The Doodlebug War: a Tale of Fanatics and Romantics (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 3)

by Andrew Updegrove

  “Let me see who we’ve got.” She spent half a minute swiping through screens on the tablet she’d brought with her.

  “How time consuming will this be?”

  “We’ll need most of someone’s time for the next few weeks.”

  “Hmm. Looks like everyone who’s done DR before is pretty swamped. I think we’ll need to break someone new in.”

  That was unfortunate. Working someone new into that angle of the business was always a bit risky. You had to be sure you picked someone who wouldn’t be hostile to the assignment before you got into the details. Roach rather enjoyed manipulating his employees, and liked to handle that conversation himself.

  “You sure?”

  “Sorry; otherwise, we’re going to have to pull someone off some other project, and I can’t think of any project where the account partner wouldn’t hit the roof.”

  “Okay. Who do you suggest?”

  “Can I get back to you?”

  “Sure. It’s worth taking the time to do it right. Try and give me two or three names of people who haven’t been here that long.”

  Sedgewick stood up. “Will do.”

  “Today?”

  “Today.”

  * * *

  Roach looked at the summaries of the two candidates Sedgewick came back with. He hadn’t known they had an employee by the name of Sean Lynch, but many of his particulars matched well against one of the profiles Roach often looked for in a DR candidate. Poor kid from South Boston. First in his family to go to college, much less grad school. Probably carrying a ton of student debt. Hard worker and hungry to get ahead. Bit of a temper. Already working without complaint on the accounts of two of the firm’s most publicly unappetizing clients. Roach noted Lynch had recently changed home addresses, so he might be in some sort of transition and therefore more vulnerable. And he had granted access to his Facebook account.

  Roach went to Lynch’s Facebook page and clicked back through his posts and pictures. Nothing useful or remarkable turned up at first. Then he saw one that would either seal the deal or disqualify Lynch for the job. It was a picture of him at the beach with his arm around a young woman, and the young woman he had his arm around was Sara Ravitz.

  He typed both names into his web search bar and requested an image search. Sure enough, while there was only a single picture of the two of them together at Lynch’s page, there were lots to be found on other sites, apparently taken over a period of several years. On a hunch, Roach pulled up the profile that had been worked up on Ravitz and checked her home address against the one Lynch had recently changed. Bingo. They were indeed the same.

  He leaned back in his chair. The fact that he’d only been able to find one picture of Ravitz on Lynch’s Facebook page indicated that he’d tried to purge his page of every trace of Ravitz, but he had missed one picture. That suggested Ravitz had terminated her relationship with Lynch and he wasn’t happy about it. Plus, he had anger management issues. There seemed to be much more to be gained than lost, provided he approached the situation carefully.

  He buzzed his assistant. “Michele, book me a quiet table for two at the club tomorrow at noon, and ask Sean Lynch—he works for us—to join me … no, you don’t have to check with him first. He’ll be available.”

  * * *

  Sean Lynch checked the time on his computer screen for the fourth time in five minutes. Any moment now, he would be meeting Paul Roach for the first time. Roach was not only the son of a founder of Roach & Drye but the partner with the biggest reputation in town. He had no idea why Roach would want to meet him, much less have lunch. But whatever it was, it had to be good.

  He looked up to see Roach standing next to his cubicle.

  “Ready for lunch?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Not sir—Paul. Sorry we haven’t met face to face before.”

  Lynch shook the offered hand. “No worries … Paul. It’s an honor.”

  Roach smiled. “I thought we’d grab a bite upstairs at the club. Sound okay to you?”

  Of course it did. The Federal Club was the old-line, exclusive watering hole where the firm wined and dined its clients. Lynch had never been there before.

  “Sounds great!”

  So far so good, thought Roach. Obsequious deference to authority was another part of his favorite profile. They were welcomed at the club and immediately led to a table in the corner of the wood-paneled room.

  “I don’t know how your tastes run, Sean, but the fish here is usually pretty good.”

  When they ordered, Roach noted with approval that Lynch followed his lead, also opting for the baked haddock.

  Roach chatted the younger man up amiably until their food arrived and then got down to business.

  “So, Sean, here’s the reason I asked you to lunch today. I’ve heard a lot of great things about your work, and I’ve been keeping an eye out for a good project that you and I could work on together.”

  Lynch almost dropped his fork. Like most of the recent hires, he had no idea how well or poorly he was doing. It was something of a sweatshop, with plenty of grunt work for junior staff to do. It took a couple of years before you got access to more challenging assignments, which was when the project managers began to cull the lesser lights from those allowed to advance to the next level. Thank God—he obviously must have made the cut. And he must be toward the head of the list if the big man himself wanted to work with him!

  “That would be great. I’d be delighted to work with you on any kind of project.”

  Roach smiled. So far, so good. But they weren’t quite there yet.

