Dangerous Folly

I am in this earthly world; where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly:
—Macbeth IV.ii

I didn’t go into CCS on Wednesday as it was my day to work in my own office. I did, however, intend to investigate what my search spiders had found overnight. Unfortunately, Andi was unable to get together for more than a pleasant good morning kiss before she left for class. She said she was scheduled to go back to the university for interviews in the afternoon and that she had a committee meeting this evening. She’d be bringing Cali home about 10 if I wanted to stop by for a cup of tea before we said goodnight. I told her I wouldn’t miss it.

“Unless you are locked up someplace,” she sighed.

“Locked in.”

“Mm hm.”

That left me with a day to work in my office on 15th and to begin putting together the pieces that were left by the police. They’d finished gathering the evidence I’d left them yesterday and the tape was removed from my door. With my new toys, I had more computers lying around than would fit on my desk. I closed up my old laptop and plugged in the new one. It was powerful, but it ate batteries.

I immediately logged in to the computer in the CCS office by remote access on my tablet. The first search I wrote gave me limited results. It showed that I was online in the office but none of the other people I wanted to find. The second search result was more productive. I had a log of employee numbers of everyone who had entered the manufacturing facility in the past 48 hours. I matched names with employee numbers from the Human Resources database and waited for my list to be downloaded.

In the meantime, I started my gaming machine and called up the entire record of the game I’d run Monday night. I wanted to know who was playing and where they were physically located. While that was running, I flipped on my desktop unit to take a look at what the police had left me. Surprisingly, that was the first computer that gave me results to look at as all three struggled to access the cloud through my wired connection at the same time. The picture on the screen that greeted me was chilling.

The mutilated body of a child flooded my largest monitor. A message flashed across the screen that read “Two can play this game. Who do you love, baby?” the screen blanked and then images started flashing across the screen with a timer bar that told me there were two million files waiting to download.

I jerked the network cables out of the wall for all three computers as I noticed images starting to download on the laptop as well. This was not good. A quick scan of the files that were downloading told me my computer had been hit with a motherload of porn, much of which was still downloading. I pulled the power out of the desktop and the laptop, then pulled the battery from the laptop as well.

Damn!

I called Jordan and had to leave a message. Things were heating up. I knew we had a predator on our hands, but I wasn’t used to being the prey. Then a thought struck me. I dialed into the office and asked for Don. The call was routed to Darlene.

“Darlene, I need to talk to Don immediately.”

“He’s in conference with Mr. Dennis.”

“Put me through to both of them, then. This is an emergency.” There was only a moment’s lag before I heard the phone connect.

“What’s going on, Dag?” Arnie asked.

“Is Don with you?”

“I’m here,” Don’s voice answered.

“Here’s the situation. I was ras’d in a few minutes ago when I was hit with a massive attack on my office network. It blasted past my firewalls, virus detectors, and several other bells and whistles I’ve got running in my office. It’s nasty stuff. There is a chance the worm got through to my laptop in the office. If so, it could propagate through the network. You’ve got to isolate my computer from the rest of the company.” I could hear a door slam, but the only other sound for a few seconds was the clacking of keys. “Are you guys there?”

“I’m here,” Arnie said. “Don is in your office. How long ago did this attack take place?”

“Less than five minutes ago. I disconnected my computers, called the police, and then called you.”

“You called the police?”

“I’ve been doing some consulting for them on tracking down an online predator. This looks like it’s related.”

“That’s bad news for you, Dag. Very bad. If you’ve infected our network…”

“I haven’t infected anything,” I said hotly. “If the corporate firewalls are working the way they should be, nothing should be able to get through the connection.”

“Still, I can’t afford to have risky behavior in my department. We’re under scrutiny as it is.”

“Well, with luck that will all be taken care of soon, too.”

“You’ve got a solution to our little problem?”

“I’m closing in on one. I should be able to tell you more by the end of the week.”

“Good. That’s good, Dag. We’ll mop up here. You take care of your equipment. See you tomorrow.”

