A Good and Hardy Soldier

This is the sergeant
Who like a good and hardy soldier fought
’Gainst my captivity. Hail, brave friend!
—Macbeth I.ii

She could have been a fifteen year old girl partying with her parent’s credit cards. Stupid, but essentially innocent. In reality, he was a thirty year old computer hacker whose latest identity theft victim was still in high school and had no idea her credit had just been trashed. He was a thief.

I really hate thieves and I’m a badass in cyberspace.

When the police were in position outside his door he made the move to erase his computer, but before he could execute the command I pulled the trigger and blue-screened the machine. I could practically hear him scream. Who gets a blue screen these days?

The truth is that if he’d gone ahead and executed the command, he’d have succeeded in wiping the drive. When you are working with the police, you can’t tamper with the evidence. There could be no trace of my presence on the machine. So I didn’t touch the drive. While we were playing our game of cat and mouse I was taking control of his monitor in the background. When the police signaled me that they were ready, I uploaded a blue screen image. He was frantically trying to pull the battery out of the computer when the police broke in. The cybercop in charge hit the escape key, cleared the screen and had immediate access to a fully logged-in computer. It only took a few minutes, with a warrant in hand to back up the entire drive to an unencrypted device, and then change the password so they had full access.

It was a nice, coordinated operation. Detective Jordan Grant put together the strategy with me as a class exercise in our criminal justice course. Everything worked flawlessly. I had my own business, of course, and was in no way related to the Police Department. Occasionally they hired me to do a forensic analysis of a computer. It was carefully controlled. My hours were logged. There was always a witness looking over my shoulder to ensure I wasn’t tampering with the evidence. Usually, the witness was a bored and unemployed programmer who simply logged my moves without comment. But in the after hours, I was all too happy to assist with a tricky sting without compensation. No official capacity. No paper trail. Just a concerned citizen volunteering information.

Jordan and I had been studying together under Lars Anderson at Olympic University pretty much since the day he arrested me a little over a year ago. That was the day I found out my bosses had gutted the employee-owned company and stripped our stock of all value. Jordan led the cybercrimes unit that came in to seize the evidence. Unfortunately, they were going about it all wrong and all their surprise raid was going to net was more time for our precious CEO to cover his tracks. As Director of Information Technology and an employee who had just had my life savings ripped off, I offered my services to the police. The arrest was to get me out of the building without spooking the CEO before a warrant could be issued for his arrest. I was released in the parking garage. I decrypted the entire office system backup files and nailed his ass to a wall. There were still appeals to come, of course, and right now he was sitting in a luxury condo under house arrest with an ankle bracelet. I wasn’t done eviscerating him yet.

Jordan and I had been working together ever since. He took me to class with him one day and I looked up to see my former superior officer in the Navy walk into the class and stand at the front. Lars Anderson took one look at me and simply said, “I’ve been waiting for you, Hamar.”

***

I slept most of the day on Friday. I’d been working on cracking the guy’s computer for two days and wanted nothing more than a hot shower and sleep. Afterward, I’d think about eating something other than cold pizza. That opportunity was my usual Friday night meet-up at The Faculty Lounge. I showered and put on a clean pair of jeans and a fresh Alice in Chains t-shirt then set off for the Blue Moon on Capitol Hill.

For several years before pulling the plug on my former employer, I’d taught a couple of classes at the local community college. There had been a big push some time ago to get professionals in a given field to teach certain classes instead of professional academicians. I had one of those late Friday afternoon classes that only the desperate and determined ever took. It was easy to tell one from the other. After one grueling class trying to explain why the current flavor of scripting language in vogue was not the same as writing real computer code, I stumbled out of the classroom and practically collided with an attractive young English Professor.

“You look dragged down and beaten up,” she quipped.

“Not the easiest class I ever taught. These kids know absolutely nothing.”

“Why else do you think they’re in your class?” she asked.

