The Gillespie Five (A Political / Conspiracy Novel) - Book 1 (42)

by T. K. Harris

  Please, no more.

  The door opened and Tommy tried to rise like the guards expected. Instead he was seized with uncontrollable shivers. The guards came toward him and Tommy braced himself for the blow he knew was coming.

  "Leave him. And leave us." The unfamiliar voice was female. At least he thought so, but his mind had been playing tricks on him.

  Tommy opened his eyes. From his prone position he saw a small woman in a white coat, carrying a bag. She stood, waiting as the guards hesitantly filed out of the cell, closing the door behind them. For just a second he thought he'd seen a flash of fear in one of the guard's eyes as he had glanced at the doctor.

  Once the door was firmly shut, the woman made her way to his bedside, setting her bag down on the floor beside his bed. She had dark blond hair, cut short, and the brightest blue eyes he had ever seen. He couldn't figure out her age, but from the way she carried herself he figured she must be at least in her late twenties or early thirties. She smiled at him as he tried to rise. "You're fine. Just lay there quietly. My name is Dr. Lyndsay. How are you feeling?"

  Tommy started to respond when another spasm of coughing took him. The doctor gently rubbed his back until the coughing subsided and then helped him sit. Once he seemed steady, she reached in her bag and pulled out a bottle of water. "They said you weren't feeling well and I think that was an understatement. Here, drink this. When you're ready, I'm going to check a few things okay?"

  She opened the bottle and helped Tommy drink. When he finished she said, "Now I need you to take off your shirt."

  He tried to do as she asked when another coughing fit caught him. Dr. Lyndsay waited until he stopped and then reached over to help him. A part of him shied away, embarrassed to need someone's help to undress – especially a strange woman – but he was too weak to give into the embarrassment.

  With his shirt off, Tommy collapsed against the wall behind his bed, exhausted. He was having a tough time keeping his eyes open as the doctor began methodically checking his pulse, blood pressure, heart beat and breathing, all while keeping up a steady stream of conversation. He was also finding it difficult to concentrate on her words. He thought she asked him a question and tried to respond but found his tongue had become too thick.

  A sharp prick in his arm was quickly followed by a second and then a third, but he found he really didn't care. Everything seemed to suddenly be coming from very far away.

  Relax. Just relax.

  He wasn't sure if she had spoken or he had thought it, but it sounded like a good idea.

  001000000110111101100110001000000111010001101000

  Dr. Lyndsay watched, waiting for the kid's breathing to stabilize before giving him the next shot, the one that would bring him to the surface just enough to let her do what they had brought her here to do. As she waited, she took in his bruised body wondering why they always brought her in only after they had done something like this. Brute tactics that they knew rarely worked.

  His breathing steadied and she gave him the shot, hoping it wasn't too late. If they had managed to break him already, there would be nothing she could to do to help them get the information they wanted.

  Chapter Eleven

  Alex spent the morning working from home, trying to remain calm as he waited to get access to Tommy’s dorm room. Two days of waiting hadn’t helped his agitation, and he had found himself reaching more than once for his phone, on the edge of not caring what flags he raised. But he’d waited. And waited.

  To fill his time, he worked on some long overdue tasks he usually put off. He also put out a few tentative feelers to see if there had been any recent FBI stings on hackers that, for whatever reason, his team hadn’t been brought in on.

  When his brother finally called, Alex was halfway through a bagel and in the middle of an online conversation with one of his managers. He left both without hesitation and was already sprinting to his car before he heard more than a ‘hello’ from Ken. It wasn't until he had pulled out of the parking lot and was on the road that he realized his brother was still talking.

  "Alex, did you hear me?"

  "Sure, Ken. What did you say?"

  He could hear his older brother's sigh over the phone and had to force down the little kid brother's immediate response of satisfaction. He was more mature than that. Most of the time.

  "I said that they apparently haven't leased out the room yet and that you can have access to it, but you have to go through their security office and someone there will take you."

  "Not a problem."

  "For the umpteenth time, what are you hoping to find?"

  "Let's just say I need time to 'meditate' and see if I can put myself in Tommy's shoes. I don't care what you tell them, but I need at least fifteen minutes."

  "Fine."

  Alex could have pulled his own strings to get access to Tommy’s room but that might have raised flags he wasn’t ready to raise yet. If the FBI did tag Tommy and take his computer, they may not have noticed something that wasn't exactly standard in a dorm room. Especially if it had been hidden.

  "Have the police said anything else about Ben's story?"

  "No."

  Alex could hear his brother's frustration. He still couldn’t believe the police were hesitant to make the connection. "What about your PI?"

  "He hasn’t found anything either, although he’s going to talk to the Bevel family soon. He still seems skeptical though."

  "Ya, but you're paying him."

  "True. We'll see. Whatever you're up to, Alex, I hope it works. We need to find Tommy."

  The sound of despair in Ken's voice shot straight through Alex. He missed his nephew a great deal but it couldn’t possibly compare to what it must be like for his father.