  “I’m glad to hear you say that. One of the founding principles of this firm is that every type of business should have the right to get its story out to Congress and the public, even if that company isn’t popular. People and legislators make snap judgments about lines of business all the time, you know. Take our coal clients, for example. America would never have achieved what it has over the last one hundred and fifty years without a dependable, affordable industrial energy supply. But now? A lot of people want to just shut down all the mines. They don’t want to hear anything favorable about coal, even if it’s accurate.

  “Here at Roach & Drye, we don’t think that’s the American way. We firmly believe our job is to make sure that all the facts get out there, no matter what the business may be, and then let Congress and those people who still have open minds decide.”

  Lynch had heard the party line many times, beginning with his first interview with the firm. He nodded approvingly.

  “That said,” Roach continued, “we want to be respectful of the beliefs of our employees, and we also want to be sure everyone on every team is ready to do his or her very best for the client.”

  Lynch’s glow of self-approval was ebbing a bit. He mostly viewed the conduct of business as an amoral matter and didn’t spend much time thinking about the behavior of any particular company or industry. But he knew that not all of his friends looked at the business world that way. They enjoyed tweaking him about what they insisted on referring to as his “mercenary tendencies.” And he was furious over being dumped by his long-time girlfriend because of his job.

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t have any trouble working on any account the firm decided to take on.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that—I appreciate the show of faith. Still, let me tell you a bit about the client and then give you the names of some of the groups that are critical of it. It’s called the Data Center Security Association. It develops and promotes physical and cybersecurity standards for the new data centers that are popping up all over the place to support cloud computing. An enormous amount of computing is already done in these centers. Give it a few more years, and just about nothing will run anymore on servers located at businesses, universities, laboratories, gov
ernments, trading floors, or you name it. I know your minor was computer science, so I expect you probably know more about this than I do.”

  Lynch was flattered Roach knew this much about his background. “Yes, I’m pretty current on computer trends. Cloud computing takes most of the burdens of security, updating, and maintenance off a business’s shoulders and centralizes it where service providers can worry about all those things, maximizing efficiency and lowering costs for customers.”

  “Excellent! I’ll have to run our talking points by you next time before we send them to the client.”

  Lynch was glowing again. He’d always heard that Roach was a tough guy to work for, but the man who was buying him lunch sounded more like his favorite uncle. But Lynch was also slightly puzzled; why would Roach think he might have any reservations? DCSA sounded like a Motherhood and Apple Pie association compared to some of the other accounts he was working on.

  “Unfortunately, there’s always someone out there that sees problems with everything. In the case of cloud computing, most of those people are expressing concern about security. Not that that’s not a concern, of course. As a matter of fact, that’s what DCSA was formed to address—it’s a standards setting organization that develops holistic security standards for all aspects of running a data center, from setting up the systems to establishing and maintaining perimeter security to vetting staff. But that’s still not enough for some people. One group is even worried that, somehow, someone’s going to blow all the data centers up unless we bury them fifty feet underground, if you can believe that. Can you imagine how much that would cost?”

  Lynch could, more or less, and it did sound absurd.

  “So—any qualms so far?”

  “Absolutely not.” Lynch thought he’d show off a bit more. “The IT industry has been headed this way for years. Even Homeland Security has moved all of its software and data from thousands of locations to just four cloud computing centers. I expect that they ought to know something about security, physical as well as cyber.”

  “Excellent again. It sounds like you’re an even better match for this team than I imagined. So here’s some more background. One of the things we’ve been doing is helping DCSA prepare the way for Congress to adopt the DCSA standard into federal legislation, instead of asking some agency that doesn’t know what it’s doing to draft detailed regulations for data centers. Congress references private sector standards into law all the time, although most people aren’t aware of it. In this case, Congress was really quite interested in taking advantage of the good work DCSA has done, and the speaker of the house, no less, introduced a data center cybersecurity bill that incorporates DCSA’s core standard verbatim. In a few weeks, we expect both houses to approve that bill and send it off to the president for signature. But groups are still trying to block it.”

  “Excuse me, but why? It sounds pretty straight ahead to me.”

  “It is straight ahead, but every bill has enemies. Maybe someone would make more money if there was no law. And another someone thinks their own business model will be threatened if the bill passes. And somebody else is a nervous Nellie that sees doom hiding around every corner. Make no mistake about it, some of these groups get pretty down and dirty. In fact, I’ll share something with you confidentially that we don’t tell most people in the firm.”

  Roach leaned a bit closer, and Lynch reciprocated with a thrill. The big boss was sharing information with him—a second-year employee—that more senior staff might not know!

  “Nobody in our business wants it to become common knowledge in the press, but in this town, everyone’s hacking everyone else’s computers now, and that includes non-profits on the hacking side. If you’re not playing the same game, you’re going to get screwed. Most of our clients know that their computer systems are getting hammered, and if we can’t help them stay ahead of the opposition, they’ll go to one of our competitors. It would surprise you some of the questions I get asked when we’re being interviewed by a potential client.”

