He hung up before Frank could reply.
* * *
Richard Fetters was wracked with indecision. His grand design was in peril. Yazzie continued to surge in the polls, and Fetters hadn’t been able to come up with a shred of dirt to pin on him, or a credible plan to entrap him.
It didn’t end there. Butcher had said that White Crow knew which telephone app Fetters was using to influence the voting, but not how it worked. What if Adversego had found that out, too, and communicated it before he disappeared? And even if White Crow didn’t know all the details yet, he could hire his own hacker to figure the rest out. Should he try to head that off by reconnecting with White Crow and negotiating some sort of deal?
But what? It turned his stomach even to consider it, but perhaps he should offer Yazzie the Vice Presidency. Better to gain the White House first and figure out how to get rid of both Yazzie and Wellhead second.
And what about Adversego? Had he not only figured out how the app hack worked, but how to thwart it as well? Fetters had learned of the tragic “accident;” even seen pictures of a smashed camper with the right license plate. But anyone could Photoshop a picture. He wasn’t prepared to believe the police report until one of his people heard it straight from the coroner who signed the death certificate.
Fetters had assigned one of his staff to supervise his team of hackers. He called him now and spent the next hour interrogating him. He wanted to know every detail of the steps they were taking to ward off any attempt to outflank them on Election Day.
* * *
White Crow stood at the one-way window in his office, staring at the Casino floor but oblivious to what he saw. He had been standing there for a long time.
Butcher had been his only contact at the agency, and his pawn had vanished. He cursed himself for burning his bridges with Fetters before he had all the information he needed. His arrogance was responsible for his predicament, and now it was his pride that was keeping him there. Should he contact Fetters and try to work something out?
He turned away from the window. It was likely too late for that. He’d hired an investigator to look for this Adversego person, but time was short. Whether he’d really died in his camper or evaporated as effectively as Butcher, the result was the same. Could Fetters have been behind both disappearances? What the hell was going on?
He would need to work fast. He’d seen Butcher’s out of office message on the phone he’d taken from him. He would use Butcher’s email account to spoof his assistant and ask for all reports from Adversego. And he would need to find and hire some hackers as quickly as possible to work with whatever information he had or could get. That would be risky; he wouldn’t really know what he was doing, and he had very little time to learn. But he had no choice.
* * *
Josette, feeling rather like Liberty Leading the People in the iconic Delacroix painting, was preparing to rally a select few of the Filles de Lafayette once again to the cause of liberté, égalité and fraternité. She had made a strategic decision to be less than fully forthright with them. After all, in the primaries, the plan had been only to incentivize sensible voters to get out and vote, not to defraud them when they did.
Her call would be limited to those who were expert programmers. She would tell them that it was Wellhead who planned to steal the election, although for now that could only be a guess.
She would not tell them that someone else was already working to stop the election from being stolen, or that the information she gave them came from a laptop she had stolen from him. And she would certainly not tell them that she would use their work to turn the election herself, rather than disclosing the solution to the American authorities.
Hopefully they would believe her. But it would be fine if they did not, so long as they were content to play along as if they did. It was acceptable if they wished to preserve the ability to later claim that they were shocked to learn that she had never disclosed the solution to the authorities at all. If that was the role that destiny had assigned to her, then she would stand at the barricades alone.
* * *
45
Maine: It’s the Way Life Should Be
Frank was running along a muddy dirt road, condensed fog dripping thick as rain on his head from the weeping spruce limbs overhead. He’d been on this blasted island for two whole days now, and hadn’t seen the sun yet.
He still hadn’t set foot in the cottage. Instead, he had stayed in his familiar camper, parked at the edge of the sea, peering into thick, impenetrable mist, and foraging through his cupboards for food that appealed to him amid the goods that were someone else’s idea of a normal diet.
Marchand tried to contact him twice a day, but he ignored his calls. After all, there were dozens and dozens of secret agencies out there besides Voldemort. There must be someone else who could take it from here.
He was also more wounded that he cared to admit by Josette’s betrayal. Yes, he’d been well aware that first and foremost she cared about her cause. But still, it confirmed how totally she had seen him as no more than a convenient means to an end. The gun pointed squarely at his face had made that point rather convincingly.
At the end of his sodden run, he leaned against the camper to catch his breath. There must be something on this island to do, he thought. After his shower he’d go back to the ferry dock and see what the tiny town had to offer.
The answer, he found an hour later, was that it did not offer much. There was a motel, and across from it a paper store, outside of which a tall man wearing red suspenders was surreptitiously replacing the store’s neat sign with a crudely lettered one that read “Carla’s Cat House.”
He wondered what the hell that was all about and motored slowly up the street.
Thankfully there was a more than adequate market. His spirits rose considerably as he toured its aisles and tossed easy to prepare items into his cart. Now if the damn fog would just lift.
