Death of Secrets

by Bowen Greenwood

  Releasing Mike was a natural. Kathy, he'd felt OK about releasing because he at least knew her somewhat from the Neon and from the meeting in Mike's office. He stroked his chin, considered Mike's request for a moment, and finally nodded at the man holding Colleen's shoulder. "OK, let her go too."

  The agent holding Hugh growled, "They say this guy's Jakarta. Want me to let him go too?"

  Nathan sighed. Letting prisoners go wasn't making him popular with the FBI agents. "No, no, look, if they're right then he's definitely the one we want."

  Stepping close enough to the agent so only he could hear, Jacobs added in a whisper, "The man I just had uncuffed is a Congressman on the House Intelligence Committee. If you want that cost of living adjustment to get safely through Congress, we need to be both gentle and discreet here, got it?"

  The agent nodded, but didn't loosen his grip on Jakarta's elbow at all.

  "OK, then, stuff him in a back seat somewhere and run him in. If he's who they say he is, this is going to be a long night for all of us. Now, then…"

  He trailed off, and turned to his friend. "Suppose you tell me how you got mixed up with one of the most wanted cyber-criminals in the country."

  Mike hemmed and hawed. He had no idea how to explain what they'd learned without it sounding crazy.

  "It'd be easier to tell you sitting down, Nathan," Kathy said for him. "This turned out to be pretty amazing."

  Nathan stared at them all for a while, then nodded. "OK, then. Let's go back inside."

  The crowd of building residents had mostly thinned out once the fire department had declared the whole thing a false alarm. A few of them found an FBI raid to be more interesting than whatever they'd been dreaming, and stood around gawking rather than go back to bed. Nathan led them through that crowd, to the elevator, and back up to the fifth floor. First they went to Jakarta’s bedroom, where Colleen retrieved her pants and put them on. Then they went to the living room to talk. Kathy figured that pretty soon she'd start to feel at home here. Without waiting for Nathan to say anything, she dropped down onto the couch. Mike took the place beside her, and Colleen sat next to him. Nathan eased himself into the armchair.

  Mike was just about to begin their tale when one of the agents processing the crime scene walked in.

  He wore the same short haircut and business suit so common among those who enforced the law for the federal government. "Director Jacobs, we found some funky stuff in their office space."

  "How funky?"

  "I'm not even sure what it is. Looks like some kind of handmade computer peripheral."

  "Is it a bomb?"

  The agent shook his head. "No chance, but…"

  "I know what it is," Colleen said. "But it takes some explaining."

  Jacobs turned to look at her. "OK, Kathy's roommate. Tell me your name first, and then fill me in on what kind of weirdness you've gotten my friend into."

  Colleen looked over at Mike as if blaming him for Nathan's attitude. But then she just shrugged. "My name is Colleen Christina, I'm a computer science major at Georgetown. Kathy's had me working on that stupid flash drive ever since she found it."

  Jacobs nodded. "OK, Kathy's told me about the flash drive. She and… oops!"

  Michael looked at him.

  "Mike, your friend the bouncer from the Neon is down at the Hoover building right now. I found him at your hotel room; he'd been beaten up pretty badly."

  Kathy gasped. "John? Is he OK?"

  "Oh, he'll be fine. He's a tough guy, and the only broken bones were just ribs. He ran ten miles to McLean before he met me. But it’s going to take a while for those black eyes to get better. I suppose he ought to be here, might know a few things that you guys don't. He paused, then called for one of the FBI agents.

  "Could you call Meade and see if they can find someone to run up here? I’d like them to bring John Lincoln. If you get the guys in my department, they’ll know who he is."

  The agent took out a cell phone and placed the call, walking back down to the computer room as he did so.

  "OK, Ms. Christina. Please go on," Jacobs said, turning back to Colleen.

  "Well, anyway, while Kathy and Mike here were getting chased all over creation for that flash drive, I'm the one who actually had it, trying to figure out what was on it. Encryption is one of my hobbies, and let me tell you, this one was a challenge. I finally managed to decrypt the file list on the flash drive, but that was as far as I got. Probably never would have gotten there had I not gotten a bit of outside help."

