Shevesky, the older one, leaned forward, a quick grin lighting his face. “CAS—Corporate Assessment Services.”
“I’ve brought these two here today in order that we may have a little discussion.” Morrison inspected the mallard decoy on his desk. “I think it’d be useful to know what”—he paused—“certain companies are doing, what they’re thinking.” He eyed me to be sure I wouldn’t ask some ridiculous question, such as the legality of whatever he had planned. “These men tell me that they know how to get information sent out by fax.”
“You guys can steal faxes?” I said in surprise.
“We can retrieve them,” corrected Mr. Shevesky.
“That’s amazing.”
“We do other work, too. Background checks and so on.”
“I got to leave for a plane in twenty-five minutes,” Morrison announced. “So you guys got to hurry it up. The scenario is this: a group is now in a business suite on the fifth floor at the Plaza Hotel. Their faxes are coming and going from Germany. Can you get us copies of those faxes as they appear? If so, how? What are the risks?”
“I’ll turn it over to Mike.”
DiFrancesco was already slouched in his chair like a kid bored in class. He looked disdainfully at me, then out the window. Shevesky was clearly the handler, whereas Mike DiFrancesco was the talent. He retained an aloof composure, knowing that everything went through him. “Well, for your basic fax suck,” DiFrancesco began, gazing at the ceiling, his mouth open, “there’s two levels to the problem.” He put his hands together, as if to pray, his eyes still upward. “The first is getting access to the fax signal, meaning—well, the quantumbogo-dynamics of operation—”
“Mike,” Shevesky interrupted. “English, regular English.”
“The theory of operation behind faxes is that they scan a document and turn a very small strip of the piece of paper into a description of it in ones and zeros—”
“The machine digitizes the strip,” I said.
“Yes, it digitizes light and dark spaces in a very small grid into ones and zeros that get coded into a format and translated into tones. The tones are compatible with the voice transmission capabilities of a phone system. Now if you’re going to tap that signal we need to get access to the sound of those tones and for that we need some sort of access to the wires over which those tones travel. So, given it’s an execudroid hotel suite, there’re a couple of complications. I’ll come back to—”
“Do we have to get the MIT dissertation?” Morrison asked. “I mean, give me a break.”
“This is the way he works,” Shevesky assured us, flashing a rabbity smile. “He hears the problem, talks it out once, and then never forgets a step.”
DiFrancesco combed through his thick black beard with both hands, as if looking for lice. “The first necessity is access to the tones themselves, the second is the ability to capture that transmission and decode it. There’s going to be two vendors in that hotel, there’s going to be New York Telephone, which has access to the building for adding and deleting phone lines, and then there’ll be the vendor company for the switching system that the hotel uses, say Northern Telecom or whoever the vendor is, and the problem is that the fax signal is being generated and being received on an extension of the phone system, just like all phones in an office are generally extensions of one main number.”
DiFrancesco was now opening and shutting his legs unconsciously, as if receiving physical pleasure. His pants were badly worn where the insides of his legs rubbed together. “Now, that extension will appear in a riser box in some sort of telephone closet where the main cable arrives onto the fifth floor before it fans out laterally and arrives in various rooms as a phone jack, which the wire from the fax machine in question is plugged into. But that extension doesn’t exist in the New York Telephone region of the territory and the reason being that when a fax call gets made, the number dialed on the fax machine goes to the PBX and—”
“PBX?” Morrison asked. He cleaned his teeth with his tongue, irritated at the jargon.
“That’s the local switch or exchange—”
“The damn box of phone wires on every floor?” Morrison asked. “Is that what you’re talking about?”
“Yes,” DiFrancesco answered, eyes still up, seeming to be reading flyspecks on the ceiling, the great hams of his thighs vibrating. “When the number is dialed on the fax machine, the call goes through the extension to the PBX on the floor. The PBX looks at the phone number being dialed and decides what circuit the phone number should go out on. It usually has a group of lines that local calls go out on and a group that long-distance or international calls go out on. The whole thing takes about a microfortnight.”
“What’s a microfortnight?” I asked.
“About one-point-two seconds,” DiFrancesco answered, as if I were the stupidest man alive. “Now, my feeling is that physical access is the least detectable method, least potentially pessimal. I’d book a room on the same floor and try to get access to the riser box and—”
“No, no!” Morrison shook his head. “I don’t want you or some guy in there in the hotel pretending to be a guest or a phoneman or Donald Trump or somebody fiddling around with the equipment box.” He turned to Shevesky. “You told me this could be done remotely, that your guy could sit in front of a screen and just magically get the faxes that way. This isn’t—”
“Wait, it can be done. He’s just running through the options.”
