Death of Secrets

by Bowen Greenwood

  Everyone in the room sat stunned for a moment, all staring at the shattered window. Kathy turned away and clung to Mike, hiding her face against his chest so she didn’t have to see. Franken finally broke the silence. "I wish that hadn’t ended the way it did."

  Kathy seemed to come out from under a spell. "Detective Franken! What are you doing here?" She turned to Mike and added, "He's been investigating the original murder, where I found the flash drive. But how'd you end up here, Detective?"

  Franken pulled the office door shut behind him. "I met that federal agent guy you were with. Jacobs. He told me I could find you back at the apartment he'd just raided. I got there just in time to see y'all being dragged off in a van. Followed it here."

  "Which must mean you have a car here, right?" Mike asked. "We can get past the secretary by holding a gun on her, maybe past the whole office that way. We get to Franken's car and call for help. It's a police car, it has a radio, right?"

  The detective sighed. "Um, that would be a negative. In theory, I had a night off tonight. Driving my personal car, no radio."

  Mike swore, and Colleen got out of her chair. She walked over and picked up the flash drive. "I’m not so sure we should just sit in this room scratching our collective ass. That other guy could come back any minute. And somebody’s bound to see that body down below."

  John shook his head. "It’s on the loading dock, no one’s back there. Of course, if they get a parts shipment just now…"

  As if to reinforce Colleen's warning, they all heard noises coming from outside the door.

  But no one knocked. Listening at the door, Kathy heard the sounds of someone settling into the desk outside in the reception area. There was a muffled voice, and then a few moments later an intercom on Carlos’s desk beeped. "Are you there, Mr. Saglieri? Just wanted to let you know I was in."

  Mike shook his head vigorously and held his finger to his lips. No one moved or spoke, and finally the light on the intercom light blinked off. "Must be the secretary," he said once it did.

  Franken opened his mouth to speak when they heard more voices outside in the reception area. Mike tiptoed up to the door with Kathy to listen.

  "Welcome, Representative Harris, I’m so glad you could come today. Let me show you into Mr. Tilman’s office," they heard.

  "Tilman’s little meeting," Mike whispered. "I have to warn Julia, I can’t let her get blackmailed by him."

  "Julia?" Kathy whispered back.

  "Congresswoman Harris," Mike said. "She sits on the committee with me; that must be her outside." They heard the sound of the receptionist leading the Congressman to Tilman’s office.

  "We might be able to make a break for it while she’s in there," Kathy suggested. But as soon as she said it they heard the receptionist greeting still more Representatives.

  Mike and Kathy listened, while their friends huddled up right behind them. They thought they heard about ten Congressmen come in and enter Tilman’s office. When the commotion outside finally died down, Mike stepped away from the door and motioned everyone else to come with him. Speaking in a whisper, he said, "Listen, I have to stop this. Those people – I don’t like all of them, and most of them are from the opposing party, but they still don’t deserve to have their secrets strip mined out of their heads. We’ve got to do something."

  "But what can we do?" Kathy asked. "Are you going to just barge in there with a gun and break the meeting up? They’d all think you’re crazy!"

  Colleen grinned. "We don’t need to break up the meeting," she said. "All we need to do is destroy the GigaStar log of what they think while they’re in there. That much, we can do from right here."

  She walked around behind Carlos’s desk and turned on his computer. When it finally completed its slow boot up process, she started clicking on files. "Now," Colleen muttered, "If I can just find where on their network that GigaStar log is being saved…"

  At first she just clicked through files and directories, looking for one with a name that would give her a clue. Before long, though, Colleen spotted something familiar. "Hey," she piped up, "Let’s have a peek in at them, and see how the meeting’s going."

  She clicked open the surveillance folder she’d looked at with Jakarta. After a second or two of searching, she found the "Executive" file she’d looked at before, and opened the most recent file in it. Kathy, John and Mike clustered around her as a live feed came up on screen, showing them the meeting in progress in Tilman’ office.

