“So, both your pistol and your Colgate got unloaded. Nice.”
They waited for their luggage on the carousel and then went outside to hail a taxi. LaRue explained that rental cars weren’t available to the public in Bermuda and Agent Jiminez was having to get the paperwork done to secure a vehicle for their investigation. Derek and Roger climbed into the back of a cab, with LaRue in the front passenger seat. They exited the airport and proceeded to take Long Bird Bridge going south.
“Where are we going?” Derek asked.
“We’ve arranged some rooms at a hotel called the Rosewood,” LaRue explained. “It’s just outside of Hamilton and a bit quieter, more secluded than in the city itself. You’ll have time to drop off your stuff and unwind a little. We’ll head over to the bank around six.”
“I thought banks closed at six?”
“They do,” said LaRue. “But that doesn’t mean that we won’t be working.”
A quick glance at the watch on Derek’s wrist showed 4:17 p.m. Even with the time change, it seemed there was no rest for the weary.
It was a pleasant enough drive. Derek asked the driver about the island and learned that Bermuda was actually a collection of islands rather than one large land mass. They were leaving St. David’s Island on the north end and were proceeding toward the city of Hamilton, which ironically was not located in Hamilton Parish. The car followed the coastline along North Shore Road, a narrow, two-lane highway with a single solid yellow line being all that separated the cars driving on the left side. Derek couldn’t help but stare out the window at the brilliant, almost luminescent turquoise water intermittently visible between low, scrubby trees.
The Rosewood was a cluster of gray-walled villas located on a well-flowered hillside 10 minutes past Hamilton. It was noticeably quiet when they exited the cab. Derek found his room to be a bit dark even in the afternoon light, but it was well furnished and otherwise comfortable. He passed by the small kitchen and opted to just rest. It was amazing how weary he felt after being on a plane all day. But he couldn’t relax and just stared out the window, waiting.
At 6:15 p.m. another taxi arrived, and Derek, Roger, and LaRue bundled into the car and headed into town. They entered Hamilton via Front Street, a prime strip of commercial real estate lined with numerous historic, pastel-colored buildings built in a Victorian style. Shops and retail establishments packed the blocks their left, while on their right sat an open harbor once used for cruise ships. At the far end of the district, they took a left onto King Street and began an uphill incline away from the water. After a few blocks they neared a fire station, a church, and what looked like a large colonial fort peeking out from the treetops. The cab pulled over in front of a pink three-story building with a large, rectangular portico over the entrance. White shutters propped out from the upper windows.
Bermuda Bank of Commerce.
Derek unfolded himself from the back seat of the cab and stretched as the others piled out. There were scooters of various makes and colors parked across the street. Derek grabbed Roger by the elbow as he exited the back seat.
“Roger. Our bank.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s pink.”
Roger waived the words away. “All business is done over the Internet. No one will ever know.”
The sun was getting lower, plunging King Street into shadow and muting the otherwise vibrant pastel hues of the buildings’ exteriors. As they approached the front door of BBC, a middle-aged woman with dark skin and brown hair pulled back into a bun was waiting for them on the other side of the entrance.
“This is Ms. Adele Thompson,” said LaRue, introducing her to Roger and Derek. They each shook her hand in turn. She had a firm grip and Derek decided she was not a person to trifle with.
“Mr. Callahan, as an important client of ours it is very nice to meet you finally—although I regret the circumstances that have brought us together.” Adele spoke in an authoritative British accent, which she quickly turned onto LaRue with disapproval. “Agent LaRue, this whole situation was very disruptive to our institution today. I had people that could not access their computers for hours at a time because somebody was sitting there, installing some computer program or whatever. How long is this intervention going to take?”
“It could take some time, Ms. Thompson.”
“Hmph. Well. Inspector Doggett has been looking for you while you were out, please make sure you speak with him.”
The group went up a staircase and past a floor full of low-walled cubicles for the general office workers, bankers, and accountants. There were a number of bank employees still there working, apparently making up lost time from the disruptions earlier in the day. Roger, who had a much longer working history with BBC than Derek did, walked off with Adele to talk privately. LaRue scanned the room until he saw a tall, black man pacing over by the window, wearing a blue police uniform and speaking on a cell phone. Excusing himself, the FBI agent made his way over to who Derek presumed was Inspector Doggett. Derek started walking unescorted around the office floor. It only took a minute before he found Lucy sitting at a desk with her laptop open.
“Hey,” said Derek.
“Hey,” Lucy replied in an aloof voice. She was wearing running clothes—tights and an athletic jacket that was unzipped in front. She didn’t take her eyes off her computer screen.
This was going to be harder than he thought.
“How’s it going?” he said.
“Fine.”
“You helping in getting this place secure?”
“Yep.”
Derek rubbed the back of his head at how lame this conversation seemed.
“Okay. Hey. Can we go somewhere private and talk? Come with me.”
She stood reluctantly as Derek marched over to the stairs. He checked over his shoulder to confirm that Lucy was still following him—she looked annoyed—and then proceeded upward.
