In Digital We Trust

by Rahul Bhagat

  “Exactly. The Vinur will do anything to stop that,” Gunther said.

  “Thank you,” Natalie said. Stump sensed resignation in her voice. “Can you give us the entire history of the victim’s Vinur-server communication, all the metadata?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  The meeting concluded, and they got up to leave. They had just stepped out of the room when Gunther called from inside. “There is one more case where the digital partner will contact the server.”

  Natalie whirled around. “There is?”

  “Yes. If it is sending data to the server.”

  “What kind of data?”

  “Mostly audio files of conversations.”

  “And why would it do that?” Natalie asked.

  “For psychologists. For them to monitor the patient’s mental health. But the victim had a commercial account—the function to send files should have been disabled.”

  “Was it?” Natalie asked.

  “Let me see.” Gunther buried his head in the laptop and typed rapidly. “No, it wasn’t. That’s strange.”

  TWELVE

  NATALIE had developed tunnel vision ever since she received the file containing the entire history of Gabriel’s Vinur-server communication. On their way to the airport, her head was buried in the laptop.

  Stump looked at her screen with unintelligible rows of characters then looked outside through the cab window and lamented, “These government trips are so stingy they don’t even give you time to look around a little. We’re in Iceland, and I couldn’t even see the volcanoes.”

  Natalie gave no reaction. It was as if she could see nothing, hear nothing. Her undivided attention was on her laptop. At the airport, as soon as they cleared security and stepped into the cavernous waiting area, Natalie planted herself in one of the plush chairs and flipped open her laptop. Stump sat down beside her.

  “Something I can help with?” he asked Natalie.

  “Uhh... no, I’m good. This is a gold mine, a lot of interesting stuff. Let me run through it, and I’ll explain.” Natalie looked up at Stump.

  Stump left her alone. He stretched out his feet and looked up at the ceiling. A latticework of metal bars held a dome-shaped roof far above. He felt as if he were in an indoor stadium. After a while, he got up and wandered around the waiting area. He bought two bottles of water and thought about buying a sandwich for Natalie but changed his mind. Then he just wandered, looking at the shops, looking outside.

  Five more years, he thought. It’s close but feels like a lifetime away. I don’t fit in in this world anymore. I have no fucking clue what that kid was talking about. All that server and encryption talk went right over my head.

  For a long time, he stood at the window, just staring outside. Then he remembered the flight, and it was getting close to their departure time. He decided to go back and check on Natalie.

  Natalie spotted him from a distance and signaled frantically for him to come over. Stump picked up pace.

  “Thought you might be thirsty.” He handed her a water bottle.

  “Thanks,” she said and proceeded to crack open the seal and drink eagerly. “I have a breakthrough,” she announced between gulps of water.

  “Let’s hear it.” He felt so proud of her enthusiasm.

  “Gabriel’s Vinur was communicating with someone else too.”

  “Who?”

  “Knot0. It was through the central server.”

  “Who’s Knot0?”

  “That’s the handle, the Jabber account ID. It’s like an email address for chat messages,” Natalie explained.

  “So you mean there was a three-way communication between Knot whatever, the Vinur, and the central server?”

  “Exactly. It’s right here in the server log.”

  “Who is this person?” Stump was intrigued.

  “That’s the mystery. Knot0 was communicating through Tor.”

  Stump was confused. He didn’t know what Tor was. Natalie explained that Tor was the name of a network of computers whose sole purpose was to confuse the path of a signal. A signal would go inside the Tor network, and it would bounce around within the network so much that the signal path would look like a cloud. Then the signal would come out of Tor and continue to its destination. If someone was tracking a signal, as she was for Knot0, she would go from server to server, as the signal bounced back to Vinur, and then hit the Tor cloud. Boom. Gone.

  “Tor moves the signal so much, even the best quantum computers lose sight of it. I have no idea who the source is,” Natalie said.

  “That’s a bummer,” Stump said.

  “Yeah. His Vinur was sending massive documents to this person. Audio files of its conversations with Gabriel,” Natalie said.

  “And it’s all hidden?”

  “Yeah, encrypted. In the last half hour before he jumped, there was a constant three-way connection between them,” Natalie said. “It was as if the Vinur was relaying its conversation with Gabriel in real time.”

  “What was going on?”

  “No idea.”

  “Nothing you can do?” Stump felt frustrated.

  “Brute force.” Natalie did her usual routine of hunching the shoulders, rolling out her tongue, and giving a sad-dog look.

  “And that means what?”

  “I have to go through the communication log with a magnifying glass.”

  “Looking for what?”

  “Slipups. Did this person ever slip off the mask? Whenever Knot0 communicated with the Vinur, it always first masked its IP address by sending it through the Tor network. The IP address is how we know the physical location of a computer. If Knot0 ever forgot to mask, in a hurry or something, that’s how I’ll know its address.”

  Stump noticed that people had started lining up to board.

  “Okay, it’s time for our flight,” he said.

