All The Big Ones Are Dead

by Christopher A. Gray

  “Yes,” said softly, was all Julius could manage.

  “Great,” Marc said, standing up and turning back to look down at Julius. ‘Here’s my card. Come to my office at eight this evening. Dress casual. Security will be alerted to your arrival. I’ll have dinner sent up for us. Just the two of us.”

  “I don’t get it,” Julius replied, half turning. “Why? I mean, what have you got in mind?”

  “I have a proposal for you. It’s something that’s best presented in my office. The walls have ears everywhere, man. Cameras, audio, video. You’re high-end IT. You know what’s going on out in the world. People and organizations are inadvertently recording information they aren’t even looking for. My office is secure. No ears or eyes but ours.”

  Julius looked up at the tall businessman. Julius didn’t know much about fashion, style, expensive clothing or really anything to do with the world of the wealthy classes. But he knew ten or eleven thousand dollars worth of perfectly tailored clothing and professionally polished boots when he saw them. Money talked, even to Julius the wise and practical, and especially to Julius the wise and deeply indebted. He shook his head at the strangeness of the situation as though he was hovering in the air a few yards away, like a detached, accidental observer.

  “I get it, I think,” Julius said, looking at Dominican’s business card. “I’ll be there.” As Marc walked away, Julius felt a wave of nausea. He felt lightheaded too. His debts and his stupid decisions had been discovered not just by people like Bins and the casinos, faceless as they all were, but by someone he knew. He felt exposed and sick.

  ***

  At eight sharp, Julius Coppola entered the small, ornate lobby of a sixteen-story office building on William Street just a block away from the massive Exchange Place. The old building was solid, lined along the narrow old William Street alongside a coffee shop, a restaurant to feed the office workers and business people during the work day, a dry cleaner to take care of their suits and shirts and dresses and skirts, the Hanover Deli, office supplies, more restaurants, more dry cleaners and a couple more clothing stores mainly selling business cheap suits with a second pair of pants free. The lobby he entered was clean and polished, with marble floors like mirrors reflecting the light from the large, sixty or seventy-year-old hanging brass ceiling fixtures.

  Julius walked the forty feet from the front entrance to the security desk. It was made entirely of mahogany and dark marble, with a countertop high enough to make him feel like a child. The uniformed guard stood up and smiled as Julius approached. The guard was armed, looked fit and clear eyed, and seemed completely non-threatening despite the presence on his right hip of a holstered automatic.

  “Mr. Coppola?” he asked as Julius reached the large desk. Julius nodded.

  “Please show me your personal identification. Driver’s license, Columbia ID, and anything else you’ve got.”

  Julius dutifully dug out his wallet, pocket-clipped ID pass for the university, and a couple of credit cards. Don’t clone the credit cards, pal, Julius thought, because they won’t do you any good. All tapped out.

  The pleasant guard took Julius’ ID and sat back down.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Coppola. This will take a couple minutes.” The guard nodded in the direction of some beautifully aged leather armchairs on the right side of the lobby, so Julius walked over and sat down.

  As he looked around the lobby, something suddenly struck him as very odd. The main entrance to the building was through one corner of the structure, three steps up from street level. That meant the high windows in the east wall and south wall of the lobby looked out onto the two streets that formed the intersection. The lobby was triangle shaped, which meant that the third wall of the interior - the only other wall - had to offer a doorway or passageway to get to the elevators and stairs and the other parts of the main floor of the building. Problem was, all Julius could see were the lobby, security desk, a lot of expensive looking artwork hung between the high windows and along the long, third wall that ran behind the security desk. And that was all. No doors, no entrances, no arched portals, no hallways or passageways. A beautiful lobby that went nowhere. It was vaguely claustrophobic. Julius had to shake his head, but the feeling persisted.

