Corrupted Memory

by Ray Daniel

  Oscar said, “Can’t you just read it online?”

  “I like the smell of newsprint, okay? Now, go get me a Wall Street Journal.”

  Oscar stood, grunted, and lumbered out of the Starbucks, folding the money into his pocket.

  With Oscar gone, Graxton said, “Tucker, you seriously destabilized that boy. I think Facebook was his drug of choice.”

  “I think there’s an online twelve-step program. You should Google it.”

  “He has serious anger-management issues. He needs to beat somebody up.”

  I considered Oscar’s size and the latent violence that came off him like body odor. “Well, that can’t be good.”

  “It’s not. This is a major pain in the ass. So you should know that the only reason I’m talking to you is that you’re Sal’s cousin.”

  Jael coughed into her hand.

  “And because Jael asked me to. Two. There are two reasons.”

  “And a fanatical devotion to the Pope,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I can give you a third reason to talk to me.”

  “Really? How?”

  “How much money does my Uncle Walt owe you?”

  “I told you. He doesn’t owe me any money.”

  “Look, I’m not wearing a wire and I won’t tell anyone. How much?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “C’mon, Hugh. Work with me.”

  “Get lost.”

  Jael said, “Mr. Graxton, this is not helpful.”

  “I’m not here to be helpful.”

  “I’ll make it worth your while,” I said.

  “Really? How?”

  “I’ll pay it.”

  “You’re going to pay me Walt’s fifty grand?”

  I blanched. “That much? He owes you that much?”

  “Why would you pay it?”

  I told Graxton about Lucy and Talevi, how I needed Walt to get into GDS, how I didn’t have any leverage. Then I shared my plan.

  Hugh said, “I like it. If Walt gets you into GDS, you pay me sixty thousand dollars.”

  “I thought it was fifty.”

  “There’s a ten-thousand-dollar change fee. It’s like the airlines.”

  “Screw that, Hugh. Why should I pay ten grand more?”

  “You’re desperate to save Lucy, right?”

  “Yeah. I told you that.”

  “So for ten thousand you get a little negotiating lesson: don’t bring your desperation to the table.”

  I crossed my arms, “Hmmph. Fine.”

  Hugh picked up his iPhone. “Now, let’s call Walt.”

  Sixty-One

  My Honda Accord Zipcar rested in blissful anonymity in the Russell’s Garden Center parking lot. I had chosen the Accord because it was the least likely car to be remembered by eyewitnesses. Ornamental shrubs dotted a flat landscape that led up a low rise to hothouses and long buildings that sold houseplants and garden supplies. Global Defense Systems lay beyond those buildings across Route 20.

  Hugh Graxton parked his BMW next to my Accord. He and Oscar climbed out. I felt exposed in front of Oscar without Jael, but I had left her in Boston. If I got caught doing this, I’d be arrested. If Jael got caught, there’d be an international incident. Of course, that wasn’t to say there wouldn’t be one anyway. The closer I got to the idea of espionage, the more my stomach tightened. It thrummed like a bass drum as I saw Walt emerge from the one of the hothouses.

  Walt approached and called, “Tucker? What are you doing with him?”

  Graxton put his finger to his lips and turned to walk away from the buildings and into the scrubby brush behind the Garden Center. Nobody noticed us disappear from view.

  When we were hidden, Walt approached Graxton. “What’s this about?”

  Graxton nodded to Oscar, who punched Uncle Walt in the stomach.

  “Hey!” I said.

  Oscar glared at me and Graxton said, “You shut up now and let the man work. You’re getting what you want.”

  Walt was doubled over. He straightened partway and said, “What was that for?”

  Oscar slapped Walt across the face with an open palm, knocking him to the ground. Oscar closed in, aiming a kick.

  Graxton said, “That’s enough.”

  Oscar lowered his foot. I saw a light tremor in his arms. He was itching for Walt to give him an excuse.

  Walt stayed down, cradling his red cheek.

  “Walt,” Graxton said, “you owe me money.”

  “Yeah, but—” started Uncle Walt.

  “But what, Walt? What? You’re going to pay me now?”

  “You know I can’t pay you now.”

  “Then how did Oscar surprise you with a punch in the stomach? You didn’t pay me. Why shouldn’t you get a punch in the stomach?”

  Walt rubbed his lip and spit onto the ground. There was no blood. “What’s Tucker doing here?”

  Graxton wrapped an arm around my shoulder. “Tucker here is paying off your debt.”

  “What?”

  Graxton strode over to Walt, grabbed him by his blue button-down shirt, and pulled him to his feet. He held Walt close. Walt scrabbled at Graxton’s fist where it held his shirt. “What do you want from me?”

  Graxton released the shirt. “It’s simple, Walt. I want you to sneak Tucker here into GDS so he can steal some secrets and save his girlfriend. That’s all. I just want you to enable a heartwarming tale of love and espionage.”

  “I can’t—” started Walt.

  Graxton raised his hand. “Don’t even.”

  “I’ll get fired. I’ll get arrested. I’ll lose my pension.”

