Infinite Exposure

by Roland Hughes

  After reading it Lenny said, “Well, you definitely need to go shopping for this girl's jewelry and make yourself available once she gets back.”

  “I take it we will begin a slow accumulation of Pytho Corporation shares now?”

  “You are learning boy. You certainly have far more potential than those other two I hired. Yes, we will start, and this evening I will make a few phone calls from a disposable cell phone to the accounts we advise and tell them to do the same.”

  “Let me guess, you will tell them Pytho will be announcing a big new software package and a major client in about a month?”

  “I may leave off the client part,” responded Lenny with a smile.

  “So, we will wait for First Global Bank shares to drop a little next week and begin accumulating again there as well?”

  “You do just about have this figured out don't you?”

  “I have a good teacher,” Jeremy smiled back.

  Lenny chuckled. “We have about a month before the bounce happens. By that time we could own somewhere between 12% and 20% of both companies. Slightly heavier on Pytho Corporation of course. Their stock is down now and will get the biggest bounce from the news.”

  “Can we keep 12% hidden that long?”

  “Hopefully. If we do it slowly we should be OK.”

  “I take it you will start buying them right now, before making the calls?”

  “You really can fill in for me when I'm on vacation can't you?”

  Both men simply smiled and Jeremy left the room. Once again, he had brought home the bacon. The other two analysts hardly spoke to him since he had shown them up in front of Lenny. No need to call a meeting for this one. The email could have given away his contact. Jeremy was pretty certain Lenny would place that sheet of paper in the shredder as soon as he left. In fact, he could hear the shredder running now.

  Jennifer, the receptionist, saw the smirk on Jeremy's face as he was walking by. She caught his eye and mouthed the word “what.” Jeremy walked over to her and whispered, “When the bonus checks come out this year you are going to want to cook me dinner and give me a massage.”

  Softly Jennifer responded, “It'll take more than a big check for that, you will have to get my husband an all-expense paid tee time for a foursome at that golf club he wants to try out and settle for it being breakfast while he is golfing.”

  “Interesting,” Jeremy said with a smile as he walked away. She was in her late 40s. Kids were teenagers looking at college a couple years down the road. Honestly, Jeremy thought she was simply the dutiful wife and mother working here because they hadn't saved enough for college. He had no idea that she would be open to fooling around once in a while. The things you learn when you tease! he thought.

  ***

  John was not having a good day. Today was the day most of the workers at his company voted on unionizing. He had fought this tooth and nail and still it happened. They didn't need to avoid unionizing all together, simply to hold off for another six months or a year. John needed the data center migrations to all be completed so he could carry out his plan.

  His company hadn't hired too many new people lately. In part it was due to fear they would have to pay people more once the union came in. The other reason was nobody would take the shit wages they were offering, probably because they thought the union would be taking over and they wanted to start out at better wages.

  They had been short handed the last month. John was working 14 hour days himself and forcing his employees to work even longer. It's not like it was back-breaking work. Mostly just staying awake and monitoring the job schedulers. Sometimes they had to mount media for backups to run, then remove the media and label it for shipping. Backups could take hours. The systems were never off-line. There was a disk to disk backup which happened in a matter of minutes. It was the backing up of the backup to removable media that took forever. Removable media was needed so it could be taken to off-site storage.

  His team had only bungled a few of the media cycle rules. It was much easier when they were shipping things to Iron Mountain, but now that the off-site backup storage was here in India, it was a debacle. The company they were using (and he assumed they owned part of) had incompetent help. Basically, John believed they were the people he had turned away. To understand the true level of that insult, you had to know just how low the requirements were to get in here.

  If the people working at the remote site managed to get the correct backup media returned to John's people, it often took forever to get to it or it arrived damaged. The backup site was about a two-hour drive away. Correction, the backup site was about two hours away if anything like American highways or interstates actually linked the two places. The chuck-hole-lined mud ruts and the lack of suspension in the transport truck played hell with the backup media. Some of the cases arrived completely ruined. It looked like they had simply been tied to the back of the truck and dragged all the way.

  John had complained to his boss several times about this problem with the backup storage. His boss tried to look into it, but was always told “they're working on it.”

  The problem reared its ugly head publicly when one of the locations needed to restore a document from a backup. Nearly three hours after the request, the backup media it should have been on arrived and was unusable. They had to go back and get the prior day's backup. This time John's boss took one of the upper management type's car and brought the media in it. The car didn't look so good when he got back with it, but the media worked and they were able to satisfy the request before it was morning in America. The only benefit from the entire ordeal was that someone above John's boss was now looking into getting better transportation for the off-site storage company. He probably wouldn't have been so interested if his car hadn't developed a very large oil puddle under it after John's boss got back. John estimated the puddle was about five quarts in size. One of those chuck holes must have ripped loose the oil pan.

  John went to a window and could hear the chanters out in the street through the glass. All chanting for better wages, better treatment, and a strike. Just lovely, he thought. A strike will have them locking this place down like a fortress.

