by Chris Knopf
Surveillance cameras were coyly concealed throughout the building, along hallways and within common areas and conference rooms. Having worked for a security equipment company, I knew what to look for, which meant never acting as if I did. Official staff in grey slacks and blue blazers moved regularly through the building, somehow being unobtrusive and obvious at the same time. Fit, composed and square-jawed, I didn’t need the IT guy to tell me they were all ex-military.
Though I had virtually no contact with my fellow employees, I saw a fair amount of Chuck, the result of some of his pent-up demand for data analytics. The assignments came at me in a steady stream, though he was respectful of my time, allowing me to set my own reporting schedule. It wasn’t difficult work if you had the right software, which Brian in IT was happy to provide.
Seeing a lot of Chuck also meant seeing a lot of Patricia Cheerborg. It was apparent she was his closest protégé and that they represented a duality through which ran the whole of the department’s operations. He copied her on every e-mail he sent to me, so I made sure to consistently hit the “reply all” button. And on a few occasions, as I waited for an audience, I saw them move between each other’s offices as if it were a common work space. This is what inspired a plan that would surely necessitate Natsumi’s participation.
“You’ll never fit in any of my things,” she said, looking me up and down with a critical eye.
“I know. We need to go shopping.”
“What’s her size?” she asked.
“I don’t know what that means. Sort of tall, on the slim side, though big boned. A little stooped.”
“That’s a start.”
I Googled her and found a few photographs from company events and her LinkedIn page. Even better, there was a video interview of her when acting as spokesperson for a Fontaine development project.
“You’re lucky about the hair,” she said. “We can buy it prepermed and ready to go.”
As every male on his first attempt at going drag knows, even modestly high heels are very difficult to walk in. I tried them with a pair of panty hose, over shaved legs, and a knee-length light wool skirt in order to capture the whole experience.
“I wonder when I’ll be able to look at you without at least a little smirk,” said Natsumi.
“It’d be heartless to deny you that joy,” I said, as I wobbled around the house.
“I bet your legs are better looking than Patricia’s,” she said.
“The kind of thing a guy waits his whole life to hear.”
After we bought the wig, blouse, plastic-rimmed glasses and cardigan sweater, the greater challenge became more apparent. My shoulders.
“Maybe if I lost weight,” I said.
“That won’t make your skeleton any smaller.”
“She stoops,” I said, demonstrating as well as I could while still unsteady on my feet.
“How long can you sustain that?” she asked.
“Let’s find out.”
So I practiced for a few hours every night for over a week, until I mastered her long-legged loping walk and slope-shouldered posture, though after taping my performance with a camera similar to what security would install at Fontaine, it wasn’t assuring.
“You’re still too manly on top,” said Natsumi. “You’re not a good enough schlump.”
After some thought, I resorted to one of the most versatile tools of the pragmatic and deceptive. Duct tape.
I assumed as slouched a posture as I could and Natsumi taped me into position, working around the stuffed bra. It was just shy of excruciating, but I had movement of my hands and could free myself of thinking about that unnatural shape.
“Too bad about the nose,” said Natsumi, searching out the final flaw in the disguise.
“My mother used to say the same thing. She blamed it on my father’s side of the family.”
“Just keep your head down.”
I used this preparation time to do a little low-key network probing using Brian’s admin password. I stayed in the outer rings of the file structure, mostly recording what was accessible without actually cracking into the folders. Though it was within this relatively safe realm I came across a valuable find—an appointment schedule one of the administrative assistants kept for Chuck, Patricia and a few other high-ranking people in the department. At that point in the process, there was no more precious asset.
Thus the opportunity arose about a week later when both Chuck and Patricia were scheduled to be at an evening presentation in the city. This was posted a few days before the event, giving me time to smuggle the women’s clothes into the office along with a flash drive containing what I hoped was the key to the rest of Andalusky’s electronic realm.
In the morning I asked Chuck for a brief chat at the end of the day. He said he could do it a few minutes before five. So I showed up when the two of them were getting ready to leave the building. As we chatted in the hallway, I sneaked another look at the camouflaged security cameras, assessing their likely angles and coverage.
Back in my office, I logged on to one of my approved servers, typing in the first section of a report I’d already composed at home. Installed on my computer was a program that picked up the report halfway through and continued with a recording of the keystrokes, creating the appearance I was diligently working away at my desk while I adopted my Patricia Cheerborg identity.
Around seven o’clock I left my office and headed down a nearby stairwell connected with the parking garage. I was wearing a long raincoat, underneath which I wore the Patricia outfit down to my calves, which were covered in cut-off pant legs taped to my knees. I got in my car, and after climbing into the passenger seat, completed the conversion. One of the greatest points of exposure came next, when I left the car and followed a different route back to the stairwell. My hope was that unless my movements were being directly monitored, which in the garage would have to be from some distance, it was unlikely anyone would notice Marty Goldman get in his car and Patricia Cheerborg emerge from the passenger side moments later.