  "Wow," Colleen muttered. "Look at that huge video screen! It takes up almost the entire wall."

  Kathy and Mike watched as Tilman stood in front of his video wall, giving his presentation. The screen itself displayed slides to accompany his speech, shifting occasionally between expense charts, effectiveness graphs, and things of that nature.

  Colleen grimaced. "I see Nathan Jacobs came for the meeting," she said, noticing the NSA man in the audience. "Guess he still believes that fool theory he came up with last night, about Jakarta trying to sneak all this stuff in without EG knowing."

  Hearing that, Mike looked at the other faces listening to Tilman. "Harris, Wentworth, Kohl, Birnbaum… jeez, he’s got a lot of big names in there. Tilman’s going to end up with more secrets than he wants."

  Standing behind Colleen, Kathy blinked at that, stared at the computer screen, then brought her hand up to her mouth and bit her finger to hold in a gasp. "Mike, you’re brilliant!" she exclaimed. "That’s exactly what he should do."

  Mike stared at her blankly. "I’m brilliant? What did I think of?"

  ***

  Tilman couldn’t help smiling. The faces sitting around his conference table, watching him give his speech, were so endearingly lacking of any indication that they knew what they’d walked into. Here they were, calmly letting his newest little electronic toy sniff up any secrets it could find, and Carlos was even now in the process of burying the bodies of anyone who could warn them about it.

  "Thank you all very much for coming over today, I’m so glad you could take time out of your schedule to be here. I know a lot of you have had questions about the GigaStar program, particularly concerning the cost. We’re here to lay those concerns to rest today.

  "I’m sure nobody here needs to be reminded of just how big a job fighting terrorism is. The GigaStar is designed to make that job easier."

  Tilman gave the audience his most winning smile, and clicked a button on the remote control he held. The display on the video wall behind him flipped from a flashy Electron Guidewire logo to a chart comparing the GigaStar with the current state of the art in wifi monitoring technologies.

  "What we have achieved is nothing less than a fourfold increase in effectiveness over existing technology. The short version is, the GigaStar can pick up wireless internet traffic from four times as far away, and successfully read password-protected wireless networks, not just open ones."

  He worked through his presentation, shifting his eyes from person to person, gauging their response. He was particularly gratified to see Nathan Jacobs in the audience.

  Most of the Representatives were showing positive body language – leaning forward, good eye contact, etc. Tilman watched them all, gauging whose vote he was likely to win.

  ***

  "OK, Kathy, what’s this idea of yours, and when did I think of it?" Mike asked.

  She gave him a smile. "OK, so you didn’t think of it yourself. But it was something you said that gave me the idea." She talked without looking directly at him. She stared at the computer screen, where in one window, they could see the meeting going on in Tilman office, as Colleen searched through files in the other.

  "He’s monitoring the whole thing on GigaStar, right?" Kathy asked

  Mike nodded impatiently. "Yeah, of course. Otherwise we wouldn’t need to destroy the log, which is what we’re trying to do to help my distinguished colleagues in there."

  "Well, maybe there’s something better than destroying it," Kathy replied. "That’s what you said
that got me excited, Mike. ‘More secrets than he wants.’ This thing picks up the thoughts of everyone in the room – remember how it listened in on all the FBI agents in Jakarta’s place, even though we weren’t interested in any of them?"

  Mike nodded again.

  "So it’s got to be picking up Tilman’ thoughts, too."

  His eyes went wide and his jaw hung open as understanding dawned across Mike’s face. "Colleen, can we do what she’s thinking?"

  Kathy’s roommate threw back her head and laughed. Her smile possessed a wolfish character. "Kathy, you’re a genius! And yes, it’s very easily done."

  Colleen stopped to allow herself another laugh. "Jacobs wouldn’t believe me, huh? Well, I’ll show him some proof he’ll find hard to ignore. If he saw it happening live, there’d be no way to doubt it," she replied. "See that big video screen in there?"

