The Drucker Proxy

by Lior Samson

  “I thought as much but didn’t want to say anything. Is it mutual?”

  “Sort of. When it comes to me, I think Barbra might be Tyrell’s cousin. We haven’t actually talked about it, but …”

  “Then it ain’t real, girl. If you don’t say it out loud, it didn’t happen.”

  “You going all philosophical on me? You wanna talk about what’s real and what isn’t? That’s where the problems come in, you know. Is the Drucker proxy real? Is it really Cole Drucker reincarnated?”

  “That’s easy. It doesn’t have a soul. It’s a machine, just numbers, flying numbers in a machine.”

  “So say you. Maybe I don’t have a soul either, maybe there’s no such thing.”

  “I don’t buy that, as you can guess. My faith tells me—”

  “Your faith.” Dana drew out the last word with derision. “No, I’m sorry. Let’s just leave it that you believe and I’m going to hell. Either way, can we work together?”

  “Who said you’re going to hell? It’s not for me to judge nor for you to know. But, yes, we can work together. I want to figure this thing out, too.”

  “Good, then I need you to find out more about this Gwen Seabrook and what she had to do with Cole and with Existendia. And I need you to connect with a … friend, Rolf Nagy. And with a not-friend, Geraldo Potts. And—”

  “Slow down girl. I’m going to need to take notes here.”

  “Later. There’s a mall cop on a WheelIt heading our way across the air bridge. I’m going to duck into the New Gap here and get lost, exit on another floor. If he makes like he’s coming after me, get in his way or something. I’ll pick up another new phone before I leave the mall and will call you from it once I’m safely away.”

  “Oh, I love this stuff. It beats the hell out of trying to persuade IT people to follow new version-control procedures established after the merger.” She glanced toward the officer. By the time she looked back, Dana was gone. The cop leaned on his WheelIt to accelerate across the gap, then slowed to make the turn toward her on the broad walkway. Suddenly enamored by a workout suit in a window display, Tonika stepped absentmindedly directly into the path of the cop. He pulled back so hard on the handle of his two-wheel chariot that he ended up backing into a couple with a double stroller heading the other way. The servos on his WheelIt refused to let him tumble over, with the result that he had two young parents screaming in his face, while the twins in their double stroller launched into their own screeches.

  Two more mall police were converging on the shouting match as Tonika, taking her cue from Dana, slipped into the crowd watching a fashion show in the next store. She pushed through and headed for the stairs to the store balcony where she exited on the next level up in the mall. She grinned as she turned toward the elevator bank. It had been a long time since she had felt such a rush of real adrenaline, and she had to admit that she was rather enjoying the whole thing.

  As she approached the Tensora in the parking garage after a long detour through several sectors of the mall, she slowed. There was a strange woman looking it over. “Hey,” she called.

  “Hey yourself. Let’s get out of here. Parking garages kinda freak me out.”

  “Dana, I didn’t recognize you. How did you change so fast?”

  “Layers. Make-up wipes, and a spare wig. A large handbag has many uses. I just can’t take chances.” She picked up several shopping bags resting on the concrete. “Help me with these. I stocked up on spares of a lot of things on my way out.”

  — 27 —

  Dana paced. She hadn’t been called to testify before the grand jury, not that she particularly expected it after being charged with obstruction. Still, she was pissed. Was it her status, being out on bail, or was it that they didn’t need her to indict? She hoped it was the latter, because otherwise she knew she would get into her whole self-flagellation thing and would agonize over whether she should feel guilty for poking her nose in or hate herself for getting caught. Still she wasn’t terribly worried. In California, a grand jury did not have to be convinced that the prosecution could prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, only that the case should go to trial. An indictment could be handed down any day now, or so the news reported.

