by Steve Jordan
“Oh… that’s good to know,” I said sarcastically. “What’s next… do I have to talk to plants?”
“Naw, Fern’s too busy,” the guy came back without a beat, and stuck out his hand. “I’m Phil. Nice to meet you, Mike.”
“Likewise,” I replied, throwing a casual look around the place. “Nice digs. I now understand the second half of the name over the door… is there a significance to the first half?”
“Oh, yeah,” Lou replied. “That was my nickname when I used to work at a certain fairly-famous bar.”
To my credit, it didn’t take me long to put those pieces together. I’d seen the movie and everything. “You used to work at Coyote Ugly?”
“Yup,” she replied proudly. “I wore my hair wild then, real scruffy,” she added, running her hand over her now-smooth-and-silky shoulder-length hair, “with goth makeup, and after a bit, they started calling me Coyote Chow. It was funky… but it put me through college. And it’s got a certain recognition quality about it.”
“I’m hip,” I smiled. “So… what can I do for you?”
“I have a problem,” Lou said. “Some of our software designs are turning up in the hands of one of my competitors. It’s got to stop.”
“Any idea how it’s happening?” I asked.
“Of course I don’t,” Lou replied calmly. “If I did, someone would already have their knees broken, and I wouldn’t be talking to you.”
“Got it,” I nodded, filing that little tidbit away for future reference. You never knew when knowing a knee-breaker could come in handy, even if it was just for knowing who to avoid getting into an argument with. “I take it you think you can trust Phil?”
Lou and Phil exchanged glances, and I immediately knew the two of them were lovers. Which didn’t necessarily answer the question, but it told me what Lou was going to say next.
“Hell, no,” Lou said. “But I know where he buried the bodies, so he’s on my side.”
So, okay, I was wrong. The surprises I’d already had today should’ve been enough of a warning not to assume I knew everything.
“All right, then,” I said, trying to maintain the last vestiges of my confidence, “let’s go somewhere private and talk. Is there a Starbucks around here?”
Ten minutes and a grande double-shot skim milk espresso with room later, we were all sitting in the corner of the local Starbucks, and I was trying not to listen to the Joanie Mitchell CD playing over the PA. Not that I have a problem with Joanie Mitchell, per se, but I was really getting my fill of old music today, and at that point I would have paid good money to hear just one song by the Black-Eyed Peas.
First, I needed to know more about what Coyote Chow did. Through our conversation so far, I had already discovered that they were all recent grads that went into business together, with Lou in the lead thanks to her bar-earned bankroll. Name the three biggest Pacific tech schools, and more than one of their alums was in there somewhere. It also explained why the place looked like a 90210 set, beef-and cheesecake included.
The company was essentially in the business of designing software “containers” for other software. It was sort of like a Zip file, only not necessarily zipped… really, it was more like a vault that would hold the software until it was unlocked by a passcode. This would prevent just anybody accessing the software, a concern for software companies that were afraid of their product being copied and shared across the World Wide Web, spreading thousands or more copies of the software while they made profit off of only a few copies. It was a concern I could understand, of course, though the jury was still out as to how serious a problem it really was… yet. But most people in the software industry, especially those who had grown up sharing copies of early Microsoft and Adobe software, were positive that not only was the potential lost profit humungous, but in the future it would be gargantuan, and a means to control it had to be in place.
Most present methods involved web connections that would establish the identity of the software, and the ID of the computer running it, store that in a database, and allow the software to run as long as those values didn’t change. But not everyone had continuous web access, and very few people liked the idea of databases storing computer IDs (and who knew what else) out of their control. So other forms of verification were always being researched, and in this case, Coyote Chow was working on biometric solutions to the problem.
“So,” I asked for the sake of confirmation, “you’re working with fingerprint recognition software right now, and encrypting the fingerprint into a passcode that’s tough to spoof or copy?”
