by Alan Ross
Chapter 22
Pulling it all Together
“Morning, son.” Kathy was already knee deep in work, probably organizing something because there was nothing else to do.
“Hi mom. Last couple days of freedom, pretty soon you’re going to be at Don’s beck and call again.”
“He called yesterday afternoon to say they were back in town and to make sure there was nothing major going on here. I told him we’d all been sitting around playing games and enjoying the free time but he thought it was a joke.”
“Good one, I’m sure that once he’s back we’re going to be running around catching up on his perception that everything’s behind schedule.”
“Stop by the kitchen, I brought you some homemade strudel that my neighbor Martha Stemple made. She doesn’t see well anymore but still can put together some baked goods. You’ve been so busy lately, are you sure everything is ok?”
“I’m doing fine, just preoccupied with something personal. Should be fine in a couple of weeks. Thanks for asking and for the space, it’s important to me.”
“Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” Kathy thought Bill had taken the parole discussions seriously and was working on something related to that but didn’t press him on it.
The strudel was better than any baked item he’d ever had, including everything his mom made, which was saying a lot. He snuck back into the kitchen and took another piece, hoping that others wouldn’t notice him taking extra trips. As he opened his email he was half expecting something from Darren Ward but there was nothing of any importance there. It had been several days since he sent Darren a mail and should give him an update.
He launched the backdoor monitor program that was installed on the chemist’s computer and didn’t see any current activity. Scrolling through the keystroke logging program there were some orders that had been placed for additional processing equipment, which meant that they were still putting shop together and probably not yet manufacturing the virus. He noted some of the things that were being bought, thinking that might help Darren see how things were coming together. There was also some talk about a trip to the CDC to visit with a senior director there but no indication of the outcome of the meeting.
Bill summarized the update and send another anonymous mail to Darren, using the same program. He had thought about trying some others but decided not to add any additional variables to the equation. After the message was sent he put together some basic HTML code, which was the computer language that a lot of websites used to present content to users. His first instinct was to simply mirror The Cause website but this would likely give Darren a trail back to him, especially if Homeland Security was using any kind of web crawling technology, which is how the search engines collect content. The situation was critical but there still wasn’t evidence that this was more than just a plot, no reason for Bill to give himself up yet. Isolating himself, the prison and Foundation from the information is still very important to him.
Putting the actual HTML code together is the most trivial part, Bill has plenty of information about the project and knows that he can put together a compelling story for Darren. The hard parts revolved around where to put the web server so he can retain anonymity and how to permit collaborative communication on the website through something like a message board without leaving bread crumbs back to him. It was getting to the point where he’ll have to take some additional risk but he’ll save the collaboration for later. The other thing he could do is set up ephemeral, or temporary website content and then migrate it to various servers so he’s not in one place for too long.
Bill put his head down after lunch and pulled together the code for the website, including much more information there than on The Cause website. He added a spot for Darren to leave him a message, a little input box. Now he needed a site and a plan to get the information that Darren puts in the input box without leaving tracks. This is not a trivial problem for Bill and he scoured google looking for a good approach. There were a bunch of lame approaches but nothing that was bulletproof. The best method appeared to be hosting your site in a country that wouldn’t share information with the U.S. government and mentioned China, India, Africa and the old standbys in Eastern Europe. Bill didn’t want to go around cracking websites of the world but thought it might be able to find a way. This might take some time and his head was hurting by mid-afternoon.
Darren was sitting in his office, looking at the newest email that came from Jack. This one included more concrete information about the type of equipment the project was buying as well as some link back to the CDC, which was something he could check out. He made a few phone calls and finally reached someone he knew in Atlanta who told him off the record that there was a top secret project around smallpox. There still wasn’t enough information to let him know that it was more than a plot and damnit why won’t this Jack talk to him?
Darren called to George, who sat in the next office. “Can you come in here for a few George?”
George came over. “What’s up, want to take a field trip?”
“Can you shut the door?”
“Something wrong?” George’s face took a serious pallor as Darren composed his thoughts and how to approach the subject.
“I’ve had some anonymous tips in the past week and I want to get your take on it. We need to keep this one quiet for now, there’s not quite enough to go on.”
“You’ve got my word, must be something serious.”
“It might be. I received a couple of mails the other day from someone calling themselves [email protected], who claims that there is a bioterrorism plot cooking against the U.S. regarding a new strain of smallpox. I’ve tried to trace the messages back but they’ve been run through some remailers.”
“Were they our remailers?”
“Unfortunately not, If I ever get a chance to talk to this guy I’ll tell him that some of his messages aren’t getting through and he should try some other remailers without telling him to use ours directly.”
“So what details are available so far? Smallpox is something that’s been discussed for years, especially when we were going after Saddam but there hasn’t been a viable new strain of the disease. Is this threat supposing a new strain?”
“According the mails this new strain is much more virulent than any other and the supposition is that existing vaccines will not provide any protection, meaning a doomsday scenario. I’ve been skeptical but received some additional information today and was able to weasel out of someone at the CDC that there is a top secret project right now dealing with a new strain of smallpox. Off the record, of course.”
