Dragonfly Bones

by David Cole

  18

  Back in the parking lot, Brittles opened the doors to let out some of the heat.

  “You’re getting kinda pink,” he said.

  I picked up the Aquitek baseball hat, wiped my forehead. The hat fit so easily on my short hair I had to take it off, rub the hair for the umpteenth time.

  “Annie Lennox,” he said. “I’m old enough to remember.”

  “Just turn on the aircon.”

  “We’re just going across the street.”

  “The call center is over there?” I asked, eying what looked like trailers or temporary buildings behind a fence.

  “Nope. Come on.”

  “We’re walking?”

  “Put the hat back on.”

  Across the road, Brittles went up to a solid chain-link doorway and pressed a call button. As though waiting for us, a man in khaki dress slacks and a green Polo shirt came up to check our ID.

  “Friedlander,” he said, satisfied. “CIU. Car’s over here.”

  “He doesn’t say much,” I said quietly to Brittles as Friedlander went quickly ahead of us to an old white Taurus with almost two hundred thousand miles on the odometer.

  “He’s a detective.”

  “Working with us?”

  “Nope. He’s my contact here to escort us into the call center.”

  We drove slowly past the main complex, headed east.

  “Why do you have horses?” I asked Friedlander as we drove by a stable.

  “Pursuit,” he said shortly. “Chase horses. Haven’t been used in years. State would save a lot of money by disbanding the unit. But I guess some idiot in the director’s office must like horses.”

  “You mean, they chase whoever escapes?” I asked.

  “Nobody escapes from this place. Not on my watch, anyway.”

  We drove another few miles past several other complex buildings and a maintenance garage, dipped around a sharp S-curve over a narrow bridge, finally arriving at a guard post. Friedlander stopped, showed the guard his ID. The guard flicked his eyes over me, asked for ID from Brittles, then waved us through.

  “This is Eyman Complex,” Friedlander said.

  More gates. More COs. More prison units. More sally ports. And, finally, a large one-story building with galvanized siding and a shiny new microwave dish atop a tarpaper roof. I recognized the dish immediately as an Internet uplink. Friedlander escorted us into the building, waiting while IDs were checked again, and left us in a makeshift sally port area looking out on a sea of waist-high cubicles with clear plastic walls. Although each cubicle had a computer, only a third were occupied.

  “That Friedlander doesn’t talk much,” Brittles said.

  I paid no attention, recognizing the computers.

  “Let’s get to these machines,” I said. “I’ve had enough of people.”

  “Wait. There’s a protocol everywhere in this prison.”

  “And I’m yours,” a voice said behind us. “Miss Winslow, I’ve admired your work for years. I’m Shane Caraveo.”

  Now, that I don’t like. People knowing who I am. No, that’s not quite right. A lot of people in the hacker world know my name, but almost nobody would be able to recognize my face. My face flushed with anger, but before I could say anything he held up a large folder, the cover turned back to show a picture of me in my Aquitek uniform. Puzzling, since the picture was obviously of me, but I’d never posed for it.

  “Let me show you around.”

  The three of us went up to a narrow catwalk around the work center, and Brittles stayed in a corner to talk with an armed CO. I could hear the muted whispers of voices, none of them distinct.

  “Here’s the setup,” Caraveo explained. “It’s a closed, secure network. Three dozen workstations cabled by ethernet to a server farm over in that locked cage.”

  “Workstations?”

  “Yes. Like the old terminal and server setups. No hard drives, no floppy or CD drives. Motherboards very simple, designed to connect the workstation to the server, run the dedicated software. Workstation box also houses the monitor. Only things outside the box are keyboards and mice.”

  “Network cards?”

  “Nope. All the hardware is on the motherboards. Actually, an inmate designed them. Have you seen inmate TV sets?”

  “Clear plastic cases.”

  “Same here,” Caraveo said. I inched along the catwalk, wanting a closer look at how the operators worked. “Uh, Miss Winslow, don’t move by yourself.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Look across the room.”

  The armed CO held his AR-15 loosely at his side, the barrel pointing at me.

  “I’ll take you down on the floor. I’ll even let you talk with a few inmates. But at all times, I have to be with you. You can’t move independently. All the time, remember where you are.”

  “But these people must be serving minor sentences,” I protested.

  “Two counts of murder.” Caraveo pointed at one man. “Murder, arson.” Pointing at another. “Armed robbery, assault. It’s not the crime. It’s the behavior. Every inmate at Florence is rated according to risk factors, to make it simple. In the main complex you visited earlier, almost every unit there holds level fives. Maximum security. These men here are all level threes. Lower risk.”

  “Who built the system?”

  “Our company. We’re based in Miami. Call centers, help centers, catalog centers, that’s all we do. Hardware assembled in China to our specifications. I wrote the database programs. I lived in Finland for a while, worked with anonymous email resenders over there, before the religious nuts shut us down. That’s how I know your name. We handled some of your accounts. Years ago. Five years ago, I think.”

  Well. A lot has changed in five years, I thought. Including my reputation, since I didn’t remember routing anything through Finland because Japanese networks were notoriously insecure.

