His computer at home had to be left on to retrieve all email to an encrypted folder. He received more than 500 emails per day. He never bothered to decode them, he simply didn't have the time. There were now 14 cells for whom he handled communications. Most ISPs in this country would bounce your email after you received 200 messages. John couldn't risk that. Many of the soldiers in the field used libraries and colleges to send email to him. He couldn't risk a bounced email landing in an administrators folder. It might actually be looked at and figured out.
John kept up on all of the latest technology trends. He read the industry trade magazines during every free moment. He didn't read as much to satisfy a thirst for knowledge as to find out anything new that was mentioned about surveillance and viruses. He ran every kind of virus scanner imaginable. The last thing he wanted was some Trojan horse piggy backing on an email message that would give him up to the authorities.
This may be India, but he would not have a trial here. At best he would get a brief pass in front of news cameras with officials denouncing him as a terrorist, then he would be executed. The “best” situation didn't happen much anymore. John knew several of his co-workers were members of local cells. They had no idea he was the communication method. One day some of them simply quit showing up to work; by late afternoon replacements sat at their desks. His bosses said nothing about it. Had they left for other jobs there would have been much hollering by one of his bosses and shouts about suing a competitor. The silence was more telling than a confession.
Infidels have a saying “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” He had heard some of them say this while helping them with computer problems. For John, this wasn't a saying, but a mantra for survival. He had a scheduled job which deleted all of his sent items twice per day. It also emptied his email wastebasket once that was done. Finally it kicked off some privacy software which would perform a DOD-secure erase of all empty space on his hard drive. He had to thank the U.S. Department of Defense for publishing a standard of erasing data so securely it could never be recovered. John knew all too well that just because a file was deleted didn't mean it was gone. He had helped many customers recover deleted files.
While waiting for his new identity to arrive he was cleaning his home like it hadn't been cleaned before. Wearing gloves and a hair net, he was scrubbing and wiping every surface. He even pulled the hair traps out of the drains to remove any and all evidence of his presence. He took special care to scrub the underside of the toilet lid and seat. He had read about police checking there for fingerprints.
Finally his new identity arrived. An old friend of his had brought it. They both knew they would probably never meet again. John picked up his two suitcases, computer briefcase and bag of trash from cleaning, then left. His friend took the key to the place as they said good bye. The bag of trash did not leave his possession until he was three streets over. He bought a ticket, and waited for a bus. While he waited, he read through his new identity. It came complete with references from a consulting company in the very city he had worked and some walking around money. So, they did what we said and never told us, he thought.
***
Nedim returned home from work exhausted. It was the wee hours of the morning and all he wanted to do was sleep. Of course, his “friends” were waiting for him and wanted him to check his email before turning in. “Why don't you do it, I've shown you how?” he asked them.
“We cannot risk a mistake at this point,” his cousin replied.
Sighing, he sat down in the chair and logged into his email. Seven messages were waiting with two coming from the same user. His friends noted this and wrote the user down. As Nedim went through the forwarding process they noticed that one of the forwarded messages went to this same address. They had him translate all three messages. One message referred to a plan to blow up a tunnel under a river. Another message made reference to blowing up multiple trains at the same time. The response going back was a request for more information about what was required. No hint about a location was in the messages.
Nedim was now allowed to eat, pray, and go to bed. Ramesh gathered up his notes to file a report with headquarters in a few hours. Umar settled down on a sleeping bag. In a few hours, Nedim would need to be awake again and Umar would need to be his shadow. Ramesh informed Umar about the lectures with the cleric Nedim was attending and told him he would be required to infiltrate the circle to hear what they were discussing. Umar was not pleased.
***
Kent was sitting in a conference room with his Big Four Consulting firm team. It was the largest conference room the bank had in this building, and was almost too small. His assistant Margret, was the only other bank employee in the room, all of the rest came with the consulting firm. Because Kent knew nothing about IT, he had little ability to defend himself from the team surge that happened three days into the project. Other than the team leader, they were all fresh college graduates, which the team leader claimed were all required. All Kent knew was that he was paying $120/hour for each of them, there were only seven slides in the PowerPoint presentation, but they all billed him for 40 hours per week. A quick math calculation informed Kent that about half of the consulting budget he had available went out the door last week.
All of the girls working on the project wore short skirts with stockings and heels. They all wore some kind of top that looked very business and professional when you looked at them standing, but when sitting down they could turn/twist/bend to show all they had to offer. There was a lot of turning and twisting keeping the conversation going during the entire seven slides of the presentation. They managed to consume exactly 40 minutes before opening it up for questions.
