by Chris Knopf
So even though I didn’t have the chops that came from hours at the keyboard poking and prodding at security walls, I did understand the principles and best practices of your everyday successful hacker.
With these thoughts, I stood at the base of the data fortress that enclosed the Dirección General de la Policía y de la Guardia Civil, the governing authority of the Guardia Civil, and peeked in.
The first option was to select English translations, which I summarily rejected. Only the thinnest layer of information would be available in anything but Spanish. I moved through the outer layer quickly, arriving at the first guarded portal. Instead of testing the lock, I used standard commands to open up the hard code.
It was in a programming language I understood reasonably well, and the person who had written it was reasonably artful and efficient. This was good and bad, since a sloppier hand would have left more inefficiencies to exploit.
I settled in for several hours, studying every line of code and learning the rhythm of the program, searching for a way to get through the web-based layer and into the databases that lay behind.
It didn’t happen that day, or that night, but eventually I stumbled over a string of code that delivered an administrative shortcut, and like throwing the switch on a teleporter, I flicked into a new server, a new database and a new reality. Then promptly hit a wall.
Where the layer I’d just pushed through was likely handled by an outsourced service, possibly offshore, the enterprise servers had been built up over years with the heavy hand of security clearly present. It made sense. It’s what you’d find in any corporate database.
But at least I was partially in, and had access to the file structure, some of the directories, and other peripheral information. I could study that, which I did for another four days.
I apologized to Natsumi for disappearing so long into cyberspace, but she would have none of it.
“This is a big city. The Prada alone can take four days to explore. I have no complaints.”
Another way I look at the current state of large-order IT is you have an enterprise system, usually with big data management capabilities, living at the core. I see this as the mother ship, around which swarm dozens, sometimes hundreds, of subsystems that are linked in through a variety of channels. I knew this to be the structural nightmare facing security people, charged with keeping the core impregnable, yet allowing all these motley websites, servers and applications, over which they had little control, to interconnect.
This was my next angle of attack. I started searching for pathways from the data center in Madrid out to the local command posts and their subsidiaries spread out across the country.
I assumed that interoffice communications would be the least secure, given the sadly false expectation that threats mostly come from outside. But not in this case. Somewhere on the IT staff sat a very clever, hard-nosed functionary responsible for internal security who took the job very seriously. I mentally tipped my hat, and shifted over to nodes less likely to fall under his domain.
And that’s where I found the wormhole. Some enterprising tourist bureau in a small town in Valencia had teamed up with the community affairs director of the local Guardia Civil—who was looking to polish up the comandancia’s public image—to start a common website. You could go there and not only discover exciting tourist attractions, but also get pointers on safe driving and all the public services your hometown guardias provided.
The site used a content management system that allowed access by both the tourist bureau and the police via identical passwords. The first step was to crack into the tourist bureau’s email server through a simple phishing exercise. That gave me the user name of the site’s webmaster. I used this to ask the CMS to send me a new password. The second the email hit the admin’s mailbox, I copied the new password and deleted the email. I entered the login information and dove into the administrative files.
As hoped for, the CMS had several directories through which I could connect with the operating system on the server that ran the comandancia’s management system. I found the screen where I could give myself full administrative privileges, which laid bare every file on the server, including personnel.
Of all the files, this was the one most likely to be linked back to the core system, since a central operation would have to handle the bulk of the administrative requirements.
I was moving fast, driven both from the thrill of the chase and the fear that an alarm was about to go off on the desk of that wily internal security guy in Madrid, who could block me out in an instant, or shut the server down entirely.
Fortunately, that wasn’t going to happen, though I didn’t know that then, my nervous system crackling with a mixture of excitement and dread. Or disappointment, as when I reached a request form to obtain copies of personnel files. I requested the one belonging to Colonel Domingo Angel and was denied access. There was no getting around this one, and I shouldn’t have been surprised. There was likely no more sacrosanct repository than a ranking officer’s personnel file.
But I searched on, now several hours into the exploration, my eyes watering and my wrists and fingers literally cramping up. Natsumi came in the room a few times, bringing in tea and sandwiches and bottled water. If I’d asked her to, she would have pressed wet washcloths to my brow or massaged the kinks out of my shoulders and back. But a light hug was all I asked for and all she dispensed, and I was happy for that.
Then, as often happens, a mundane little function showed itself, at first so innocuous as to be invisible, but then it hit me like a bolt.
It was in a series of search links, along with things like Locate Post, Locate Communications Staff, Locate Regional Dispatch, Locate Animal Control, there was one simple link, Locate Retired Officer.
Two clicks later I had the P.O. Box, telephone number and email address of Colonel Domingo Angel.
“PACK YOUR bag,” I told Natsumi. “We’re going back to France.”
“The Côte d’Azur?”
“Close. Aix-en-Provence. A few hundred miles west of the Cap. Up in the hills.”