I climbed back up the stairwell, passing my floor on the way to the next, the top floor where they housed company top management.
When I reached the hallway, I adopted my best Patricia Cheerborg walk and headed for her office. I’d made another guess, that security would be unaware of her meeting in the city, assuming that keeping tabs on executive meetings would be too burdensome. Seeing her appear at her office after hours, on the other hand, would be commonplace, and unworthy of extra attention.
Head down, I walked with Patricia’s purposeful stride directly into her office, which was unlocked, answering yet another worrisome possibility. I sat at her desk, swiveled around to face the credenza and took a deep breath. Though presumably hidden from view by people or cameras, I pretended to go through some papers on the credenza while I waited for the storm troopers to appear. Or not.
When it felt like I was in the clear, with my heart rate down to a steady trip hammer, I took a bunch of Kleenex tissues out of my skirt pocket, gathered up a few file folders and left the office, making a show of sneezing and snuffling into the Kleenex. Again, with clear purpose, I made the quick turn into Andalusky’s office, also blessedly unlocked, and shut the door.
This time, I didn’t hesitate, but went right for his desktop computer. I put the flash drive into the USB port and switched it on. When the user name and password request popped up, I used Brian’s admin credentials, and hit enter. As the machine booted up, an invisible little app slithered out of the flash drive and attached itself to Chuck’s computer at the operating system level, expressing itself as a legitimate slice of communications code and thus undetectable by known security software.
“Known” being the operative word. In the arms race between spyware hackers and the people committed to their defeat, the balance of power shifted nearly by the minute. Though I’d acquired the latest version of my app from a reliable source, no one could know if it weren’t already tagged and targeted
by the righteous opposition. There was no way to know.
The advantage I had, warranting the mighty risk I was taking, was being able to inject the agent directly into the computer at the start-up phase, bypassing any network presence where automated sentries guarded the gates.
It was tempting to cruise around Andalusky’s e-mail and file folders, but as soon as the app was safely tucked away, I logged off and shut down the computer. This part of the mission presumably accomplished, my entire nervous system decided it was time to jump up and run like hell.
Luckily, running of any kind in Patricia’s modest heels was out of the question. Instead I went back into her office to let another reasonable length of time pass before making the last run through the building.
I sat at her desk and attempted to breathe normally, steady breaths despite the pull of the duct tape, and compose myself for whatever would come next.
Which turned out to be a knock on the door.
CHAPTER 19
I actually opened the window the allowable few inches, proving the impossibility of fitting through. Even if I could, the four-story fall would surely kill me, and then there’d be no way to explain the skirt, heels and frothy wig.
So I sat down at Patricia’s small, round conference table and looked at the closed door, disappointed to hear another knock.
“Perdoname ¿hay alguien en la sala? Eez anybody here?” came the female voice from the other side of the door.
I got up and opened the door, again holding a wad of tissues to my face.
“Oh, sorry, I come back,” said the tiny woman in a grey uniform armed with an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner.
“No, no es una molestia. Voy a salir pronto,” I said, automatically, using my best version of a female voice, sounding more like a comic imitation of Julia Child than Patricia Cheerborg.
“Señora, no sabía que hablaba español.” Madame, I didn’t know you spoke Spanish, she’d said, clearly taken aback.
I kept the tissues firmly planted to my face and shook my head, not daring to risk another word. I pulled on my coat with one hand, grabbed a few files and fled the scene.
Rattled, I started to run down the stairwell to the garage, then forced myself into a more acceptable pace. The click of my heels on the cement stairs sounded like little muffled gunshots.
I made it to the car without encountering anyone. Before starting the engine, I ripped off the wig, took off the heels and tucked the coat around me. There was nothing to be done right then about the makeup, though I made a few feeble attempts with some napkins from the glove compartment, only achieving a few ugly smears across my forehead from the eyeliner and an unwelcome mouthful of lipstick.
You had to go through a gate on the way into the parking lot, but luckily, not on the way out, which I always found curious, but in this case highly convenient. I kept to a reasonable speed as I drove out of the complex, though once hitting the public road, I let myself give it a little extra gas on the way to the highway, and after that, the quick trip up to the blessed woods of Pound Ridge.
THE NEXT day, when Andalusky turned on his computer, the first thing it asked him for was his user name and password. When he typed these in, it unlocked his computer, giving him entrée to most of the corporation’s file servers and his e-mail account, which lived on the Internet up in the cloud. The user name and password were also transmitted through a mini network within his office group, and thus well inside the corporate firewall, to a common administrative file that had lain dormant since the system had been installed. A split second after this file received the information, the communications link disappeared and the app slid back into the cyber shadows.
