by Martha Carr
The other servers’ locations were known to a horizontal group of cells, high enough in the Circle’s hierarchy so that if something happened to one cell, one network of agents, another could laterally move over and keep the server operational.
Only Maurel’s would fall silent if something were to happen to her.
Each of the servers had a secure communications link set up to allow only authenticated users to log on to the system and each location’s link was unique to that location.
A firewall had been set up around each network that didn’t allow any traffic to come into the network from outside the users but it was all still connected to the internet. A user, or agent in the field who was pouring in the information they’d gathered, entered by a port in the firewall that had to be opened up with a series of encoded steps to allow communications to flow.
It was called port knocking and involved the user knowing first how to locate the online ports, or doors in the cloud system set up by the regional server. The user would then initiate a connection with a closed port through a set of sequences that would open the right ports for the information they were going to import, or export.
But the first set of sequences would still not give the person access to any information stored on the valuable server. The agent would have to have a current encryption key to then access the contents on the system.
There were two distinct steps. First, knowing how to tell the port to open up, and second to be able to validate with an encryption key and password that changed every week before an agent could log into the cloud. The encryption key or certificate was a digital signature algorithm set up with multiple layers as well. The first layer had an encrypted signature that would allow an entire group to get closer to the information. The second layer had a constantly changing random signature quotient that was unique to each user and allowed the agent to only access a very narrowly defined area. The last step, a pass phrase would determine if they could enter information or take any away with them.
Someone using the system correctly would only be able to access his content. Even then, they would still not know where the ultimate servers existed in the world.
Separate servers had been set up in even more locations where agents could port knock into the data with links to an intermediate set of servers that eventually connected to the six main locations.
The system made it possible for anyone, anywhere in the world with access to a smart device and wifi to gain access to the portal that they needed.
Maurel was one of six agents who hovered over a segment of the system and made sure nothing peculiar suddenly appeared or disappeared.
She had been with the Circle for so long that it had become her entire life. No real family to speak of anymore outside of the contacts who came and went.
She was in her sixties and too old to be running through the woods or anywhere else in pursuit of someone or even worse, from someone.
The last assignment had been easier. She lived on the campus of an orphanage posing as a Mother Superior. Before that she had been in Richmond posing as a psychic, Madame Bella. No one ever paid close attention to psychics who set up shop. They didn’t want to be seen as taking any of it seriously. That assignment had lasted a few years and had put her directly in Wallis Jones’ path. It had also cost her a couple of fingers when Maurel had to save her own life but she had managed to hand out a few wounds herself.
Playing a Mother Superior turned out to be another of her favorite roles. The people who sat around her were always talking about what they might have been or hoped to become and it always involved something with a little more flash.
Maurel wanted to be a little more average. Not the average details of finding a husband or a little house but just the consistent backstories of childhood and the tiring struggles that everyone else had to tell. All of hers were written for her by copywriters within the Circle and they had changed too many times for her to try and remember. That would have been too dangerous, even in her daydreams. For better or worse, in this day and time she was Maurel Samonte and worked at Westin Fullerton, an enormous insurance management company, as a data information manager. Any other thoughts were devoted to her role in the war.
For a little while though she had tasted some kind of normalcy but it was just by chance. The assignment as a Mother Superior had placed her in the center of Circle operations and given her the best chance at being herself that she had known since first joining the cause so many years ago.
Her role was to appear as a spiritual leader and watch over the children who were part of the Butterfly Project at the Circle’s scattered orphanages across the country. They were the Circle’s next generation. Occasionally she had even let herself believe that she could retire right there in that role and live happily ever after.
Then the war broke out and as soon as the first casualties were reported something inside of her knew that nothing was going to stay the same. She had made a mistake to ever let herself think that retirement was going to be something she could design or even have as her own.
It was after all just one more assignment and when the new orders came, Maurel dropped her old name and started studying her new background.
Her current assignment gave her another title as the manager of the Kroton system for Westin Fullerton with corporate campuses all over the world. They were listed as a Fortune Sixteen company, with several foreign subsidiaries and were one of the largest pharmacy insurance companies in the world.
It was an almost perfect cover for data mining. Almost everyone who carried around an insurance card had their prescriptions processed by Westin, whether they knew it or not. Medical insurers, third party administrators, corporations that were self-insured and even the new health care exchanges set up in the United States created for the millions of uninsured, all needed someone to manage the prescription claims.
Westin Fullerton took it one step further.
Strategically located across the world were large, non-descript, warehouse-sized buildings that did nothing but process bulk orders for medications for chronic conditions. Everyone with a chronic condition that had to take medications on an on-going basis eventually ended up doing business with Westin.
