The man interviewing him would also be his boss. He told John he was joining the company at a very opportune time. His company had just won a contract to off-shore four sets of data centers into this building and another building just like it in a different location. The additional generators and UPS equipment were being installed even as they spoke. Another building was being built on this campus to hold programmers.
It would be a few weeks before the new machines arrived and were installed. They had managed to obtain some books and training documentation on the mainframe and midrange systems that were arriving shortly. Their U.S. partner was flying over a small team to handle the installation and configuration. John's job would initially be computer operator and network monitor. His first assignment would be to read through all of the documentation they had obtained and get fluent on the systems.
John asked the man if he had some links to sites with the documentation so he could continue reading on his own. The man took his email address and emailed him the links to the on-line training. They then finished the paperwork to get John on the payroll. John didn't negotiate salary with the man and the man was all too happy to avoid an argument about the low pay. They had been seeing a lot of push back about the pathetic wages they were offering. The main reason they hadn't already staffed up for this (or any) contract was that few would take their pathetic wages and the owners were too cheap to raise the salary. John would be making $12.00 per day. Some days would be 8 hours and some would be 14, but he would always make $12.00 per day.
Several busy, yet uneventful, weeks passed for John. He established a bank account under his new identity so he could cash his paycheck. Every day he went into work and spent most of it reading manuals. A flurry of people went in and out of the data center installing computers and giving John some instructions on how to start and stop them. The team from Big Four Consulting landed with the first set of backup media to install on the machines. John had even more documentation to read with respect to the starting, stopping and troubleshooting of the bank applications. He spent quite a bit of time on the phone in training conference calls.
John's boss managed to hire several other people who knew less than John about computers. He was supposed to train them as best he could. John was promoted to lead operator simply because someone had to be lead operator and he had been there the longest. It was odd to be at a place only a few weeks and receive a promotion. Of course the promotion came only with a title, not any money or extra benefits. It did come with one intangible benefit for someone with John's sideline. He was allowed to read up more on the banking systems and received administrator passwords on the systems. In his reading John learned that once the data center migrations were complete, roughly one-third of the world's money supply would pass through the systems he controlled every day.
***
Margret sat looking at the pile of paper on her desk, the triple booked meetings on her schedule and then back to the email from Kent which had been copied to Kathryn.
Margret,
I will be traveling to our other locations over the course of the next four weeks having meetings with the IT teams in place there. I'm assigning you the data center migration project. You will be the liaison between Big Four Consulting and the business.
Kent
“The son of a bitch should be castrated with a rusty spoon,” Margret said aloud. He had done nothing on the project or work related for the past three months. His entire day consisted of hobnobbing with higher-ups to get a lunch appointment set up each day, then spending the afternoon coordinating foursomes for Saturday golf. He wouldn't even attend a meeting unless someone above him was going to be there.
Margret pulled up Kent's calendar and looked at the last three weeks. What an MBA, she thought. He had studiously filled his calendar with bullshit entries leaving only 15 minutes open here and there. Margret was all too familiar with this tactic. To seem important you had to “look” busy and make it difficult for people to have meetings with you. This made the higher-ups think you were slaving away for the company.
What Kent was really doing was spending the day surfing the Web. Margret knew this because she had run the IP usage report for Kent's machine. Now that the little bastard had figured out how to get on to the Internet and run a mouse, he did absolutely nothing. He even surfed the Web from home using the company's VPN! The higher-ups never saw the IP usage report. They would only request reports about the amount of time people spent logged in and active, not reports about what they were actively doing. This man had turned doing nothing into an art form. Now, he dropped the project which was going to get him his promotion onto her back along with everything else of his she was doing.
Traveling around the world to visit each existing data center and programming staff was probably an easy sell for him. Most likely he pitched it as “doing the legwork to ensure a smooth migration.” What he was really doing was taking a company-paid four-week vacation. He would meet with each data center manager and each development manager to discuss their needs, then they would all be compelled to take him out for entertainment. He would be traveling to four different countries and taking in the sights while there.
Every one of those IT teams reported to Margret, not Kent. She could have easily prepared the report on who they could eliminate after each migration. Every one of those banks had their own IT culture. It was incredibly difficult to impose the processes and controls used by the original bank. You could try the pitch that if their IT processes had been better they wouldn't have been eaten, but that argument was hollow. Had upper management not been so damned greedy and gone so far out on a limb with options and their derivatives, the banks wouldn't have gone under; everybody knew it.
On the right side of Margret's desk was a pile of paper with programming requests from all of the different branches. On the left side was a pile of paper, mostly from the board, screaming about getting a single view of the company for ease of planning and financial reporting. Margret knew this entire data center migration thing was a lark. It had been a lark when Kent's predecessor started it, but the only experience the guy had was in data center consolidation and the board was looking for a quick win at cutting costs.