  When his work day finally ended, John went home to see how his new trainee was doing. This trainee hadn't picked it all up as fast as the first one, but had learned enough to be out on his own soon. Someone had given him some money and he had taken a job with a different company here in Bangalore. He had enough money that he could rent his own place in this complex and would be moving out tomorrow.

  They chatted awhile. John answered a few questions, then checked his own email. It really was his own email he checked this time. Over one-third of the cells he normally handled email for were now being handled by his first trainee. This new trainee had a much more capable machine and had taken over half of John's remaining cells. John asked his current trainee when the new trainee would arrive. He was stunned to hear that this trainee would be training two others soon. They would be given the remaining cells John handled and sent to other locations.

  So, I'm being phased out, thought John. Guess it didn't matter. He would be too high-profile now that there were surveillance cameras all over the data center. He was going to have to hide once his plan went into play.

  It was in the middle of this train of thought when John opened up an email from a cell he used to handle. It was actually for him. Once he deciphered the message he found out they wanted information about the off-site storage company. John didn't understand why, but made a note to pull down the files from work. The bulk of the information was on the company Intranet. The place wasn't of much value as a target. It employed at most 30 people and was only of need if someone had to restore a system or a file.

  John was too tired to make sense of it now. He logged out and went to bed.

  ***

  The Brit was livid! He wanted to kill his entire team. He wanted to kill everyone they reported to, then he wanted to go out and kill everyone he eve
n remotely thought was a terrorist. He had the training to do it and by God it was time he put that training to use!

  What set the Brit off was the cable news. The bombings had finally happened in Lutton. Three subway trains and a bus all within half an hour of each other. It appeared that the person on the bus got stuck in traffic, so he took out the bus because he missed his train.

  This had been what the Brit feared. People would sit on their arses and the attack would be carried out. At least the main objective of the attack had failed. From the pattern displayed on the news, it looked like the terrorists had planned on blowing up each train as it got to the point where one tunnel joined another tunnel. This would take out or at least block the flood gates.

  Why were the flood gates important? The Brit had it figured out long before the journalists. The last bomb, which went off on the bus, was significantly larger than the others. This terrorist's train would have been in the tunnel under the river when the bomb detonated. They were planning on flooding the entire subway system killing everyone on the other trains down there. Hundreds, if not thousands would be stranded with no affordable method of getting home.

  It was the kind of attack which showed a lot of planning. While the people blowing themselves up might have been illiterate inbred bastards from some poverty stricken region of the world, the plan came from someone with training. Nobody on the Brit's team had seen this coming, not even the Brit. Most were assuming they were going to try and blow up a pair of trains passing each other in opposite directions to maximize casualties. Nobody had thought this far out.

  “We should have thought this far out,” the Brit said. They have already tried to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge more than once. Thankfully, the people they sent to do it were so useless they ended up getting busted in a routine traffic stop before they had even assembled all of the explosives for the job.

  The Brit was lost in his raging thoughts when the phone rang. It was the man in the suit calling him.

  “I assume you've seen the news.”

  “You bloody well know I have!” screamed the Brit.

  “There is a team showing up at your hotel inside 15 minutes. Meet them downstairs. British authorities want to handle the remnants of the Lutton cell, but we are cleared to round up four other cells. They aren't being arrested, they are being taken to our interrogation center.”

  “Oh! Now we can round them up!” screamed the Brit.

  “Nobody saw this one coming, not even you!” said the man in the suit. “If you had put this before me we would have rounded up what we had. It wouldn't have stopped the attack since we only knew of a few and still hadn't seen any explosives. I'll wager that when the news starts giving us the identities of the bombers none of those names will be on our suspect list either.”

  That truth took some of the wind out of the Brit's sails. He hadn't seen this coming and they only had three names of cell members. This act took one more person than they had identified and there was probably a support network in place for this team.

  “What do we do with the ones we nab?” asked the Brit.

  “The driver knows of a building on a runway which was used for bombers during WWII. It's mostly shut down now, but we have people arriving there to set up a holding pen and wait for the rest of the planes.”

  “Planes?”

  “If you get everybody on the list you will have over 60 prisoners. That's really more than we are prepared for at the interrogation center, but we have to nab these before British authorities start wanting to nab more of their own.”

  “What are my orders for tomorrow?”

  “You and the rest of the team will remain with the prisoners until they have all been loaded, so pack some rations and overnight supplies. I don't yet have another assignment for you, but should shortly.”

  With that the conversation ended. The Brit went about getting his hardware and putting some MREs along with bottled water into his backpack. One thing was for certain, leading the life he led, the first thing he did when he landed anywhere was to obtain a case of MREs. Militaries around the world stopped calling the food they supplied “rations.” Now the prepackaged food troops were ordered to carry was called an MRE, Meal Ready to Eat. They weren't really ready. You had to have a little heater kit that got hot when you put water on it to warm them up, but it was better than a can of beans, which was what rations used to be.