  "I'll do everything I can, bro."

  He hung up just as he was pulling into the campus parking lot. Locating the main administrative building he headed to the security office, only to be greeted by one of the college faculty members who said she would be escorting him instead.

  Not wanting to draw undue attention, he asked no questions as he followed her across campus to one of the brown, two-story dorm buildings and up the stairs to the second floor. When she stopped in front of one of the doors and opened it, he thanked her and asked if he could have a few minutes alone in Tommy’s room. He schooled his expression into that of a concerned relative as he explained he was hoping that by putting himself in the last place Tommy may have been, he might be able to figure out where he had gone. He wasn’t sure if she bought his story, but she nodded, giving him a few words of sympathy and then stepped back to let him in.

  He waited a moment, taking a quick look around as he listened to her receding footsteps, before heading to a set of built in wall shelves and a small hidden compartment he had helped Tommy build. He smiled when he removed the cover and found exactly what he was looking for.

  Turning on his phone's wireless option he quickly located the special wireless access point he had acquired for Tommy. Once connected, he scanned the router. What he found brought another smile to his face. "Good job, kid," he said as he began downloading the logs created by a customized program he had also given Tommy.

  The program gave Tommy the ability to accurately log all incoming and outgoing traffic in order to help him on a research paper for one of his forensics/tracing classes. The software was something Alex's group had designed and wasn't publicly available. And it would tell him exactly where Tommy had been online the days before he disappeared.

  Once he had completed his download, Alex turned off his phone's wireless, covered the router back up and left. Nodding at the woman who had let him in, he turned and headed to his car, forwarding the download to his friend and colleague, Jason, along with a cryptic note.

  Which one of these doesn't belong?

  01101111011101010110011101101000011101000010000001101001

  Agent Stone watched Alex exit the building before pulling out her cell and placing a call to her supervisor, Special Ag
ent Wilson.

  "Someone just came by. Knew exactly where the router was located."

  "Who?"

  "The kid's uncle."

  "Have we run a background check on him yet?"

  "No, just the parents."

  "Start a background check. Let's see where that leads us."

  "Should I leave the router?"

  "For now. See what else we catch. Put a junior agent on watch."

  Sighing with relief, she hung up the phone, pulling on the constricting turtle neck she wore. She was anxious to be out of the dull clothes that faculty people seemed to wear no matter what college campus you visited. For what seemed like an eternity, she had been stuck here waiting for just this moment and was itching to get back into the field. Even if it meant doing something as tame as a background check.

  Chapter Twelve

  Alex pulled up to the security gate at work, waving his badge at the guard. Once through, he drove down the main road and turned right at the intersection of three small side roads, all of which led to other facilities.

  Stopping in front of a three story, non-descript concrete building, he parked in his designated spot and headed inside. His mind was racing as he greeted several of his colleagues with a distracted ‘hello’ and continued to his office. Once inside, he closed the door and began plugging in his laptop, trying to decide what he was going to do to keep sane while he waited for Jason’s response. When nothing interesting immediately presented itself, he decided to finish working on the mind numbing tasks that had to be done and he had used to fill the past several days with.

  Alex took out one of his encrypted flash drives and plugged it into his laptop before logging in. He then logged in to the three other machines at his desk. Each machine got its own encrypted flash drive. All his data – work and personal information – was kept on encrypted flash drives that only he had the keys too. These were all backed up regularly on another set of flash drives, stored safely elsewhere. By doing this, he ensured that nothing important was ever stored on a single device that someone might get access to. And, if anyone ever got a hold of his flash drives, they’d have a hell of a time decrypting them.

  Alex knew this because he had personally developed the algorithm to secure his information, and then handed it off to several people to try and break. Five years later, there were people at the NSA and other organizations still trying, and many who had suggested he submit his algorithm to be considered as the next ISO standard for encryption. Which of course he would never do. Alex didn’t create the algorithm to be ogled by strangers and judged worthy or not. He already knew it was worthy. He had simply created it for the same reason most hackers and coders did anything. He’d done it for the challenge.

  Alex had just signed into one of their office's many anonymizing servers, which masked his originating IP address behind a series of other IPs, when there was a knock on his door.

  "Come in."

  Bill Morrison, the company's lead computer forensics specialist, popped his balding head in.

  "Ya, what's up?"

  "Not much. Just noticed you’re in late when you're usually the first one here, and that you seemed distracted more than usual. Any news on your nephew? Or something else I could help with?"

  Alex shook his head. "Nothing yet. And, thanks, but I'm good. Just trying to concentrate and get next week's schedule together."

  Bill gave him a long look before slowly nodding his head. "Fair enough. Well, there are donuts in the break room if you're interested."

  "Thanks."

  Bill began to close the door when Alex thought of something. "Hey, Bill."

  "Ya."

  "We planning any stings or investigations with the FBI?"

  Bill cocked his head for a minute, then said, "No. Not that I know of. There was supposed to be one a few weeks ago, but for some reason they went with another group. Not even sure if they executed it or not."