“To be accurate,” Lou replied confidently, “harder to break than would be practical in the overriding majority of cases.” She was hitting the nail squarely on the head. Security never has to be perfect, or even impossible to break: As long as most people using security figure it’s easier to just pay for it than to break it, it’s effective security. It was good to hear someone speaking of security who wasn’t thinking in impossible absolutes… that was the sign of pure idiocy, as it never worked out as intended, and in fact usually did more harm than good in false promises, customer dissatisfaction and damaged reputations.
“So,” I continued, “exactly who do you think is getting exactly what?”
“A company called Encrypt Keeper,” Phil replied, pausing from taking a sip from his latte to say it.
“Encrypt Keeper,” I repeated. “I guess the stylish name trend hasn’t been lost on you guys.”
“Well-said, M.D. Schitz,” Gail commented wryly. This got the expected reactions from Lou and Phil, to which I shrugged and turned my personalized Starbucks cup to face them. There, emblazoned in bright letters running from bottom to top, was my moniker for everyone to see.
“Moving on,” I urged.
“Encrypt Keeper,” Lou moved on, “recently presented to one of its clients an encryption application that clearly includes part of a design we came up with here. We found out through a mutual friend at that firm. This had happened once, two years ago, but we just assumed it was one of those coincidences. But since then, we’d gone in a completely new direction, so there’s no way there’d be two such coincidences.”
“We’re in the middle of a big proof-of-concept project,” Phil added. “It involves combining all of our joint components into one system. We’ve got some big software hitters waiting for it. If we get pooned by Encrypt Keeper, we’ll lose the contracts, and it’ll be the end of us.”
“What do you think?” Lou asked.
“Well,” I said, “You’ve either being hacked… or you’ve got an internal leak. Unfortunately, if you continue on at standard operating procedure, it could take time figuring out which, and nailing them. I think what we need is a Trojan Horse.”
Gail looked at me. “You mean, like the virus?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. The Trojan virus was one of a few that were well-enough known to the layman… today, you could barely use the term “Trojan Horse” without someone thinking of the virus. So Gail’s reaction was understandable. “I’m thinking of the original reference, actually: Leaving something on your system that someone else can’t resist getting at.” I looked at Lou and Phil. “Did either of you tell anyone why Gail and I were coming by today?”
Lou and Phil exchanged glances, and Lou said, “No.”
“I assume they know Gail is a—”
I started to say “CPA,” but Gail cut me off when she said, “An old friend.” I looked at Gail, she looked back at me, and I had to mightily resist the urge to roll my eyes and sigh loudly enough for the baristas to hear me across the room. More secrets. For a sleepy vacation-type town, San Diego was proving to be as chock full of secrets as a gynecologist’s office in Washington. Or so I’ve been told. Overheard at a bar, really, but that’s beside the point.
“Okay,” I said finally. “Tell anyone who asks that I’m Gail’s new boyfriend, and was just along for the ride today. But expect me to come by, unannounced and unexpected, in, oh…
two days. I’ll need some time to prepare my Trojan Horse.”
Lou and Phil nodded. “And then?” Lou asked.
“And then,” I replied, “I’ll show up to sell it to you.”
4: Personal is personal
“So, do you know what kind of Trojan Horse you’re going to sell them?”
I thought Gail’s choice of time and place to ask me that question was… questionable. Specifically, we were sitting at either end of her shower floor, which is where we’d ended up when our sex was done and we couldn’t move any more. Hell, my left leg hadn’t stopped twitching yet. We had come here straight from Coyote Chow, and some of our clothes were off before we got out of the car. I swear, I will never understand how Pete could have let this sex monster go. And after the escapades that had finally deposited us here, wet, tired, twitching, and still naked, pretty much the last thing on my mind was anything even remotely connected to IT.
So, I said, “No.”
“When will you know?”
“Probably at some time in the future when we are dressed,” I said truthfully. “Why? Is there a hurry?”
