The Lafayette Campaign: a Tale of Deception and Elections (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 2)

by Updegrove, Andrew

  “Well, I guess your people must have made some, didn’t they?”

  “No, Mr. Butcher, we didn’t. When an Indian came to town, it was great fun to get him drunk − watch him stagger, maybe even fall down. And it was very profitable to take all he owned in exchange for alcohol, once he became an alcoholic. You see, Mr. Butcher, Indians had never come in contact with alcohol before, and they become addicted to it far more easily than your people do. When you have no job, no money, no horse, no pride and no future, it is very tempting to drink.”

  White Crow stood up and walked to the wall of glass facing the casino floor. His arms folded and his back to Butcher, he said quietly, “Did I ever tell you that my father died an alcoholic, Mr. Butcher?”

  Butcher said nothing, and the casino manager turned around. “No? He was 43, and I was just 14. The booze got my uncle Peter, too. Also my cousin Yiskah. He was only 33.

  “Perhaps you have noticed that we do not sell alcohol anywhere on the reservation except here at the casino. But your people do, Mr. Butcher, just yards over the border between our land and yours. There isn’t an Anglo town within 25 miles, but there is a liquor store right there by the side of the road. It is open 18 hours a day. Surely you have noticed it. No? Will you have another drink, Mr. Butcher?”

  Butcher put his glass down carefully, wondering how he was going to salvage the situation. He tried to think clearly, and then spoke slowly.

  “I’m sorry. It’s obvious I’ve really touched a nerve here. But you’ve done well for yourself, and I thought you had left all that stuff behind you.”

  When he heard the words “all that stuff” leave his lips, he realized he’d stepped in it again. He continued more quickly, “But anyway, I know that the things white people have done to your people were shameful and terrible, and I guess I never knew that things were still so bad; I grew up back east, you know. I don’t know what I can do, but if it helps to say I’m sorry, well, I really and truly am sorry.”

  He paused, and then continued. “Anyway, I’m glad that I helped you make a lot of money, so let’s just clear out my account now, and I’ll let you get back to running your business.”

  Butcher stopped and tried to look confident.

  White Crow gave a wide smile this time. “Ah yes! Your account! Unfortunately, I’m afraid that we are not quite even yet. There were expenses, you see. Middle men – many, many Lakota middle men – brothers, cousins, nephews, second cousins – so many good people on this reservation and others placing small bets so that they would not stand out. Each must have their fair share, don’t you agree?”

  Butcher’s face flushed. He wasn’t used to being jerked around, and he wasn’t going to take it from some tin pot casino manager, even if he was in hock to him.

  “Don’t try and pull that crap on me, Ohanzee! I know damn well you must have made a pile on this scam. We had a deal, and I’m not going to stand for you reneging on it. How stupid do you think I am?”

  “How stupid, my friend? You mean, when I saw you drinking too much and losing in my casino over and over again − did I think you were as stupid as some drunken Indian?”

  White Crow was speaking swiftly now, leaning forward until he was only inches from Butcher’s face. “Stupid enough to sign a treaty with the white man, and then another treaty when the white man reneges on the first one, and then yet another one, each time leaving him with less and less land, until the stupid Indian has nothing left but a God-forsaken desert? Do you think the Indian was that stupid? Or did it ever occur to you that he had no choice?”

  Butcher’s mind was reeling, losing ground to the effects of the alcohol, the hour and White Crow’s unexpected attack. It was a struggle to maintain his self-control. “I’ve said I’m sorry about that, but that’s history. I had nothing to do with it. I’ve kept my word, now you keep yours!”

  “Very well, then,” White Crow said. “We’ll do this the White Man’s way.”

  He walked over to his desk and rapped twice. Immediately, a door in the rear of the room opened, and two burly men walked in. Butcher recognized two of the Native American bouncers that normally roamed the floor of the casino.

  “Let me give you one final history lesson, Mr. Butcher. What I have learned as a Native American is that the only man who must keep his word is the one who has another man’s foot on his throat. At the moment, Mr. Butcher, my foot is on yours.”

  White Crow was wearing his thin smile again. “Hopefully you have enjoyed our hospitality when you have stayed with us. I especially hope that you have found the up-to-date Internet and telephone services we provide to your liking. As the manager of this establishment, I personally monitor their performance. Quite closely, in fact, for special guests like yourself.

  “Once again, it seems, you have not been very careful. I, on the other hand, have been quite diligent and thorough. For example, I know who you report to. And I also know how to reach him.”

  Butcher jerked backward, as if he had been slapped.

  “So listen to me carefully. I will let you know when I am willing to raise my foot. Until then, you will do as I say. Now get out of my casino and await instructions.”

  Butcher started to speak, but the two bouncers were walking towards him. Instead, he backed up slowly towards the door that led to the bar, and was grateful when he reached it. As he was opening the door to complete his retreat, White Crow spoke one last time.