Seconds after that, I opened the administrative file from my office desktop using Brian’s system administrator permissions. I copied the information, then deleted the file and purged all sign of its existence from the directories.
Using Andalusky’s e-mail address and password, I went to the e-mail provider in the cloud and created a duplicate of his account with its own login instructions. This I could access from anywhere at any time.
Although this contrivance was theoretically invisible to the company’s security measures, I thought it better to wait until I got home to start exploring.
So all that was left to do that day was to wait impatiently for it to end.
BACK AT my table full of computers in the house in Pound Ridge, I poured what I thought would be the final cup of coffee of the day and brought up Chuck’s e-mail. The first thing I did was type the name Alberta into the search box, though before I could type past “Alb” about a thousand e-mails appeared on the screen, the name Albalita highlighted in brilliant yellow.
Albalita Suarez, Executive Director, The People Project. The institution into which Okayo poured her zeal and devotion, where she sat on the board of directors.
I went to their website and in a few moments had a portrait of Albalita, in starkly professional suit and expression to match the gravity of her mission—to bring health and social well-being to the world’s poor through the opportunity to be financially independent and secure. To us, she was Alberta, the woman on the fishing boat in the Caribbean, whose mission was to abuse, terrify, interrogate and then condemn Natsumi and me to death.
I couldn’t help but note the apparent disconnect.
I MANAGED to read a few hundred of the e-mails between Chuck and Albalita, starting from the earliest dates and working forward in time, before falling asleep on the keyboard. The story they told was of the wealthiest power on Earth, the US Federal Government, in a complex dance with the planet’s poorest individuals.
That the notion of winning hearts and minds has become easily lampoonable doesn’t mean it isn’t essential if any largescale military power hopes to succeed in a conflict with a weaker, yet culturally cohesive local population. So the central planners in huge, air-conditioned concrete buildings in Washington, eager to find a supplement to the tanks, drones and infantrymen to hurl into foreign communities, saw a lot of merit in The People Project’s approach to hurling money at their constituencies.
Not hurling so much as scattering, as one does when hand-seeding a garden. As a concept, microfinancing is relatively simple. Rather than lending large amounts to big institutions which are then charged with providing services to the general population, you lend tiny amounts to thousands of individuals directly so they can put the money to work in the most effective and efficient way possible. At the same time, you foster personal responsibility and a sense of self-reliance on the part of the borrowers, teaching them the particulars of good money management while bringing them into the larger financial universe.
Those in the federal government who thought this was a good idea also knew executing such a program was well beyond the logistical capability of the State Department or the Pentagon, or any other government agency, even the United Nations. In an unusual moment of thoughtfulness and clarity, someone decided this was a job for specialists, people who understood the staggering administrative challenges to qualifying applicants, then lending to and collecting from people who often lived on dirt floors and whose greatest financial asset might be a single goat.
So even the selection of the right subcontractor in this case fell to another organization that had proven its talent for sourcing anything and everything, worldwide.
The Société Commerciale Fontaine.
As it turned out, the man in charge of dispensing these contracts had only to travel the width of the marital bed to find the perfect enterprise. To circumvent conflict-of-interest charges, he put the assignment out to bid. Okayo publicly recused herself from the decision making and The People Project mounted a robust and ultimately successful campaign to win the contract, led by their executive director, Albalita Suarez.
Thus began a fruitful relationship between the dispensers of US foreign aid, their fiduciary—contractor Fontaine—and The People Project as the NGO specialist in the field. In the process, a billion and a hal
f dollars found its way into the hands of millions of impoverished people throughout the world striving to build more financially secure, self-sustaining lives.
Out of this success came a strong mutual regard between Chuck and Albalita. It grew more intense and demonstrative with every milestone achieved, every triumph celebrated. As I concentrated on the messages there was nothing that would reconcile the reality expressed in these e-mails and what had happened to Natsumi and me.
No wonder I succumbed to exhaustion.
I DROVE into work the next day, resisting the urge to go deeper into Andalusky’s e-mail. I was fairly bludgeoned by lack of sleep, my late night in front of the computer made worse by waking up early to brief Natsumi. She took it all in, made coffee and entreated me to be careful.
“I know you always are,” she said. “It just makes me feel better saying it.”
Everything else about the morning was routine. I pulled into my usual parking spot, used my ID badge to get through the employee entrance turnstile and said hello to the guard, carrying my briefcase and coffee mug freshened at a deli along the way. Everything routine but for the security guy standing outside my office and the other one suddenly walking behind me.
“Good morning, Mr. Goldman,” said the guy at the door. “Could you come with us please?”
He moved away from the door and I felt a gentle herding vibe from the other man, so I followed along compliantly, feeling a brief urge to dive down a passing stairwell, though I knew I’d be pinned to the floor before I had a chance to take half a step.