  In the meantime, Dana had her team—Geraldo and Tonika—quietly working with her, pounding the pavement while she paced in her living room or pounded the keyboard attached to her weak little WinTel tablet computer. Tonika had passed the purloined SD card on to her, and she was trying to make sense of it with Geraldo’s help, but it had been slow going using only a decrepit machine without all the proper software tools. And she reluctantly acknowledged that her hacking skills had grown rusty.

  She returned to her computer. Lacking sophisticated tools, she set about simply studying the code of the exploit that had gained access to the software system of the Tensora. She disassembled the code, converting it back to more readable symbolic form, and started going through it instruction by instruction. It was not a complicated attack in itself, only a simple buffer overrun that spread itself beyond data boundaries, overwriting built-in code with new instructions that loaded and then executed the payload, the part of the program that actually did the dirty work. In this case, the payload breached the security of the car’s local network to make changes to core programs in various parts of the complex software that monitored and controlled the vehicle.

  Dana was hoping to find some left-over or embedded text that might give a clue to who might have written the program. Hackers have been known to leave behind little bits and pieces that point back to them or reveal a stylistic signature, such as, a preference for certain sequences or unusual instructions. Dana was disappointed. In this case, the code was remarkably straightforward to follow. There were no clever coding tricks, no obscure techniques, just highly disciplined programming following classic rules for well-structured loops and decisions. It reminded her of the code she’d seen from military hackers who worked for the Chinese army. Could this be the work of Chinese operatives? But why? What possible reason would China have to attack Coleman Drucker?

  Back when she was part of the hacker scene, Dana had seen other examples of code like this: clean, straightforward, almost regimented, with none of the clever flair that so many hackers would use to demonstrate their chops and win the attention and admiration of their peers. She remembered one black-hat in particular, a hacker-for-hire who went by the cryptonym Ipotane. He had a stellar rep and was known for well-organized, rigorous programming that never broke, never failed.

  Ipotane. What kind of a handle was that? Online handles were an art form often expressing coded personal details that invited analysis. DJLP333 always seemed pretty obvious to Dana, who pictured a nerd with a shelf full of beloved vintage vinyl albums. Others, like Aloe-Wishes, one of Ipotane’s occasional collaborators, were memorable but cryptic.

  A quick consult with Google reported that the word Ipotane was Greek, referring to a mythical race of half-horse, half-human creatures. Dana couldn’t remember if Ipotane the hacker had ever been outted. She started poking around those parts of the web that Google wouldn’t know about. A couple of hours of digging uncovered references to code “attributed to Ipotane” or “supposedly copied from Ipotane” but nothing that revealed an identity. And then there was a comment that leaped out from the screen, something about Ipotane and other hackers of the legendary Snake River League. Ipotane was rumored to have sharpened his chops as part of the Idaho National Labs team that allegedly launched a secret cyber counter-attack against the Chinese after American natural gas transmission pipelines had been hacked. It was all speculation, of course. Nothing of the real story had ever come out in mainstream media, but the dark web held no shortage of stories.

  Ipotane: half-horse, half-human, like a centaur or horse and rider. There it was, right in front of her. Gwen Seabrook, with her Snake River tattoo and her love of horses, could well be Ipotane and the code Dana was studying could have been written by Ipotane.

 
The challenge for Dana would be sniffing out Seabrook’s digital trail without tipping her hand. Maybe it was time to revive another handle, her own: DDDiana, mysterious mistress of invisibility. Dana was pretty sure her handle had never been compromised, at least not among hackers. One could never be sure about the government, about what the clandestine services knew and what they didn’t.The challenge energized Dana. She started planning. She’d have to hack her own tablet computer, install better encryption, set up a protocol to spoof her IP address—it would take some work to be able to do it right under the noses of her watchers: the cops she knew about and the others about whom she could only guess.

  By the next day, DDDiana was being welcomed back by a network of old friends known to each other only by their handles. She was slowly working her way to close in on Gwen Seabrook when Geraldo called to tell her to check out the breaking news about the Coleman Drucker death. Dana switched back to a regular browser to stream KCRW, the local NPR outlet.