  “A final word of advice, my friend. Don’t make any travel plans until after November. You can expect to have a very busy election season.”

  * * *

  10

  The Doctor will Diagnose you Now

  Frank was puffing his way up the dirt road leading away from the canyon rim, focusing on his breathing. He’d managed to lose four pounds in the first week of his new regime, and another five pounds since then. He’d also progressed from walking fast to alternating walking with bursts of labored jogging. His new, more realistic goal was to reach the point where his jogging interludes were longer than his walking ones.

  To his dismay, he’d been less successful on the technical front. Despite the revelation that whatever had been interfering with data on his server hadn’t affected the same information on his laptop, he was still struggling to figure out why. Worse, when he tried the same exercise a second time, the data on his laptop did flip.

  But what had changed? Had he done something different the first time without realizing it, or was there a vital clue he was missing?

  Eventually, the answer came to him, or the first half of it, anyway: because his server had been restarting while he tried the test on his laptop the first time, the programs were disconnected from the Internet.

  In the parlance of the trade, his laptop and software were temporarily “air gapped,” and therefore immune from external tampering. That could explain why the data flipped when he ran the report the second time – by then, his server, his Wi-Fi and his Internet connection were all back in action, allowing whatever mischief the hackers had put into motion to travel from the host copy of the polling software to his laptop. Or perhaps the mischief had somehow been triggered via the Internet from afar.

  But if that was true, he should be able to detect evidence that changes had been made to the program copy on his laptop between the first and the second test.

  But no. He’d tried the same experiment on a brand new laptop he had with him, loading the polling software from an installation disk and running it thoroughly through its paces with poll after poll, all the while with his Wi-Fi card turned off. Sure enough, Davenport kicked Johnson’s butt every time. But with the Wi-Fi back on, Davenport always went down to defeat. And yet Frank still could not detect the slightest change in his laptop software.

  He mused on that quandary for several cycles of walking and jogging. How would he change something without changing it
? He made himself break into a trot again. That wasn’t quite the right question, was it? He should have asked how he would change something without the change being detectable.

  That might be the right question, but it didn’t seem to have an answer. Gasping for breath, he slowed once again to a walk.

  He was still puzzling over that quandary as he showered and changed. And also while he stared across the canyon, eating the banana and cup of dismally uninspiring bran flakes that had become his daily breakfast.

  What was left? Hadn’t he already considered every conceivable possibility?

  Maybe writing down all of the possible answers on a piece of paper for a change would help. He went into the camper for a notepad, and then started writing the possibilities down:

  1. I just missed something.

  2. Whatever is happening is happening somewhere else on the system.

  He stared at the pad and couldn’t think of another alternative – a dead end already. Then an old saying occurred to him: after you’ve eliminated all of the possible answers, all that’s left are the impossible ones. At a loss for something more promising, he wrote:

  3. It’s quantum mechanics in action – it wasn’t Johnson or Davenport that “won,” it was Schrödinger’s cat. Until I ran the report, neither and both had won.

  Cute, but probably not too helpful. He didn’t know enough about quantum mechanics to go anywhere with it anyway. So number three was out. He’d already done as much as he could on number 1, so if that statement was accurate, he didn’t know what to do next. That left the possibility that he just hadn’t been looking in the right place. But where else was there to look?

  He began pacing.

  Where to begin? Well, for starters he knew that the Marvinites had checked their own system and the pollsters’, too, and had been unable to detect any changes. But maybe they had been looking in the wrong places as well, or the changes had been so subtle that they hadn’t been able to detect them.

  Maybe an analogy might help him see something. We already talk about viruses, and the analogy between biological and computer system infections really is very close. So maybe if he took the medical analogy further, that might lead somewhere. He liked that, and began walking faster.

  If he thought of this as a disease, how would he go about diagnosing it? He’d look for symptoms. And he’d run a lot of tests.

  He sat down in his chair again and picked up his pad of paper. So what were the symptoms?

  All he could think of was the fact that the polling data was flipping. Was he still missing something? How about tests? Were there any he hadn’t thought of yet?

  No. He couldn’t think of any. He’d run the server logs, and looked for anyone who had come and gone. He’d scanned everything there was to scan with every scanning tool he had. He’d run the object code of the polling software through an analyzer before and after the scans and the code looked the same. He’d even run tests that it made no sense to run at all. And finally, he was willing to swear on a stack of bibles that there wasn’t a back door anywhere in his system.

  So if he had already checked the pulse, temperature and blood pressure of the system and found everything normal, didn’t that mean the patient must be well?

  Well, no. After all, a thermometer could only tell you about a patient’s temperature, right? And a wristwatch, her pulse, and a pressure cuff, just her blood pressure! None of them would be any use at all in detecting a heart murmur, would it?