  Jacobs nodded. "From who?"

  "Well, the dead guy who gave Kathy the flash drive told her to get it to Jakarta. She thought he meant to fly it to Indonesia, which there was no way she was doing. But I figured he must have meant Jakarta the hacker, since it wouldn't make much sense to just name a whole city, you know?

  "Besides, when Kathy told me the dead guy was Eric Harrison, that pretty much clinched it for me. When he got arrested the first time, the rumor online was that he was working with Jakarta."

  The NSA man nodded again. "Yeah, pretty good call. Obviously it was right."

  Colleen nodded. "Yeah. So anyway, they got me over to their hotel in McLean, and Mike had a laptop. I used that to start hunting for the infamous Jakarta."

  Jacobs' face lit up. "Ah, you must be KH12, then!"

  Colleen blinked. "Yeah. How'd you know?"

  "I came to the hotel looking for Mike and Kathy when they never checked in. I found the laptop still on, and your messaging software had like two dozen messages waiting for you. I sorta read some."

  Colleen slapped her forehead. "I left it on! I hope you didn't see anything too personal…"

  "Well, the main thing was one wondering if you'd found Jakarta. But also, someone named Tony sent some personal remarks."

  Colleen rolled her eyes. "My so-called boy friend. I suppose I better call him pretty soon."

  Jacobs nodded. "Anyway…"

  "Right, sorry, got distracted. Anyway, the short version is, I made contact with Jakarta and eventually he arranged to have us brought here. We had a minor run in with some other folks who didn't seem to want us to get here, but eventually we did.

  "What Jakarta told us was kind of hard to believe until I'd seen it myself."

  "What was it?"

  "Well… OK, you're Nathan Jacobs, right? Head of the Information Assurance Directorate at the NSA?"

  He nodded and a small smile spread over his face. "That I am. How'd you know?"

  "I'm a computer buff," Colleen replied. "You're pretty well known in cyber circles."

  He chuckled at that. "I always wanted to be a celebrity."

  She rolled her eyes again. "Whatever. The important thing is that you know a bit about computers, right?"

  Nathan raised his eyebrows. In a dry, laconic voice he allowed, "A thing or two."

  "Good. So you know what's the ultimate dream of human/computer interaction? What the entire HCI field knows the future holds, just not how to get there?"

  "You mean TR?"

  Colleen nodded. "Exactly. Thought recognition."

  Jacobs scoffed. "You're not going to try to tell me that Jakarta wrote an entire TR interface all on his own!"

  She shook her head. "Of course not. He stole it. "

  "From?" Nathan asked.

  "Electron Guidewire."

  "Oh, that's an even bigger crock! I work with EG a lot, they don't have a program like that going."

  Colleen nodded. "They not only have a program, they've done it. They built a fully functional thought recognition interface, and they call it GigaStar."

  Nathan just laughed. "I'm sorry, Miss Christina, you seem very nice and very smart about computers, but you've fallen for some social engineering fed to you by a very good hacker. Jakarta duped you. I work for the NSA and the GigaStar is our project. It's not that different from a wardriving rig.

  Kathy interrupted. "Um… what? Wardriving?"

  Colleen said, "Hacker slang. It’s a tool you s
et up in your car, to drive around and pick up other people’s home wifi networks. But GigaStar is a lot bigger deal than that."

  Jacobs shook his head. "It’s just far better at monitoring Internet traffic than anything we’ve ever done before. I've seen one. I know the CEO of Electron Guidewire personally – he's a good friend of mine, and Mike's too. They just aren't involved in anything like that, trust me."

  Colleen snorted. "Yeah, right! Then how come I watched someone being murdered there?"

  "Um… murdered?"

  "I peeked into their surveillance videos, they have a plain-as-day video of some poor schlep up on the roof smoking, and this other guy – same guy Kathy and Mike keep running into, judging by the description – comes up behind him and shoves him off."

  "Up on the roof…" Jacobs blinked. "Smoking… Krupotnik?"

  "Who?"

  "Ivan Krupotnik. One of EG's programmers. Tilman told us he died, but not that he was murdered."