Had Kent's predecessor even bothered to read her integration plan, they would have been down to one set of data centers now. All they had to do was train each of the branch locations on how to use the existing system, then migrate the data into the existing systems. There was only a handful of additional fields in use by the banks that had been conquered. Had they started and used quality consultants, they would be done. All of the extra data centers would have been permanently eliminated, along with the programming staff from the conquered banks. Cost savings would be in the millions and the board would have been able to get a single picture of how the bank was doing. Now the programmers at each location were busily making changes that weren't supported by the central bank systems just to try and hang onto their jobs. Almost no documentation existed for these changes. Migration was going to be a real PITA (Pain In The Ass).
***
Three weeks had gone by since they first found out about the cell in Lutton. The Brit had been grinding his teeth for three weeks as well. He was beginning to wonder if the Pakistani government hadn't allowed them in just to rub their noses in it. As long as Pakistan was “cooperating” with this operation, the world powers wouldn't invade, at least on the grounds they were aiding and abetting terrorists. The nuclear program they had going on was going to be a different story all together. The Brit had been quietly gathering what information he could on that and feeding it back to his contacts in the UK.
What had him in an irate mood today was the sheer fruitlessness of it all. More and more information had come in. The man in the suit kept saying that the people on the ground could only identify the message senders. Three weeks of tailing them had turned up no meetings or other members. There was now beginning to be open speculation that this entire message series was a r
use to see if anyone had caught onto how al-Qaeda was communicating now.
The Brit had spent far too much time in covert operations to believe al-Qaeda that smart. They had intercepted messages about the quantity and type of explosives being assembled. There had even been a long list of prospective targets. It seemed that they were planning to blow up multiple trains in the tunnels under London in such a way that when the last bomb went off, one of the trains would be directly under the river. The plan appeared to be to blow up the trains where the tunnels connected so there would be little to no chance of damming the ensuing flood.
A good many messages had gone back and forth about the size and type of explosive needed under the river. Some files had been transferred with specifications for the tunnel itself, but there had not been one single meeting of a cell. In fact, the two people being followed didn't seem to go anywhere but to the Internet locations and to the store. Some were willing to drop the tail, but the Brit kept bringing up the one piece of information which made it all credible. They had been seen buying multiple disposable cell phones. Given the quantity of explosives they needed, it could only be a matter of time before the explosives purchase and/or storage would surface.
The Brit was taking this one personally. Everybody knew it. He never spoke of home, family or lovers, but even if you had none of those back home, seeing an attack coming on your own soil was bound to bring forward some feelings of patriotism. The man in the suit kept an eye on him and monitored his communications while this was going on. Even MI6 didn't know about this operation and it was his job to keep it that way.
All it would take would be for the Brit to leak the information they currently had. Even if he told them nothing of the operation, everyone would know there was some clandestine OP going on. Then they would want to take credit for it, which meant they would have to get more information on it to claim being part of it. Not a good situation, but the risk was to be expected. He had to control it. Politicians would eventually say the operation was occurring with the full support of the Pakistani government and that would lead to large terrorist attacks here, in the man in the suit's own country. Not to be allowed. Only a handful in Pakistani intelligence knew anything about this operation. Too many in the government were backing al-Qaeda to let any officials know about it. They would all be executed the same afternoon officials found out.
***
Kathryn had spent her morning cracking the whip and denying overtime wages for the subcontractor actually migrating the communications equipment. She planned to spend the afternoon talking with the first group of 20-somethings who had just gotten back from Bangalore. They flew the first set of backup tapes over to the new data center and restored them onto the machines. Once there, the systems managers from the data center being phased out was to spend time tweaking startup and shutdown procedures.
A temporary high-bandwidth connection had been created so there could be one last data migration during the evening of the cut over. A handful of staff from the bank's data center had been given operations accounts on the new system in case there were any problems. A few consultants had been contracted by Big Four Consulting to actually partition the machines allowing only enough of the machine to be visible to this client as they would need. They also created the accounts for the bank's employees restricting their access. The meeting in the afternoon was to try and find out if there had been any problems in getting the software loaded to both data centers.
It was odd to have time to kill before lunch. Kathryn had always been in the mode of flashing her body and smiling to clients over lunch trying to find one dumb enough to actually use this firm. Today she had no lunch plans. Kent was out-of-town for weeks and Margret didn't appear to stare at her legs or look down her top, besides Margret couldn't sign any contracts or take them to the board. Kathryn had always been in the mode of working three to five clients at a time trying to close a deal. All of that changed when she landed this contract.