  Maybe there was a test he hadn’t thought to run because he wasn’t thinking about the right disease − the equivalent, for purposes of his medical analogy, of an electrocardiogram to spot a heart condition.

  The sun was beginning to set by the time he gave up on that line of attack. It had seemed promising, but he still couldn’t think of any data or test he’d missed.

  Could it be that the answer was staring him in the face and he just couldn’t see it?

  He tried to clear his mind and give it one last shot. Maybe he had tried all the right tests – even the equivalent of the electrocardiogram. And maybe he hadn’t missed anything. After all, there was a way that even an electrocardiogram might not tell you anything, and that was if you were trying to catch an intermittent symptom, and you hadn’t run the test at the right time. You wouldn’t know the patient had a problem unless you ran the test at the precise moment it was happening, right? That’s why they had patients wear a heart monitor for a whole day of ordinary activity – to be sure they captured just the right few moments of abnormal activity.

  That sounded good, because so far he’d always run his tests before and after the data corruption had occurred, and not while he was inputting the data and running the reports. What an idiot! Now he’d have to start all over again.

  It was getting dark, and he was getting hungry. But he was impatient. What could he check quickly?

  The only thing that wouldn’t require running tests all over again would be to check the server’s access log for the time period when he was running one of his clean laptop tests – the ones that encountered no problems while he was offline, but then produced altered data ever after, whether or not he was online.

  He called the log up and scrolled through until he found the right time period.

  It was slow and tedious work parsing through the endless lines of data. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. The only traffic recorded on the laptop’s modem was between the server and laptop copies of the polling software.

  And then he looked again. That wasn’t exactly right, was it? There was another line that repeated endlessly through the log, identically, every few seconds, so endlessly and reliably that he had ignored it entirely. Almost, you might say, like a heartbeat.

  Excited, he ran his finger down the margin of page after page of the report, looking for one of the repeating lines that looked just a little bit different than the others.

  And then he saw it − a single line that was just a few bytes longer than all the rest – and then one more slightly longer one, just a hundred lines or so further down. A slow smile of satisfaction – and admiration – spread across his face.

  * * *

  11

  Time Out!

  “That’s right, Vickie. Simple as that. So can you guys take it from here?”

  “Sure thing, Frank. No problem, and great work!”

  In fact, it hadn’t been great work that had finally allowed him to crack the mystery of the flipping poll numbers. Just the kind of attention to detail he should have brought to bear from the start. Once he’d spotted the few extra bytes of code he knew he’d found the exploited chink in the system’s armor. After that, it had been relatively easy to work out how the rest of the hack had been carried out.

  Settling back in his chair, he stared out across the magnificent gulf of the Grand Canyon, and smiled wryly. Only the mega-patterns of mesa and river, shadow and light jumped out of the vast canvas spread out before him. It was difficult to appreciate, or even to truly see, the infinite variety of distant details that together comprised the overwhelming vista. Not quite a perfect metaphor for what had made the puzzle so difficult to solve, but it would do.

  He should have felt relaxed, luxuriating in the early autumn sun, but he wasn’t. He felt good about cracking the problem he had been tasked to solve, yes, but now what? Suddenly he was at loose ends again, with nothing to fill his time except the discredited goal of writing a book. What was he going to do about that?

  As he stared out over the canyon, though, he kept returning to the mystery of who had pulled off the polling hack. He wasn’t particularly curious about the intruder’s motivation, and anyway, that was Marvin’s responsibility to figure out. What he really wanted to know was who had crafted such a simple and minimalist strategy for achieving whatever those ends might be. It was as close to a perfect crime, in t
he information technology sense, as Frank ever expected to see.

  What had made the hack so masterful was that the transformation of the data seemed to occur as if by magic, leaving not a clue – almost − to indicate how it had been performed. Most elegantly, the hacker had taken advantage of a port – that is, a point of entry to and from the wild world of the Internet − that every computer in existence obligingly opened over and over again every hour of every day.

  The purpose of that particular gate in any firewall was to allow the computer’s internal clock to sync up with one of the super-accurate Internet time servers that existed solely for that purpose. Absent the resulting nanosecond corrections that a system made, its own clock would gradually get farther and farther out of phase with the true time, resulting in all sorts of problems as the discrepancy widened.

  The constant time checks also fulfilled another purpose: each time a computer connected to a remote time server, it also recorded the exact time in the stream of its own activities. These time stamps could later be used to determine what had occurred when, such as a hacking incident. The irony of using that same port and mechanism to mount an attack that had defied so much forensic analysis added to Frank’s appreciation of the hacker’s style.

  But other aspects of the hack had earned Frank’s respect as well. Since all computers used the same network protocol to manage the time check/time stamp process, the hacker had been able to use just one subtle trick to corrupt the results of every pollster, regardless of the particular system they owned. Better still, the time check operation was built into the most basic functions of the computer’s operating system, and not the polling software at all – in other words, somewhere an investigator would never think to look.