Dead Anyway

by Chris Knopf

  No excuse, I told myself. The memory was in there, extractable.

  I conjured a mental image of my old self: reviewing options, developing tables with side-by-side comparisons, poring over hardware catalogs, effortlessly shooting down jet streams of swirling data, homing in on the ultimate solution.

  It’s too much, I thought. I’ll never get it back.

  But that’s okay, I said to myself, I don’t have to get it all back. I just have to get back enough to let me breach security and capture the data in the system. I remembered such a thing was possible, and hoped it wasn’t a manufactured memory.

  Since I was already at a safe workstation, I switched over to my renewed interest in Austin Ott, the Third, whom Chalupnik had also referred to as Jason Three Sticks. It wasn’t much, but more than I had before.

  I started with Google and went well past page 500 before giving up the chase. Then I tried to uncover paid databases on known criminals, but quickly realized the futility of searching for the criminal record of an alias of a man who likely had no record at all.

  I tacked away from that approach and pulled up a Word document so I could put something down on paper.

  Mr. Gross: The gift of Sebbie Frondutti was an act of good faith, albeit unsolicited, meant to demonstrate that I can be a reliable intermediary. I hope this gesture will encourage you to reciprocate. I’m seeking information on a professional killer who goes by the alias Austin Ott, the Third. He is also known as Jason Three Sticks. Any information you feel free to share with me on this person would be greatly appreciated. Should you and your former colleagues have any interest in apprehending Mr. Ott, the more complete the information you provide, the more likely this wish will be fulfilled. (I will find him eventually, but help from you will speed the process and assure your share of the benefit.) If you’re agreeable, put a classified ad in the print version of the Sunday New York Times offering a “1965 Mustang convertible, four-speed, 289, insanely clean and meticulously maintained, sold to the best offer with assurances it will annoy your wife as much as it does mine.” Further instructions will follow.

  After putting on a pair of surgical gloves, I printed it out and left the library bleary-eyed from hours in front of the computer screen. I drove around Bridgeport until I found a little bodega, where, with the gloves on, I bought a tonic water in a clear glass bottle with a twist-on cap. I poured out the liquid and used my pocket knife to scrape off the label. Then I threw the empty bottle in the backseat and drove north. About an hour later I was in Rocky Hill. By now it was almost dark, night coming early that time in late fall, so I stopped to eat—killed time on the laptop—then drove the rest of the way to Shelly’s neighborhood.

  Before I got there, I stopped at a little strip mall and under the ghostly fluorescents, with a fresh set of gloves, curled up the note and stuck it in the bottle. I drove down Shelly’s street and tossed the bottle in the middle of his front lawn.

  After the tedious trip home, I brought up the computer for a final check before bed. The only unread email was from Natsumi Fitzgerald.

  “What I meant was, I’d really LIKE you to stop by my table sometime. Then maybe we could go out for another wild night of drinking. I’ll have my shot, you have your beer. You pay for mine, I’ll pay for yours. Did you ever meet up with your friend?”

  For some reason, I reread her email several times, and then answered in the affirmative, before succumbing to the usual late-night exhaustion, which drove me into bed for another night’s sleep, strangely neither fitful, nor riddled with ugly, snarling phantoms or ephemeral reminders of irredeemable loss.

  BRAIN SCIENTISTS will tell you there’s no better way to solve a problem than to sleep on it. As the light of day joined with my emerging consciousness, the beginning of a solution crept stealthily into my mind.

  I saw myself at the workstation of one of Florencia’s employees. His computer had locked up and she needed to extract his data. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a problem, because as system administrator, I could just waltz in there and take over; but for some dumb reason the guy had overlaid our security with his own private application, which was blocking me out. This would also be an easy problem to solve if he was in the building, but he was snorkeling in the Virgin Islands, and hadn’t left the necessary passwords. Florencia was none too pleased. I offered to come in and figure out what to do, probably out of misplaced concern for her knuckle-headed employee.

  I succeeded, but how, I asked myself.

  I opened my eyes and saw the light, outside and within my battered brain. I suddenly knew then how to get into the agency’s system. The only catch was I’d also have to get into the agency itself.

  I called Evelyn.

  “Does the agency still have a security system?” I asked her.

  “It does. Why are you asking?”

  “I need to get in there. Do you know the password? And do you have a key?”