What was that all about? Arnie went from being threatening to exceedingly calm in a heartbeat. Just telling him I was onto a lead shouldn’t have changed him that much. Maybe he was just regretting having snapped at me in the first place. No matter. I needed to clean up the mess of my electronics. I started by pulling the hard drive in my tower. I sealed it in a static proof bag and pulled a spare out of my locked file cabinet. Something told me I was going to need to expand my inventory of spare parts if I kept going in this business. I did an install and put a clean system on the machine. I loaded it up with all the anti-virus software I had and connected an old modem to my landline. My T1 was obviously compromised as a route out. When it came time to get back online, I would have to use the old-fashioned way.

I grabbed my tablet and logged on to the cellular network. I wasn’t going to identify myself any further on the Internet than I had, but I needed to check my mail accounts. I knew exactly who had launched this attack, and he wouldn’t have done it without leaving me messages. He was the kind of guy who loved to talk.

Sure enough, my email had been bombarded with messages, some ranting about Internet spies, some flaming me directly, and all of them containing an invitation to click on a message that I could see would lead to another virus. The last mail message, however, was one I hadn’t expected this time. It read simply “Unit purged with no harm. IGotUrBak.” What was this? Could it be that Don was the one working to back me up and watching to see what I would do? He certainly had the skills and access to everything in the company.

***

My phone buzzed.

“Hamar.”

“What happened?” Jordan was speaking.

“Booted the computer this morning and an attack message showed up on screen. Started downloading porn and unpacking it to everything on the network. And I’m not talking legal porn. This stuff is sick. I disconnected everything and bagged the hard drive. This was complete with a threat, Jordan.”

“I’m on my way there now. I’ve got a tech with me that will verify. See you in 20 minutes.”

***

Twenty minutes gave me just time enough to check the laptop. By disconnecting everything as quickly as I did, I’d aborted the download to the new laptop, which was a relief to say the least. I wanted to know more than ever now who was accessing that room. I looked at the results I’d received from my match. What I saw was not what I expected and not what I wanted to see.

I pulled my ID badge out of my pocket and looked at it carefully. The log showed that every time I’d walked by that room the past week, I’d been logged as entering it. I checked the times. There was video footage that showed me at that door twice last week and twice again this week. And there was an access log that showed me entering it.

What was it Jen had said? “It could be a setup,” was beginning to look like I had been set up. Damn.

***

The Internet is a dangerous place. The fact that I called the police and that my entire interaction with Predator X had been recorded by a court recorder as a tech tore apart my computer kept me out of trouble. The hard drive that was now filled with a self-replicating virus that kept unpacking level after level of highly illegal porn was confiscated as evidence not against me, but against the scum who attacked me.

The problem was the cops had yet to make a hard ID on the guy. We all knew who it was. None of us wanted to believe it. But the evidence so far was all just one step away from being hard enough to make an arrest.

What bothered me most were the words that had scrolled across the screen with that first horrid image. “Who do you love, baby?” It reversed an old television catch-line and turned it from a comfort to a threat.

I needed to think. And for this thinking, I needed to drive.

Half an hour later, I was cruising south on I-5 in the Mustang, feeling the horses in the muscle car whine with power. As soon as I was south of Tacoma, I opened it up and let it roar at 85 slowing down just enough at Olympia, Centralia and Chehalis to not draw attention. Then I put the pedal to the metal and spent 45 minutes over 90. That car moves like a demon, but it drinks gas. I refueled near the Cascade locks on I-84 and swung back onto the Interstate until I hit 82 headed north. I’d been driving nine hours with hardly a break when I reached Ellensburg, going around in circles. It was nearly midnight and both the car and I needed fuel.

I thought about the paper trail I was leaving and what it could mean if there were stolen credit cards that just happened to land in the places is was visiting this night. I was plain spooked, but I didn’t have much cash on me, so I ran the card through the pump and went to sit in an all-night truck-stop for food.

Had they already lifted credit cards? Printed an untraceable batch of “gift cards?” Downloaded customer data files?