The third floor was where the executive offices were located. Derek found a large conference room with a polished wooden table and a speakerphone in the center. Large windows allowed for an impressive view of the harbor down the hill. Lucy stepped into the room and Derek closed the door halfway for some privacy, leaving it ajar since he had no idea if anyone would complain. He could have been commandeering the CEO’s private facilities for all he knew.
“Sit down,” directed Derek. “Please.”
Lucy hesitated, then pulled out one of the chairs and sat.
Derek didn’t. He stood there nervously, staring at her.
“Are we going to talk?” asked Lucy after a few moments.
Pacing, Derek struggled to find something to get the conversation going.
“Can you take me through what you’ve gotten done here at the bank?” he said finally. God, you are such a lame ass. That’s not what you want to talk about. How was it that an executive, ex-consultant, Marine Corps officer couldn’t launch the right conversation with this girl?
Lucy glared at him incredulously. But she started talking.
“It’s been pretty straight forward, really. We spent most of the day sweeping the desktops for spyware. I reviewed the network switches and routers myself. Everyone’s changed their passwords. Inspector Doggett has an officer rotation to provide physical security. We’ve done a lot in a very short time. So, now, it’s mainly a matter of waiting.”
“Okay. How will you know...” Derek stopped abruptly. This was ridiculous. It wasn’t why he had asked her up to this conference room.
“I’m so sorry.”
Lucy didn’t take her eyes off him.
“I’m sorry. Really, really sorry about that night. You have no idea. I’m not a mon—” Derek tried to say monster, but he couldn’t get the word out.
“I know,” Lucy said softly.
They just looked at each other for a few moments, Lucy sitting, Derek standing still near the wall on the other side of the table.
“Where does this leave us?” asked Derek.
Lucy lowe
red her eyes and stared at the table. “I don’t know.”
“Maybe we could... figure it out?”
This was really hard.
“You could have killed me,” Lucy said finally, through the silence. Her voice was even and detached. “We’re not talking just dental work here. I could be dead. I could be dead, at your hands—and you wouldn’t even have known what you were doing.”
“I’m sorry, Lucy—”
“No—no, stop. Stop, Derek.” She held up a hand. “I know you are. You weren’t in control of what you did. I don’t blame you.”
He shook his head. Dragging Lucy—Ricks—across the apartment, a pistol in his hand and ready to go.
“You don’t know how terrible I feel,” he said.
“I can guess, Derek. I understand. I understand you. You told me early on you came with a lot of issues.”
Derek put his hands on the edge of the table. “Lucy, it will never happen again. Never, ever, ever.”
“You’re right. It won’t. Derek, I can’t be with you anymore.”
The whole room suddenly felt stuffy, like all the air had stopped moving.
“Lucy—”
“No, Derek. I just... can’t. It’s hard for me to even be alone with you right now. I’ve been trying to keep from shaking the whole time we’ve been in this room.”
Derek wanted to go over to her and hold her tight. He wanted to protect her. She was sitting in the chair by the table, the sleeves of her jacket covering her tattooed arms, hunched over like an animal that might break into flight.
“That wasn’t me,” he said.
“It was you,” Lucy replied fiercely. She took a moment to recompose herself. “Derek, I... you’re a good person. It took me a long time to realize that. I’m sorry for how long it took—really. I judged you poorly early on, and it was wrong of me. Then I got to know you, and the more I saw, the more I understood the things in your life that made you who you are. You were someone I could relate to. Somebody I cared for. I still care for you.
“But there’s a part of you that’s just... it’s more than I can handle. I’m sorry I’m not a stronger person. But I can’t.”
“I’ll get help,” Derek offered.
“You’ve never tried before?” Lucy said skeptically.
Derek had been through counseling for years—primarily early on, after leaving the Corps. There was a stretch when he had thought everything was under control. But control had proved to be anything but absolute. Jules had made him go back when the nightmares reappeared, years ago. Everything subsided and drifted away again. For a while. Had it been from the counseling? Had it truly helped? Now he was living the nightmares yet again—would they have just been worse without the help he had already gotten?
“I thought so,” Lucy finished for him.
They both stared at the top of the conference table in silence.
“Is this what you want?” Derek said finally.
“It’s not about what I want.”
“Why can’t it be?” Derek took a conciliatory step around the table.
Lucy sat bolt upright. “Don’t.”
“Lucy...”
“No.”
He could hear voices from downstairs through the open door.
Derek forced his feet to be still. Lucy’s body language suggested she might dash out of her chair any moment. Sadness washed through Derek’s whole being as he realized how desperately he had come to care for her. But the distance between them appeared to be insurmountable.
Footsteps trampled in the hallway behind Derek. He turned around to see Roger shove his head through the open door.
“Fuck. There you are. We need both of you, now.”
“What’s going on?” asked Lucy.
“Downstairs,” Roger commanded. He shoved the door open but didn’t wait on them, instead turning immediately on his heels and rushing back down the stairs.
47
The panicked voice was loud and clear before Derek reached the second floor.
“It just came to life and started typing on its own,” a young male employee was saying. He was in his early twenties, tall and skinny and awkward in his ill-fitting clothes. “I didn’t know what was going on. I’m sorry. Oh, I’m sorry!”