Weaving over the heads of everyone who worked on the noisy floor of the mail order warehouse was a large, serpentine track that carried plastic green tubs, two feet by two feet squared, across squeaky little rollers. Each tub represented one person’s prescription order. Most with a healthy profit margin.
A relationship was forged between the company and the customer that would last for years and was more important to most people than any other. Management had quickly learned that people would consider forgoing vacations or even mortgage payments before they’d give up on their medications.
The business was a cash cow with a partnership that only death could break.
A greyish-white, padded anonymous-looking bag full of drugs would show up in someone’s mailbox in exchange for all the pertinent information about their health, their employment, their family and where they lived. All details that even helped Management to know who was most vulnerable to offers from a feeder school.
The company was better at gathering information than Google or Facebook, combined and were under dense regulations never to share any of it with anyone. That made planning the development of the war even easier.
Management could build demographic profiles to use as a basis for decisions about what areas of North America were worth taking by force and what areas could be absorbed more easily through gaining a family’s trust. The upper cells had come to see there was no better way to do that than through the open door of someone’s health and well-being. Westin Fullerton was one of their better creations and was helping them to infiltrate everyone’s daily life.
The Circle was aware of what they saw as a problem and had come up with a simple solution. Piggyback on what Management was doing and steal the same information, including who was in the ranks
of Management that they’d never been able to identify before now.
The company was infiltrated and run by strictly Management people right up to the senior levels. Management had seen the value of not only having access to the general population’s information but the staying profitability of health care. It was one of the few things that would still be viable, even in a bad economy or a war.
There were a few known Circle operatives in the ranks but they were kept in low-level positions where they had no access to anything important. One of them was the man who delivered the mail every day, pushing around a cart.
Maurel was seen as neutral by Management and her background constructed so carefully that no one was able to detect how recently she came to exist in this identity.
There was a detailed background check before she was hired but all of her references were put in place for just such an occasion. Circle families whose direction was to live quiet lives within the middle class and never appear as if they took sides with anyone. Then when they were called upon, they could give a plausible reference and vouch for someone with just enough detail that didn’t draw suspicion.
That way a high-ranking mole could dig their way into the center of a Management operation and create a hidden server.
Each of the Circle’s six main servers were classified information so that hackers wouldn’t know to even look for them. That’s why the last one, the sixth one was known to even fewer people. The information that was mined on a daily basis was part of the bigger scheme to finally bring down Management or at least cripple them for generations to come.
The Keeper had devised the plan and would give the order to start the last phase when they had enough information on key Management people who were customers of Westin and in particular received a padded white envelope in their mailbox every month.
Even Maurel didn’t know exactly what the last phase of the plan was exactly. It had been described to her as the failsafe and her part would come at the end of it, if it was ever necessary.
Further protocol had been put into place to fool Management in case they started to catch wind of any of the servers. There were other databases being run on the outside of the system that the Circle put a lot of energy into hiding, with just enough sensitive information to give the operation a sense of authenticity without risking any real harm if it was detected. Even the Circle people running that system were unaware they were acting as a front. They were defending misinformation with their lives but it was just as necessary in order to protect not only the soldiers in the field whose information was being kept through a backdoor in Management’s own system, but the volumes of information that the Circle was able to steal from Westin Fullerton’s records. The false operation was vital.
If it ever became necessary, Management would have something to keep themselves busy while never suspecting that the real prize was an older woman who sat in on of their cubicles and had lunch with them in the corporate cafeteria almost every day. Maurel usually settled for the salad bar except on Southwest Tuesdays when she would head down in the elevator early to get some of the popular chili. That always ran out early.
She found that it was always best to enjoy as many pieces of the role as possible and have some kind of life. She had learned that a long time ago. It was necessary to accept everything as normal, otherwise the imaginary questions of what might have been would creep up in her mind and might show on her face.
“Okay, I’m going to take over your screen for a moment,” said Ed, the technician on the phone. “And see if I can’t figure out why the data isn’t syncing up with us.”
“No, it’s not on my end,” said Maurel. “The data is getting to you just fine. It’s not getting loaded into your system so that it can be released for use the next day. Does that make sense?”
“Sure, sure,” said Ed. “Hold on, let me see something. Can you hold on?” Before Maurel could answer there was already the sound of Abba singing ‘Waterloo’ in her ear.
Maurel wasn’t worried. She knew her system was still secure. There was a backup system Maurel had constructed that she could go to if Ed couldn’t straighten things out in time for her to send a report.
