Open Source

by Matthew Frick

  Susan couldn’t find any contact information on the blog’s home page. Apparently this person liked to voice their opinions, but was smart enough not to stick their neck out within easy stomping distance if someone did not care for those opinions. She could understand that. But she also knew the internet inside and out and knew full-well that once you put fingers to keyboard, you were marked. Somewhere, somehow, everything you did could be tracked back to you, no matter what precautions you thought were protecting you. Identity theft was too easy, and finding just a name or number was even easier.

  Susan started with the blog’s Internet Protocol, or IP, address. This number, which her computer displayed for every link found on any one of the search engines she used, was how she keyed in on the fact that the posting had been made from a location in the United States. She deconstructed the number, translated from the standard binary code into a number usable by people who weren’t computer programmers by trade, and determined the site came from the Southeast—somewhere between Charleston, South Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida. Despite her years of schooling and advanced degrees, she didn’t acquire this skill until she attended a company cookout a few summers before. She learned what you could determine from a computer’s IP address and how to use it from one of IWG’s administrative assistants—read: secretary. More accurately, she learned from one of the secretaries’ 12-year-old sons.

  Now that she knew a little about where the blog originated, she began trying to get specifics. Susan went to the blog archive section and opened the oldest post available. December 19, 2005. Not that long ago, but it showed that “Middle-Truths” had been in existence for a while. The majority of weblogs were only maintained by their creators for a few months if they lasted more than a week.

  Susan read with interest the inaugural post, trying to gain some clue as to the identity of the blog’s owner. Whoever this person was, they were a bit of a Grinch, Susan surmised as she made her way through a colorful rant decrying the commercialization of Christmas. Apparently this person grew up as either a Roman Catholic or an Episcopalian, based on the repeated references to the selling out of the “priesthood.” The author was most likely from somewhere around Charleston or Savannah, as opposed to other cities further south in her search area, given the specific barbs to places made in the post. Susan went to the next one. This post was dated December 24th. Nothing revealing here.

  Wait. At the bottom of the post was a mention of someone named Jennifer. So the author had been dumped by “Jennifer” sometime in the past, and Christmas Eve was a rough time for him. Susan decided to play the odds and deduce that the author was, in fact, male, although she kept the possibility of lesbian in the back of her mind—the very back of her mind. From what Susan could gather, this Jennifer woman had meant a great deal to the author. The rest of the post was a series of bitter, self-pitying statements lamenting Jennifer’s absence and may have been the tell-tale signs of suicidal tendencies, except the guy was still around.

  The third posting was written on New Year’s Day. Early New Year’s Day. It was apparently written under the influence of alcohol or, at the very least, the remnants of a night spent celebrating, heavy on the sauce. Susan couldn’t help but feel somewhat voyeuristic as she peered into this guy’s life one little bit at a time trying to find out who he was, or just as importantly, where he was, so she could contact him. She laughed at the sarcastic, but probably true-to-fact description of the party the night before.

  Susan snapped to attention and got her pen ready. The party had been at a place called “The Sunset.” Restaurant, bar, boat house? She was guessing a bar or tavern of some sort. Further down, the author mentioned that the party was so loud he could still hear some of the drunk singers from his front porch. That meant “Sunset” referred to a bar. Drunk plus singers invoked a vision of karaoke in Susan’s head. She smiled at a flashback of Wednesday nights while in college. She refocused. More important to her search, the post revealed that the writer didn’t live very far from the bar if he could still hear the party from his house.

  Susan opened another tab on her web browser and did a Google search for “Sunset Bar Savannah Charleston.” The closest hits she got on the first page were the Sunset Grill in Charleston and the Sunset Tavern in Savannah. The Sunset Grill had its own website, and Susan opened that link to photos of a very picturesque, very expensive-looking restaurant on the Cooper River. Probably no karaoke there.

  The link that mentioned the Sunset Tavern was to a page from the Creative Loafing news weekly that listed bands playing the local area. One of them was at the Sunset Tavern. Susan jotted down the address and typed it into Mapquest.com. She got a location of the bar on the Wilmington River in Thunderbolt, a suburb of Savannah. Now she was getting somewhere. All she needed was a name.

  She read two more posts on the Middle-Truths blog until she came to one with a comment at the bottom. Susan buried her head in her hands and scolded herself for not looking for comments to the posts in the first place. If someone who knew the author replied to the post, there was a good chance it started with a greeting that might give away the author’s first name. Sure enough, there it was. On the fourth comment.

  “Damn, Casey! Where do you come up with this shit?” was posted by someone identified as “mom2four.”

  The busy mother must not have subscribed to “Casey’s” scientific argument that a car engine whose cylinder valves were coated with the filling found inside a Dunkin’ Donuts Boston Kreme Donut could go 13,000 miles between oil changes. Susan sided with mom2four on that one.

