by Rick Cook
FREEKER: Anyone got any good codez?
DRAINO: So he says ’first assume a spherical chicken’
PILGRIM: The P-153 is a piece of shit. Use a canopener.
RINGO: Does anyone have the DTMF codes to do that?
DEATHMASTER: Hahaha
A.NONY.MOUS: Look in the last issue of 26OO.
WIZ: Hey Danny how are things at the Keep?
The message scrolled by so quickly he almost missed it. Then he called up the buffer, read it again and goggled.
"DRAINO: Wiz," Danny typed, "is that you? Where are you? Are you all right?"
"Fine," the answer traced out on Danny’s screen. "Maybe we’d better go to a private channel."
"Jerry, Moira come here!" Danny yelled over his shoulder. "It’s Wiz."
"Well, they’ve had a problem all right," Special Agent Marty Conklin told the FBI director. In the corner Conklin’s boss nodded approvingly. "They’ve got their butts in a sling so they want us to pull a rabbit out of the hat to save their bacon."
The director winced at the mixed metaphors. She wasn’t sure she approved of Conklin either. He was obviously pushing the Bureau’s weight restrictions hard and the director had a strong suspicion he couldn’t pass the annual physical training test either.
But in Conklin’s case the title "special agent" was especially appropriate. He was the FBI’s brightest, if arguably weirdest, specialist on computer and telecommunications crime. His boss had managed to make him look halfway presentable in a rumpled gray suit, but he had still come along just in case his prize charge got too far out of hand.
The director lit another cigarette and blew smoke out her nose. I’ve got to quit these-as soon as this business is settled, she thought. "What exactly happened?"
"They left a back door ajar at a black site and now they’ve got newts in the firewall."
"Can you put that in English?"
Conklin paused to do a mental translation. "Okay, they have a site that’s physically highly secure. Everything’s guarded and under lock and key. For some reason they need Internet access from the site, but obviously they don’t want the next net newt who comes along to take the system home with him."
"Don’t want a what?"
"A net newt-slimy little uglies that you find under rocks."
The director nodded. "Oh, you mean hackers."
"No, I mean system breakers, computer criminals." Conklin was about to launch into his canned lecture on how most hackers are not criminals, but his boss cleared his throat meaningfully.
"Well, anyway, what you do in a case like that is set up a firewall. That’s a computer that connects to the net on one side and to your secure system on the other. All it does is pass messages back and forth. It acts as a barrier to keep out the net… uh, the bad guys.
"Now normally a firewall doesn’t have any user accounts on it. It is strictly there as a gateway to the main system. But in this case someone did something real dumb."
Conklin smiled broadly at having caught the nation’s top communications security agency in an error. "When a computer comes from the factory there’s a standard password installed, something like ’password’ or ’administrator,’ something the field engineers can use to set the system up. Anyone using that password has superuser privileges on the system-they can do anything, because you need that kind of access to get the system up and running. Of course, since the password is the same on all machines of that kind it’s a major security hole and you’re supposed to erase it as soon as the system’s set up."
Now the director was smiling too. "And they didn’t?"
"No ma’am they did not. So some slimy little newt comes along, uses the password to set up his own accounts and starts helping himself to all the free computer time he can carry. Now they’ve found it, they’re embarrassed and they’re scared it’s a major security breach so they want us to nail the little sucker."
The director was still smiling. Bureaucratically this was better and better. Not only did No Such Agency need a favor-it didn’t have law enforcement powers and couldn’t arrest the system breaker even if it could find him-but the problem was the result of a bone-headed blunder by their people. When the FBI cleaned up this mess No Such Agency would owe them big time.
"In fairness to them," Conklin’s boss broke in, "it was an easy thing to overlook. The system has only been operational a few weeks and since the firewall doesn’t have any users there was no reason to check the password file."
The director shook her head. She wasn’t interested in being fair to No Such Agency, she was interested in milking this for all it was worth. Unless…
"Is this really a national security problem? I mean is there a possibility the main system was penetrated by an outside agency?"
Conklin shook his head. "That’s what No Such Agency is afraid of, but that’s a bunch of professional paranoids playing Cover Your Ass. Fundamentally this was a dumb stunt, the sort of thing a fourteen-year-old kid would do from his Macintosh. There’s no sign of any other tampering with the system or of any attempt to get from the firewall back to the main system. I’m ninety-nine percent sure it’s a run-of-the-mill newt."
"But not one hundred percent sure? Then of course we need to pursue it." And put those arrogant SOBs even further in our debt, she thought. "What are the chances we can catch this, uh, ’newt’?"
"If he keeps using those accounts, about a hundred percent. That’s why No Such Agency hasn’t canceled them. We’re watching, waiting and tracing him back."
* * *
"I don’t understand," Moira said. "If Wiz is talking to us ’real-time,’ as you say, why is it harder to track him in chat than when he sends us messages?"
Moira was sitting with the programmers in their workroom. She tried to spend as little time there as possible to let them work in peace. So she only popped in a dozen or so times a day. Jerry had rigged a panic button to summon her and any of them who weren’t in the room if they got a message from Wiz, but Moira still checked constantly.