  ***

  Nathan Jacobs sat in the comfortable leather chair at Tilman’ conference table and listened to the presentation. He was going through all the specs, just as the NSA knew them. It all sounded so familiar to Jacobs – so comforting. EG couldn’t really be planning something totally different, could they? Everything Tilman said was exactly as it should be, exactly as his agency had been told it would be.

  Trouble was, if Colleen was right, that was what he’d expect to hear too. It was an argument that couldn’t be settled just by listening to Tilman, or just by listening to Colleen. There’d have to be some kind of investigation.

  Of course, the attacks on Kathy and Mike while they held the flash drive were pretty darn suspicious. Either Jakarta had lied to them about not being responsible for those attacks – and Jacobs had no doubt the boy was capable of lying – or someone else had done them. And if it was someone else, the most likely suspect was Electron Guidewire, trying to get their code back. And if that was so, then it was grounds for investigation indeed. At the very least they might have committed attempted murder. At worst, extreme measures like that to recover the flash drive suggested that they had something to hide.

  But it all came down to whether or not Jakarta had lied to Kathy. The most likely option was that he had, and all the other attacks had been his fault too. He’d just needed to conceal that to get them to give him the flash drive. And concealing it shouldn’t have been hard for him.

  Hackers called it "social engineering." The trick was, when you couldn’t manage an electronic break-in to a company through simple programming and tricks, then you called the company up and told a convincing lie in order to get yourself a password. As simple as it seemed, it worked alarmingly often. And in order to use that trick, most hackers developed a depressing ability to lie.

  But most hackers were also nonviolent, and the attacks on Kathy had been very violent indeed. So he was back to square one, with no way to disprove Colleen's theory. One way or another, though, he needed to talk to Tilman and Carlos about whether they were responsible for those attacks on Kathy.

  ***

  "Can you really do it, Colleen?" Kathy asked.

  "Sure," she replied. "He’s obviously feeding the video screen in his office a PowerPoint from his computer. We just open a GigaStar window over the top of the slide show window, and instead of his presentation, all those right honorable people will find themselves reading thoughts – their thoughts, Tilman’ thoughts – everybody’s thoughts. For all I know, the range of a real unit might be great enough to pick us up, in here. Remember that the thing Jakarta built was just a homemade test version."

  "Do you think they’ll recognize it for what it is?" Mike asked. "After all, the output from that can be pretty confusing, from what I’ve seen."

  "Yeah, but you realized what you were looking at after a while, didn’t you? And what’s more, Nathan Jacobs is in there. He’s seen it once before, and he’s the one we have to convince."

  Mike nodded. "Right, I get it. OK, let’s do it."

  Colleen continued sorting through files. "OK then. I just need to find out where the stinking GigaStar program is that’s reading that input."

  Mike paced as she searched, feeling the tension mount inside him. He had no idea how long the meeting would drag on, and if it ended before Colleen found what she was looking for, then they’d lose their best – possibly their only – way out of this.

  Kathy stood behind Colleen, reading over her shoulder. "Is that it?" she asked, pointing to something on screen.

  Colleen shook her head. "No, I already looked at that, Kath. That’s the project source code itself – what was on that flash drive we stole. I saw that file once before when Jakarta and I hacked in here."

  Kathy was distracted for a moment, watching the meeting in the other window. She saw one of the Representatives tucking papers into a folder and gasped in alarm, thinking the meeting was over. But Tilman was still speaking, so it couldn’t have completely wrapped up yet. "So you think this file we’re looking for must be in the same place you guys looked last night?"

  "Well," Colleen replied, "that seems like the most likely loca… no! Oh, I am so stupid!" Furiously she closed the search window she’d had open, and started another. "It’s probably on his own computer, not on the central server."

  Kathy watched as Colleen typed for a few seconds, and then a long list of files scrolled down the screen. She felt a wave of anxiety creeping up when she saw how many they had to go through.

  Colleen, however, practically leapt out of her chair. "There it is!" she shouted, loud enough for Mike to worry about the people in the next room. "Open sesame!"

