which would be Moldova, Finland, Buenos Aires, San Diego and Fiji; and we’ll wash through the Amazon cloud twice, in and out. How’s that sound?”
“Damn good. Now, I want you to download through the dummy account on Gmail, the one we set up last year and never used. Do you remember it?”
“Oh, right. On it.”
“Also, take the information on one of those Macs in my office, the biggest one. There should be a lot of data, even if we get cut off short. And use the building line, not the office line.”
“Okay, give me a few minutes to set everything up.”
“Go! I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes. I want to make some calls here.”
I clicked off, put the sat phone in its charging unit, grabbed my office cell, and tapped in Lauren’s number. I started to stress as the phone rang once, twice, three times. She answered on the fourth.
“Derek,“ she answered, not with her usual confidence.
“How’re you doing?”
“I’m okay… Cathy’s out of surgery. It apparently went well. We can’t see her tonight.”
“Well, that’s good news,” I said lamely.
“Yeah, I guess,” she sighed, then paused. A silence hung in the air between us. Fortunately, she broke it. “Something weird happened at the hospital. Some guy showed up, said he was from the insurance company. Very strange… and I think he took my photo.”
“What!”
“Yeah. And then he just left. Didn’t give a name, a card, nothing. He even said the wrong insurance company. Cathy and I have the same company, AAA.”
My sense of situational awareness flooded me. “You need to stay with me tonight, at my hotel. Get your stuff together for tomorrow, grab whatever else you need, and leave. Do this right now!”
“Am I in some kind of trouble?” Her voice was tight. “Derek, you’re freaking me out.”
“Lauren. Listen to me carefully. Pack up your stuff, what you need, get in your car, and go to my hotel. I’ll call them now. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” I moved into command authority. This situation required a leader. I was that guy tonight. “I know what I’m doing, Lauren. Get your stuff, and get moving now. And call me from my room.”
“Okay,” was all she said before she clicked off.
I called the manager at the Biltmore on his private cell phone number that he had given me and instructed him to expect Lauren, to let her into my room—personally—and to make sure she had everything she needed.
“No problem, Mr. Randall, we’ll take care of everything.”
Even though it was late, I called Ed, who answered on the first ring.
“I know it’s late,” I said. “I’ll have some information in an hour or two. You want to talk tonight or first thing in the morning?”
“Are we in trouble tonight?”
“No, we scrubbed out your computers and online interfacing. Whatever we find tonight will involve more of our strategic response and our tactical considerations. I’ll call you early.”
“Okay. And just so you know, the boys went over to Ziv’s apartment and took a look. Just as you said, there were bugs everywhere. We left them in place. Don’t worry about Ziv. He’s family, he’s on the team; this kind of stuff happens.”
“These people are pretty sophisticated, Ed. Let’s handle this the right way.”
“With your help, we’ll do just that. We’re not without means.”
I cut back in before he clicked off. “We’ve located the woman who hacked Ziv.”
“So soon. That’s good work… Who is she?”
“She’s in Kiev. She has a government job, diplomatic security, but we’re sure it’s a cover. What she is doing in this caper is unknown at this point.”
“Interesting. Give me her details, please.”
“You’re not going to do anything weird… are you?”
“No… not us. But we have friends.”
“I’ll shoot you an email with her particulars. Remember, nothing weird.”
“I promise.” He clicked off.
Had I noticed a slightly different energy at the end of the call? Even still, I had a good idea about what sort of “means” he was referring to. And I liked that kind of confidence, built out of experience and smoothed over with an old-world kind of wisdom. I shot him her info and coordinates. I was concerned about what he might do, and I was pretty sure who his friends might be. It would be a good test… of trust.
I was eager to see what we’d find inside Siroco—and about their president and VP, Richard and Lev, as well as the two dingbats who’d come to the yoga class and gone home to the hospital.
I tapp
ed in Linda on the sat phone. I knew we would find some good stuff in the bowels of Siroco. How good? That was the part that excited me.
7
“You ready?” Linda answered on the sat phone.