Danny shook his head and compressed his lips into a tight line. "It shouldn’t be, but Wiz got real clever. He’s using a program called IRC to chat and he’s connecting through the freenet in Cleveland. Dialing in on the phone system to one of the freenet’s numbers and using their IRC facility."
"But you said if you could get back to the telephones in your world you could easily find where he is tapping in from our world," Moira said plaintively.
"And normally we could. We can use the software built into a digital phone switch to let us trace someone’s connection point in about three seconds." He made a face. "Problem is, Wiz knows it too."
Jerry nodded. "It’s as if he’s deliberately making this as hard as he can."
Moira’s mouth quirked up in something that wasn’t quite a smile. "Most likely he is. If the geas commands that he keep his location secret then he will bend all his efforts to that end. He cannot deliberately go against the geas."
"Anyway," Danny said, "Wiz always said he didn’t know much about how we tapped into the phone system."
"That’s because he didn’t want to know," Jerry said. "The whole thing’s blatantly illegal."
"So what are they going to do? Send the FBI to arrest us?"
"His conscience bothered him."
Danny shrugged. "Anyway, he must have understood more than I thought. See, we can use the automatic trace facility in the switch to find him, provided he’s coming in through a digital switch. Digital phone switches are just about universal in the United States so I took that as a given."
"And it is not?"
Danny made a face. "His first link is to the local phone company. The next one is into the private phone system of a major oil company, where normal trace facilities don’t go. Okay, we got that one. But the next link is via the oil company’s leased lines to its satellite link to one of its exploration offices in Ulan Bator, Outer Mongolia. Needless to say, that is not a digital switch."
"Oh," Moir
a said in a small voice.
"It gets better. The next link is from the Ulan Bator switch to a switchboard someplace else in Outer Mongolia. We think it’s in a yurt. Anyway, that one is not only not digital, it’s still run by a human operator." Danny made an even worse face. "Currently we are trying to figure out how to get through that one. Then we’ll see what other surprises he has in store for us."
"It does not sound hopeful then," Moira said.
"There’s one more complication you should know about. Even once we slog through all that we will have to run a trace from the switch he is using to his connection point back in this world. That will take a couple or three hours from the time we locate the right switch.
"Needless to say," Jerry added, "we are still pursuing the e-mail link as well." He reached out and patted Moira’s hand. "Don’t worry, we’ll find him whether he wants to be found or not."
"Is this place secure?" the FBI director asked, looking around the conference room deep in the bowels of the FBI building.
"As secure as we can make it," the staffer at the foot of the table told her. His name was Wilkins and he was in charge of such things.
The director grunted and pulled a package of cigarettes out of her purse. The room was supposed to be a no-smoking area but no one objected.
She lit up, inhaled and blew smoke out through her nostrils. "Before we get to the regular business we have a non-agenda item."
Everyone leaned forward expectantly. If it was too sensitive to go on the agenda it was very sensitive indeed.
"Moron Pashley," the director said, taking obvious relish in mangling the name. "He’s still making trouble."
Everyone leaned back. Several staffers stared down at the papers before them. One or two looked up at the ceiling, as if hoping to find the answer written there. No one in the room had to be told who Pashley was. He wasn’t at all important in the grand scheme of things, but since the call from the head of No Such Agency he had become a major burr under the director’s saddle. As a result, the top echelon of the FBI spent an inordinate amount of time trying to keep him discreetly under control.
"How?" asked Paul J. Rutherford, her special assistant and troubleshooter. "He’s stuck out in the middle of the desert."
"He’s less than two hours from a major airport and he wants to go investigate this new hacker case personally."
"That could be tricky," said James Hampton, her legal adviser. "We’d need a very good reason to forbid him."
"If we can’t forbid him we can sure as hell transfer him," the director said. "Send him to some place really remote."
"Well, there is a site in Antarctica," Rutherford said. The director brightened visibly.
"Won’t work," Hampton put in. "It’s outside the U.S. and we’re legally forbidden to operate anywhere else."
"Well, what can we find inside the U.S.?" The director asked. "There’s gotta be a deep, dark hole somewhere we can stick this clown."
"Just any hole won’t do," Hampton reminded her. "It’s got to have a major computer link to the outside world so we can maintain Pashley is working on computer crime."
"The Aleutians!" someone further down the table said. "There are a couple of places out on those islands with major computer links and nothing else but fog, seagulls and Kodiak bears."
The director thought of Pashley meeting a giant bear in the fog. She brightened again.
"Won’t work," Rutherford said glumly. "Those computers are too important. If he screws them up we’ve got major problems, national-security-wise."
"But the Cold War is over," the director protested. "We’re not worried about the Russians any more."
"We use them to eavesdrop on the Japanese and Koreans," Hampton said apologetically.
The director ground out her cigarette and muttered a highly politically incorrect phrase from her childhood. One that used "mother" as an adjective three times.
"All right, this clown wants to go to San Francisco ’to pursue a hot lead.’ Any suggestions?"
For a long moment no one at the table said anything. Then Hampton voiced the inevitable. "Since it’s a legitimate national security case I don’t think we dare stop him," he said apologetically.