However time was running out for even the secondary report. If nothing appeared within the appointed hour an automatic message would be sent to a different operative who would alert a Circle cell that a report had been missed. No one along the chain would know who had missed their report. They would only know to send a predetermined message till it rose up the Circle ladder to the appropriate person.
Systems would be put on alert, affecting a variety of operations, particularly battle strategies but no one would come to check on Maurel. They would wait to see if a message would appear at the next appointed time to find out if she might be dead or alive.
That was also protocol.
Fifteen minutes to go until the message would be sent and Maurel would let it go for the day. She could work on entering actual Westin information instead.
She had been in too many tight spots to let something like this get to her. The operation that brought her into contact with Wallis Jones had been just as important and that one had almost ended in disaster at the highest Circle cell. The Keeper had almost been killed. This was a momentary glitch even if officers in the field would have to come up with different strategies while the Circle waited to find out if one of their own had been betrayed.
“Okay, you were right. We see it. It was something simple. The code that turns the documents into pdf’s and relays everything back to Kroton was hanging up the whole thing. Sorry about that.”
“Not your fault, Ed. Glad you found it. Will I need to reload all of the data I sent in since yesterday?” His answer would determine if there would be a way to run a report today. If someone else reentered anything then Maurel would have to use the backup system after all.
When things ran smoothly, key officers in the field came back to their day jobs and sent data using certain program codes that determined what fields Maurel would enter into Kroton. Even though Maurel sat at Westin Fullerton, Circle officers were in every walk of life door knocking to send information straight into a Management system as Westin corporate documents. Even if the officers were just as unaware.
Checks and balances were in place at every level to protect against the entire operation being exposed or worse, brought down. Officers didn’t know anyone in the cells above them or in other units. If they were ever captured in a suburban battlefield they would not be able to give up the next link in the command.
Modern torture that was officially known as thoughtful interrogation wouldn’t yield anything. Someone might break and want to tell something to bring on a peaceful death but they wouldn’t know enough for it to matter and eventually even their captors would understand.
In order to gain useful information someone would have to be able to see past all of the keywords like ’30-day refills’ or ‘durable medical equipment’.
Besides, only nine minutes to go now. Time was growing short. She held her breath for a moment despite all of her years in the field.
“Nope, we got it. Once we fixed the problem the system kicked in and started picking up everything. Give it a couple of minutes and your stuff will all be there.”
“Sounds good,” said Maurel. “I’ve got a couple of minutes.” She slowly took in a deep breath.
“Yeah,” laughed Ed, with a snort. “Almost three hours till quitting time, what’s a couple more minutes?”
There was still time to run the report so that it would be there for another operative who was buried even deeper within Management’s ranks. They would take it up to the top of the Circle. Even Maurel didn’t know who was on the other end, gathering her reports.
There was that other matter, thought Maurel.
There was another portal that only Maurel and two other agents on the outside knew about that could wait. Maurel had recently been ordered to start monitoring a small cloud in the database tha
t collected information on a shorter list of people whose names were encoded to keep their identities anonymous. Maurel couldn’t tell who they were, or even what side they were on, but she wondered what importance they played in all of this.
A group of salesmen passed by her cubicle talking loudly about how business was going. Maurel looked up for a moment as they passed by to see if she could tell if someone was limping or favoring an arm.
It stood to reason that some of these people were enemy combatants returned from the same open battlefields near the Canadian border and were nursing some hidden bruises or sutured wounds. It gave a new meaning to paid time off.
“Maurel, you want my popcorn?”
It was Farrell who worked in the cubicle next to hers and had to comment out loud on everything that happened during the day. Most people had learned to see it as background noise. The popcorn was free with coffee every afternoon. An odd combination and resulted in the entire building smelling like a movie theater every afternoon.
“Sure, Farrell, thank you.”
“Can you hold it with your bad hand?” asked Farrell. Maurel smiled and held out her left hand to show him the remaining fingers worked just fine. “How did you lose them?” he asked, nodding at her hand. It wasn’t the first time he had asked.
Maurel caught someone rolling their eyes as they walked by. A lot of people thought Farrell was a little odd because he had no filters and was bound to ask whatever he was thinking. Maurel found it refreshing most of the time.
“It happened a long time ago,” said Maurel. “A different life,” she said, taking the popcorn and turning her back. That was one good trait Farrell did have. When someone went back to work, he went back to talking to himself without any kind of fuss.
Maurel kept her back to everyone and let the report run across her screen as she scooped up a handful of popcorn and pushed it into her mouth. She thought about the one place she might have called home if only she could tell someone.