  “So. What do you want to see first? What’s in the cage?”

  “This whole place is a cage,” I said.

  “Yeah. Well. The small server farm is down in that cage. I meant, do you want to see the servers, or the operators?”

  “Downstairs.”

  “I won’t introduce you to anybody. Don’t make eye contact. You are, after all, a woman. These guys don’t see many women, except a CO with a gun or a taser.”

  He reached to my shirt lapels and I slapped his hands away.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “Fasten your top button. Pull your cap tight. Look official. Look like you know what you’re doing and do it quickly.”

  He led me down the metal staircase and across metal flooring into the maze of cubicles, stopping at one that wasn’t occupied. I sat in a surprisingly comfortable chair, adjusted myself to the keyboard, flexing my fingers.

  “Good ergonomics,” I said.

  “They are people,” Caraveo answered. “Whatever other punishment they get in here, my company won’t give them carpal tunnel problems or bad backs.”

  Inside its case, the workstation hardware consisted of just the motherboard and the monitor tube.

  “No fan?”

  “These guys. They take motors apart, they make things from them. Keys, shanks. They use the wire from motors for lots of things.”

  Three cables ran out the back of the case, all of them anchored inside, all running down and underneath the metal flooring. I knelt on the floor, saw how the cables went through a tight rubber grommet. I tugged on the white power cable. It didn’t move. Nor did the blue ethernet cable. Some small slack in what looked like standard telephone wire.

  “Anchored underneath,” Caraveo said. “No inmate can get to the cabling. If we have problems, we just unbolt some of the cubicle partitions, then there’s a special key that unlocks the metal flooring plates.”

  “And everything runs to your servers?”

  “Not the power cables, no. They’re connected in nodes under the cubicles. All the ethernet cabling goes through a couple of routers, a
n electronic switch, then to the servers.”

  “And how do people input the information?” I couldn’t see any telephones. “How do they even get the calls?”

  “Headsets. Plug in here.”

  He showed me a plug on the side of the workstation.

  “All in one box,” he said. “Like everybody in here. All packaged in a box.”

  “Show me how it works.”

  Caraveo took me past the empty cubicles toward the other end of the room. We stopped outside and slightly behind a cubicle. A thickset black man slouched comfortably in his chair, his voice barely louder than a murmur, his fingers flying across the keyboard. He moved his eyes to the side, knowing somebody was behind him, but not looking around.

  “Yes, Miss Sampson. That item is currently in stock at twenty-four dollars and ninety-five cents. What is your next item?”

  Hardly a big-ticket sale, I thought.

  “Thank you, Miss Sampson. Please give me your address and a telephone number, area code first.”

  I watched him key in the data, all of it displaying on the screen. He misspelled the city name, “Phenix,” moved his cursor into the word, correctly typed “Phoenix,” and then the telephone number. I started to say something, but Caraveo nudged my arm and shook his head, then bobbed his head forward to the monitor.

  “And how will you be paying for this today, Miss Sampson? Visa. And card number, please?”

  As the man typed the credit card number, four groups of asterisks appeared on the screen. When he asked for the expiration date of the card, more asterisks.

  “Thank you for ordering from us, Miss Sampson. You should expect delivery within five business days.” About to click a switch on the headset wire, he paused and laughed. “Yes. Well, I hear that, Miss Sampson. Thanks.”

  He clicked the switch and ten seconds later he started talking again. He never once looked to see who’d been watching. Caraveo took me back up onto the catwalk and across to the server cage. He squared his face a few inches from a square white panel and said his name aloud. A bluish line moved across his right eye and a few seconds later the door lock clicked open.

  “Retina scans,” he said as we went inside the cage, the door relocking automatically. “You ask me, it’s the only real security in this place. Got any questions about how it works down below?”

  I hesitated, unsure how much I could tell him.

  “No problem,” he said. “I know about the scam, but I don’t have a clue how it’s happening. I’ve been over the software here a dozen times. I’ve written in different code blocks to trap things. Figuring, if there’s an information leak, it can only happen two ways. Either the operators are memorizing a whole lot of data, not impossible. We’ve had several guys in here with photographic memories. But pretty unlikely, given how we screen and rotate the guys. So. Option two. The weakest link is between the servers and the Internet uplink.”

  “Where do you send the data?”

  “Secure satellite.” He saw me smile. “Yeah, well, as secure as it’s gonna get these days. It’s only an uplink. No downloadable trojan horse programs. Not that I don’t sweep the hard drives daily.”

  “So. How are they doing it?”

  “Well, Laura,” he said, emphasizing my name, “I guess that’s why they’re paying big bucks to the experts. I can’t find it. And I’m good. How good are you?”

  19

  Two hours later, running through all of Caraveo’s software, I couldn’t find any programming bugs or trojan horses. Nothing. No hacker security attacks. No viruses, no Internet programs we couldn’t identify. Nothing.

  “Clean,” I said grudgingly.

  “That’s a relief. I could give a shit if my company has screwed up. But I love my code, I write clean code, and I just couldn’t see any problems with it. So?”

  “When do you change work shifts?”

  “Another two hours.”

  At the cage wall, through twelve-gauge steel diamond webbing, I watched the operators below.