“Of course, those guys can be worse than the spooks sometimes in terms of coming clean with the bad stuff. It might be a coincidence, there’s likely a chance that the CDC has ongoing top secret projects for biological and chemical weapons. What does the chatter suggest?”
“Backs up what was stated in one of the emails, there is some chatter coming out of Asia about smallpox, hasn’t been much but has been going on for the past few months. Not sure if the CDC’s project is a reaction to this or something else entirely.”
“And you can’t find this Jack? Why don’t you put Terry on it? He could find any needle in the haystack that is the world wide web.”
“Like I said, I’m just bouncing this off you now but I’m starting to believe there might be something to it. If I ever get anything more tangible from Jack that doesn’t come from a truly anonymous remailer then I can put Terry on it but for now I don’t want to dig around and raise any alarms. I’m thinking this Jack is somehow related to the project but is nervous about the potential disaster that may be looming if this becomes real.”
“There aren’t many people in the world capable of constructing a new strain of something like smallpox without a tremendous footprint of resources. The Chinese government could probably do it and maybe the North Koreans but I can’t think of many others.”
“Our own government
comes to the front of my mind. All it takes is one person to open Pandora’s box and start the next bubonic plague. Thanks for talking this through, I’ll let you know if I get anything else from Jack.”
“I’m itching thinking about smallpox, let me know if I can do anything to help. There’s nothing big going on in my world right now and I could use some action besides fighting with my wife about guitars.”
“Was going to ask what happened with that but figured that it wasn’t good if you weren’t talking about it.”
George left and Darren reread the latest mail from Jack. Maybe he could track down the source of the project by tracing down who’s been buying big chemical equipment. This was going to be tough because there were no make or model numbers and the stuff wasn’t likely so big to attract attention. Maybe some additional detail would be forthcoming and he could trace it down that way. Not much else he could do until he heard from Jack, who was turning into ‘deep throat’ for The Cause.
Bill figured out how to put up the website safely over breakfast. Even if Darren could trace him to one country that didn’t share information, there was little chance he could do it through three or four. He found some names of hosting providers in Africa as well as a few subversive Chinese sites, which he was leery of. It was doubtful that anything happened in China without the government knowing about it.
He created a virtual machine, which appeared to be a regular computer but was really borrowing resources from another system within the Eastern European supplier of Foundation chemical. He used the virtual machine to request a new website from an African provider located in Nigeria and thought about all of the scam emails he’s received over the years, promising him millions of dollars. When he was bored he would send them responses but never got replies because his mail back to them was always a big joke. Before long he had a Nigerian hosted site, loaded with advertisements, which was how they were able to give the space and bandwidth away. There were some strict limits in terms of how much network traffic the site could have per month but that wouldn’t matter in this case.
Bill installed a small web browsing client so he could connect to the site in Czechoslovakia and tested it, ensuring that he could see the content. This worked fine but he still had some nagging in the back of his mind that he was leaving a door open to be discovered. There was only the link between the prison and the remote servers but he was going to initiate all communication with the web sites from anonymous places, never directly from the prison or even from Foundation. After thinking it through he felt like he could continue so he drafted another note to Darren and sent it off. It was Friday, which meant steak for lunch. Bill would have traded it for more of Martha Stemple’s strudel but he didn’t mention that to Kathy. After lunch he sent the complex password to Darren, not wanting someone to intercept either message and be able to gain access to the site.
Darren came back from lunch Friday looking forward to the weekend. Another mail was in his inbox from Jack and he hoped it would give some additional insight, didn’t want to be on the fence with this all weekend. He’d talked to Monica about it in greater detail last night and she advised him to break it open, saying that once in a while it was ok to cry wolf without all the information, especially if this was as serious as it seemed from the little information he’d received.
The mail had a website address and a username along with a signature of Jack. Darren went to the site and tried the username but it was useless without a password. He pounded his keyboard in frustration, yelling at Jack across the miles. George heard him yell and came to see what the fuss was about.
“Jack sent me a website and username but no password. Lot of good that does me, not like I can pick up the phone or respond to the email and tell him he forgot.”
“Maybe he didn’t forget, perhaps he’s just paranoid and is sending the password under separate cover. Any other messages come in?”
“Nothing so far but you could be right. He’s being careful about having his identity revealed, would make sense that he wouldn’t want any other information being compromised. Good call, I’ll sit tight and see if something else comes through.”
While he was waiting Darren did some brief detective work, trying to find where the website was. “Another Czechoslovakian site” he muttered to himself. “Maybe we should provide free websites in part of our address space too.” He wrote that down on his doodle pad, something good to follow up on in the future. His mail indicator flashed in the system tray, letting him know something had come in. It was another mail from Jack, this one a password. Darren went back to the website and entered the password, which took him to the home page of Jack’s site. There wasn’t much new here that wasn’t in the mail but seeing everything well organized in one place made Darren see things differently. The plot still hadn’t been revealed and there were no details of where the smallpox was coming from or what the actual target would be.