  Most people hated being forced to eat MREs. Some of them were good, but most made high-school cafeteria food seem like fine dining and airline food a mouth-watering experience. If you wanted to survive in the field though, you had to have a tolerance for them. Some of them had some nasty preservatives. They didn't seem to ship that 20-year bread anymore. Even the surplus catalogs didn't have it these days. That stuff tasted great, and really would last in its package 20 years on a shelf. But it had so much MSG and other preservatives in it that if you ate the entire “loaf” in one sitting you got a severe case of the “quick step.” Nothing makes a hike pure misery faster than a case of diarrhea. In a jungle or a desert, you would be dead before the end of a two-day march unless you happened to find lots of drinkable water along the way. Gathering water along the way was always a risk.

  Among the many sacrifices a professional in this business makes is they commit to eating at least one MRE per day even when they aren't on duty. It's not that you like them, you simply want to live when you are on duty.

  The Brit had been given time off while waiting for his next assignment. He had come home to England and taken a room at a hotel he liked. There really wasn't much “home” left here for him. He had a sister, but he didn't really communicate with her much. They got along well, and he loved her like a sister, but given what he did for a living, he kept his distance. She was married with two kids and he didn't want to put any of the family he had left at risk.

  Most people would take one look at this hotel and wonder why the Brit liked it. Achieving a two-star rating was simply a dream for it. The Brit didn't mind so much. It was a blue-collar area. There were some good pubs within walking distance and the owner liked him. The owner actually let him put a great big gun safe in a storage room. Thanks to home-owner marketing, the gun safe simply looked like a great big safe. The only thing that made it a gun safe was the inside of it having notches to stand guns upright on one side, hooks to hang hand guns in the back, and some shelves to put ordinary things on. This one even had a smaller safe in the bottom of it so you could keep really valuable stuff.

  The Brit grabbed his large duffel bag and headed for the gun safe. He met the owner on his way there.

  “You've seen the news?”

  “Aye mate.”

  “They are sending you out to do something about this?” the owner queried, seeing the bag and backpack.

  “Not this one so much as stopping the next three,” the Brit responded. “Too many regulars involved in this one for us to wander in.”

  With that the owner nodded and unlocked the storage room. Normally you wouldn't lock a storage room with little of value in it, but the owner knew the gun safe was in there and given some of his clients, he'd lock up the little bars of soap if he could. The owner didn't stick around to see what was in the safe. He understood this man's occupation enough to want to know even less than he did know.

  It was always kind of odd when the Brit stayed here. It was like the whole town knew the mercenaries were back. Fights didn't happen in the bars very often. The really low-end scum didn't try to rent a room at his place. The drug dealers hid themselves, well, most of them did, the others were just found dead in an alley shortly after doing a deal in the open. The people out on these streets seemed to know the second one of these guys' planes touched down. Anyone who lived here long enough would notice the quiet. It was like the quiet when wildlife flees before an earthquake.

  ***

  Vladimir had his Web surfing interrupted by a special WAV file playing on his ping server. One of the control programs he had loaded on t
he email user's machines was designed to gather a fresh information packet about the machine and send it to him every time the machine booted. The machine serial number indicated the long silent first trainee had found his new home.

  Another program was busy sending copies of each email message he received to a special folder on the ping server. This guy wastes no time, thought Vladimir. A routine check of the IP address showed that an email hub was once again in Pakistan. Well, thought Vladimir, at least they won't have to move too far. He prepared an email for the man in the suit and Hans containing the new location information and a link to the folder containing the inbound email. He was pretty certain they would put the Brit to work on the email messages once his holiday was over.

  The day was shaping up to be both quiet and productive. Soon there would be some new ping hits from the outbound emails being opened. Things were going to be back to normal it looked like.

  Fate simply doesn't like normal. No sooner had Vladimir thought this than he got another packet from a reboot. The machine ID matched the second trainee, but the IP address looked different. A quick search of the previous packets proved Vladimir's suspicion. Still in Bangalore, but no longer with the trainer. Vladimir sent out a tiny ping request to the trainer's machine just to be sure it was still up and running. He had noticed a distinct drop off in the quantity of email messages being handled by the trainer. Now it was starting to make sense.

  The second email from Vladimir was much more excited. He included the new location information and the following:

  All,

  Second trainee has moved to new location in Bangalore. Not far from trainer, might even be in same housing complex.

  Volume of email being handled by trainer almost non-existent now. Something big is getting ready to happen and the trainer will be one part of the operation.

  Vlad

  As always, Vladimir was pretty certain his reports would be filed in the shredder by the man in the suit. Hans appeared to actually read them and respond once in a while, but Vladimir knew he changed little when it came to the major decisions. They did, however, take his advice about how to proceed with these email hubs; that was most unusual. Right now he was wondering if that was such good advice. Strategically it made sense if you wanted to expose as much of the network as possible, but that was before the trainer went nearly silent. Unless the team found out he had some terminal disease with only months to live, this was a scary thing. Al-Qaeda didn't normally compromise assets this well placed.