  “They don’t seem to pay us much attention.”

  “Don’t believe that for a second,” Caraveo said, holding up a laminated plan of the workstations. “See the guy at station thirteen? No, no, no, don’t look at him, look somewhere else, but keep him in your peripheral vision. You’ll see him cut his eyes up at you every few minutes.”

  Okay. So they watched me. I’ve felt watched before, I’ve been stalked before, but here I had the positive security of being separated from the inmates by locked doors and solid steel.

  “Just him?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to freak you out. But every man down there,” Caraveo said slowly and emphatically, “is watching you.” He saw me cock my head slightly to the side, eyebrows raised, a half smile on the left side of my face. “You ever been watched by so many men before?”

  “Never.”

  Caraveo twisted one of his rings, a snake that wrapped itself around the second joint. When he saw me looking at the rings, he smiled.

  “You’re wondering, how the hell does that guy work a keyboard with rings on every finger. Right?”

  “Especially a laptop,” I said. “Crowded keys.”

  “Not really.” Flexing his fingers, studying two of the rings as though he’d not paid them any attention for a long time. “Writing programmer code, I can fly way above one hundred words a minute. Mostly, they’re from another time. Pony tail, rollerblades, living in New York City. I’d see another cool ring, I’d just buy it.”

  He twisted off a golden thumb ring, showed me the inscription inside.

  “From my girlfriend,” he said. “My partner. It’s Hebrew. Something from the Song of Solomon.” He put the ring back on. “I lived right in the heart of west Greenwich Village once. Ten years ago. Just two doors down from the Erotic Bakery.”

  “Erotic? A bakery?”

  “Lots of cookies.” He shrugged. “You know. Woman’s breasts, with pink icing. Penis with blue icing. That kind of thing. Anyway, I’ve never been looked at by more people since. Men or women. Course they were all men.”

  “Why are they watching me?”

  “Inside, you always watch the keepers.”

  “Oh. So, just because somebody watches me more than somebody else, that doesn’t mean anything about the credit card business?”

  “Nope. What do you want to do now?”

  I’d already thought about that.

  “What do you do if your server goes down?”

  “You mean, if the inmates can’t enter orders from the callers?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “If the down time only lasts a few minutes, the callers get a recorded message that there’s a heavy backlog, please be patient, stay on the line, we’ll be right with you, that sort of crap you’ve heard a hundred times.”

  “For how long?”

  “Six, seven minutes. That’s the longest I’ve been down with a short term problem. Anything longer than that, I have to shut down the servers to find the problem. All calls get rerouted to a backup call center. Somewhere in Kansas, I think. Or Nebraska, or…somewhere.”

  “And if you have to take the server down, what happens to the inmates?”

  “They wait. If I get it back up, they’re online again. If not, they go back to their cells.”

  “Take your servers down.”

  “Whoa. I can’t do that,” he protested.

  “I think I know where the problem is.”

  He waited for an explanation, but I kept silent. He fiddled at his keyboard, uncertain, and then executed a short program. Instantly, all the inmates looked up at the cage. Caraveo picked up a headset, held the microphone stalk to his mouth.

  “There’s a problem,” he said, his voice booming over a loudspeaker. “I have to shut things down. This person is here to help me fix the problem. Server will be down for the rest of your shift. Correctional Officers will arrive to escort you back to your cells.”

  He unplugged his headset, dropped it on his desk, f
iddled with his mouse before he looked at me.

  “I hope to hell you know what you’re doing.”

  We waited for half an hour until all the inmates were cleared out of the work center. Finally, certain that we were alone, Caraveo let us out of the cage.

  “Can you get below the floor plates?” I asked.

  “Helluva lot of work.”

  “I may not need to do that, but I need to know if it’s possible.”

  I picked a cubicle at random, sat in front of the workstation. Caraveo gave me a four-inch screwdriver with a special head.

  “Not Phillips,” he said, “and not slotted. You’d think it was so specifically different that it would last a lifetime. In here, somebody will make a tool just like it within a few months, so we refit all these things every forty-five days.”

  He pointed to a dozen screws. I removed them and the plastic case separated in two parts. The CRT was awkward to work around, but I finally isolated the motherboard, borrowed a jeweler’s loupe and stuck it in my eye, looking for improvised soldering, anything that would indicate that somebody’d altered the motherboard.

  Nothing.

  “Never been that thorough,” Caraveo said. “What next?”

  “All the other workstations.”

  “We’ll be here all night!”

  “But only tonight. This place creeps me out. If there’s a hardware clooge, I want to find it now. How can you stand it, working behind bars every day?”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can I help?”

  “If I don’t know,” I said impatiently, “how will you?”

  Five hours later, I’d looked at all the motherboards. Caraveo followed me, reassembling the workstations, tidying up after me. At one point I asked for a copy of the map of the cubicle area that numbered each workstation.

  Finally, I had seven red crosses over seven cubicles. The last workstation lay disassembled in front of me.

  “What does that mean?” Caraveo asked.

  “I don’t know. But there’s something, I don’t know what, somebody’s altered the motherboards.”

  “That’s impossible.”