The director used the phrase again.
Well, Ray Whipple thought, at least I’m getting some time in San Francisco out of this. Ray liked San Francisco, especially when it was summer in the desert, but he wasn’t looking forward to this trip at all.
He looked around the office to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything-and to keep his mind off what the rest of today was going to be like.
For one thing it involved a ninety-minute automobile ride with Myron Pashley, followed by a wait in an airport and a two-hour flight with the man. That was a lot more than the Recommended Daily Allowance of Pashley and damn close to the LD-50.
Which was the other thing. The man would not shut up about this system breaker he was tracking. Since most of what he had to say was palpable nonsense and he seemed utterly immune to anything he didn’t want to hear, his chatter was like fingernails on a blackboard to the astronomer. Ray was taking his Walkman and a selection of his favorite Bach tapes in the hope he could drown Pashley out. He suspected strongly the FBI agent wouldn’t take the hint.
Look on the bright side, Whipple thought. When we get to Silicon Valley he’s someone else’s problem.
Finally, Ray turned on his vacation demon and logged his terminal off the system. The vacation program would automatically respond to any e-mail messages with an electronic form letter telling the sender he would be gone for a while. He looked around the office for the last time and realized Pashley’s terminal was still active and connected. Idiot! Ray Whipple thought. As a final gesture he turned on the vacation demon on Pashley’s system as well.
Unfortunately Ray was distracted and didn’t think it through. The vacation demon didn’t think at all. It just did what it was programmed to do.
It was mid-morning when Wiz came into his workroom. Since Anna had started working here he was actually able to sleep in most mornings and he enjoyed the sensation immensely.
Just because he slept late didn’t mean others did. Anna was usually up at first light of dawn and even Malkin didn’t often sleep later than he did.
This morning both of them were in his workroom staring at the screen saver he had finished the night before. Anna was standing carefully behind the blue line on the floor, broom in hand, obviously interrupted at her work. She was staring at the display like a child seeing her first Christmas tree. Malkin was just behind her, also watching the ever-changing patterns.
Anna saw him and blushed. "Oh, I’m sorry, My Lord, I didn’t mean to… It’s just that it’s so beautiful."
"It’s a screen saver," Wiz told her. "Although there’s really no screen there to save."
Malkin examined the glowing pattern and grunted. "What does it do?"
"Well, it doesn’t really do anything." Wiz looked back at the swirl of color. "You know, if they had invented those things back in the sixties when everyone was dropping LSD the intellectual history of the Western World would have been considerably different."
Malkin grunted again and turned away.
"If you’ll excuse me, My Lord," Anna said tentatively. "I’ll leave this room until later." With that she turned and hurried out.
Wiz watched her go and shook his head. He was no more immune to physical beauty than most men, but like a lot of men he rated other things higher than looks when it came to female attractiveness. Intelligence, for instance-which definitely put Anna out of the running. Besides, the girl’s vulnerability triggered his protective instincts.
And always and above all there was Moira. He sighed at the thought and set to work.
As usual, the first thing Wiz did was to check his mail.
The very first message was from a net id he didn’t recognize. Spam or junk mail? he thought as he called it up.
Special Agent Myron Pashley will be out of the offi
ce and unavailable for the next two weeks. Please forward any urgent messages to fbi fbi.gov
Myron Pashley,
Special Agent, FBI
Wiz went cold. They were on to him! Someone must have found his mailboxes on the broken system and called in the Feds. He recognized the form of the message as a vacation demon. It was just sheer blind luck that the FBI agent who had been getting copies of his messages had gone on vacation and hadn’t bothered to exclude his drop from the demon’s reply list.
Wiz slammed his hand to his forehead and damned himself as an utter idiot. He had been stupid to use that mailbox setup for so long! It was only a matter of time before someone traced him back, found the cutout and caught him.
But in spite of the danger he needed that e-mail link to the Wizard’s Keep. He’d have to come up with something to make it secure from snoopers in both worlds.
System breaking had never been Wiz’s idea of hacking. Danny could probably have come up with a much more sophisticated way of hiding while using the net. But you can’t become intimately familiar with systems without learning things that are useful in less-than-legal ways.
Wiz thought hard for a couple of minutes and then he smiled. Yeah, there was a way. Something that would be just about untraceable unless they figured out the trick-and drive them nuts if they tried to trace it.
A few minutes work at the keyboard and a net of purple and green lines flashed into being above his work table. Several more key clicks and a few of the intersections burned fiery red. Wiz looked at the glowing orange letters next to the red points of light. Each red dot indicated a computer on the Internet that doubled as a router. Not bad. The only question is which one to use?
"Yes!" he whispered. Even Jerry would never think that the system might be lying to him. If he was careful, they’d never have any reason to suspect at the Wizard’s Keep.
That first line of defense would be tough, but it was simple enough that he could put it into effect almost immediately. That would buy him some more time while he added extra layers of security behind it.
Wiz bent to the magical workstation with a will, his fingers flying over the keys. Just a few more hours, he thought. Give me just a few hours and I’ll be damn near invulnerable.