“I just wouldn’t want to see anything happen to Lou’s company,” Gail said.
There was something in her tone that suggested something significant, though I had already managed to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was no great reader of faces. Still, I went out on a limb and asked, “What was the deal with not letting me say you were a CPA? Is it supposed to be a secret or something?”
Gail tilted her head and rolled her eyes over my head, the way people do when they’re trying to figure out how to tell you something without just coming out and saying it. “I just keep my business and personal lives separate. Most of my friends don’t know what I do or who I work for, and my business associates… don’t have access to my social circles.” I started to ask why, but in another one of those leaky-thoughts moments I seem to have, Gail cut me off by saying, “I like it that way.”
Well, about all I got out of that was that Gail’s relationship with Lou was personal and not business. No, I got something else out of it: That Gail didn’t want to go into it any further. So I shrugged it off, and after a moment, collected enough stray energy to pull myself to my feet, favoring my left leg, grab a towel, and start to dry off. “I’ll have something good figured out by tomorrow morning,” I said over my shoulder.
By the time Gail finally managed to get up, get dressed, and found me, I was messing with her smoothie maker. I had already stuffed four apples, two bananas, a bunch of grapes and a mango down the chute, and was trying to decide whether or not I could stand anything else in there, when Gail saw the oddly-colored mix in the pitcher. “You’d better quit while you’re ahead, Emeril,” she said calmly.
I switched the thing off, and removed the pitcher, trying to remember where she kept the juice glasses. I picked a cabinet and saw tall glasses instead, but they worked, so I grabbed two and poured even amounts of the mix into them. I handed one to Gail, who sipped at it, and regarded me over the edge of the glass. I didn’t really have anything to say at that moment, and as we were both dressed (more to the point, Gail was no longer naked), my mind was already straying to the matter of concocting a Trojan Horse for Coyote Chow. So, Gail lowered her glass, and said, “I guess I should get you back to your gear.”
I drained my glass, and nodded. “Yeah. Lotta work to do.”
We got all the way down to the car, out the driveway, all the way out of the hills and onto the highway before Gail spoke again. “You know, if you don’t want to help out my friends, you can just say so.”
“Who said I didn’t want to help them?” I said, trying not to sound testy.
“Don’t be testy,” Gail said. “I’m just sayin’.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t have a problem with your friends. I’m just trying to figure out this whole thing about keeping business and personal stuff separate. You’re the one who seems to be testy about that.”
“I’m not testy,” Gail replied. “I have my reasons.” After a moment, she risked a glance at me, and saw me staring significantly at her. She knew she wasn’t getting off that easy. “Look, I did some things. In my youth. If they got out into my professional circles, I’d lose my job. It’s that simple.”
I doubted it. But I decided to let it go. “Hit Starbucks on the way home, willya?”
It was getting dark by the time we got back to Pete’s apartment. Gail stopped at the door and said, “I’ve got a lot of work to do tonight for tomorrow. I’ll call if I can get away for the evening.” As she spoke, she was her usual sexy, confident, exuberant self. But then, for an instant, I caught a different look in her eye, something not sexy, confident or exuberant, but something I couldn’t put a finger on either… and before I could spare another second to think about it, she reached forward and kissed me, one of those kisses of hers that has the uncanny ability to push whatever else you were thinking right into another space-time continuum. Then she pulled back, taking one last suck of my lower lip, and said, “See you later, lover,” as she backed out of the doorway. Another step, and she turned and strode away, making sure I got a good show of her junk as she walked down the hallway.
“Trust me, bro,” I heard from behind me, “you do not want to let that junk get away.”
I turned around. Pete stood just a few feet away, positioned in the foyer so that he could also watch his ex’s sexy caboose bustle down the hallway. He smiled at me, but I just found myself staring at him. I still couldn’t fathom how my brother, with young-Bruce-Campbell looks and a healthy libido, could have let that junk get away. It just made no sense to me. I thought about the present situation, and a thought occurred to me. “Was it another guy? Is that it? Did she betray you?”