  “In what the media and public have dubbed the ‘Bashing Bot Case,’ the District Attorney’s office today revealed that the grand jury had not returned an indictment. It is widely believed that charges of manslaughter, sometimes popularly referred to as negligent homicide, were being sought against Aram Netsky, CTO of Existendia Enterprises, in whose office Coleman Todd Drucker, CEO of construction tech behemoth Drucker Unified, was bludgeoned to death by a computer-controlled robot arm. Pressed by reporters to comment on rumors about possible charges against Coleman Drucker’s digital proxy, an intelligent computer program believed by many to have operated the robot arm, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office dismissed the idea as ‘ludicrous, without precedent, and a legal quagmire of contradictions. You can charge a person, a group of persons or even a corporate entity with a crime, but you cannot charge a piece of computer software. That’s all this so-called proxy is: just an app, a glorified app. Sources close to the investigation do not believe criminal charges will be forthcoming. Our legal affairs correspondent, Ariana Plotnik, has been following the case. Welcome, Ariana. What do you make of these latest developments in what has been a high-flying case for many weeks?”

  When the door buzzer sounded, Dana paused the feed. It was two police officers coming to recover her GPS tracker; the charges against her had been dropped.

  — 28 —

  Bert Jamison, his plaid bowtie bobbing, stuttered his way to a finish of his presentation. “P-p-played. We are being played, people. The stock is being manipulated, and it looks like we have a traitor in our midst. T-t-timing makes it look like there’s an insider leaking information.”

  Adam Treadwell nodded. “Thank you, Bert. As acting CEO, I’ve decided to keep this just among us in this room. You are the trusted, inner circle, and by that I mean not only my personal trust, but also the trust once placed in you by CT. We keep this to ourselves, period, and I’m going to ask for you to return those copies of Bert’s report before we adjourn. So what do you think?”

  Barbra flipped through the stapled document in front of her. “But this doesn’t look like profit-taking, Bert. If anything, it seems like somebody, or somebodies, are taking advantage of volatility to quietly build holdings. It looks like maybe a consortium of investors riding rumors and leaks to pick up shares on the cheap, but they’re not short-selling or profit-taking, just waiting it out until there’s another dip.”

  Bert nodded. “I thought that t-too.”

  “So, what makes you two think there’s an inside connection?”

  Adam took over. “Because most of the dips in our share price come shortly after a disclosure from one source, an analyst calling himself Backhoe Bob who blogs on construction industry trends. He’s pretty sharp in general, but he is scary spot-on with his comments on Drucker Unified. He knew that we were dropping the on-site 3D cement-printer project, he knew that we were pulling out of the deal with Kayuki Industries, he knew that groundbreaking on the Vancouver project would be put off until next year. Dot dot dot. He seems to know about every hiccup and embarrassment that we have worked to keep quiet about.”

  Barbara tapped the report. “But from this list, it’s not all bad news he’s leaking—if they are leaks. I mean,”—she flipped pages—“item twelve, his claim that we were about to sign a deal with the Portuguese, the stock climbed after that.”

  “Right, and some of the shareholders shaken by the falls chose that small rise as a chance to cash out. And who were the buyers? Mostly the same small institutional investors, it looks like, none of them major players in themselves, but they all seem to be marching to the same drumbeat.”

  “So, do we know who this Backhoe Bob is?”

  “I have some people looking into it, but nothing yet. He’s relatively new, but he’s amassing followers and his influence has been growing rapidly, given that so much of his advice is right on the money.”

  Barbra’s face lit up. “Hang on, you said he’s new. How new? When did he start blogging?”

  “Sometime last summer. I can get the exact date? Why?”

  “I don’t know, just a hunch. Is there any pattern to his pronouncements about us? Do they tend to come from a particular division or concern certain operations?”

  “No, it’s like he’s reading from our playbook, sitting in on our management meetings. He seems to know everything in our strategic plans and our projections. That’s why I kept this discussion to just the five of us rather than the whole management team. Anyway, I wanted you all to know this was going on and to be on the lookout for anything or anyone suspicious.”