  Colleen folded her arms over her chest. "Sounds like this upstanding, respectable contractor isn’t quite all that."

  "Look, Miss Christina, that’s an awful big leap you’re making there. Even if there’s some kind of trouble there, there’s a big difference between that and saying they tried to snooker the NSA, Congress, and most of the federal government. I still haven’t seen any proof that it wasn’t some friend of Jakarta’s who’s behind all the murder and attacks. You have only his word that he didn’t orchestrate the previous attacks, after all. And given that he’s lied to you about what GigaStar is, he could easily have lied to you about that."

  Mike was shaking his head now. "Nathan, I thought exactly the same thing. Even after that Jakarta guy explained it, I still didn't believe it. But when Colleen showed me… Well, it's true. Jakarta didn’t lie to us about GigaStar. It works exactly as described."

  Nathan stared at him. "There's a working TR interface right here in this building?"

  Mike nodded, and Colleen stood. "It's the thing your agent found that he couldn't recognize. Come on, I'll show you."

  "This, I've got to see to believe."

  Colleen led them down the hall, into the computer work area. The cold night wind blew through the broken window, and about five FBI agents bustled around, cataloging evidence. Colleen saw the box again, the big flat panel that looked so much like a monitor or an overgrown touch pad. She sat down at the computer it was hooked to, now glad that she and Mike had failed in their plan to disconnect and destroy it. She was about to turn the box on when one of the FBI agents stopped her.

  "That's evidence, Miss. We need to take that computer apart and catalogue it, it can't be turned on." Colleen was surprised to see a female among this mostly male group. Her pantsuit looked every bit as official as the other agents, though, even if she had a bit more leeway in the hair department.

  Colleen looked to Nathan, who looked back at her. "You're not going to delete anything? Not tamper with any of the log files that are necessary to our case?"

  She shook her head. "Look, I've used this system before. It's not password protected or anything like that. I can log on and use it without hurting any of the files you guys need."

  The female FBI agent arched an eyebrow. "Pretty lax security for a hacker."

  "Not really. I'm sure you do the same thing at home. All of us who do this seriously protect our machines like Fort Knox from outside intrusion. But since we use them so much on a daily basis, our on-site security is lax enough to make it easy on ourselves."

  Grudgingly, the woman nodded. Jacobs said, "OK. Any software delete it tries won't be too hard for our labs to recover anyway. Just don't touch anything you don't have to, Miss Christina."

  She nodded, and turned the box on. The boot up process was slow, but finally the desktop appeared – a simple flat color with no fancy pictures or themes. She checked the menu of recently used applications, from that determined which icon belonged to the TR system, and clicked it.

  A window opened up on the screen. Nathan watched in fascination as text began to scroll down. Having seen it before, Kathy was already accustomed to the lack of punctuation and grammar in the TR output.

  >Self-test completed; all results within norms.

  >Listening on port 110101

  >Subject COLLEEN CHRISTINA reacquired; identified from file.

  >Subject MICHAEL VINCENT reacquired; identified from file.

  >Subject KATHERINE KELVER reacquired; identified from file.

  >Six other subjects acquired.

  >Identified input from subject four: "It can't really be what she thinks."

  >Identified input from subject MICHAEL VINCENT: "I wonder if Nathan will help me keep this out of the press."

  >Subject six feels annoyance with individuals to right.

  > Identified input from subject MICHAEL VINCENT: "Oops, I forgot."

  >Subject nine expresses interest in object to front.

  >Identified input from subject COLLEEN CHRISTINA: "See director jacobs? Thought recognition."

  >Subject four self identifies as NATHAN JACOBS

  > Subject NATHAN JACOBS feels awe.

  >Subject NATHAN JACOBS feels disbelief.

  >Identified input from subject MICHAEL VINCENT: "How can you not think of anything it's like impossible things always rush in oops don't think about kathy pink elephant pink elephant pink elephant pink elephant"

  >Laughter from subject KATHERINE KELVER.

  >Identified input from subject COLLEEN CHRISTINA: "think a complete sentence director and watch it appear on screen."

  >Subject nine feels boredom.

  >Uncatalogued input from subject six, sexual in nature.