  “Yes and yes,” she answered. “Why do you need to go there and what do you hope to find?”

  “I need access to the computer systems. I don’t know what part her agency might have played in this disaster, so I’m loath to let it go without at least having a record that I can refer to later on.”

  “What kind of record?” she asked.

  “Everything. I want access to the whole operation. Current and historical.”

  “I don’t know how to do that, and I can’t ask without raising suspicion,” she said.

  “You don’t have to. I just need to get to one of the workstations. Preferably Bruce Finger’s. Is he using Florencia’s office?”

  “I don’t know. The offices have nameplates. When are you going to do this?”

  “Tonight. At two in the morning. Before you go to bed, drive over there and put a key under the mat.”

  “That’s imaginative.”

  “It’ll only be there a few hours.”

  “How are you going to know what you’re looking for with no math skills?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a calculator on my smartphone. That’s all I need. What’s the security code?”

  When I got off the phone I went right to the computer and wrote “boot disk” in the search box. There wasn’t much about the process I remembered, but those two words were enough to get me going. Originally created to help techs troubleshoot corrupted files, or recover data from damaged machines, a boot disk application took the place of the built-in “boot up” program, overlaying its own mini-operating system and user interface. This essentially allowed the tech to hijack the computer, bypassing any and all security measures. You could do whatever you wanted with the computer, and once you shut down and popped out the boot disk, it was like nothing ever happened.

  As with any application that could be adapted to proper or improper use, there were both officially sanctioned and outlaw versions. The outlaw ones were, of course, the best.

  However, this wasn’t something I could do remotely. I had to have physical possession of the computer.

  It took the rest of the morning, but I found a program called MattBD that was written to match the agency’s hardware and operating system, the precise description of which I still had buried in my archives. I downloaded the app, which only took a few minutes, and burned it to a disk.

  The easy part was done. I had to wait until dark for the rest.

  FLORENCIA’S AGENCY was in one of the many faceless little office buildings that lined one of two major thoroughfares that led in and out of Stamford from the north. I parked several doors down and used a series of shared parking lots to approach from the rear. I wore a fake beard and a hat over one of the long-haired wigs. If a security camera picked me up, they’d record a cliché of a disguised man.

  Though I couldn’t know what security measures the new management might have added to the original system, I thought it unlikely things had changed. Insurance agencies just weren’t the type of places people typically broke into. Though millions of dollars passed through the computers, the o
nly cash on hand was barely enough to pay for a pizza delivery.

  The entrance to the building, conveniently off to the side away from the street, was shrouded in darkness. I crouched down and pulled up the big mat that was still in use, and retrieved two keys. One for the building, the other for the agency. I went through both doors without hesitation, bringing along a laptop and a few other handy devices.

  The heat had automatically dropped back for the night, so the air was cool and smelled of carpet and human industry. Guided by imprecise memory and a pen-sized flashlight, I felt along a hallway until I came to Florencia’s office. The bracket that once held her nameplate was empty. I went to the next office and saw Bruce Finger’s name. I let myself in.

  In defiance of the stereotype of the tidy, meticulous financial expert, Bruce was an inveterate slob. Mountains of paper and periodicals not only rose above his desk, there were stacks on the floor and in the middle of a small conference table. His computer keyboard and screen had safe haven on a little platform that slid out from the desk. The CPU was on the floor where I’d placed it five years earlier. I turned it on and put the CD in the slot. Moments later, a screen with the MattBD logo appeared with a little dialog box that said, “Press any key.”

  I hit Z and waited. After a few minutes, the ghost was in the machine. The look of the interface was different from the official software, but all the same folders and files were there.

  The first thing I did was copy the software that ran the accounting and financial system, operations and email to an external hard drive. Then I went into Bruce’s folders and started copying everything there. It was a lot of data, but well within the terabyte of storage I had available. It just took a long time, made longer by crouching in the dark with a tiny flashlight and ears tuned to the slightest sound.

  Which is why I heard someone moving through the office before I saw the sliver of light under Bruce’s door. I looked over at the window, but knew it was for naught, since it was a solid slab of glass with a vent at the bottom too small to squeeze through. There was no closet to hide in, no curtains or couch to slip behind. Trapped.

  For a second I was tempted to switch off the computer screen, but didn’t know how that might affect the downloading. I heard doors opening and closing, and a clattering sound that proved the invader was unafraid of being caught. I almost stopped breathing as I strained to hear, but the thump of my heart was the only thing that got louder.