  Tonika passed her copy down the table. “Shouldn’t we have our security people looking into this?”

  “Already done. And Bradley here has launched a communications audit that should spot suspicious message patterns if whomever is involved is dumb enough to be using our phones or email, but I don’t expect that will turn up anything. It’s got to be someone in upper management, probably on this campus, maybe in this room, although I would certainly hope not. I’d hate to think any of you would stoop so low, and I’d hate to see any of you go to prison.” He squared up the stack of reports in front of him and started slipping them into the shredder beside his chair. “That’s it, people. Keep your eyes open and be careful.”

  — 29 —

  Dana, now DDDiana, was proud of herself. She was particularly proud of successfully passing herself off as a consultant offering a discounted penetration test as an introduction to her new services. That way, if she tripped alarms and got caught owing to her rusty skills, she could congratulate the client company on its superior security and offer to waive all charges for her services. It had been great fun convincing a junior cybersecurity engineer at Pacific TeleMo to let her demo her abilities without going through procurement channels.

  She grinned as she finished with the pen-test on the Pacific TeleMo website. Having gained access to the backend servers, she was now pawing her way through customer IDs and passwords in a database that had itself been encrypted but with a weak key that had only taken a couple of hours to break.

  Her pen-test had triggered no alarms and encountered only moderate barriers to access. Back in her hacker days, she had learned that even companies with first rate cybersecurity often had holes in their website systems with poorly guarded backdoors that ultimately led into their main data resources. Once she unlocked one of those backdoors, she could see the whole corporate data set and soon discovered that Pacific TeleMo had better security on their marketing research and financials than on their customer data. Typical.

  At this point, a malicious attacker would most likely have implanted a private backdoor to be saved for later when it could be used to access the subscriber file and dig further for credit card details. Dana, on the other hand, was interested in only one particular customer. She searched the database using Gwen Seabrook’s cellphone number, retrieved her account number, customer ID, and password, then used them to access the complete call log. Worried that her activity might
be spotted at any moment, she downloaded a year’s worth of call records, then disconnected. She ran the numbers through a reverse directory service using an automated script, then eyeballed the recent results. There were the earlier calls and texts to Cole Drucker, but it was the other names she recognized, and the fact they continued through to the present, that caught her eye. It was like reading a corporate telephone directory for Existendia top management, with multiple calls to and from Aram Netsky, Bannon Turndale, and Jerry Pendrake among others. Most surprising of all, however, were scattered calls from Barbra Wilson’s personal cell number.

  What was going on? Barbra had denied any knowledge of Gwen Seabrook when they first found the text messages on Cole’s phone. But there it was, evidence that she had known about Gwen much earlier. Now Dana was unsure whom she could trust. She felt betrayed by Barbra. Should she confront her? Play it cool and try to trip her up? Do nothing, at least for now?

  And what should she do about the troika at Existendia? It seemed pretty obvious to her that Netsky was the prime suspect in Cole’s death, at least if she eliminated the proxy program itself. But even that was really Netsky’s brainchild. He was the software-engineering Svengali pulling the strings. What would stop him from manipulating the proxy to make it do whatever he wanted it to do? Dana’s head swam with questions and conjectures.

  She glanced at the wall clock. Enough. It was time to let DDDiana rest. Dana was due at Barbra’s for dinner and a weekend of getting reacquainted after their court-mandated separation. It might be uncomfortable, knowing what she now knew, but Dana was ready to keep her own counsel and wait for an opening. Besides, she thought, the sex would be good. She caught a guilty glimpse of herself in the mirror as she headed for the bedroom to change. She was grinning at the thought of Barbra in bed. What did that make her? What did that make Barbra? “Shit, men aren’t the only ones who can chase tail.” She started shedding her clothes on the way to shower. “What’s sauce for the gander …”