Pete just shook his head, and gave a wistful smile that I interpreted as “I wish it were that simple,” or maybe, “Don’t you wish it were that simple?” Or maybe, “Would I tell you if it were that simple?” Or maybe, “It’s complicated, but telling you would be too simple…” As I said, my face-reading abilities were really letting me down lately.
At any rate, he said, “No, she didn’t betray me.”
“Well, I know you didn’t sleep around on her.”
“ Oh, no,” Pete replied, with a look that I interpreted as, “I’d never do that when I had her,” or maybe—but we’ll skip that line this time.
“Then what was it?”
“Look, bro, I just screwed up, is all,” Pete said, turning and walking into the kitchen. “I got stupid and lazy, and she got sick of me. It was my fault. Just stupid.” He opened the door to the fridge, and pulled out a beer, holding one out to me. I took it. “So, what’s she got you working on?”
“An electronics company south of town,” I said, twisting off the bottle cap. “They’re having problems with someone stealing their secrets. I’m gonna have a go at faking out the hackers, or insiders, whichever it is, with a Trojan Horse.”
“You’re gonna give ‘em a virus?”
“No,” I replied, remembering the conversation at the office. “More like the original Trojan Horse. The bad guys won’t be able to resist it, and when they try to access it, it’ll give them away.”
“Sounds pretty much like the virus to me.”
“Well… it is,” I replied. “Hence, the name. But in this case, it won’t be set to automatically melt down their computer… it’ll be designed to gather and send evidence that will convict them in a court of law. Benign, but effective.”
“Oh. Okay,” Pete said, and pulled from the beer. “How you gonna do it?”
“I hope I’ll know that by morning,” I told him. “Right now, I just want to hang out a bit. Anything on TV?”
“I was just about to put on Royal Pains. You should see the Indian chick they’ve got on that show… gawd, she smokes!”
“ Royal Pains?” I repeated. “Never heard of it.”
5: Preparing the Trojan
Once I had my Trojan Hor
se idea, right on time first thing in the morning, I had to actually create it. Writing code had a lot in common with what they say about invention… you know, ten percent inspiration, ninety percent perspiration. Only with code, you could amend that to ten percent inspiration, forty percent perspiration, and fifty percent searching the web for bits of code you could use yourself. You actually did that before the perspiration part, because the perspiration came from putting all those bits of code together, which meant your forty percent perspiration was more like forty percent debugging.
This took me most of the day. Pete got up, and promptly went off to hang at the beach. Gail called me in the morning, but she said she had meetings all day, so we couldn’t have spent any time together during the day at any rate. It was just as well, because I needed to concentrate, and that was hard to do when she was pushing herself at me (she was a good pusher… and she had great junk).
When Pete came back, it was after seven, and the first thing he did was to mention a great Chinese delivery place he knew. So we ordered out. I was putting the finishing touches on my Trojan at about nine, so I called Gail.
“Hi, lover.”
“You sound out of breath—”
“Exercising,” she said. “How’s it going?”
“We’re good to go,” I told her. “Do you want to tell Lou I’ll see her in the morning? And remember, tell her she’s supposed to be surprised to see me.”
“I’ll tell her,” Gail said. “I’m losing my rhythm… can I talk to you tomorrow, after your visit?”
“No problem,” I said. “Talk to you later.”
When I hung up, Pete said, “Did you say Lou? Guy or Girl?”
“Girl,” I replied, giving him that “You know her?” look.
“Lou Chow,” he said, and nodded. “Sure, I’ve met her. She’s a cool chick.”
“You know a lot of Gail’s friends, I guess,” I commented. “You know her squeeze, Phil, too?”
“Yeah, I know him.” He drained his beer and left-handed it over his shoulder, without looking. It dropped into the trashcan, all net. “Straight-up guy. Want another?”