“The PBX will also have a modem attached to it,” Di-Francesco continued, as if he hadn’t heard anyone speak. “So that maintenance personnel for the service organization can dial in and get access to it, and program remotely to change instructions. When you play around with programming on the PBX you get the additional delay of passwords. Different PBX’s have different passwords programmed by the service personnel. That would seem to be a problem.” His eyes brightened with devilish delight; he was a master of secrets. “Now it just so happens that there’s a factory password that the factory engineers use and that overrides the programmed password no matter what. I have a bunch of these factory passwords. I can probably dial into whatever PBX is on the fifth floor at the Plaza Hotel. It’ll be a major manufacturer. Now, in a big hotel, changes that you make in one terminal turn up in other places. Normally there’s a set of routings so that when an extension like ours, the one hooked to our fax machine, makes a call, its digits are analyzed and then put through a filter called class of service, which determines whether this extension has the right to make such a call. If it does, then it gets moved on to another thing called automatic route selection, which determines how the call should be processed, which trunk to pick, is a trunk available, if it’s not available does it overflow to another group of trunks, does it wait for a trunk—what happens? And then it processes beyond that to dial rules, which say that now that we have picked a particular line, we may need to modify the digits, let’s say we got a lot of traffic to New Jersey and the organization has put in a direct line over to New Jersey. But the caller has put a 201 in the front of the number and so now that the call is switched onto a direct line to New Jersey, the 201 has to be taken off. The dial rules say do this, do that, keep first three digits, pause, cut the caller through, terminate procedure when call is connected, and so on. Now, let me figure the next . . .”
There was a beautiful, ravaged woman in my home now who needed nothing more than the physical comforts I could provide. But I was sentenced to listen to the fantasies of some fat computer wonk. I looked at Morrison, gave a half shake of my head. Let’s not get involved with these nuts.
“... so what we have to do for your situation is create a whole parallel body of routing instructions. When this fax machine makes a call, we want it to—wait, let me ask you this—are the faxes you’re trying to intercept going to one particular country or company or going to one particular area code?”
“Why?” Morrison asked suspiciously.
“Because we have to create routing instr
uctions that filter for the faxes you want to capture, unless you want to capture all of them, which adds a lot of extra work.”
“Most of the faxes will be going back and forth between here and Germany,” Morrison said casually. “Those are the ones we want.”
“Good.” DiFrancesco was now twiddling his beard into a greasy black spike that protruded from his chin. “That makes it easier. We’re gonna take that call and say, route it as follows and we pick a local line, and instead of going to Germany, the call will be dialed to a seven-digit number, which will be one of my lines here in the city. Because I don’t want to be detected, it goes to a number that is set to call forward to another number, and that other number is set to call forward to my operation. It goes through a couple of call-forwarding legs, just to make it harder to detect. So now the call goes through and my equipment connects. Then the call rules say now send the original number that was dialed, the Oil international code, then the Germany country code, and then the number in Germany—exactly the number originally dialed.”
“This is too complicated,” I said to Morrison. “I think that—”
“You’ve lost us,” Morrison said to DiFrancesco.
“He’s a genius.” Shevesky nodded to me. “A genius.”
“. . . so then my equipment makes a bridged connection. Now in the process of setting this up, I have to be very careful setting up digit filters, because the hotel is going to bill this room for these calls and I have to make sure that none of these local-dial digits end up as part of the call record. It can’t bill out as a local call. It’s got to look like an international call on the bill. Okay, so the fax comes through my equipment and meantime, I’ve tape-recorded all the tones, for backup . . . now we’ve trapped the call. Then we have to decode the fax, but it’s not simply a matter of attaching a fax machine and playing the recording into it.”
“I don’t get it,” Morrison said.
“When you send a fax there’s a little song and dance between the faxes where they ask each other are you a group-one or a group-two or a group-three fax machine, which are all different protocols. Then it might say, ‘Are you a Sharp machine?’ ‘No, I’m a Ricoh or a Toshiba.’ You know, each brand has its own rules. That complicates the decoding process.”
DiFrancesco took a heavy-chested breath.
Shevesky looked at me. “A genius,” he said.
“This is crazy,” I told Morrison.
“So we need something that listens to the fax,” DiFrancesco went on. “I take a PC-fax card, which is basically a specialized modem, and instead of running the fax card manufacturer’s software on my PC, I can go in and write direct code to control the fax-modem chips actually on the board so that I can instruct it to listen, not transmit, and, based on that, I decode the tones back into digital representations of dark and light spaces in one strip of the document. Then all those strips become the document on my screen. Those strips won’t be perfect. Line-feed information, page setup, and page-cut information won’t be perfect. A couple of bagbiters will be in there somewhere. But you’ll get the text. It might be exploded a little bit, the dots spread apart, and I might have to fool around with it on my screen, but you’ll get the text.”
“Okay,” I interjected. “I think we know enough to—”
“Now,” he continued, “that being said, there are two things that could foul this whole rig up. If the two faxes are speaking a very special dialect, then we’re sunk. Chances are that won’t be happening because the hotel will provide the fax machine, chances are we’ll have two different brands and they’ll have to talk the most common fax language, called universal group three. The other problem is what if they’re sending back and forth more than text, if it’s pictures, if it’s pixel-oriented, then the degree of distortion—”
“Oh no, just text,” Morrison said quietly, his tone different now, that of a man seeing a beautiful sunrise.