“Yeah, but I have another idea,” I responded. “I’d like to do a parallel hack and see if we can insert the ‘Mal-7’ bug. Let’s try to put in a back door.”
“I only have two hands, Derek, in case you forgot.”
“Okay… Let me try to do it from here. Send me the access codes.” The chimes reflected how incredibly efficient Linda was. “I’m going to run this through one of the burners. Hold tight while I set this up.”
“Holding here.”
I tracked a route similar to what Linda had devised for the main hack. I used a couple of friendly servers way off shore and ran the route in and out of TOR to try to shut down any reverse hacking to get my identity. It was through a burner cell phone and down into my laptop, which was a big risk, considering all the info I carried on it.
“Okay here. You good?”
“Yes, dear, nothing has changed on this side.”
“Just to be sure, you’ve got all the capture protocols ready?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Okay. Let’s do it. Go!”
We both pushed Send. Deadly, viper-like zeros and ones went screaming into battle with an enemy, instructed to see everything, copy everything, and create a pathway back in when and how we wanted. We needed at least sixty seconds of uninterrupted access once we got in to be effective: to scan the overall system, to isolate the emails, and to imprint-copy. Our copy capability was conceptually like a screenshot. It completed multi-gig bunches of copying in less than a nanosecond. We had state-of-the-art, cutting-edge programs, but based on what James had told us, I knew that might not be enough.
I was watching the second hand on my Swatch. When we passed one minute, I knew we would get a good return. When we got to one-minute-thirty, I was sure of it. Around one-forty, it clicked off. Just as James had said, we did not have the “Plus-1” element of the access codes, and they knew it, reacted, and shut us down.
“Wow,” Linda said, “a lot of stuff here. Let me organize it. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”
“Go; I’m here.” We clicked off.
I checked my laptop. We had the best programs and capabilities available. It had set up our backdoor access, a hidden pathway into the very heart of Siroco. I was hopeful that they did not have some kind of system-crawler program to recognize unusual emails or covert lines in code. I was eager to get Linda’s breakdown of our haul.
The sat phone chimed.
“You’re going to like this,” she said. The chime on my laptop told me it had arrived. It was a large file. I saved it with an appropriate file name: Siroco Hack. And then I studied what Linda had sent, neatly organized by subjects, companies, and individuals. Amazing what modern computing power can do.
The first batch was companies that Siroco people were communicating with or receiving emails from. It was an interesting assortment and included Prime Mortgage (no surprise there), Miami Crane Works, Sabra Security (again, no surprise there), Florida Trucking, International Shipping, and Verdugo Container Corporation. There were other communications with a few banks, Miami-Dade County Permitting Department, Palmetto Plaza, and some others.
The second batch was individuals going out and coming in. There were many. It would take some intensive analysis to adequately understand who these people were and what they were doing. The haul was good; we had what we needed to initially understand the situation and make the appropriate recommendations to the client. This kind of sophisticated computer and online analysis was why people hired us.
“I want to study this more,” I said. “Stay there. I’ll call you back in a few minutes. There’s work to do.”
“Okay,” she responded.
Just then, my cell chimed. I snatched it from across the desk and saw that it was Lauren. I clicked off Linda and accepted Lauren.
“Hey, where are you?”
“I’ve got all my stuff, and I’m ready to leave,” she said in a weak voice. “Derek, I’m frightened. What’s going on?”
“You’ll be fine. Just get to the hotel. Where do you live? I mean, house, condo, apartment?”
“I have a house in Coconut Grove.”
“Do you have an alarm system?”
“Yes, of course… This is Miami.”
“Okay. Make sure it’s on when you leave. Leave some lights on: living room, kitchen, bedroom. Can you access your security system remotely?”
“Yes, through my cell phone. I can see from the front door and a few other places in the house. Why is that important?”
“Don’t worry about it. Just leave some lights on and go to my hotel. I’ll be there soon; I’m working on something here at the Center.”
“Okay,” she said. Her energy seemed as low as anything I had seen in the hospital.
I clicked off and went back to the readout on Siroco.