Or were they waiting for the next time they could verify I was in the building? It was best that I stay away, but I was going to have to go back tomorrow. There was only one person who could answer the ultimate question. I had to come up with a plan for asking it.

In the café, I ordered tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. It came with chips and a pickle on the side. I wolfed it down with a cup of trucker coffee while my computer was booting up. The truck stop had free WiFi, so I logged in and accepted the terms on the browser screen. It was time to get into the office and see what was going on. I was far enough away that I couldn’t be there making off with cash while searching the corporate data for a traitor. Right now I had no less than seven suspects and that had kept me so occupied that I couldn’t even begin to guess who else might be involved. I still thought the key would be in finding out who was on the corporate network during my game Monday night. I opened the email account to which I’d sent the search results and started comparing them with known markers on the network log from that night. Five out of seven suspects had logged in between 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. But none had visited sites associated with my game.

That was no problem, since I showed up as logged in as well, but none of my game activity was logged. I was pretty sure that I could identify who was online. I already knew that Jen was following me around the city until close to 1:00 a.m., so it was unlikely she had been online. Unlikely, but not impossible. I was getting stuck. Everyone was still a suspect.

I decided to come back to the problem later when my computer chimed. I’d set up an alert system earlier to let me know when anyone used my ID to open a door at the company. I scanned down the list of doors and saw that somehow, I’d just opened the door on 12^th floor into the manufacturing facility. I quickly paid for my snack, using a credit card and checking the receipt for the timestamp. With physics operating the way it does, I couldn’t be there and here at the same time.

***

When I get stumped by a puzzle, I sometimes change projects just so my brain will disconnect from the logic of the problem. Often, while I’m working on this new problem the answer to the previous one will simply come to mind. That’s one of the reasons I work on Sudoku puzzles and why I take multiple clients. So I decided to shift my focus to a client that seemed simple by comparison. I’d do some of the research that Cali had asked me to do. I already knew I wasn’t going to betray Andi, no matter what I uncovered, but I did need to show Cali there was nothing to worry about. I ordered a BLT and a bowl of chilli with more coffee and started searching for Andi.

It was completely possible in my mind that the yearbook staff had screwed up the pictures and had put someone else in Andi’s place. That was my operating assumption. So I started searching for Anne D. Sullivan in Florida.

I wasn’t happy about what I found. The Sullivan family in Sarasota, Florida had a daughter named Anne. Photos posted online showed that the family was, indeed black. On a hunch, I found a number for the Sullivans but it was only five a.m. in Florida and I decided that was too early to call.

I checked directories around Ann Arbor, but found no indication that there was a Sullivan with a daughter near the right age. I looked up every high school in the area for information on their alumni during a two year period that matched Andi’s age and college graduation information. I extended my search and state-by-state repeated the process. All with the same results. None. Further, there was no certificate of marriage for Anne Sullivan and Charles Marx, and no death record of Charles.

At five, after paying for my third breakfast with a credit card, I went to the car and dialed the number in Sarasota.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Sullivan?”

“Who’s calling please.” I had the college yearbook open in my lap and picked a name from the graduating class at random.

“This is Dick Warnicki. I’m calling on behalf of our graduating class at Central Florida University. We’ve launched an effort to locate all the members of our class for a directory and I’m wondering if you could give me contact information for Anne. We seem to have lost touch with her.” There was silence at the end of the line.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You people all know that Anne died two weeks after graduation. Why are you calling to torment us.”

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Sullivan. I didn’t have a note on that. I thought I was just calling people we hadn’t heard from. Please forgive me.” I felt like a royal heel. Dead? I wasn’t expecting that.

“Just don’t call again. We already gave all her things to the historical society that called after she died. There’s nothing left.”

“Could you give me the name of the historical society?” I asked before I thought. She had to be getting suspicious.

“It was a long time ago. Just leave us alone.” The line went dead.

Something about giving a dead girl’s things to a historical society didn’t ring true with me. I had to draw the same conclusion that Cali had over a year ago. Andi Marx was not Anne Doreen Sullivan. For some reason, that made my heart hurt.