  It’s like a bad dream. Only one way in. The same way out. Nothing inside besides a security guard and a leather-bound row of expensive old armchairs. Wait for a while. But nothing changes. A bad dream. I’m tired. I’m scattered. I’m just not thinking straight. It’s like . . . and then he lost the thread. He closed his eyes to shut out the oddness of the place.

  “Mr. Coppola,” the guard said, “you can go up now. Take elevator number two. Go into the car and wait. It will take you directly to the penthouse offices. Mr. Dominican is expecting you. Enjoy your dinner.”

  Julius stood up and looked to the guard for directions. There didn’t seem to be any place to go. He felt lightheaded and bit freaked out. He was expected to find his way to an elevator from a room that had no exit except the door to the outside world through which he had entered. But then the guard turned to his left and Julius realized his mistake. The change of position by the guard had allowed the work light on the security desk to shine toward the back wall.

  The guard smiled as he saw realization dawn in Julius’ eyes.

  “It’s a deliberately designed optical illusion. The hallway marble pattern and color are an exact match to the marble on the wall behind me. From the armchairs or the security desk, the darkened elevator hallway looks like part of the wall. You can actually see the hallway clearly from the front door, but few newcomers ever do because they’re always drawn to the ceiling lights, the leather, the artwork and the security desk first.”

  Julius had to squint, and shift his head side to side in order to retain the visual of the now perfectly obvious hallway. He stepped forward to the left of the security desk to enter the dark hallway and as he did so a motion sensor triggered the lighting to reveal a 1920s art deco elevator lobby done in brushed stainless steel, limestone and granite. A few steps into the hallway brought him to car number two with its doors open and waiting for him. At the end of the broad hallway, and at least another thirty feet away, there was a bank of monitors in the end wall, flanked by branching hallways on each side. Those hallways seemed much narrower, but Julius could not see any more detail because the overhead lighting had come on only in the elevator lobby.

  He stepped into the elevator car and the doors quietly whisked closed. There was only one button on the control panel. It was mounted in a smooth stainless steel plate that also contained a floor readout, the button for PH, a complicated lock with different positions marked around its tubular keyway, and a small speaker grate immediately above a red emergency call button. There was also a small green light and a small red light, set right above each other in the panel like a tiny traffic light. The red light was on. The PH button was already lit too, the doors had closed, but the elevator hadn’t started moving.

  “Security sweep one will begin in five seconds. Please stand still,” a digitized voice announced from above. The floor readout began counting down. When it reached zero, Julius heard the sound of air movement above him and felt a breeze moving upward on the skin of his hands and face. Without warning the floor and three sides of the car emitted strong, split-second blasts of air. Molecular detector, Julius thought, looking for explosives chemical traces. There was no further indication that the elevator car would start moving. The little traffic light remained red. “Security sweep two will begin now. Please stand still for five seconds,” the voice announced, and Julius almost immediately heard a brief humming. A scanner built into the elevator as well. After another ten seconds, the voice announced, “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Coppola.” Then a soft chime sounded, the little traffic light turned green and the elevator began a smooth, quiet ascent.

  At the twelfth floor, according to the readout, the elevator stopped and the doors opened. There was another security guard standi
ng just outside the doors, his right hand on a holstered sidearm. He was smiling, he was not particularly bulky, but he looked like he meant business.

  “Mr. Coppola,” he said amiably, “please slowly show me the contents of your right inside jacket pocket.”

  Julius shrugged, slowly opened his jacket so the guard could see his inside pocket. Almost immediately, the guard smiled and used his left hand to pull a notepad out of his uniform shirt pocket. His right hand didn’t move from the holster.

  “Write your name and mobile phone number down for me please. Use your pen,” the guard said, nodding in the direction of Cross Calais ballpoint pen that Julius was carrying in his inside jacket pocket. He gingerly accepted the notepad from the guard, pulled his pen and did as he was told.

  “Thank you, Mr. Coppola. Your pen looks exactly like a spike or heavy nail on the scanner. Have a nice dinner.” Before Julius could reply, the doors whisked shut and the elevator smoothly resumed its travel to the sixteenth floor penthouse.