“Okay.”
“We’ll be able to read the text and translate it from the German?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Morrison looked at me; we both knew who would be doing the translating.
“Now, what about incoming fax calls from Germany?”
DiFrancesco’s massive face froze, his brain seemingly spinning inside its cavity. “You have to trap the incoming call before it gets to the fax machine in the room and starts kicking out information. So you create an extension. When a fax call from Germany comes into the PBX on that floor in the hotel, it gets discovered and bounced to a new extension and becomes a speed-dial number routed outbound through the automated routing service to my operation, just like we did with the calls originating from the hotel. I pass the call through my system and have my system dial back out, calling the original number that the fax came in on, but locally. Because it’s a local call, the programming in the PBX now allows it to go through, just as it was supposed to when coming from Germany.”
“Yes,” Morrison exclaimed. “I’m starting to get it.”
“But I haven’t told you the things that can go wrong.”
“Tell us,” I said unhappily.
“The maintenance company could find the reconfiguration and report it to the hotel. Also, the international transmission rate for faxes is ninety-six hundred baud a second, and even though the links to Germany are pretty good, by sending the calls downtown and through additional lines and everything, you’re decreasing the volume of the connection. You’re reducing the quality of that connection, so now you run the risk that you’ll cause the fax machine to default to a fallback mode, because, see, if ninety-six hundred isn’t working right, the fax machine will fall back to forty-eight hundred baud and the machines would be very slow. They might not notice it as important. They might think that the fax machine prints out so slowly or takes the page in so slowly because of the international transmission or bad New York Tel lines, or whatever. But there’s another problem, too. All this rerouting of calls downtown and through my system and everything will probably add about fifteen seconds of setup time to both types of calls. Maybe it won’t be noticed because these are international calls and people expect there to be a little slowness making them . . . but it’s a perceptible issue, it’s a weak link . . .”
“Fifteen seconds?” Morrison asked.
“About. But what I’m saying is that with each one of these things you’re creating an atmosphere in which if someone decided to get suspicious they’ve got all kinds of evidence.”
“We’re not going to worry about these things,” Morrison said. Now I knew why I was in this meeting. I was to be Morrison’s dirty tricks bagman. He turned to me. “I want you to set Mike up somewhere and just get him going,” he said.
“I only work out of my own location,” Mike said quickly.
“How do we get in touch?”
“Here.” Shevesky jumped forward and spread around a couple of business cards. “Get in touch with me.”
“Okay,” Morrison went on. “We’ll get Mike to work.”
“It’s too risky,” I said. “It could blow up in our faces. It’s stupid as hell. We don’t need it.”
Morrison sat there, thinking. The framed photos of his retarded sons looked toward him, two scrubbed and smiling faces. If he’d had two normal sons, would he be who he was now? I knew he believed that the right sheet of paper could tell us what information the V-S negotiating team was sending their bosses back home. And if Samantha got anything out of Waldhausen, then it would be a way of checking the veracity of whatever he told her.
“How fast can you set up?” Morrison asked.
“Couple of days,” DiFrancesco said.
Morrison glanced meaningfully at Shevesky and nodded. “You and I have worked out the billing—so that’s it. We’ll be in touch and you’ll let Jack know what you have for us on a daily basis.”
At the elevator, DiFrancesco asked me about the men’s room.
“I’ll show you,” I said, leaving Shevesky at the receptionist’s desk. In
the back hallway, I said, “Listen, can you give me a real phone number, your actual number?”
He wrote it down on the business card Shevesky had given me.
“So what are your qualifications?”
He stroked his thick beard in sleepy contemplation. “I’m out on appeal pending a conviction in federal court last month for computer hacking. Class E felony.”
“So who is this Shevesky?”
He loosened his tie with a yank. “Ah, he’s just a suit who sets me up with jobs.” He laughed into the mirror. He hadn’t brushed his teeth in quite some time. When we returned, Shevesky was picking nervously at the mahogany framing around the elevator door. I gave him the smile.
“We’ll be in touch.”
I went back to Morrison’s office. “I know what you’re going to say, Jack,” he exclaimed. “But it’s not worth saying. If the deal goes through before they find out then it’s an internal matter at most. If not, then a trivial suit we’ll settle out of court.”
I had to challenge him. “You want my opinion, which I’m sure you don’t? This is totally fucking ridiculous. We have the best lawyers and bankers in New York running around trying to justify their fees and we have a floor of research departments and we don’t need this rinky-dink shit.”
“We might. It could help us.”
“It’s worth the risk? If they somehow found out, and reported it? The Corporation would suffer terrible public humiliation. Federal investigations, bad press here and internationally. Op-ed writers would moralize until the cows came home. Other companies we did business with would investigate if their communications had been compromised. The shareholder groups would attack. The SEC would immediately investigate. The stock price would crash. Anyone publicly connected with stealing V-S’s faxes would be finished.”
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