After the market, there were a few shops, a couple of small restaurants open only a few nights a week at this time of year, and a bar and grill that was open every night. He assumed that if he showed up in any of them during the off season he’d stick out like a blue lobster.
A half-hour later, he was parking back in front of the locked up cottage after driving down every paved road on the island.
He was still staring at the ever present fog when the phone rang. With a groan, he saw that it was George − again. On the last ring before it cut over to his message service he grabbed it.
“Okay. You win. But if you gloat I’ll hang up.”
George gave a silent prayer of relief. “I’d never gloat, Frank. But I do need your help very badly.”
Secretly, Frank felt relieved. Besides being bored, he didn’t want whoever it was that was trying to steal the election to think they had gotten the better of him. And he certainly didn’t want Josette to.
“Don’t mention it. Is there anything new I need to know?”
“Nothing from our end. The polls are showing Yazzie ahead now, which is a bit of a surprise.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, that would make you think that Yazzie’s people are behind the hack. But I don’t think so.”
“So again, why?”
“Because for a few days, we were picking up some pretty clumsy traffic coming from one of the reservations out west. Someone was visiting dark sites trying to hire some hackers for a rush project. But they didn’t look like they really knew what they were doing, or how to hide their tracks, either.”
“Interesting. Could you tell whether they hooked up with anyone?”
“Inconclusive. All we know is that they stopped looking for help. And then of course there’s Josette. What do you think her chances are of manipulating votes?”
Frank had spent a lot of time thinking ab
out that.
“Well, she has my phone; she has my laptop; and I assume you told her about the security token app. If she was in the room while you and Marla were faking the token numbers, she would have seen you type my PIN number in as well.
“All she had to do was check my email before we changed my token software, and she’d immediately find the detailed report I sent to Voldemort right before I was nabbed. That’s why she wanted my laptop, and she had plenty of time to hunt around while we were locked up in that damned room. Josette always thought that Butcher, or someone he was working for, was trying to hack the election, too. Since he disappeared around the same time, we have to assume that she was right, and that he also has my report. Last of all: if Butcher was using me to figure out what was going on, there’s still whoever it was that hacked the game app to begin with.”
George felt defeated. Three sets of hackers? “I guess it doesn’t matter, as long as there’s even one guy out there who can control the game app.”
“Not so. The more teams there are competing for the same prize, the more strategies I need to figure out and beat. If they think I’m still out here, they’ll be trying to stop me from doing that. And even if they believe I’m dead, they’ll worry about the other teams. Assuming I can come up with a good blocking mechanism, one of them may very well come up with a way to control the app that keeps my strategy from working. I might think that I’m in total control, but I’d be kidding myself. This whole thing’s like a game of Blind Man’s Bluff, except that everyone is wearing a blindfold. We’ll all be stumbling around, not really knowing where the other players are, or what they’re up to. Nobody will know whether they’re winning or losing until the election results are announced.”
“So what’s your plan to get around that?”
“Good question. I don’t have an answer for that yet.”
“There’s less than two weeks left, Frank. That’s all we’ve got. Let me know any time if there’s anything I can do to help. Anything at all.”
“Great. Call up the New York Times and tell them what’s going on. Then I can come home.”
“Other than that, Frank. Keep in touch.”
* * *
Frank was feeling both pleased and unhappy. Pleased, because he had solved half of the problem that needed to be solved. And unhappy because he had decided he needed help on the other half. For starters, he needed George to find him a really crackerjack hacker, and it had taken some explaining to get him on board.
“Yeah, I guess I can do that,” Marchand said. “But why? Don’t you think you can figure this out on your own?”
“Of course I do! The problem is that I need to know how a hacker would do it. And fast!”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve got as many as three opponents out there who are all trying to pull off the same trick! Before I can come up with a way to beat them, I need to know what it is I’ve got to beat. I want someone who can not only guess what they’ll do, but also go look for evidence to see if he’s right. That way I can spend all my time staying ahead of them.”
“Point taken.”
“Great. So how quickly can you get me a top of the line black hat?”
“I hate to sound like a broken record, but since I’m on my own here, I can’t use the usual CIA resources. But I do remember a guy I helped put in jail a few years ago. He ought to be up for his first parole hearing soon, and he could use a friend. I’ll get back to you.”
That sounded promising. In the meantime, Frank had a little programming to do at his end. He had solved the blind man’s bluff problem as soon as he realized that he’d been using the wrong game metaphor. The right one was rock, paper, scissors: the children’s game where each player threw their hand out making the sign of one of the three objects in the name: a rock – which could beat the scissors by breaking it; a scissors – which could defeat the paper by cutting it; or paper, which could best the rock by covering it. And so on. Any choice could be beaten by one of the remaining two options, so you could only win through luck, or by psyching out your opponent. There were only so many ways to manipulate the vote, and all of the hackers would be trying to guess the approaches the others planned to use, knowing that each of them would be doing the same thing.