  So, Casey from Thunderbolt. Susan decided that was all she needed and went to the online White Pages for Savannah, GA. She entered the name “Casey” and came up with four matches listed in the phonebook. She looked at her watch. Nine thirty-seven. Well, she needed to try. The first number rang seven times before an answering machine picked up with the voice of a small girl announcing that no one was home and could Susan please leave a message. Susan hung up, deciding that there was a good chance the house was being robbed at that exact moment, thanks to the thoughtful tip left by the little girl.

  Susan put a question mark by the number on her list as a possible, but not probable hit. Her decision was purely a gut feeling. She looked at the next name and number on the list and dialed.

  “Hello?” a raspy voice answered, followed by a deep cough from lungs that had tasted the business end of too many cigarettes over the years.

  “Mr. Casey Johnston?” Susan asked, referring to her list of numbers.

  “What?” More coughing. “Look I ain’t givin’ any more money to you bastards. I got pulled over last week and those cops ain’t give two shits about that sticker on my window.”

  “What? No, no. Mr. Johnston, my name is Susan Williams from the Intelligence Watch Group in New York. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about something you wrote on the internet.”

  “The internet? Missy, I’m 78 years old. I’ve never used a computer, and I ain’t got no reason to start now. You musta got the wrong guy.”

  Susan was relieved. She was hoping the coarse attitude on the other end of the line wasn’t the author of the Baltic Venture theory. She really did not want to extend her conversation beyond what had already occurred.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Sorry to disturb you,” Susan said as she hung up the phone. She started to get a sinking feeling as she looked at the two remaining numbers on her list. Maybe she had guessed wrong after all. She dialed the third number and waited for an answer.

  “Hello?” she heard, along with what sounded like hundreds of chanting fans at a ball game of some sort.

  “Um, yes. Hello?” Susan replied loudly trying to overcome the background noise. She leaned forward at her desk with one finger in her right ear.

  “You don’t have to yell,” Casey said as he turned down the volume on his TV.

  “I’m sorry. Mr. Shenk?”

  “That’s me. Who is this?”

  “Um, my n
ame is Susan Williams from IWG in New York City,” she said, regaining her composure. “Are you the owner of a weblog called Middle-Truths?”

  “Yes.”

  Susan’s face lit up. “You are? Good. Mr. Shenk, I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about a posting you made on Friday night.”

  “Fuck!”

  Susan moved the phone away from her ear as the obscene outburst both caught her off guard and undoubtedly damaged her eardrum.

  “Damnit.”

  “Uh, Mr. Shenk, perhaps I should call back tomorrow?”

  “What? Oh, no. Sorry,” Casey said. “Chipper just hit into a double play and lost the one real chance we’ve had in days to end this losing streak.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Braves, ma’am. Baseball. Sorry, you were saying?”

  Susan gathered her thoughts quickly. “Yes, sir. I read your post about the Baltic Venture, and I was curious to know how you came to your conclusions. I mean, how did you come up with a theory about a secret arms deal?”

  Casey turned off the muted television and sat on the couch so he wouldn’t be distracted during the conversation. He had a few questions of his own now.

  “First off, it’s Casey, not sir. And who did you say you were again?”

  “My name is Susan Williams. I’m an analyst with the Intelligence Watch Group in New York.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re a private company that monitors world events, and national ones for that matter,” Susan said. “We piece together what we find and come up with usable analyses that companies and government agencies can use to better understand what is happening behind the scenes and what the meanings of those events are.”

  “Like the CIA?”

  “No, sir...I mean, Casey. We’re a private company.”

  “Like STRATFOR.”

  The slap in the face. Strategic Forecasting, STRATFOR, was IWG’s biggest competitor. If there were such a thing as competition in what they did. Susan, and others at IWG believed the work they did, both at her company and at groups like STRATFOR, we’re providing a service to the nation by trying to untangle the web of global geopolitics so world and company leaders could better understand what the other side was thinking. They hoped their efforts would lead to more meaningful, honest discussions in the diplomatic arena without the all-too-common misunderstandings that led to bad blood or, at worst, war. But IWG was a business, and in the world of capitalism, that meant the other guy was just a competitor. At least that’s how the board and bean counters viewed it.

  “Sort of,” she said. “We’re not as big as STRATFOR, but we try our best.”

  “Okay,” Casey said. “How did you get my number, anyway?”

  Susan smiled for the first time since Casey answered the phone and actually started to relax. “Like I said, I’m an analyst. I take little bits of information and try to tie them together into what I hope will be the right answer. If it makes you feel any better, yours was the third number I tried.”

  While Susan explained her investigative prowess, Casey opened his internet browser and found the IWG webpage. He went to the employee section and found Susan’s name listed as an “Iran Specialist.” He continued talking while he performed his own search.

  “Alright, but what does an Iran Specialist from the Intelligence Watch Group have to do with a hijacked ship in the Baltic Sea?”