  Roach stopped abruptly, waiting for a reaction to what he had just said. Non-profits hacking their perceived enemies was news to Lynch, but he tried to look like the kind of sophisticated man of the world who would have expected nothing less.

  “I guess that’s just the kind of world we live in today,” Lynch said with a shrug.

  “Indeed yes. Sad but true. So let me list a few of the organizations on our opposition list. These are the ones that we already know are against cloud computing data centers.” Roach had made up the list to provide camouflage for mentioning the RTF, and he watched Lynch intently as he walked through it.

  “First there’s the Latter Day Luddites. They’re kind of a guerrilla theatre fringe group, out of Berkeley, California, that’s very anti-technology. Then there’s the Citizens for Sane Technology. Same outlook, but a more conventional approach. And then there’s the Telecommunications Industry Coalition. They’ve been serious trouble, because they see data centers putting lots of price pressure on their members. But we’ve been able to outflank them so far. And finally, there’s the Responsible Technology Foundation. They’re the nervous Nellie group I alluded to that thinks someone will bomb us into the Stone Age if we build data centers aboveground.”

  Lynch had been listening politely until he heard the last name. Roach watched as a range of emotions flickered across Lynch’s reddening face, beginning with surprise, progressing to confusion, and at last settling on wide-eyed satisfaction. Success! That was the look Roach had been hoping for. Lynch had sensed the opportunity for revenge and liked the way it smelled.

  “So are we good to go?”

  “You bet!”

  “Excellent!” Roach stood up and clapped him on the back. “In that case, let’s go downstairs and get to work!”

  * * *

  A week later, Mitty received a hand-delivered envelope from Roach & Drye. Inside was a document with one of Roach’s business cards paperclipped to it. In the upper right-hand corner appeared “DCSA Report – CIS Draft 1.3,” and the title of the document read, “An Analysis of Probable Effects Arising from the Destruction of a Critical Percentage of Centralized Computer Data Centers.”

  “Sue, get Paul Roach on the line.”

  “Will do.” Less than a minute later, she buzzed him back. “It’s Paul.”

  Mitty spoke before Roach could say hello. “How bad is it?”

  “Pretty bad. I haven’t gotten a detailed readout from one of our own experts yet, but you don’t get sloppy work from the Center for Infrastructure Studies. According to the executive summary, destroying any randomly selected thirty-seven percent of the big data centers would take down substantially all essential systems and services. If the enemy knew the right ones to hit, taking out as little as twenty-eight percent of the total would take everything down and keep it that way until the destroyed centers were rebuilt, which would be impossible with the Internet unavailable.

  “On the impact side, they’ve concluded that an attack during the summer would result in the death by starvation, thirst, and other causes of at least half of the U.S. population within one month, with most of the rest to follow within three months. If we got hit any time from November through March, the one-month total would rise to seventy-five to ninety percent, depending on how cold it was. Then…”

  “That’s enough. I want everyone you’ve got with the right skills to pick apart every piece of data, and every assumption made, in this report. Find out about the individual authors, too—see if any of them has ever messed up in the past. And what about Ravitz—what have you been able to get on her?”

  “Will do on the new requests. On Ravitz, so far, nothing useful. She leads a quiet, ordinary life. Never juiced her résumé. No drug use, even in college. Only drinks socially and then moderately. Highly regarded professionally and personally.”

  “Well, i
f she’s never screwed up in her professional or private life, you’re going to have to do that for her. I need something we can use if we need to that will make people question her motives and her credibility. Can you do that?”

  “As you know, we’ve done that kind of work before.”

  “Good. Well it’s time to do it again.”

  * * *

  Lynch now had a brand new email stream to monitor: his ex-girlfriend’s account at the Responsible Technology Foundation. He hadn’t had to get his hands dirty, either. Someone else had done whatever it was that was necessary to set up a reflector on the RTF server that bounced a copy of every inbound and outbound email from her account straight to him. Better yet, they’d also set things up so he could not only impersonate Ravitz, sending emails the recipients would think came from her, but only he would receive their responses.

  He was enjoying himself immensely. He’d been smarting mightily since she had given him the gate. The opportunity to get some payback on that humiliation was sweet indeed—especially since she’d have no idea she was being shadowed. If he was sufficiently clever and restrained in sending emails in her name, she’d never realize she was being impersonated either. He’d have to hold that tactic in reserve for when he needed it most.

  Lynch found he had no qualms about what he was doing. Quite the opposite. After all, who was she to say she could no longer live with someone who worked for a lobbying firm with unsavory clients? It wasn’t as if that kind of employment was against the law. And from what Roach said, these holier than thou non-profit groups were playing just as fast and loose as the people they were always trying to pillory in public. That said, he couldn’t believe Sara would ever dream of hiring someone to hack into someone else’s computer system.

  So much the better. That would just make it easier to be sure his client won and she lost.