  THIRTEEN

  STUMP developed a real admiration for the kid after coming back from Iceland. She worked day and night, rummaging through the jumble of communication logs, following any potential lead to see if it led to an unmasked IP. It got to the point where Stump took over the responsibility of giving human company to Fatso and making sure her vine was watered. Often, while in her apartment, he would sit down at the kitchen table and debate with himself if he should try to get in touch with his daughter. But he didn’t even know how to contact her. He could always ask Cheryl. But she would never tell; she never forgave him.

  One morning, a bleary-eyed Natalie walked into his office.

  “I need a passenger manifest,” she said. “From the airport at Costalegre, Mexico.”

  “I can take care of that. But why a passenger list from Mexico?” Stump was intrigued.

  “I’m tired. I’m going home to crash for a bit, but this is our last hope. I found unencrypted chat messages in the NSA registry that trace back to this IP address. There is nothing else. Knot0 has been meticulous.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?”

  “If it doesn’t work? Oh God, I don’t want to think about it. Call me when you have the list.”

  Stump reached out to his Mexican counterparts for the information. They told him it would take some time. The request was for an old passenger list from a remote resort. When he finally received the list, late in the afternoon, he was not sure if he should wait until tomorrow to inform Natalie. Eventually, he decided to give her a call. The news immediately woke up a sleepy-voiced Natalie. She told him to wait in the office.

  Half an hour later, Natalie showed up looking fresh and rested.

  “Okay.” She dropped in a chair and grabbed the finger stylus to control the cursor on the living wall. She clicked on the passenger list. A long list of names was displayed. She turned to Stump.

  “Let me give you a little background,” she said. “Costalegre is so remote that they have no Internet connection. The only way to access the Internet is through a guest computer that hooks up to a satellite link.”

  “And Knot0 used that c
omputer?” Stump asked.

  “Yes. For three days in a row. Large audio files were sent. That’s why I asked you for the list of passengers who flew in and out of there around that time.”

  “What if Knot0 drove?”

  “Possible. But my guess is that Knot0 is an American. And for an American, if the choice comes between a long drive and a short flight, I’ll put my money on the flight.”

  “What next?”

  “We have a list of people, one of which is Knot0.”

  “But who is it?”

  “We also have a list of people who know Gabriel. Let’s see if any of those people show up in the passenger list.”

  Natalie ran a search program and instructed it to use the passenger list as input then, one name at a time, match it with all names that existed in Gabriel Rhee’s entire case folder.

  A match popped up.

  “Who is it?” Stump squinted his eyes.

  “Lizbeth Elisa,” Natalie said.

  “Who?”

  The search program had located a picture. A dirty-blond woman with a large forehead stared back at them. Nancy’s out-of-town friend.

  FOURTEEN

  STUMP was on the phone, speaking with one of the boys in his mentorship program, when Natalie peeked in the office. He waved her to come inside.

  “I’ll be done in a second,” he said and pointed at the chair.

  Natalie waited for him to finish then dove straight into discussing the result of the background search on Lizbeth.

  “She can pull this off,” Natalie said. “She is a product manager for an enterprise software company. Studied engineering, specialized in artificial intelligence technology.”

  Natalie riffled through files in a directory and clicked open a row of old pictures, mostly groups of students. She focused on one of the pictures so that it filled up the screen on the living wall. She fiddled with the controls, and a moment later, the entire living wall turned into a giant screen, its pebble border gone. An old picture of a group of students standing in front of a building filled the screen.

  “That’s her, in the corner,” Natalie said. “Back in the day, NASA organized a competition to develop AI-powered psychologists for deep-space astronauts who were having problems with isolation. Her group was the winning team.”

  Natalie opened a text file with software source code and scrolled down. A section that listed the main developers and architects of the software came up.

  “There she is,” Natalie said. “One of the original developers. She built the open-source platform on which Vinur is based. She knows it inside out.”

  “How could she control the program on his phone? Didn’t he get it from the company?”

  “It’s easy—code injection. The program has built-in features to consult with and take instructions from psychologists. She probably injected a small piece of code in the program to create a trapdoor. And then she could do anything. The program thought she was the psychologist and followed her every command.”

  “Is it that easy? That... code injection?” Stump asked.

  “As easy as clicking on an image. And yes, she’s the one who advised Gabriel to buy life insurance. Here, I found the email,” Natalie said. She read an excerpt from the email message. “‘Now you guys are life partners, and you have to look out for each other.’”

  Stump got up from his chair and reduced the tint on the skinny window behind his back. Outside, trees heavy with fresh foliage swayed in the wind.

  “I don’t understand this. Why would she do that? She had been laying the groundwork for years. But why?”

  “The million-dollar question,” Natalie said.

  “Hey, open those university pictures.” Stump turned excitedly and bumped his knee against the table.

  “Easy there, Detective,” Natalie said.

  “Bring up the pictures, bring up the pictures,” Stump said with excitement, trying to speak past the pain.

  Natalie brought up the old university pictures from Gabriel’s file. Him in a pool with a drink in his hand; a girl in a bikini, sunbathing in the background; him on a beach with a group of girls and guys; him holding a woman from behind in a tight embrace and kissing her neck. The woman had dirty-blond hair and a large forehead.