  Ten seconds later, there was another soft chime and the doors opened to reveal another beautiful lobby. As Julius stepped out of the elevator, he belatedly realized that the area just outside the car was caged. He was in an anti-personnel trap. There was no further delay though, because the cage door opened automatically and he stepped right through into the penthouse.

  “Hey, Jules,” Marc Dominican said, off to Julius’ left, “glad you could make it.”

  Julius was off balance. The placid demeanor of the main floor security guard, the weird optical illusion on the main floor, the intense security in the building and the elevator, the unexpected contact from Marc, and Julius’ intense insecurity about his debts and his gambling were making his head swim. He had yet to fully acknowledge to himself that he was not in the midst of a strange dream.

  “Jules, come over to the table. You look hungry and the food is getting cold.”

  He was hungry, in fact, and the sumptuous smell of the food made his mouth water. He turned and walked to the table set in the middle of a sitting room in Marc’s massive penthouse office. The white linen nicely set off the Delmonico serving platters covered with the classic domed lids. Marc set about lifting each lid and serving the two of them. Steaks, frites, romaine salad, and a nice Bordeaux. The two men said little as they both hungrily dug into their meals. The evening was moving along, and despite whatever else was to transpire, neither of them had eaten since noon.

  “What do you want from me, Marc?” Julius asked, as calmly as he could, after they’d both finished.

  “Jules, I need your help,” Marc replied in a matter-of-fact tone. “I’ve got a technology problem that I think you can solve, and I’m told you’ve got access to some technology I need. It’s something that I don’t want to be directly associated with, but I require it to secure some of my telecommunications.”

  Julius thought about it for a moment, but he really couldn’t come up with anything in the way of telecom tech that he knew about beyond the university’s actual phone system. Even that large system was not under his complete control though.

  “I don’t actually know much about telecom security, Marc. I don’t mean to disappoint. I, uh, just don’t think that I can see how to help you.”

  “Let me explain, Jules,” Marc said, settling back in his dining chair. “You support the work, through your IS/IT department of all the post-doctorals, grad students, labs, everything? Right?”

  Julius nodded.

  “John Logan has been working for some time on really high-end data encryption, decryption, encoding, decoding, and related matters. Correct? And you know Logan well. Correct?”

  Julius nodded again. He knew Logan well. They were close friends. Logan was a brilliant mathematician who had attracted the interest of everyone and everything from PARC to NASA to the NSA and even murkier government and quasi-government agencies, NGOs, and organizations that didn’t use any identifying letters at all. One of the reasons that Julius’ departmental budget received substantial increases each year was specifically because of the attention that the work of Columbia superstars like Logan attracted. The school and its brightest lights had to be extremely well protected. Julius and his staff ate, slept and breathed a culture thick with the highest possible security and defenses against intrusion.

  “I do. I mean, yes, I know Logan. He’s brilliant, and we get along. I mean I respect the work he’s doing. It’s not, um, bullshit. What do you want with Logan?”

  “I don’t actually want anything to do with Logan, my friend.” Marc said, leaning forward slightly. “I want a specific set of algorithms that Logan developed over a year ago. I am told that the algorithms are languishing; that they were developed as part of his test bed for the encryption and decryption work he’s focused on now.”

  “Why don’t you just send someone to license them from Logan, and . . .” Julius started to say. “Oh, um. You said you didn’t want to be directly associated with the technology, yes?”

  “Jules, I don’t even want to be having this conversation with you. It’s bad enough that you’re in deep financial troubles. It’s bad enough you’ve got a gambling, ah, issue, and that I have to skulk around doing an end run around the normal sorts of licensing and royalty and copyright issues. Let’s just say that I need something ultra-secure and that the very best security is the kind that my, ah, competitors aren’t even aware exists. It’s also the kind that the developer doesn’t even know I have.”