That brought me up short. Of course, they expected to learn something they didn’t know. My job was to teach them, right? Wow! So simple.

“It looks like you could use adult company. A bunch of us meet on Friday after class for The Faculty Lounge. Why don’t you join us?” I looked at her with a fair amount of astonishment. Was she asking me out? I was flattered, of course, but actually I was in a relationship. She could see I was hesitating and started to laugh. “It’s a faculty group, not a date.” She rolled her eyes and I glanced down to see a wedding ring on her hand. There were times when I was such a typical man.

I’d seldom missed a faculty lounge night since. There was a tacit agreement among those who were regulars that their goal was diversity, not departmentalism. I hadn’t been teaching this year, but I was still allowed to represent the views of technocrats in the unusual setting. We met at the Blue Moon because even though there were dozens of great restaurants on Capitol Hill, the majority of us were hardcore meat-eaters and wouldn’t set foot inside one of the vegetarian restaurants, no matter what the nationality of their cuisine.

Jan Garrick was in line ahead of me when I walked in and greeted me warmly. “You look tired, Dag. Everything all right?”

“Thanks, Jan. Surprisingly enough, teaching isn’t the only tiring profession.”

Jan ordered his meal and waited while I ordered mine. Then we walked to the big table where The Faculty Lounge was convening. He’s a full professor in physics at the U, but is one of the most down-to-earth guys I’ve ever met. Most of us at the lounge are community college instructors and most part-time. It’s nice to see somebody who has made tenure.

As we approached the table, I saw Andi and smiled. She immediately scooted over on the bench and I slid in beside her. She gave me a good once-over and shook her head exaggeratedly.

“When are you going to get some adult clothes and quit playing teenager?”

“Hey! If I worked in a big office I might consider dressing up, but I work out of my little one-room up on 15^th and don’t see anyone but a barista or pizza delivery guy all day. Why choke myself with a tie?”

“Even us baristas still have to look at your puss each day,” Dick Wagner said as he and his wife Paula pulled up chairs at the table. Dick taught basic business classes at SCC and set out to prove his methods by opening a nice coffee shop near the hospital. He hired a lot of his students and they rotated in positions of management during their “internships.” But the best part was that he and Paula served the best espresso on Capitol Hill. Well, just because he liked to serve an upscale clientele didn’t mean I was going to shave anytime soon.

“You might all get your wish sooner rather than later,” came the gruff voice of Lars Anderson from behind me. He hadn’t gone through the food line, so I didn’t see him come up to the table. It was unusual for Lars to come to The Faculty Lounge, but not unheard of. I’d introduced him to the group a few months earlier.

I had a strange relationship with the man. Yes, he’d been my superior officer in the Navy while I was working in the Intelligence Center in the Gulf. He’d given me a lot of instruction then, but I’d been more interested in serving my time and getting out with money for college. It was a real shock to me to find out he was in Seattle and teaching in the criminal justice program and Olympic University. But our relationship went a little deeper than that. He was in some ways still my superior officer—my boss. In the State of Washington, you can’t become a licensed investigative agency unless you can show at least three years’ practical experience investigating or pass a licensing exam from the State. You can, however, get an Unarmed Investigator License if you are employed by a licensed investigative agency. Lars, having been in the business for years, employed me in his agency and held my license. For all practical purposes, I functioned on my own, but any kind of work that required me to be licensed and bonded had to be funneled through him.

Before I could welcome him to the table, Jordan strode up with two beers and handed one to Lars.

“I hope you will forgive Jordan and me for inserting a different agenda into the Faculty meeting this evening,” Lars said, “but we’d like to toast our investigator for assisting in the capture this morning of one of the area’s most prolific cyber-criminals.” The folks at the table turned to me. They’d heard the toast once before when I brought down the CEO of Henderson Financial Consulting. Most of them, knowing me as a computer nerd and general support guru, were surprised when they heard about the collapse of Henderson and the role I played in it. Now they were beginning to look at me as though I actually had some street cred.

