“Fred! Fred!” A man in his late twenties, in glasses, blue overalls and a black T-shirt opened the door and stood in the entryway. I caught a glimpse of him around the side of the monitor. He was one of the guys I had seen handling the bubble-wrapped rectangles – which I assumed to be paintings – in the gallery area. He glanced around the office:
“Are you in here?”
I realized that he couldn’t see me behind the giant monitor on the desk, and was about to look around the side of it, when I heard Fred’s voice coming from the adjoining space.
“Over here! In the inventory room.”
The man turned and walked out, leaving the office door open.
I heard his footsteps go down the hall, and then a door close – probably the door to the inventory room. Then voices coming from the next room. I looked up: the modular walls in this space didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling, and there was a small gap at the top, allowing the sound to carry.
“Hi, Alex. What’s going on?” Fred was saying.
“We need to talk.” The other man’s voice had an urgency to it.
“What about?”
“I told you before, – after this show, I’m gone. I don’t think I can continue to work with you.”
“I don't think this is the time to be getting into this.” Fred sounded impatient and dismissive.
“I do. I feel the current situation is unfair.”
“Are you done with setting up the show?”
“Almost. I’ll finish it, and do the opening tomorrow. But I’ve been working for you for more than a couple of years, and I think, all things considered, the money is not enough.”
I heard something moved along the floor – perhaps Alex or Fred got up and pushed back a chair. “I’m not going to be doing this any more. Just send me my payment for this month, and I am done.”
“Are you saying you will actually stop working with me?” Fred’s voice came across, cold as ice.
Up to now, I was scrolling through the logs for the website and trying to ignore the noise of the voices. Fred’s tone made my ears perk up.
“Yes, that is what I am saying.”
“Is that really wise? You are forgetting just what I can influence.”
Right then, there was a splash of noise in the main gallery space, the front door seemed to open and a couple of new voices carried.
“Sounds like they are here.” I heard a door open nearby – I assumed it was the inventory room door – and the sound of steps going down the hall, into the main gallery space.
“We’ll talk about this later.” I heard Fred say.
I quickly got up from behind the desk, walked to the office door and closed it quietly. If Fred were to remember my presence in his office, he might suspect that I heard the conversation with Alex – and something told me that it was not a conversation he would have liked others to overhear.
Curious: not only was someone interested in destroying Fred Nordqvist's business, but one of his employees had just announced he was quitting, and not on the most amiable terms. It seemed he might have more than one pressing problem. Maybe this assignment would be interesting after all.
2
Through the closed door, I faintly heard a burst of conversation and activity in the main room. I could distinguish a woman's voice exclaiming something and laughing. The noise of voices didn’t sound antagonistic, and my attention went back to the web server logs and HTTP signatures.
What I was dealing with at the gallery was a plain Denial of Service (DoS) attack. The idea behind such attacks is to overload the server with malicious requests, so that it is unable to process any legitimate traffic. I ran the command “whois” on the IP the traffic was coming from, and it came back with: “Ravenswood Art Gallery”. Linda Raven was registered as the owner, with a phone number noted and an address that looked to be a couple of blocks away, on one of the streets leading to the Kirkland waterfront.
OK, it looked like a local competitor, who decided to try a little cyber-attack to interfere with Nordqvist Fine Art. I brought up the Ravenswood gallery’s web page, using an anonymizer software just in case, so that whoever ran that site wouldn’t be able to tell where I was browsing from, and found myself looking at a photo of a smiling woman in her early fifties, in the upper left of its website. She had with jet-black hair (maybe to go with the “raven” name) and blue eyes, surrounded by a soft glow achieved by a filter. She was wearing red lipstick, and in her ears were earrings with matching long red inlays (maybe corals or semi-precious stones?). As for the art, her site said that they sold European 19th and 20th century painting, sculpture and photography. So, a direct competitor, going after the same market as Nordqvist Fine Art, it looked like.
About a minute later, as I was perusing the Ravenswood Art Gallery’s site, I heard steps going back towards the inventory room, then sounds of drawers opened and things moved across the floor. The voices next door resumed, less distinct than before. My un-intentional eavesdropping continued.
“As I said already, I thought about this. I have to be realistic.”
“Hold on, aren’t you being a little drastic?”
“No. I’m telling you, I’m done after this one.”
“Oh are you?” Fred’s voice was quiet and deliberate, so that I had trouble making out his words. “You know, I can obliterate your reputation with just a couple of words to the right people.”
“If you do that, it would destroy you and your business, too!”
“Oh, I’d say that I didn’t know any better. And that I came clean the moment I suspected anything! These paintings are just a part of my gallery’s business – a lucrative part, for sure, but there is so much more that I can sell. Jewelry, photographs, sculpture. I’ll take a temporary hit and move on. Your name will be ruined, make no mistake! And you’ll be lucky if your life isn’t ruined. And that woman won’t be pleased with the turn of events either.”
There was a long pause. Alex was probably thinking of his options. I got the impression that Alex decided to end a work arrangement he had with Fred. But Fred was not on board with that – and it sounded to me like he was in a very good position to make the other man’s life very difficult.
Finally, Alex appeared to arrive at the same conclusion. I heard his voice, sounding as if coming through clenched teeth, with definite malice in it:
“OK, you win. Looks like I can’t get out of this as long as you are around. Damn you!”
I heard a door open again, and the footsteps stomp down the hall and into the main gallery space.
Fred knocked and looked into the office a short while later, asking:
“How is it going?”
“Great! Your site is back up, I put a defense in place.”
“Oh, that’s excellent!”