  "You have any data on that?"

  "I can see. Why do you ask?"

  "Just curious. Seems like I remember something in the pipeline and maybe that was it."

  "Sure. I'll send you what I have and ask around as well."

  "Thanks."

  Alex waited until the door closed, then began logging on to the many chatrooms he frequented as part of his job. At this time of day the forums and chatrooms would mostly be populated by teens and people from countries whose time zones put them at night. Countries where many of their problem people came from.

  Next he started a scanning program that checked for certain key words and phrases, and would alert him when it found any of these in the chats. While the messages from each chatroom scrolled on one of his three monitors, Alex turned his attention to the schedule.

  There were fourteen people under his management in a group of the NCCIC that served as a sort of unofficial ‘fifth’ branch. It was a relatively new special response group that Alex had worked two years to create when he realized that there was a gap in the services the NCCIC agency provided. It had taken another year after its inception to actually establish the group, time taken to work out everything from their official/unofficial mission statement to even arguments about where the group should be located. But settling the last argument was a no-brainer for Alex, who already knew, after he had visited his brother, where he wanted to be. There had been nothing like the ever changing views of the Rocky Mountains or the drives and hikes he’d had a chance to take during his visit. All it took was a few trips for the people with the check books and some well-placed facts about the strategy of using Colorado and, five years after the initial idea, the group was thriving in Denver. The agency had even brought in a few other people to represent the other four official branches of NCCIC.

  Dubbed 'The Misfits', his group's particular specialty, and primary responsibility, was trouble-shooting any non-military government systems that may have been corrupted or compromised in any way. It was his team's responsibility to cover the West Coast area and bring up any downed government systems, recover data, trace the root cause and try to prevent future issues. If the problem was crime related, they would work with the FBI to trace the perpetrator and their method of gaining access to the systems. At least that was their unofficial, official responsibility. What they really did, he could never talk about.

  Had he not been so concerned over the disappearance of this nephew, Alex would have worn his usual smile at the thought of their covert mission statement. There were many times in his travels to countries like Afghanistan, Iran, and Israel - among others - that still made Alex feel a bit like a kid playing spy.

  Alex's security computer, isolated on its own physical landline, beeped. Double-clicking to bring up the email, he automatically checked to identify the sender. He was not surprised to find the sender was marked anonymous. His group owed a lot to hackers who wrote in about potential security threats, ones they had usually already exploited. They were called Robin Hoods, or greyhats like Alex. Thanks to his job, he was allowed to walk the fine line between being a black and whitehat hacker without the risk of being arrested. Not only did it help him do his job better, it allowed him to form links to key hacker communities and individuals. This, in turn, opened opportunities for him to receive information that would otherwise be nearly impossible to obtain. He was good at his job for a reason.

  Of course the sharing street ran two ways. There were many times Alex had helped out hackers when they got in trouble. Using the handle, gr@yg@nd01f, he had helped run raids, alert some of the minor players to lay low when he knew his team was about to do a sting, and even helped bail out some hackers by pulling strings. Though they didn’t know who he really was or what he did, gr@yg@nd01f had managed to earn a degree of acceptance and respect in the hacker community.

  Determining that this email involved a security issue within the NASA network, he quickly forwarded it to the appropriate group before turning to complete his schedule.

  Once that was done, he started checking into the va
rious chatrooms. In each group he had a different handle which allowed him to relate in different capacities in each forum. He was in the middle of working with a group who was planning an attack on what he knew was a relatively innocuous system when his phone rang.

  "Alex speaking."

  "Simple alert script sending automated request to ISPs to access IP and location information."

  It was Jason.

  Used to Jason's penchant for cryptic speech, he asked, "Typical CALEA compliance request?"

  "Yep."

  CALEA or the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act was a provision put into place that called for internet service providers – ISPs – to install specific protocols and programs that allowed various law enforcement agencies to be able to track down possible suspects in ever increasing complex phone, internet and VOIP systems.

  "FBI?"

  "Maybe. Definitely not civilian."

  "So could Tommy have stumbled on it by accident?"

  Jason snorted. "The way a drunk stumbles into a bar maybe."

  Alex sighed. He was afraid Tommy might have been doing some rogue hacking on his own.

  "Did he not use any anonymizing servers before he hacked the site?"

  "Definitely. But not enough."

  "So how hard was it to get to the site?"

  "Slightly amped up child’s play."

  In Jason speak – for who most hacks were child’s play – this meant that it was at least a moderately difficult hack.

  "Anything else he accessed that might have gotten him in trouble?"

  "It was the last thing he accessed. Illegally anyway."

  "Anything important on the site then?"

  "Nope. Only node on the network. Obvious honeypot."

  Alex swore. A honeypot was any type of computer, data or network site that masqueraded as a legitimate part of a given network but was in actuality a trap. In this particular case, with the honeypot being the only thing on the network, it meant that someone had set this up for no other reason than to catch some flies.