  Julius suddenly felt cold. He wasn’t an innocent fool dumbfounded at the notion of stealing or copyright violation, nor was he frightened by the university’s policies about security and ethical conduct, theft of intellectual property or anything of the kind. He felt cold and unsettled because he spent all of every working day deeply immersed in a culture of data security, support for all of the university’s staff, teachers and students of all kinds. Data security was almost a religion for him. It colored every thought and every decision. In a world in which everything they did was constantly being assailed by outsiders trying to breach his networks and servers, here he sat with an old acquaintance and alumnus who was insistently pressing him to effectively toss it all aside.

  “What do you want, Marc, um, exactly? And if I give it to you, what’s, um, in it for me? Is that what you want to hear?” Julius was staring at the other man, not quite sure that he was correctly hearing the words coming out of his own mouth.

  “What I want comes second,” Marc replied in a sharp tone. Julius looked up again and stared at Marc.

  “Yeah, I mean it. What comes first are your debts. I will wipe them all out. Paid in full within twenty-four hours after receiving the code I need. You will also be barred from every casino, bingo hall, slot palace, poker tournament, betting shop, video gambling arcade and online gaming site that’s normally accessible in or from the U.S. Your equity loan on the co-op will be paid in full. You’ll literally have to travel outside the continental United States, Canada and Mexico to find so much as a backroom craps game. If you find a way to gamble anyway, I’ll dump your data theft into the lap of the university president, a man I know well by the way. I’ll do it through a third or fourth party. I’ll never be associated with it. You following this so far?”

  Julius nodded, slowly, but then thought of something.

  “I, um, feel like I’m being set up, Marc. What will the IRS have to say about my sudden debt payment?”

  “Not your debt repayment, Jules. Your fee for a special in-house technology project for one of my companies. With the permission of the university, of course. Taxes pre-paid of course. It will be deposited directly to your bank account, and you’ll bounce it from there directly to your creditors, except for the payout to Mr. Bins of course. Bins will be taken care of privately.

  “That’s what I’ll do for you. Or do to you if it comes to that. What I want from you is very simple. I will give you the name and location on your backup servers of a specific project folder. Copy the folder to the USB stick at the
server rack, not from a remote login. Very important for security reasons, I’m told. Very important.” He looked at Julius until he got a confirming nod in return. “Verify the stick’s contents. Then securely delete the backup folder and its previous two generations. That’s essential. It will ensure that the only truly useful copy of the files in that folder will be on the stick. You will, at noon tomorrow, provide me with the folder and its contents on this USB stick.” Dominican reached into his sport jacket pocket and pulled out a small, 16GB, USB flash drive and placed it on the dining table in front of him. “At exactly eleven fifteen tomorrow morning, you’ll leave your office with the stick and head over to the subway. Get on the 1 train toward South Ferry Loop. Get off at Fourteenth street. Walk over to the southeast corner of Ninth Avenue and West Fifteenth. The Starbucks. Stand in line to get a coffee. Someone claiming to be your friend Dave will walk up. Make sure the USB stick is in your right hand. When Dave offers to shake hands, transfer the USB stick to him. Offer to buy coffee. Dave will decline and then leave. That’s it. Afterwards, all your troubles will be over. All of them”

  Julius sat and stared for a moment. He was trying to find danger somewhere in the explanations and instructions Marc had just given him. Julius understood IP theft all too well. The university and its mathematicians, chemists, physicists, microbiologists, engineers and other highly valuable talents thoroughly understood that everyone, everywhere and at any time could become an enemy determined to steal the results of all their years of study, research and project development. Marc Dominican understood all of that too, but he also understood that gambling addiction, addictions of all kinds, could be manipulated to get otherwise honest men and women to do almost anything. Marc wasn’t waiting for Julius to make a decision. Marc wasn’t even nailing Julius down with this tactic. In truth, Julius had already nailed himself down years before when he decided to gamble more money than he could afford to lose. So Marc waited patiently for the inevitable.