  >Identified input from subject NATHAN JACOBS: "test thought for thought recognition system does this come through my mother's maiden name is Weiss."

  ***

  "I don’t believe it," Nathan breathed aloud.

  "My thoughts exactly," Colleen replied with more than just a touch of irony. She nodded to the screen, where ">Subject NATHAN JACOBS says aloud: "I don’t believe it." showed up loud and clear.

  "Shut that thing off," Jacobs said, backing away. "What's it's range?"

  Colleen closed the window. "I don't know its exact range, but it picked Jakarta up while he was walking down the hall. That's how we escaped, we were in here when he came after us."

  Kathy grinned at Mike. "What's with that pink elephant stuff, anyway?"

  Mike ran his hand over his head, and took a deep breath. "That thing is just morally wrong," he said. "When I was a kid, I remember someone telling me that it was impossible to not think of pink elephants if you were told not to think of pink elephants. That whole thing just came back to me and I kept thinking about pink elephants to keep myself from thinking something embarrassing."

  Kathy laughed. "Controlling your thoughts is a lot harder than you'd think, huh?"

  Mike nodded ruefully.

  Colleen turned to Jacobs. "You see, Director? It’s not some hare-brained science fiction scheme. It’s real."

  Jacobs nodded but didn't speak. He just licked his lips and tried to take stock of what he’d just seen. Finally he said, "I’m torn between awe at the skill it took to make it and fear of what that thing could mean on the open market."

  "Right," Michael agreed. "This stuff is ridiculously Orwellian. I mean, what possible justification could there be for invading people’s thoughts like this?"

  Nathan replied, "Well, I can see valid uses for it. As Colleen said, thought recognition would be a real breakthrough for a computer operating system. It could help people with injuries or disabilities too. And I won’t deny if would make intelligence-gathering way easier. But … Well, whoever did that was never planning on defending it in court. Mike, can you imagine the political firestorm if the NSA admitted to having this kind of technology? It’d make the meta-data scandal look like a press release."

  The Congressman grunted. "I’d have to hire a whole second staff just to keep the mailbox from getting jammed.
"

  "But still," Nathan mused. "Being a bit of a geek myself, I can’t help but marvel at the technological achievement. Did you guys find any schematics around here, that he used to design this?"

  Colleen nodded. "He used EG's design, we got it from the flash drive. Here, I’ll print up another copy." She opened Jakarta’s decoded files from the flash drive, and sent the diagram to the printer. A few seconds later, Nathan was tugging at the page, trying to get it out and readable quicker. For a few moments, all he did was look.

  When he finally did speak, it was only a whisper, as if someone had punched his gut and knocked all the wind out of him. "That answers the motive question."

  "What’s that, Nate?" Mike asked. Kathy leaned forward, trying to hear.

  "I said, that answers the motive question."

  "Whaddaya mean?" Colleen asked.

  "Well, I kept asking myself," Nathan said. "If you had technology like this, why give it to the NSA? I mean, GigaStar is an NSA project, right? So if you’re Jakarta and you’ve got this kind of capability, why just hand it over to us? At the very least, he should have been trying to charge an arm and a leg."

  "But it’s not Jakarta’s idea, it’s Electron Guidewire who designed the thing…" Colleen interjected.

  "I’m not so sure," Nathan replied. "You see, this diagram you’ve shown me has one very important difference from EG's diagrams. I saw them when they were pitching the project to us, and I would have seen something like this."

  "What?" Colleen, Kathy and Mike spoke almost in unison.

  "It broadcasts on two frequencies instead of one."

  "What do you mean?" Mike asked. But Colleen's eyes had gone as wide as saucers.

  Nathan explained. "Well, GigaStar is supposed to be a wireless network traffic monitor right? We plant it where it can monitor a network, and it sends the information to us at a remote receiver, right? Sending the data to us at the remote location requires it to broadcast the data, essentially just like a radio station. Of course, the frequency is totally different than the public radio spectrum, and it’s encrypted, but basically it has to broadcast. But this thing broadcasts twice. It sends one signal, just as we’re expecting, on the frequency that we’d be listening on for our surveillance. But there’s also a totally separate frequency."