“The attacker might shift the traffic pattern, though. I need to do a couple more things to protect against similar attacks.”
This was true – when the original malicious traffic stopped working, the attackers would often switch attack patterns. I did not think Linda Raven would do it – the software she (or someone working for her) was using so far was freely available and simple; and I guessed she wasn’t aware of many other cyber-attack tools. However, I decided to put the blocks in place for several of the more common attack patterns, just in case. And my engagement with Nordqvist Fine Art was for a week – our standard minimum consulting terms – and I was done with the basics in only about an hour; so I thought I could help make things more secure for them, even if they had only a small website most hackers won’t be interested in.
As I was doing that, my brain was running through the conversation I just heard. It seemed that my firm’s client was engaged in some unsavory dealings. I had heard him threaten an associate with exposure and ruin. That made me instinctively dislike him – since the conversation smacked of coercion and blackmail, and left a bad taste in my mouth. I thought that anyone drawing Fred Nordqvist's personal ire might be in trouble – and I c
ould understand why someone might decide to DoS his website, an act on some level similar to throwing rocks, over and over and over again, at the person your dislike.
I was done shortly before 3 pm. All in all, the job only took a couple of hours. The consulting report still remained, but I decided I had enough of the gallery for the day and that I’d do the paperwork Friday. For the time being, I could move on to more-interesting and pleasant matters.
As I was packing up my laptop, Fred knocked on the door again.
“Hi there!”
“Hi.”
“All done for the day?”
“Yes, pretty much. Your site is up, and there are defenses in place against the common attack patterns and the publicly-available DoS tools. I will put together the report and send it to you tomorrow.”
“Great, thank you so much! This upcoming opening is very important to us, and we want people to be able to find our website. You’ve practically saved my business!” He spread his hands to indicate the gallery around us and smiled an oily smile. “I want to show you my gratitude. How about grabbing some drinks? Or an early dinner?” He winked at me.
The conversation that I overhead still on my mind, I was not comfortable with being in close proximity to him and his nefarious transactions.
“No, thank you. I already have plans”.
“Oh, that’s a pity. Please allow me to at least walk you to your car.”
I mumbled something about it being several blocks away and up the hill, but he waved away my excuse and said he’d enjoy the walk.
In the main gallery space, a couple of paintings were already on the wall, and I glanced at them on the way out. They were landscapes, very pleasant, depicting woody or maritime, with sailboats and cliffs, scenes. There was no sign of Alex, or the woman I heard laughing, or anyone else. Fred locked the gallery door and followed me down the street.
As we walked, he asked:
“Are you interested in art?”
“Yes, but I don’t know much. I really like the paintings you have.” I said honestly. “They seem so full of light inside somehow.”
“Yes, well, I especially like finding stuff that no-one had really seen before, and giving people a good value – an investment for their money that will appreciate, and meanwhile something very pleasant to look at.” I could see his sizable chest puff up with pride as we walked. “I did a lot of research on art and art history. I put so much effort into establishing the gallery four years ago. It’s very successful now, it’s really found its niche in the Seattle art market, I'm happy to say. And my daughter, Pauline, works here too. She’s from my first marriage. She lived with her mother in Missouri and moved here after high school.”
I decided it must have been her voice that I heard in the main gallery space this afternoon.
“That's nice. Does she do anything else art-related?”
“Oh yes, she’s also in college part-time, studying art and art history.”
“So your gallery is a real family business then.”
“Yes, my current wife – she’s still my wife, although we are separated – works here too. We are starting the divorce – my third.” He nodded to himself in a self-satisfied manner, as if that were some sort of an accomplishment. I didn’t know what to say to that – replying “I’m sorry” seemed out of place with his self-important demeanor. So I kept quiet.
“I must say, it is an honor and such a pleasant surprise to meet a beautiful and intelligent woman! When you came in today to fix my website, I just knew that all of my problems would be solved!” He winked again. He was hitting on me, in spite of my gray hairs! I mumbled something incoherent again, and was thankful when we’ve arrived at my red car.
“Thank you for your help, again.” Fred extended his hand to me. “You will come to the exhibit opening tomorrow, won’t you? The event starts at 4:30. The owner of the collection will be there, and lots of my clients. There will be plenty of art talk, if you’d like to learn more about 19th-century British landscape painters, and food, and champagne!” His blue eyes looked intently at me.
I felt ambivalent. I disliked what I inferred from overhearing the conversation with Alex earlier, and being hit on by a much-older still married man had little to recommend it, in my opinion. On the other hand, technically, I would still be on his payroll tomorrow. And from what I’ve seen of the gallery, I liked the stuff on the walls. And I had been trying to go out and do stuff more often, not keep to myself so much. Also, I was still curious about what provoked a rival art gallery to attack the Nordqvist Fine Art website. Maybe I could find out more about that tomorrow.
All together, that spoke in favor of going. I decided to do the polite thing:
“I’ll try to make it. I’m sure it’s going to be fun.”
I opened the car door to get in. Fred took my left hand, bowed and kissed it. That almost made me change my mind about coming to the party the following night. I frowned at him as I drove off.
I got home to what seemed like cascading echoes of loud meows bouncing off the walls. My little black panther was hungry, and she wasn’t shy about letting me know it. I put some turkey giblets into her dish and watched as she inhaled them.
Being done with my obligations for the day so early, I decided to actually generate some plans for my evening, so that my statement to Fred wasn’t a lie. I got out my personal phone and dialed a number.
A Motor for Murder (Veronica Margreve Mysteries Book 1) Page 15