  “Your pension? Walt, are you worried about outliving your money?”

  “Well—”

  “Oscar, you hear this? Walt doesn’t want to outlive his money.” Graxton bore into Walt. “Trust me, shithead, you’re not going to outlive anything.”

  “I’ll pay you. I swear!”

  Graxton straightened his jacket and said, “You’re not going to pay us. Tucker’s going to pay us, right after you get him into GDS. C’mon, Oscar.”

  Oscar lumbered over to Graxton, passing Walt. Oscar raised his hand, and Walt flinched as Oscar patted his head. Oscar and Graxton walked out of the woods, side by side.

  I turned to Walt. “I need to do this.”

  “Don’t you talk to me,” Walt said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Shut up.”

  I shut up.

  Walt squatted and drew a rectangle in the dirt. “This is the building. Meet me at this back corner in fifteen minutes. I’ll get you in a side door.”

  “We’re not using the lobby?”

  “I don’t want us going into the lobby together, you idiot. Once you’re inside, I’ll get you to Patterson’s old computer. Then you’re on your own.”

  He stood, turned, and walked away.

  I called out. “I’m sorry, Uncle Walt!”

  Walt turned. “Fuck that uncle stuff. We’re done after today, you hear me?”

  I heard him. Didn’t blame him a bit. I’d be done with me too.

  Sixty-Two

  I approached the security guard at the entrance of the parking lot.

  I said, “I’m here to see Mindy Frank.”

  The guard held out his hand. “ID?”

  I handed him my driver’s license. He compared it to my face. I waited for some hidden mechanism in security theater to kick in and bite me in the ass. For example, they might realize that I didn’t know a Mindy Frank. They didn’t.

  The guard handed back my license. “Thank you, sir.”

  I walked into the lot and followed the visitor parking down the building as if I were looking to meet up with someone. When I reached the end of the building I
turned around the corner, out of sight out of mind. Ten minutes had elapsed. I reached the end of the windowless building and found a side door. The door opened. Uncle Walt beckoned me inside.

  Walt handed me a visitor’s badge with an indecipherable picture on it. “Here.”

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “It’s a visitor’s badge that somebody threw into the trash.”

  I read the badge. “My name is Carmen Hazleton?”

  “Sure,” said Walt.

  “That’s a woman’s name.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Deal with it.”

  We climbed a flight of stairs and walked past the military shrine, which honored young people from every branch. Some were grim in their army uniforms. Others smiled. Most had a generic, blue portrait photo background, while some stood in front of flags, and one had his own full-length portrait superimposed behind his head. It looked like a military baseball card. I wondered if a jammed Paladin missile would fail to save one of the kids in the pictures. A picture of a blond girl in a blue uniform caught my eye. She smiled through her nervousness, the smile ending at her eyes. I was going to save Lucy, but Talevi would never get this data.

  The facility was huge. I followed Walt past the cafeteria, down the hallways, up a staircase, through a tunnel connecting us to another building, down a staircase, past a convenience store, and through another connecting tunnel. Without Walt, I’d never find my way out. As we walked, people smiled at Walt, greeting him with a “Hiya, Walt!” Walt plastered a smiling grimace on his face and waved at them. The sweat on his bald head ran down his temples in rivulets.

  Walt stopped walking and pointed into an empty cube. The name plaque was blank, but a PC sat on the desk. Walt said, “This was Dave’s cube when he worked in Wayland. Can you get his password off it?”

  “It depends if they deleted his account.”

  “I’ve got whole rooms full of old computers that GDS won’t throw away. They keep everything. I’ll bet the account is still on there. They probably just changed the password.”

  I inspected Dave’s PC with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I needed to get his password and find the data that would save Lucy. On the other, I didn’t want to believe that GDS would make it as easy as I feared. I crawled under the desk, looked at the back of the PC, and found a security hole big enough to kill all the kids in those pictures.

  Sixty-Three

  Late in 2009, a worker at the Iranian nuclear enrichment plant in Natanz plugged a USB stick into his PC and unwittingly brought down the Iranian nuclear weapons program. When the stick entered the computer, the Stuxnet virus woke up and copied itself into the system.

  The virus had been traveling across the Iranian countryside, hopping from computer to computer through infected USB sticks. It was a clever virus, created by a large and probably international team of engineers. It carried within it a valid security certificate from a semiconductor company in Taiwan. The certificate had been stolen.

  Ensconced in its new home, the virus began to look around, searching the PC for Siemens Step7 software. Normally the virus couldn’t find the software, and in that case it would shut down and wait to infect another USB stick. But that day was a good day for the virus because the Siemens Step7 software was in place. Now the virus knew that this PC controlled an industrial system. It performed its final check.

  Stuxnet looked through the software to see if this PC was connected to a piece of industrial hardware called a frequency converter. Specifically, it looked for a frequency converter that had been

  designed and built in Iran, and when it found it, it knew that it was sitting on a PC that controlled a key piece of the Iranian nuclear weapons program: a uranium enrichment centrifuge.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  The virus inserted itself between the centrifuge and the monitoring systems on the PC. It began to manipulate the speeds of the centrifuges, driving them too fast then too slow, breaking them down. At the same time, it controlled the monitoring display systems on the PC so that the Iranian operators couldn’t see what was happening. All they knew was that their displays showed normal operation while their centrifuges were being destroyed at a record rate.