“One of the coordinates?” she asked.
“No. Retirement home of Colonel Angel. I think.”
“You cracked it.”
“More or less. I couldn’t get his file, but I have a P.O. Box in Aix, a cell phone number and an email address. It’s a good start.”
“Is there anything you don’t know how to do?”
“You don’t have to know. You just have to find.”
I DECIDED to drive there from Madrid. My reasoning was complicated, and not wholly reasonable. After being cooped up for most of the month in that residential hotel room, I longed for fresh air and open spaces—not to be trapped in the confines of shuttle buses, waiting areas and passenger cabins.
And I couldn’t take another gauntlet of security checks, with stern uniformed officials staring down at our passports, then over at us from behind bullet-proof glass; black-shoed sadists wielding electronic wands and shoving us through Orwellian X-ray machines; those tense moments before takeoff when a member of the ground crew comes aboard and whispers to a flight attendant.
Crossing the border by car wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t the same.
For our car I chose an Opel Insignia, thinking it was a good size, comfortable, yet unassuming. I had no technical basis whatsoever for my assessment, but that was the mood I was in.
After cramming the car full of our luggage and gear, I checked out and we fought our way through the city traffic; and with Natsumi and her smartphone in navigation mode, we were soon soaring across the tawny, windswept plains of Castilla-La Mancha.
“Seems to be an appropriate part of the country to be driving through, given the odds of a successful venture,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Don Quixote.”
“Never read it.”
“Just as well. You’d likely think the guy was an idiot.”
“Do you read books, Arthur? I
mean, did you?”
So much of our time together was spent demarcating our lives before and after I was shot, and before she was tossed unwittingly into the world that shooting had created.
“I read everything. Everything that kept my attention past the first page. No bias, no patterns. Fiction, nonfiction, coffee table books, newspapers, technical papers, magazine articles, cereal boxes, instruction manuals, pamphlets from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was a professional researcher. Information was my stock in trade—and a lifelong obsession, which explains the profession.”
“Is that still you?” she asked, in the guileless way she often did.
I looked at her so she could see my face when I answered. “It is. I just haven’t had the time to read.”
How could I explain to her that the hurtling, bobsled run of our lives together bore no resemblance to the life I once led? She was a very smart woman. She got it intellectually. But her experience gave her no context for understanding.
“What about you?” I asked. “You haven’t dealt a single hand of blackjack since I hid you out in my apartment in West Hartford. You don’t get the urge?”
“Blackjack was my night job. By day I wrote research papers on Münchausen Syndrome by Proxy for my degree in psychology. That’s when a mother, usually not a father, makes her kid sick so she can get lots of attention from medical professionals. I think I liked the subject because my mother always told everyone I was the perfect picture of health, even when I was hacking up my lungs with the flu.”
“You revere your mother,” I said.
“I do. She had to toughen me up for life, but she would never let anything really bad happen to me.”
“My sister made all the health decisions in my family. From the time she was about eight.”
“Quite a kid,” she said.
“She’s now a cardiologist, as you know. My parents were uneducated, but smart enough to listen to their kids, who were.”
“My real father died before I had a chance to know him. He was working on a high-rise office building and fell off a scaffold. It takes over ten minutes to walk the distance he traveled in just a few seconds. My mother told me he was an honorable man, but nowhere near as fun as Chief Warrant Officer Jimmy Fitzgerald.”
I looked over at her again. She had her head on the headrest and her eyes closed. A small, slim person, barely a hundred pounds soaking wet, she still managed to take up a lot of the cubic footage of whatever space she occupied.
“You miss him,” I said.
“I do. He was a drunk, but a happy drunk. While other drinkers got nasty, he just wanted to give away his money, what little he had. And ya can’t love people any more than Jimmy Fitzgerald loved me and me mum,” she added, in a perfect Irish brogue.
THE DECISION to drive was a good one for about two hundred miles. We were up on a plateau with nothing but high plains covered in grey green grass to either side, mountains in the distance and wind-roiled clouds overhead, when from out of nowhere a black and white Nissan Patrol SUV with the bar of blue lights on the roof hysterically alight filled the rearview mirror.
I pulled over. Both guardias got out of the Nissan. One approached my door, the other stood behind the trunk of our car. Both men stood unsteadily in the fierce winds that blew across the plateau, their white shirts rippling like sea waves. The guy at our car door asked in Spanish for my driver’s license. Then when I handed him the North Carolina version I’d used to rent the car, he asked in thickly accented English for our passports. He stood back from the car and studied the passports, holding his hat against the wind, then leaned into the window.
“Leave the vehicle, please,” he said.
We stepped out into a warm wind blowing well over twenty knots. It made it hard to hear the cop’s questions.
“Where is your destination?” he asked.
“Cerbère,” I said. “We’re traveling to France.”
“For business?”
“And pleasure. We’re touring Spain on our way to an academic conference,” I said in Spanish.