Frank’s big revelation had been that he didn’t have to join that game. Not only was he not desperate to ensure that his candidate won a specific vote using the game app – he didn’t need to care whether the game app cast a vote at all. That gave him a trump card none of his opponents could afford to use themselves.
All he needed to know was whether or not a vote was about to be cast the way the phone owner had intended. If not, he would crash the program. Then the owner of the phone would have to vote the old fashioned way. And no one could question the integrity of a vote cast that way after the election.
That left him feeling quite comfortable. How hard could it be to freeze a single app? Microsoft had been crashing entire computers for decades.
* * *
46
The Countdown
Frank wanted to think that everything was under control, but he wasn’t feeling that way. It was only a week until Election Day, and George’s hacker, Marty, still hadn’t delivered. Every additional hour Frank had to wait was one less he could use to confirm that he was on the right track with his part of the plan.
Normally, he tried to work exclusively by email. People seemed to be wired differently than he was in subtle ways. When he interacted face to face, everything he said seemed to come across as a non sequitur, even to his own ears. Email gave him time to think and the power to keep the exchange tied to questions and answers, and facts and figures.
This time, though, he needed to see how something was being said, as well as get information interactively – and fast. Plus, he had no way of knowing whether he could trust the hacker Marchand had put in jail. Maybe misleading Frank would mean more to him than getting a good word said on his behalf to the parole board. Frank needed as much data as possible to decide whether that might be the case. So he’d asked George to set up a regular Skype call for him with the hacker. The first one hadn’t gone as planned.
That was because Frank realized at the last minute that he had no idea where his snap-on video camera had gotten to. So when the call came through, he saw a scrawny, squinting, twenty-something in a prison uniform, and Marty saw only a blank screen.
“So where are you, dude?”
“Hey, I’m really sorry. I thought I had a clip-on video camera for my laptop, but I can’t find the damn thing.”
“Ha! As if. So we’re playing some games today, huh?”
“No – really. I looked for it everywhere I could think of. I’ll try really hard to find it before our next call.”
The reedy voice in Frank’s headphones gave a snort. “Whatever. So what’s with this game app anyway? Why does anybody care about breaking into it?”
One minute into the call, and already he was on the defensive. Better to tell the truth – or half of it, anyway – rather than pretend he didn’t know.
“I’m sorry. I’d like to be able to tell you, but I can’t.”
Another snort. “Like I could give a shit anyway. All I really want is get out of this hole as soon as I can.”
That sounded more promising. “I’m sure this’ll help. I’ll certainly speak up for you if you help me out. Anyway, what approach have you taken so far?”
“The obvious one. Why not? It was easy – they must have a bunch of newbies for security architects.”
“Not that we’ll complain,” Frank said.
“Yeah. So anyway, all I had to do was log in as a new user, play a game, and send my score upstairs to the main server. It went straight through an open port. Can you believe that? When you log on to their server, it opens a port to receive your score, a
nd it just stays open for as long as you’re playing. What a bunch of A-Holes!”
Frank would have chosen a different word, but he couldn’t disagree. With an open port to work with, a hacker could come and go as often as he wanted.
“So you’ll just keep using the open port?”
“Naw, I closed it for them. I figured whatever you’re up to, you don’t want anyone else messing it up. So I changed their program to open a port whenever a registered user logs on, and close as soon as the log-in is complete. It’ll keep opening for the same user, and no one else, whenever he has a score to enter, and that’s it. Then I put in a really hard to find backdoor for us.”
“Good thinking. That takes care of things going forward. But we think one or more black hats has already hacked the app. I’m assuming they’ve installed their own back doors, so one of the things I’d like you to do is hunt for them and let me know what you find. When one of them does use their back door, I want to monitor it.”
“Cool. Cat and mouse. That works for me.”
“And I also want you to check out the near field communications controls – you know, the NFC radio.”
“What for? Does the game connect to something local?”
Frank was ready with a misleading but credible answer for that.
“No, but just about every phone out there has an NFC chip now. And a lot of apps are about to start using an NFC signal to do other things, like initiating the withdrawal process at ATMs.”
Marty’s face lit up. “Awesome! I’ve been waiting for this whole digital wallet thing to finally take hold!”
“Well, it is. And we think someone’s going to try and use this app to intercept payment app NFC signals. It’s a lot less obvious than hacking the payment app itself.”
“I get it! Just like a sniffer. Wow – I could make someone do a cash transfer to my account when they thought they were making a deposit to their own! Man, I can’t wait to get outta here!”
The Lafayette Campaign: a Tale of Deception and Elections (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 2) Page 33