  Iran’s security forces descended upon the engineers, digging through people, looking for the spy who was sabotaging their weapons program. The head of the program resigned. This whole time, Stuxnet continued to destroy equipment. This went on for months, until a Belarusian antivirus company found Stuxnet.

  Nobody is saying who wrote the Stuxnet virus, but the lesson was clear: USB ports are festering petri dishes of computer infection. Because of that, I had expected and partially hoped to find the USB ports on Dave’s machine to be filled with epoxy. They weren’t.

  I was sitting in a US defense contractor’s office with a USB stick in my hand and an open USB port in front of me. All the walls, locks, security cards, and secret-keeping efforts of the US government were about to fail.

  Still, GDS had one final defense against me. They could have upgraded their computers to Windows 7, but they hadn’t. The Windows XP login screen presented itself.

  Oh my God! Our tax money at work.

  This was security theater at its most theatrical. GDS, a company that went through the trouble of looking at my driver’s license and making visitors leave their cell phones at the desk, couldn’t bring itself to upgrade its PCs to Windows 7 even though Microsoft had stopped supporting XP. Too bad for GDS.

  My USB drive contained a copy of Ophcrack, a piece of software that could decrypt Windows XP passwords in record time. I turned Dave’s computer on and Ophcrack took it over, sidestepping Windows and booting to the Slax Linux operating system. A friendly green clover appeared on the screen.

  “What are you doing?” asked Walt. “The screen’s all messed up. That isn’t Windows.”

  “I’m cracking Dave’s password.”

  “Jesus, you know how to do that?”

  “Yup. What are you doing here? I thought I was on my own.”

  “I don’t want you to get caught and start talking.” Sweat dripped off Walt’s chin.

  “Well, keep an eye out for security.”

  Ophcrack started running. It showed me a list of accounts, including dpatterson. I removed all the accounts from the list but Dave’s. I didn’t want to waste time or know more secrets than were absolutely necessary to save Lucy’s life.

  I clicked the “Crack” button and Ophcrack went to work, traversing lists of known passwords and hints. The old PC was slow and there was no way that GDS would use a simple password. This would take a while. I settled in and watched the screen.

  I considered the fact that I’d probably spent at least a year of my life waiting for computers, watching progress bars inch across screens as the computers compiled my code, copied my files, downloaded my movies, or simply booted. A full year of staring straight ahead, emptying my mind, stretching, breathing, conversing on Twitter. These little waits were never long enough to allow me to do something useful, but they weren’t so short that I didn’t notice them. They held me in suspended animation as I waited for some machine to do something that seemed important at the time.

  A hand grabbed my shoulder and I jerked my head around.

  “Aren’t you done yet?” asked Walt.

  “No! Will you please leave me alone and let me do this. I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

  “This is killing me,” Walt said.

  “Just go watch for security,” I said.

  “And then what? You don’t have a real badge.”

  “This isn’t helping.”

  Walt went back to his post, I turned back to the machine. Holy crap! Ophcrack had found the password already:

  Administration123

  Seriously? What a crappy password. I didn’t even bo
ther copying it. I had memorized it in a glance.

  I turned off the machine, let it reboot to Windows. Entered dpatterson and the password. Dave’s PC came to life and we were ready to start digging through his files. I spun in my chair and called out, “All set!”

  A jacketed security guard stood behind me, his arms crossed, his jarhead crew cut eclipsing the fluorescents behind him.

  He pointed at my visitor badge and asked, “Where’s your escort, Carmen?”

  Sixty-Four

  My eyes widened as my face flushed full red.

  Poker Face Tucker. The unreadable man.

  I jumped to my feet and pointed at the spot in the hallway where Walt stood watch. “He’s right over there.”

  No Walt.

  The guy looked at the spot and back at me.

  “You can’t stay here without an escort.”

  “Well, I know that. I just don’t know where he went.”

  “What’s his name?”

  I figured I had done enough damage to Uncle Walt and told a stupid lie. “Bob Baker.”

  “What were you doing on that computer?”

  “Fixing it.”

  The “fixing it” lie wouldn’t have worked with a piece of technology that functioned reliably. What are you doing with that screwdriver? Fixing it. Right … But it would always work with a PC.

  The jarhead stepped into the cube and peered at Dave’s screen.

  “What’s wrong with it?” he asked.

  “The usual.”

  “Piece of crap, huh?”

  “Yup.”

  “Why would Bob have you fixing his computer instead of the IT department?”

  I was caught. I hadn’t thought ahead. I had been playing checkers when I should have been playing chess.

  “Um … not the computer as much as a piece of software.”

  “What software?”

  “The compiler.”

  “What’s that do?”

  “It compiles.”

  The guard looked into my wide and twitching eyes.