There was some information that had supposedly been pulled from The Cause’s website and it was very strong anti-American rhetoric, the kind that normally sourced from outside the U.S. but Jack had clearly stated that this was an American group. This worried Darren because insider threats were typically downplayed these days, most of the work that Homeland Security performed was focused on attacks coming from abroad, where most of the big ones had come from. He thought about Oklahoma city and the tragedy that had occurred there and shuddered, thinking the American psyche couldn’t handle this type of attack right now.
Darren found the comment box that Bill had put on the website and saw the note above it “Think it’s about time we have a way to talk to each other. It won’t be real time but if you post something here I will update the code. The site location may change so don’t freak out if it’s not available the next time you try it. If I move it you’ll receive emails with the location, username and password.” Darren looked at the screen and asked it “Who are you Jack?”
He wrote a brief note to Bill, thanking him for bringing forward the information and to please keep it coming. Darren also implored Jack to contact him directly, promising full immunity and as much anonymity as possible. He also told him he hoped to meet him someday and wished him a good weekend. Darren pressed send and called Terry and George to his office.
“Did you get something Darren?” George asked, Terry wondering what they were talking about.
Darren spent a few minutes telling Terry what he’d been getting and how it was all anonymous. He showed him the website and sent him the logon information along with the address to see if Terry could find anything. Terry took the information, asked Darren to forward all emails and left to dig in. George looked around the website and said “Not much here so far Darren, just some anti-American bullshit rhetoric and veiled threats of a biological attack. We get this kind of thing all the time and you know that it’s always more hope than substance.”
“I agree George but something about this one feels different, especially since there is some chatter and based on what my CDC contact said. Speaking of which, let me tell Terry about that as well.” He sent off the filtered chatter that discussed smallpox along with a note summarizing what he’d heard from the CDC, unofficially of course. George and Darren spent the next few minutes debating the merit of it, George not as sold as Darren was. “Another thing is the way Jack is being so careful, as if he doesn’t want them to find out and go underground. This guy is a pro and that raises the hair on my neck.”
“I’ll give you that one but other than that it looks like hundreds of other sites we find a year and remember that many of them are in the U.S.”
George left out of boredom and Darren stared at the screen, wondering if Jack was going to reply today or later. He refreshed the website several times in hopes that he just missed a post, maybe they could have an actual conversation through the website. If he could talk to him there was a chance he could either make him slip up or get him to volunteer his assistance.
Terry came back in about forty
minutes later. “You’ve got a pro on your hands Darren. The site is in Czechoslovakia, where we can’t reach.”
“Yeah, I found that out. Was thinking that we should give away free web hosting in the same space where we provide the remailer services, maybe we could trip up a few more people that way.”
“Not a bad idea, I’ll get to work on that in the next couple of weeks. We can set up some virtual machines on the servers and do some limited web hosting. Cast a net and if we find something we’ll be able to get additional funding for more hardware. Back to Jack for a minute though. Everything is registered anonymously and the web logs and source code are locked down well enough that I couldn’t access them. There is a chance that he’ll log on directly to the site to look for your post and reply to you so I’ve placed a new type of tracing program on the site. Even though we don’t have direct access to it I can triangulate against all the major internet providers around the world and see if there is traffic destined for this site. It’s a major pain in the ass to filter the data but I’ve got some scripts that do a good job of it, especially if it’s coming from the U.S. I’ve also got a little bot program running that will refresh the site and send an alert if the content has changed. We’ll find this guy Darren, he’s good but nobody is that good.”
“Thanks Terry, I appreciate it. Have a good weekend.” Terry left and thirty seconds later Darren’s instant messenger program popped up. “Got an alert while we were talking, check out the site, I’m tracking down where he is now.”
Darren refreshed the web page and saw a reply to his comment. “Darren, when I read about the fraud case you just closed I knew you’d respond to me when I reached out to you. Unfortunately my identity and situation complicates things and I can’t come forward right now. I will keep you posted on any developments as soon as I become aware of them. Have a good weekend, Jack.”
Terry came in a few minutes later, shaking his head. “Nothing, looks like this guy is accessing the site from another dark site, something that’s off our radar. I can ping some secondary sources to see if I can get some logs and see where the post was made but it’s going to take some time and a lot of favors.”
“Don’t call in the favors yet, this thing is simmering but I don’t know if there’s enough there to make it boil. I’m leaving for the weekend, if you get any alerts over the weekend, give me a call.”
“Will do, in the meantime I’m going to look through our web crawler program to see if it can correlate any of the information posted on that site to other sites. It’s likely a needle in a haystack but worth looking.”
A few hundred miles away Bill logged off everything and took down the site in Czechoslovakia but kept the site in Nigeria. He didn’t want to give Homeland Security a chance to find a way in. He decided to use virtual machines every time he built the site and to move it around if possible so they couldn’t lock in on a single location. This was getting complicated, luckily he had everything documented and was being as careful as possible. He hoped nothing significant happened over the weekend that would create additional danger.