The program we used to batch this information provided for easy cross-checking of individuals with their corresponding business or corporation. I saw that Sam Ratner was connected to Miami Crane Works, William Johnson was connected to Florida Trucking, and Sonny Verdugo was connected to Verdugo Container Corporation. Richard Adams was light on emails; same with Lev Lavorosky. Nine other individuals were listed, which included, interestingly, Katarina Truska and Dimitri Porshenko with Ukrainian email addresses ending in gov.ua. They did not even try to cover their tracks… That kind of arrogance was useful. And another guy they addressed as “the General,” General Kangxi, used qq.cn, which I understood to be part of a Chinese personal account address. I wondered if he was active government or military; you never knew with China. I saw an international cast of characters.
I called Linda back on the sat phone.
“Here’s what I want you to do. Run the three businesses and the individuals connected to them: Miami Crane Works and Sam Ratner, Florida Trucking and William Johnson, and Verdugo Container Corporation and Sonny Verdugo. And check on this guy in Ukraine, Dimitri Porshenko. That’s enough for you tonight. I’ll call you tomorrow, early your time. Get to it. I’ve got a lot here.”
“On it,” she answered and was about to click off, Miami style.
I cut back in. “Linda… be careful. Look around; see what’s happening around you. These people, from what I’ve seen here, they’re dangerous. You never know. I don’t think they can set up tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll have George step up security.”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
“Linda, I’m serious. Don’t fool around!”
“Okay, sorry. You want me to deal with George?”
“No, I’ll handle it tomorrow. Just get to work on the haul.”
“Have a good night, boss.”
She clicked off. I should appreciate her sense of humor a little more… Not tonight.
It was nine forty-five. I dialed another number.
“Yes,” answered Olivia, the gruff five-foot-two reporter.
“Olivia, Derek here. Are you free right now?”
“Who?”
“Derek. You know, from lunch, from Palmetto Plaza, Derek who is also interested in Siroco.”
“Right… What do you want?”
“What kind of research capacity do you have?”
“You’re calling me at ten at night to ask about my research capacity?”
“Yes, that’s right. You’re investigating Siroco, right?” It should not have to be this difficult. I thought about disconnecting, but didn’t. “I have information. It requires some analysis… Of course, I could give it to the NY Times if you’d prefer.”
“You don’t have to be offensive.”
“Do you want to work with me or not?”
“Okay, what d
o you have?”
“Do… you… want… to… work… with… me… or… not?”
“Okay, okay, sorry.”
“That’s better. Now, we just looked inside Siroco. Don’t ask. They’re talking to these companies and these individuals. I need you to look into each—what do they do here, why would they be talking to Siroco, what’s the connection? Can you do that… Can you localize this for me?”
“Yes, of course. I’m good at what I do.”
“It’s just the courtesy part that challenges you?”
“Okay already, sorry. It goes with what I do. Give me what you have. I can turn it around in a day or two.”
“All right. Write these down: Miami Crane Works and Sam Ratner. Florida Trucking and William Johnson. And Verdugo Container Corporation and Sonny Verdugo. Start with those.”
“That’s it?”
“Start with those. There’s a lot more to this, but it’s not ready. I need to know what these pieces are, how they fit. And one other thing: do not disclose any of this yet. You do not publish anything yet. Nothing until it’s ready. Do you agree with that, because if you do not, everything’s off. This will be the end of our collaboration. Do you agree?”
“Yes… And work on your own courtesy.”
“Okay, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” I clicked off, happy to utilize Miami-style phone tactics.
* * *
It was ten-fifteen when I left the yoga center. I was on heightened alert as I walked out of the center and into the parking lot. As before, my car was the last one there. I scanned everything in sight, but nothing caught my attention. No people walking or loitering around, the usual smattering of cars parked on the residential street. I got in the big Porsche Panamera, looked around inside, thinking about the movies with the snakes, and did a security check. All was good.
As I drove off the lot, slowly, still scanning, I saw them: two men, scrunched down in their seats, parked up the street about fifty yards. Black Mercedes, four doors, windows open. I turned right out of the lot, away from their position, expecting them to follow me. They didn’t. When I turned right onto Collins Avenue, I didn’t see them.
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