He frowned at that, as if I’d given the wrong answer. He was a tall man, with a doughy face and caved-in chest. His partner, standing several paces away, was shorter and thicker, and better looking. His gaze was fixed on Natsumi and he’d drawn his service weapon from its holster.
“What is in the car?” the tall guy asked.
“Luggage and electronic equipment. I’m a computer scientist guest-lecturing here in Europe.”
The wind was making mischief with Natsumi’s silk tank top, forcing her to clench her midsection. The short cop told her to take her hands away, waving at her with the barrel of his semiautomatic.
“Hey,” I said, “what the hell.”
Natsumi held her arms away from her body, allowing the tank top to flap around her torso and at brief moments expose her white bra.
“Why weren’t you wearing your seat belt?” the tall guy asked me.
“I was. So was my wife.”
“That’s not what we observed. We can confiscate this vehicle and hold you at our post for questioning,” he said in English.
“We’re just traveling through,” I answered in Spanish. “We will be sure to have our seat belts on for the rest of the trip.”
“He should go and the woman should come with us,” said the short cop, throwing in the Spanish equivalent of “Chink.”
“I’m not a Chink,” said Natsumi. “I’m a Jap.”
“I’m a scientist with associations throughout the global community. They know my travel plans. I’m expected in France tomorrow. If I don’t show up, there will be international attention.”
The tall cop didn’t seem impressed, though a bit undecided.
“Let me see this equipment.”
I opened the trunk and showed him the laptops, monitors, video cameras and various external devices. I gave a running commentary, much of it made up, that I hoped gave the regular gear an enhanced stature. I was fairly sure he had no idea what I was talking about.
He made me open our luggage, which he rummaged through until I couldn’t re-zipper the bags. Along the way he pulled out a pair of Natsumi’s panties, which he showed to his partner.
“See?” said the short cop, “I still think we should take the woman. She’s suspicious. We need to talk to her in private.”
Apparently satisfied with his search, the tall cop stuffed Natsumi’s underwear back into her bag and slammed the trunk.
“You need to obey the laws of our country, Señor,” he said. “That includes wearing your seat belt.”
“We will.”
He looked over at his partner, whose gaze seemed permanently fixed on Natsumi’s midsection.
“He’s young and far from home,” he said to me in English. “They get over it.”
“Just keep an eye on him,” I answered, also in English. “Some day when you’re not around, he’s going to do something you’ll regret.”
“No lectures from you, Americano,” he said. “Feel lucky you and the Señora get to go to France.”
With that they got into the Nissan and roared back onto the highway, tires spinning on the gravel shoulder, then burning over the paved surface. Natsumi and I watched as it disappeared into the horizon.
“Well,” she said, “that was interesting.”
“Are you okay?”
“Assholes.”
“I memorized the license plate.”
“And?”
“And we’ll see.”
CHAPTER 10
The trip across the rest of Spain to Cerbère was smooth as silk. As soon as we crossed the border and sailed into the coastal zest of Languedoc—western Mediterranean France—I felt like an invisible weight had been lifted from my heart. A menace expunged.
With a bit of survivor’s élan, we sped over hills and through fields and vineyards with the windows open and the radio playing music that would have been unrecognizable to me no matter where it played, though Natsumi had a different
perspective.
“That’s Eskmo in San Fran and Mala from London. Circa twenty eleven dubstep get-real-on-the-dance-floor music. Where you been, boy?” Natsumi asked, with just a touch of condescension.
“In a coma, okay?”
“Not the whole time. And it didn’t make any difference anyway. You still wouldn’t know anything.”
“Okay, but I really was in a coma.”
I purposely avoided the four-lane superhighway that could have rocketed us to the eastern side of the coast in favor of a circuitous ramble through the hills and verdant fields, endless vineyards and medieval villages—sometimes not much more than piles of organized stone with colorful modern signs—that graced our passage.
Driven by hunger and hopeful despite the late hour, we stopped at a hotel that promised fine food procured entirely from an area less than a mile in any direction from the hotel lobby. Of course it was closed. I rang the bell on the front desk anyway.
“Can we possibly buy some food?” I said in my lousy French to the old, bent woman who poked her head through the curtain behind the desk. “We are traveling and very hungry.”
“Stay in the hotel and I’ll get the old man up to give you anything you want,” she said. “Otherwise, eat the trees.”
Seemed like a reasonable arrangement.
The old man, Monsieur Prefontaine, was so delighted to have two hungry, culinarily unsophisticated Americans to shower with specialties of the house, that we nearly expired from overeating. It would have helped to know that the bourride sètoise—fish stew—followed by pan-seared fois gras set on caramelized arbutus berry jus, then by turbot roasted in a verbena infusion with crushed cooked apples and lemon, and a chicken baked in a basket of woven pine needles, represented only a partial sampling of a multi-course meal, most of which was on the house.