Kent had asked them to review his predecessor's plan and see if the final round of data center consolidation was well mapped out. He expected a yes or no answer. If no, he expected to get a few extra pages added to the plan to round it out. What he got was neither of those.
Big Four's entire presentation had been a bunch of quotes from the Langston Group about the cost savings of off-shoring all IT operations. There had been spreadsheets computed with some of Kent's own numbers showing the dramatic year-over-year cost savings once all of the data centers had been moved to India. The grand finale of this presentation included a spreadsheet showing how the entire cost of the move would be recovered by the sale of the existing data center locations and all of the equipment inside of them.
Kent sat shell shocked for a while. He didn't know anything about IT, but he knew how to read spreadsheets and the spreadsheet they presented showed him an IT operating budget which was less than one third of his current budget. It wasn't until the team leader offered to give this same presentation to the board with Kent and let him take credit for it that the gleam appeared in his eye. He had just bought the white elephant, and everyone in the room could see it.
Even the tiniest bit of research would have told Kent this wasn't a consultant's analysis, but a sales pitch. Kent's assistant sat there shell shocked after they all walked out of the room. She thought they should all have been summarily fired half way through the presentation. The fact they were allowed to complete the entire presentation, and bill for it, left her feeling numb.
Margret actually had a degree in IT. The only reason she was allowed to keep her job when Kent came in was that she had also minored in business. Since he started at the bank, Kent had been after her to go back to school and complete her MBA so she could move up in the company. He had no clue that she didn't want to climb any higher. Had the market been a little better for consultants, she would already be an independent consultant. A lot of companies were consolidating data centers now, and the experience she had from the prior consolidation was a license to print money when the next big project came up.
What Kent didn't know, the board was too lazy to investigate. Big Four Consulting had an off-shore division and Kent was being told to have it as the bank's new data centers. A great big data center had been built and a lot of
communication hardware had been installed and was just waiting for a client to install computers. Another company the Big Four owned half of was the Indian version of the Iron Mountain backup storage company. It was all a neat little package.
Anyone with a degree in IT and having more than a handful of years in the field knew that Langston Group was more a marketing company than an independent analyst. They were paid to promote a new trend every year or so. Each new trend had some big marketing war chest behind it and just happened to be the very thing the Big Four Consulting companies were experts in now.
Off-shoring was currently promoted as a Utopia for slashing labor costs. Management viewed all workers as Grade 8 bolts. If you didn't have an MBA, you were a Grade 8 bolt. You could be replaced by a Grade 8 bolt from a cheaper supplier with absolutely no negative effect on business. Thousands of workers with actual skill had been replaced by recent grads working off-shore for less than welfare payments amount to in this country. Hundreds of companies were now engaged in creative accounting, hiding failed projects on their books so they could still tell investors just how much money off-shoring was saving them. Hell, the bank had refused to extend lines of credit to three just last week. Yet, here they were, about to do the same thing themselves.
***
Vladimir sat in his office just outside of Nuremberg. He had been born in Russia and done his fair share of black bag operations in the past. That lifestyle had him riding around in a wheelchair now. There was a bullet lodged in his spine from when an operation went bad. He had always been good with computers and now it was the only thing supporting him.
He didn't really remember how he got involved with this operation. It all seemed to start with a friend from the Russian mafia providing an introduction to an Arab gentleman. They wanted the same kind of Trojan horse virus he had written for the Russians to collect much of the same information. He originally assumed it was yet another identity theft ring. What was once a necessity of the spy game was now big business. He was somewhat surprised when they told him he didn't need to make the virus install itself or look for credit card information. They were more interested in gathering information on the machine itself: CPU serial number, Network card ID, the full IP routing where possible. A mental warning alarm should have went off when he heard this, but it didn't.
He told them the best method of getting what they wanted was a small simple ping script attached to an email that would ping a fixed IP address hard coded into the script, which then communicated with a server. The server and virus could send several messages back and forth containing the email address, message header, machine hardware information and other data. He would be able to write both sides of the software and as long as the script didn't try to open the address book of the email software it should remain undetected. He could also put code into it which would allow it to determine if it was being read from within a Web page rather than an email program on a local machine. He could then have the browser return much of the information.
The Arab asked how many versions of the Trojan horse Vladimir could deliver. He was certain that eventually some virus checker would catch onto the signature and the tool would be useless. Vladimir felt he could come up with five versions with different signatures and tactics so most virus scanners wouldn't block them for months. He said the real danger was in using a hard-coded IP address instead of a Web address looked up on-line. It is easy to get caught that way, but a hard-coded address that avoided DNS (Dynamic Name Service) lookup would stall off virus scanners longer. The Arab informed him they had no fear of getting caught. The IP address would be forwarded from inside of a secure facility.