Getting the data centers operational was considered vital to the cash flow of the company. Every moose with ears was buying, partnering, or otherwise whoring out Indian programmers to U.S. and foreign clients. Only about one in a hundred brought into their off-shore business was actually worth hiring, the rest were help desk script reading people passing themselves off as programmers. Margins were so low that nobody was making squat off the commission from getting that type of work. The only way you could boost the rates was if you already owned the client lock-stock-and-two-smoking-barrels. The only way to ensure you owned a client that completely was to get them into your data centers.
Margins were very high for this contract. The data center in India was roughly a football field in size and cost less than the cramped little data center First Global Bank had on a quarter floor of a high rise near where the Twin Towers had been. Running numbers for the board had been easy. Padding the hell out of them had been even easier. Because this contract was going to bring in so much money over the next five years, Margret was removed from all other accounts. She didn't mind the reduction in work, but had gotten very used to expensing her lunch in posh restaurants.
Today she was eating half a sandwich and some soup from the cafeteria downstairs and checking email over lunch. There were the usual pleas for help from the younger and newer account managers who inherited her other projects. She sent off a few sympathetic messages and informed them they already had all of her documentation for those accounts. Had any of them thought to buy her lunch today she would have given them her insights on the fetishes and weaknesses of each person in charge at their client site so they could close the deals. No lunch equals no unwritten information. You could never write information like that down, not even in your PDA. It could turn up during an investigation.
Finally she got to the message Kent had copied her on. At first she wondered what she had done to piss Kent off. He knew damned good and well that Margret didn't like Big Four Consulting. After his previous email with respect to the follow on project she thought they had a good rapport. True, she hadn't been there much the past couple of weeks. Communication was mostly via email and phone calls, but she did leave a bunch of young skirts and heels around to keep his libido going, apparently they weren't flashing enough. It was back to slit skirts and see through blouses once Kent returned.
Maybe things wouldn't be quite as bad as they seemed. She could bring some young hunky guys over to meet with Margret and offer to leave them there for additional information. Perhaps she could even take everyone to a late lunch tomorrow and pump a few glasses of wine into the girl to loosen her up. Only one way to find out, she thought as she picked up the phone.
“Hello Margret, this is Kathryn. I just got done reading Kent's email and it sounds like we are going to be working together.”
“It would appear so.”
“I have some assistants working with me on this to help coordinate all of the details. Perhaps we should all get together for lunch and make certain everyone knows what everyone else is doing?”
“A restaurant is probably not the best place for such a meeting,” responded Margret.
“I was thinking you could come over to our offices and I would have lunch catered. There is a great little Italian place which delivers here and we will probably need access to overhead projectors, white boards, etc.” responded Kathryn. “How does tomorrow at 11:30 sound? If we allow for two hours that should be more than enough time to cover everything.”
Two hours to tell me what your subcontractor is doing? You really do know how to work it! thought Margret. She looked at her calendar and it was open, so she agreed. If nothing else, at least I'll get a lunch. Kent had been bellying up to the free lunch trough since he got here. The only free lunches Margret got were catered in conference rooms during working meetings. Kent usually stopped by long enough to get some food. God forbid he actually participate in the details of his project. Margret pondered if she was going to be shown the same tits and legs Kent had been drooling over,
or if there was going to be something provided for the straight side of her life.
Kathryn finished out her day meeting the team that had gone to Bangalore. They were all positive about the experience, mainly because they had stayed on the campus and few had ventured out into the squalor of the surrounding streets. They did report some of the contractors treated them like idiots and beverage fetchers while they were working, but that everything had been installed and reports from the U.S. systems managers made it look like everything was a go. They had even tested both a full month-end and quarter-end job cycle, so all jobs would run. The remote printers and email had been blocked to capture the output and avoid a nasty media story.
Judging from the sheepish grins she saw and some of the meeting comments, at least a few of the guys had ventured over to the Red Light District. Kathryn made a mental note to get them terminated before they got diagnosed with full-blown AIDS or passed it on to some of their female coworkers here. Nothing would kill the “sex for sale” marketing tactic like an outbreak of AIDS at the firm. She had seen the reports about how over 80% of the brothel girls had full-blown AIDS and were still working. Anyone who did the math could see that shipping IT jobs over to India would effectively halve the population inside of a decade.
IT workers were paid more in a day than other workers made in a week. The culture there was such that you didn't need a big house or any car to have prestige, so the male workers spent much of their money in the Red Light District. This was the main reason they had partnered rather than buying outright. Inside of seven years the bulk of the IT workforce would begin dying off from AIDS. Already there had been some quickly hushed reports from companies that had been there the longest. Few still had any senior people. Everybody blamed it on talent poaching to hide the truth. The talent poaching scam worked pretty well given the 200+% turnover rate most companies had. Still, it was only a matter of time before the truth started coming out.
Infinite Exposure Page 7