  “They were in a relationship,” Stump said.

  “Interesting. The plot thickens,” Natalie said. “At some point, Gabriel went from dating one friend to the other.”

  “A case of a love triangle?” Stump asked. “We need more information. Someone to fill us in.”

  His phone rang, and it was a call he had to take.

  Natalie got up and said, “I’ll go look for someone who can give us the scoop.”

  FIFTEEN

  THEY walked hurriedly down a narrow path between old brick buildings. It had rained the night before, and a damp feel pervaded the surroundings.

  “The guy we’re going to see, he was in some of the courses with Nancy and Lizbeth,” Natalie said.

  “How did you find him?” Stump asked.

  “Old yearbooks. It was just a matter of tracking down someone who remembered them well. And this guy, he says he saw it implode. He saw the breakup between Gabriel and Lizbeth,” Natalie said.

  “Let’s hope he gives us something. Excuse me, which way is the cafeteria?” Stump asked a passerby.

  The woman told them how to get to the university cafeteria. It was still morning, so the campus was relatively deserted. An unkempt man was standing by the glass door of the cafeteria. He had long, tousled hair and scraggy stubble. The clothes he was wearing appeared to be old, the kind one would wear for outside, dirty work. On seeing the man, Natalie initially hesitated, but then she approached him.

  “Hi. Billy?” she asked the scraggy man.

  “Hey, Natalie. How’re ya?” Billy shook her hand vigorously. He ran a landscaping company and had the contract for maintaining the university grounds. He was going to be here anyway, so it was no trouble. Meeting cops was probably the most exciting thing that had happened to Billy in a long time.

  “Spring season is busy, you know,” he said.

  They went inside the large and empty cafeteria, ordered coffee, and grabbed cheap plastic chairs around a table in the corner.

  “You went to the university with Lizbeth?” Stump asked him.

  “Yes, sir, I did. For a couple of years,” Billy said.

  “And you saw the breakup between Gabriel and Lizbeth?”

  “Yes, sir, with these very eyes, right here in this cafeteria. I was sittin’ there, over there.” Billy pointed to a spot in the cafeteria.

  “Okay, tell us from the beginning.” Stump took a sip of his coffee and settled in his rickety chair.

  “I was here that evening, hangin’ out with my buddy. We were working on an assignment or something or maybe just chillin’. I don’t remember now,” Billy said. “The place was kinda empty. Gabriel was with Nancy, over there, by the counter, and then she walked in.”

  “Who walked in?” Natalie asked.

  “Lizbeth,” Billy said. “She was furious. ‘So there you are, hiding,’ she shouted at Gabriel. She demanded to know why he was not answering her calls, why he had been avoiding her, and what he was doing there with Nancy.”

  “What happened then?” Natalie asked.

  “Nancy took charge. She told Lizbeth that he was planning to talk to her. He didn’t feel the same for her anymore. It was over between them. At that, Lizbeth started arguing with Nancy. ‘What do you mean it’s over? I want him to say it,’ Nancy says—well, I’m saying it. They argued for a full five minutes in front of everyone.” Billy shook his head.

  “Brutal,” Stump said.

  “Then Lizbeth turned to Gabriel, who was just sitting there, staring at the table, and started pleading with him. She had been selfish, had ignored him, they should make up. God, it was pathetic. At that point, he said something in a low voice. We couldn’t hear. And man, she flipped. Just fuckin’ flipped.”

  “Desc
ribe that to us,” Natalie said.

  “Gabriel was drinking a soda or something. She grabbed it and threw it in his face then just started hitting him with her hands. Nancy and some other people jumped in and tried to separate them. It was a fuckin’ show. She was so mad. Then Lizbeth turned to Nancy and called her a whoring bitch. Told her that she thought she could steal her boyfriend with her good looks and smooth ways. She had always been by her side, and this was what she got. Told her to rot in hell and stormed away,” Billy said.

  “Quite a scene,” Stump said.

  “It was,” Billy said. “The biggest story on campus. Lizbeth and Nancy were best friends. Nancy was the princess, always took what she wanted, and Lizbeth was the ugly duckling, used to being stepped over.”

  “Anything else happen after that?” Natalie asked.

  “Actually, no. I think about a month or so after the fight, I saw all three hangin’ out together. It was like there was never any problem. I guess Lizbeth accepted that too. She never had any spine.”

  SIXTEEN

  STUMP was stuck in a tough situation with his card game. He had a bad deck; it was obvious from the start. Most of his cards were still facedown, and so far he had only two aces in the suit stacks. He had been through the deck a couple of times, but there was nothing. If only he could find a jack of diamonds. That would break the logjam. It looked hopeless. He was debating if he should reshuffle for a new game when Natalie poked her head in the office.

  “Busy?” she asked.

  “Just a few administrative things.” Stump tried to act busy. “What’s up?”

  She came inside and sat down. “What next?” she asked.

  Stump would have liked to let out a sigh. It was only yesterday they went to the university and spoke to that Billy guy, and she was already pushing for the next step. So much energy, so much drive. It was not fair. He missed those days when he too was young and full of determination.