In truth, that last statement should have been Vladimir's second warning. He was definitely off his game. It wasn't that Vladimir minded the killing game or killing itself. If this had been a simple seek and destroy and he had still been hale and whole, he would have gladly signed up to kill al-Qaeda members. Russians had died in the Twin Towers as well. A good many of his former coworkers actually went off to engage in that sort of game shortly after September 11.
What bothered Vladimir about this operation was learning what he shouldn't have learned. Vladimir was the only non-Nazi Party member to know about the second camp. At least he believed he was, with the exception of the Arab he had met. Vladimir had absolutely no problem killing these people. He had spent many of his younger days putting two behind the ear of many different types of people. His objection was to the incinerator and the “showers” and a building site that could end up on the news. His office wasn't far from the place where trials had been held and photographs of things like that sent some rather infamous people to their deaths.
Life in a wheelchair was still life after all, and the Russian mafia had been paying quite well for his services. He kept his old contacts active there in case he needed to make a speedy trip with a new identity. During his idle time, Vladimir pondered why he had taken this job. It always came down to the same two reasons:
1. The pay was more regular and just as good as his other work
2. He really believed these people deserved to die.
Vladimir made himself a promise though. The day people started going to the second camp in buses and trains instead of the back of a car, he was out of here. He told nobody of his promise, but he had his mafia contacts move his money to accounts in many different countries. There was simply no telling how far he would have to run when this was over. One thing he had not puzzled out was why there were so many refrigeration units built at the site. With all of the refrigeration units and loading docks out front, the place looked like a food distribution center.
His computer playing a WAV file and popping up a message pulled him out of his thoughts and back into the room he called his office. Much like some people have their email client playing a “You've got mail!” jingle when email came in, he had his ping server set up to play the Monty Python “Message for you sir” sound byte whenever it got a confirmed hit. He quickly clicked on the message box button to display the information and the IP address trace. Two hits had been received from the same address in Lutton, England.
***
The man in the suit had just finished reading his email when Umar came in to make his report. Hans and the Brit were there as well. Umar gave them a complete report and the translations for the messages concerning tunnel and trains. He was complimented on his team's work and told to get some sleep for tomorrow. After he left the man in the suit set Hans to hacking into the registration database for the email account providers and gave the IP addresses he had just received in his email to the Brit to run against the database. Within an hour, they had both completed their tasks. One of the IP addresses came from an Internet café in Lutton, England, the other came from a library in the same city. One of the email addresses was actually tied to a Lutton address.
The Brit wanted to immediately turn it over to a British special investigations unit, but the man in the suit stopped him. “What do we have to give them?” he asked.
“An address and a plot,” responded the Brit.
“Neither of which can be used to make an arrest,” was the counter argument. “We don't even have a name or know if the address is real. It could simply be a vacant lot. The only thing we can do is attempt to confirm the address, then have our own people put them under surveillance. Until they build a bomb or give us more explicit details, there is nothing that could be used as the basis for an arrest.”
“We should be able to nab them for questioning ourselves,” said the Brit.
Hans replied, “We will, once they have been under surveillance for a while and we can identify just whom to nab. We need to identify the person at the keyboard sending the email. This group is eager. They were sent back a request for more information. Something will let slip in the email by the time we have identified who is sending the email.”
“Give me all of the addresses. I will send them to our people in England and they will begin hanging out at the ca
fé and library. If the address is actually real for the email address, we will have someone watching there as well. It shouldn't take too long to get logging software installed on every machine in each place. In less than two weeks we should be able to identify exactly who is sending the messages. If they are this eager to move, they should be having regular meetings with the rest of their cell. It won't take long to nab the entire group. We just have to be certain we are getting the entire group,” said the man in the suit.
Greed
Nikolaus sat in his office going over the construction specifications. He had been a member of the Reformed Nazi Party for many years and worked with the many different factions who all claimed to be the Reformed Nazi Party. His current job was a vice president position for a biotech company whose name he couldn't even remember. He didn't need to remember it. The name was printed everywhere. Corporations were just chess pieces to him. He had both built and crushed dozens of them.
Most of this corporation's upper management were loyal party members. They let him do whatever he wanted because he was higher in the party than they were. To do what he did for the party, Nikolaus could never be a celebrity or public figure. His lot was to work in the shadows, making sure all of the details were taken care of. He also made sure that his signature was never on any documents relating to his current project. Signoff came from those higher in the company when he told them to sign.
Infinite Exposure Page 5