  She clicked on the GigaStar file, and in the little window where they watched the surveillance camera in Tilman’ office, they saw the display wall behind him change.

  ***

  Tilman spoke on, clicking the button on his remote occasionally for new slides. He maintained his eye contact with the audience, and felt their positive response. He explained the reasons for the cost, and what the government was getting for it. He chuckled to himself, thinking he might not even need to resort to blackmail.

  Around the table, Nathan Jacobs was watching the presentation, nodding approvingly at a list that was currently on screen, displaying the benefits of the GigaStar program. He blinked when the screen suddenly changed, and began to show a window of plain text rapidly scrolling down.

  Representative Harris put her glasses back on, and peered closer at the screen. The list of benefits, many of them very worthwhile, had been replaced by something that looked like the screen of her speechwriter’s word processor when she was in the middle of writing. Words flowed down the screen faster than any normal person could type – almost, but not quite, too fast to read.

  >Multiple subjects acquired

  >Subject D.W. TILMAN reacquired; identified from file.

  >Identified input from subject one: "Won’t he ever shut up?"

  >Identified input from subject eight: "I’ll have to leave in five minutes if I want to make my committee meeting on time."

  >Subject eleven feels boredom.

  >Subject one feels confusion

  >Subject eight feels confusion.

  >Subject four feels curiosity.

  >Subject eleven feels confusion

  >Subject nine feels confusion.

  >Subject two feels curiosity.

  >Subject two self identifies as JULIA HARRIS.

  >Identified input from subject D.W. TILMAN: "It’s working!"

  >Subject three feels confusion.

  >Identified input from subject D.W. TILMAN: "They’re falling for it!"

  >Identified input from subject D.W. TILMAN: "nate has no idea he believes carlos’s story."

  >Subject ten feels confusion.

  >Subject four self identifies as NATHAN JACOBS.

  >Subject NATHAN JACOBS feels strong interest in object to front.

  >Subject eight feels strong interest in object to front.

  >Subject JULIA HARRIS feels mild fear.

  >Identified input from subject D.W. TILMAN: "Jacobs has no idea."


  >Identified input from subject NATHAN JACOBS: "It’s the GigaStar."

  >Subject NATHAN JACOBS feels outrage.

  >Subject NATHAN JACOBS feels betrayal.

  >Identified input from subject NATHAN JACOBS: "I’ll have him locked away for so long…"

  Tilman smiled as he concluded his speech. "So that’s it, everyone. It’s a program that will deliver real, quantifiable benefits for the NSA. Yes, it has some cost associated with it, but for the benefit to our law enforcement officers, it’s more than worth it."

  Still watching his audience, Tilman now squinted a little bit, and looked around curiously. The attention he’d been getting seemed to be distracted now, and people were no longer looking at him as he spoke. "I hope I’ve covered most of the concerns people had, but if any of you have questions I’d be…"

  He trailed off, unable to go on speaking. The room was practically in an uproar now, as the Representatives around the table began to mutter and whisper to one another. Tilman listened, trying to figure out what was going on, but all he could catch was the occasional snippet: "…something’s obviously gone wrong…" "is that thing what I think it is?" "…It can’t possibly…" "…what is Tilman playing…"

  Finally, he saw something that was easy to interpret. One of the Congressman flat out pointed at the display screen behind him, trying to get a colleague’s attention. Tilman turned around to look too.

  His blood ran cold. His stomach felt worse than on the bumpiest plane ride. D.W. Tilman saw what was on his screen, and at the same time he saw his life flash before his eyes. There it sat, his GigaStar log of the entire conversation, right on the giant video wall for everyone to read. And read it they obviously had. He turned back around, and saw Michael Vincent opening the door to his office and stepping in. Mike looked bedraggled, in a suit coat he’d been wearing for days and slacks that he’d been dragged around unconscious in. He looked bad, but he certainly didn’t look dead. Which could only mean Carlos had failed. Which meant there were witnesses out there who could tell the truth, even if everyone hadn’t read it on the big screen.