“What’s the story, Dag?” Lisa asked. Lisa is an art teacher in the college night school program. We joke a lot about the fact that she sees more naked men and women each week than a massage therapist. She’d even suggested once that I come in to model for her class. I politely declined that offer. It wasn’t so much that I’m shy about my body as that I didn’t think I could hold still long enough for someone to draw me. For her part, Lisa decried the human dependency on computers (especially students) and declared that computers spelled the end of art and writing—something I’d noted Andi didn’t completely disagree with.

“It wasn’t much,” I said. “I just tracked the location and then distracted the perp long enough for Jordan’s gang to break in and arrest him.”

“That distraction meant that we got his entire hard drive as specified in the warrant without having to go through the process of decrypting the security on it,” Jordan said. “He’s an unsung hero for Seattle.”

There was a lot of general conversation about what happened and a ton of questions—most of which none of us could answer because of due process. Jordan jumped in with a tidbit that piqued all of our interest.

“Darnedest thing is, though, we don’t know who the guy is.”

It turned out that the guy had been stealing and adopting identities for so long that he’d pretty much erased all evidence of who he was. His fingerprints had been sent to the IAFIS division of the FBI. But even though the FBI averages only about 27 minutes to identify a fingerprint, they’d come up with a blank on our John Doe. DNA scanning was possible but was costly and time-consuming. There was still a question as to whether the DA would even want to proceed with prosecuting the case. So far, five different identities had all proven false.

An intense conversation rose up at the table regarding the need to protect and defend vs. basic privacy. Should the individual be allowed to be completely anonymous as far as the government was concerned? It was a tough call and the police department often found themselves caught between the need to enforce the law and an individual’s personal rights.

Eventually, it was Andi that brought the question back to Lars about why we’d possibly see a change in my appearance.

“I’ve got a request for an undercover investigator at a large financial firm downtown,” Lars said. “It seems I have an expert at identifying and tracing nearly invisible signs of computer tampering on my staff, so I’m contemplating sending him in on the mission.”

“I’ve got a couple of cases I’m working on,” I said, reluctant to express how excited the idea of getting inside a financial firm made me.

“Don’t worry, Dag, this has a remarkably flexible work schedule.”

Well, I was pretty psyched about the new assignment, even after I found out I had to go in for a job interview on Monday. I had to admit that as much as I liked the company on Friday night and my interactions with Jordan and Lars, I was feeling kind of isolated. I just didn’t see enough people in a day to keep my mind stimulated. Lars promised to send me the details by email and told me to look presentable by Monday morning. He took off fairly early, but Jordan was hanging around to see if there was any action going on later. He’d been flirting on and off with both Lisa and Andi, but I think he was hoping I’d set something up. That’s when Andi started picking up her things and said she needed to get home and feed the teen.

Since she introduced me to the group seven years ago, we’d become friends, then neighbors, then best friends. She’d made it clear right from the start that she was interested in nothing more than friendship, even though her wedding ring proved to be from her deceased husband. She was a single mom and needed no men to complicate things. With that as the ground rule, we’d become close friends, especially after my disastrous breakup with Hope. I’d moved into the apartment complex next door to her duplex, so walking to school or home from the lounge together was comfortable and almost expected.

“Can I offer to walk you home?” I asked, standing from the table. Home was only a few blocks, but up on the hill, nobody drove anyplace if they could help it. My own little Mustang hardly ever came out of the garage, especially in winter. Andi used her van to transport various kids to and from activities, but she never drove to work.

“I’d feel hurt if you didn’t.” She smiled at me and I shook my head. It was my turn to roll my eyes. We’d both adopted the expression from her daughter and it always made us laugh. “And then tomorrow,” she continued as we walked out the door, “Cali and I need to take you to get a makeover.”

“A makeover?”

“Just bring money,” she grinned.