  Susan was not expecting to be questioned by Casey right at the beginning. Hell, she hadn’t even asked him a single specific question yet. And how did he know she was an Iran analyst?

  “That’s why I’m calling you. You see, we’re looking into the hijacking of the Baltic Venture because we are curious about the circumstances. Circumstances which you yourself pointed out in your blog. I wanted to know how you came up with the idea that there were weapons being smuggled on this ship.”

  “It’s all right there in my blog,” Casey said. “What other reason would the Russians have for sending their navy out to find her? To rescue the crew? I doubt it. My guess is, the crew is perfectly safe right where they are. If these hijackers have learned anything from their counterparts down in Somalia, you stand a better chance of collecting a ransom if the crew stays healthy and is released upon payment. I mean, unless you captured a French vessel, then I guess you’re fucked either way.”

  Susan laughed at that last statement. The French were very aggressive in rescuing their citizens in a couple of instances in the past when Somali pirates hijacked yachts that were cruising too close to the coast. France didn’t like to negotiate.

  “Fair enough,” Susan said. “But where are you getting your information?”

  “From the internet. Same as you. You don’t have to have a Master’s from UCLA to figure out that the world bares its soul on the information super highway. You just have to know where to look to find it,” Casey said. “Am I right?”

  “You’re right about that,” she said, wondering how much of her own life Casey was reading on the computer while they talked. “Still, the news didn’t say anything, I mean in any country, about a weapons shipment. You just came up with that on your own?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It’s Susan.”

  “Well, I was taught to respect my elders. And since you are 33 and I’m only 31, that makes you my elder.”

  Susan smiled. “Okay, so you know everything about me. You’re good, I’ll give you that. But tell me this: who are the buyers?”

  “Again, I refer you to my blog. If I knew what was onboard, I mean besides wood planks from Finland, I could probably guess,” Casey said. “Why? Do you know what the cargo is?”

  Susan didn’t know how to answer that. She sat for a moment trying to decide how much she could tell this guy. Jim told her to keep a lid on the information from Grozny’s source. Although IWG was a private company, they still played by the same rules as the U.S. Intelligence Community. For the most part. And one of the sacred laws of intelligence was that you don’t burn a source. Too much information in the wrong hands could eventually be traced back to its origins. That meant you would most likely lose that source of information forever, either because they lost trust in you, or worse, they were killed by someone who did not want to air their dirty laundry.

  “You do know,” Casey said, breaking the silence.

  “I never said that,” Susan protested.

  “You took too long to deny it,” Casey said. “Hell, you’re still not denying it. That means you know that some type of weapons are being shipped on the Baltic Venture. I bet you even know what they are.”

  Susan grimaced. Jim is going to have my ass, she thought. She was so proud of herself for making what she thought was headway when she stumbled onto Casey’s blog that she didn’t think of the ramifications of her follow-on actions. By calling Casey, she had alerted someone outside the company that they were following the hijacking, and by default, she told him that she thought his theory was correct.

  “If I do have that information, it still doesn’t change anything. I was just calling to see what you thought because you have obviously thought about it quite a bit, and I was interested in your opinion,” she offered as a diversion to try to steer the conversation away from interrogating her to finding out what Casey believed.

  “Because you want me to do your job for you.”

  “No, goddamnit!” Susan was surprised at her outburst. This guy was starting to get under skin. She felt exposed, and she didn’t like it.

  Susan thought for a second, exhausted from the long day and seeing the light of revelation dimming as she knew this might be her only chance to get some help and save face with her boss. And herself. She could not believe she was going to give in. Her stomach twisted as the words came out of her mouth. “What if I did told you, I mean hypothetically, that the Russians were shipping S-300 air-defense missiles to Iran on the Baltic Venture?”

  “I would say bullshit, I mean hypothetically.” Casey hadn’t had this much fun talking
to a woman, an intelligent one at that, since he could remember.

  “What?” Susan didn’t believe she heard him right. She just admitted, for all intents and purposes, that she knew for a fact that the Baltic Venture was carrying missiles headed for Iran.

  “I mean bullshit, I don’t think the Russians are shipping anything. I thought you said you read my blog? If it was a legitimate sale, why would they sortie their warships to get it back? Their best bet to keep a low profile on a busted deal would be to pay the hijackers to let the ship go. Then the ship goes about her business, delivers the goods, and no one’s the wiser. I think the missiles were stolen and they want them back.”

  “Okay. You’re right,” Susan said. “Forget the Russians. I should have said Russian missiles. So we know that someone stole some S-300s....”

  “You know,” Casey said.

  “...and they’re...what? God, you’re impossible. Okay, well, I’m telling you, someone stole some missiles. You were right, and I’m telling you. Congratulations. Have I stroked your ego enough?”

  Casey laughed. “Alright, sorry. Please continue.”

  Susan sighed. “The question is: who are the buyers? We were told the missiles were going to Iran, but I don’t think the Iranian government would make a deal like that.”