The boy was standing behind Agent Jiminez, who was sitting at one of the bank’s administrative computers with his own FBI laptop open next to it. LaRue and Inspector Doggett were watching closely.
“What happened?” Lucy demanded.
LaRue looked grim. “This computer just sent a large wire transfer overseas by itself.”
“Oh, shit,” Derek said.
“You guys swept for malware, Jimmy,” Lucy barked. “What got missed?”
Jiminez was typing quickly on his laptop, a ruggedized model clearly meant for fieldwork. “The computer’s clean. My monitoring agent isn’t picking up any background routines running.”
“Well, clearly something is happening. Make sure nothing’s masquerading as a service process.”
“There’s not. It’s clean. Let me pull up the log—”
Then it happened again.
Derek watched in morbid fascination as the desktop screen came to life. The cursor danced quickly, populating blanks in the ASCII menus of the bank software with X’s in order to issue commands. Several screens went by as it set up another transfer. Derek barely had time to understand what was going on before it was suddenly all over.
“That was very smooth, almost like a script,” commented Inspector Doggett.
“Looks like it,” Jiminez agreed.
“Did you see the amount?” asked Roger. “It looked like forty thousand dollars.”
Jiminez shook his head. “Four hundred thousand.”
“What the fuck, guys?” was all Derek had to contribute.
LaRue growled. “They’re moving it in chunks. Keeping it below half a million to raise fewer flags. Jiminez, where’s it going?”
Jiminez moved quickly through what looked like recorded logs of the affected computer, long text files of every command passed through to the bank software. “Here’s the SWIFT code: BUCHROBUXXX.”
“Where is that?” LaRue turned and called across the room. “Forrest?”
Another FBI agent answered from across the room. “Fourth, fifth letters are RO? That would be Romania. Hang on... BUCH is Banca Romania in Bucharest. Main branch.”
“Damn it. Forrest, get Langley on the line. We need contact information for that bank to hold the transfers, ASAP.”
Derek struggled to keep up with the barrage of questions, orders, and answers flying back and forth. There was a ton of technical and banking terminology he didn’t recognize and his frustration started to boil over. He felt helpless, just as he had with Lucy upstairs. Derek balled his fists and mentally grappled with one of the few questions he was capable of handling.
“Lucy, how are they accessing the computer and making it do all these scripts?”
“Well, our FBI friends say they swept all the computers for malware or other sorts of bots and didn’t find anything,” she replied, still looking over Jiminez’s shoulder. “It must be disguised really well.”
“But how would it be triggered?”
“Steve,” Jiminez called out. Derek thought he was interrupting until he realized Jiminez was reacting to his question. “Who’s on the network right now, any foreigners?”
Agent LaRue typed on his own laptop two tables away. “There aren’t any unauthorized entities logged into either the LAN or the wireless network.”
“It might be on a timer,” said Jiminez, still working.
Inspector Doggett pointed at the screen. “Here it goes again.”
Derek stood transfixed as another transaction was processed.
“Forrest—the bank contact info, please!” LaRue yelled.
“Look, there,” said Lucy. “That one was a different SWIFT code. They’re sending it to multiple banks.”
“Trying to make it harder to notice,”
Jiminez said. “Maybe it would have been if we hadn’t been watching.”
“Yes.”
“It’s another Romanian bank. Maybe still in Bucharest... hey, Forrest? Got another one. BTRAROBUB30. We need contact information for them too.”
Derek stepped back. It was too hard to watch, his company being robbed. He folded his arms across his chest to keep from pounding the table. Their company, their livelihood was being destroyed in front of their eyes and there was nothing that he could do to stop it. Briefly, Derek exchanged glances with Roger. The small, gray-haired man seemed to be thinking the same thing.
“Maybe we should just unplug all the fucking keyboards. Then our little ghost here can’t keep typing,” Derek said bitterly.
Roger shook his head sadly, but Derek knew he appreciated the sarcasm.
Lucy, on the other hand, apparently did not. She straightened up from Jiminez’s shoulder and glared at Derek. Her eyes were like daggers.
Derek instantly regretted opening his mouth, but it probably didn’t matter now. It was as crappy of a situation as it could get. The blood of their company was spilling out on the floor at the hands of a bunch of criminals, and Lucy would take anything he said as a reflection on her. The amount of money being stolen was far beyond the email ransom demands. Netertainment was done. Maybe, maybe, the FBI guys could ping these bank branches and stop the withdrawals. But how many transfers were queued up in this phantom script? Would it just keep going until there was no money left at all?
It took a moment of wallowing before Derek even realized he had Lucy’s expression all wrong.
Her eyes had widened into what could only be described as panic. There was something else, too.
Recognition.
Lucy turned to the desktop terminal where Jiminez was sitting. She reached behind the CPU, grabbed hold of some wires, and pulled.
“What are you doing?” Jiminez barked.
Lucy was holding the end of the keyboard cable. It was just a typical wire—long, skinny, coated in black plastic, with a USB connector at the end. She was staring at the connector.
“Shit.”
Armchair Safari (A Cybercrime Technothriller) Page 43