  Until the vacuum cleaner started up, which was the definition of good news, bad news. I moved the wastebasket from the back to the front of the desk and put a box in the way to discourage the cleaning person from putting it back in place.

  I heard the door to the office across the hall open, and the fading sound of the vacuum as it moved inside. Then I shoved myself under the desk and prayed for a tired, lazy or negligent person to be at the helm of that vacuum cleaner.

  The door latch jangled and the room was suddenly filled with sound and light. My view consisted of the drawers in Bruce’s credenza and the base of the chair. I sent a little word of thanks for his slovenly nature, which I hoped would inhibit easy progress into the room.

  The desk shook when the vacuum hit one of the stubby legs. An involuntary jolt of alarm shot through my heart. Another thump came from another part of the desk. It was a woman, and I could hear her saying something to herself, though not clearly enough to make out the words. I imagined it to be a regular lament about vacuuming around Bruce’s piles.

  The machine suddenly appeared before me, knocking the chair out of the way as it made deepening forays into the space behind the desk. I saw a thick white woman’s leg, sheathed in heavy support hose, above black high-top sneakers. I pulled in my feet and strained against an agony of apprehension.

  The woman grunted something in an unknown language and the vacuum started to retreat. It moved back out to the hall. Then the emptied wastebasket dropped to the floor, the chair was pulled back in place, and a second later, it was dark again.

  I stayed under the desk, feeling my legs go numb from lack of circulation, until well after the light along the bottom of the door flicked out.

  Only then did I start to breathe normally and begin to appreciate just how undignified my position was. It made me smile inside, not because I could make fun of myself, but because I cared so little about what constituted proper dignity.

  The episode did serve to distract me from the tedium of the download, long enough for it to have run its course. I checked the files on the external hard drive to make sure I had everything, then moved on to the final task of the night.

  It was a long shot, but if Finger was anything like most top executives, he had little regard for proper computer security at the personal level. I opened up Microsoft Word and started searching, beginning with “password.” The word itself appeared in dozens of documents, but without any specific codes. I moved on to other possibilities, such as systems administrator or just plain administrator. Lots of mentions within documents, but no passwords. I began to compliment Bruce’s good behavior when a search for “Important Agency Numbers” brought up a remarkable document. It was a single double-space page listing the access codes and test questions for all the agency’s online banking, payroll service, group medical, 401(k), the premium trust account (a holding pen to manage the flow of client money through the agency and out to the carriers) and investment accounts at two brokerage houses. And right there, near the bottom of the page, under the heading, “In case Ethan gets hit by a bus,” the administrator username and password. The keys to the realm.

  I printed out the document to Bruce’s private printer, shut down the computer and removed the boot disk and external drive. I followed the dark hall down to the temperature-controlled room where I’d installed the servers that lived at the heart of the agency’s automated systems. As hoped, the administrator’s workstation that I set up was still there, and likely still the subject of daily check-ins. I turned on the computer, logged in and went to a place called the domain controller. This is where every employee, laptop or external computer authorized to connect from the outside was logged and labeled with their own security code. I was pleased to see Administrator One and Administrator Two listed, me being Administrator One with my access rights turned off. All I had to do was switch them back on and provide a new password. It felt unlikely a guy like Ethan, lazy enough to leave most of my original ID intact, even providing a new username, would have the presence of mind to notice a subtle change within such a large field of data.

  I had one more change, also well disguised amidst the rows of names and numbers—the registration of my laptop as an authentic workstation. This gave it a name and security ID that would allow me to log in to the network and connect to any computer from a remote location.

  After that last alteration to the active directory, I inserted a little flash drive into the USB port and downloaded a different, but related piece of treacherous code.

  Going by the rather banal name of monitoring software, the application would record everything the administrator did on his computer, every keystroke he made, every email that went in or out, every application opened and every server managed. And most importantly, every password typed into every log-in dialog box. Without him ever knowing it was taking place.

  More than a nuisance spyware virus, this one lived deep in the nether regions of the operating system, quietly and innocuously going about its business of reporting everything to the PC at my little house. Virtually undetectable as long as no one thought there was something malevolent in the system in need of detection.

  When the program was installed and the initiating command established, I pulled out the flash drive and shut down the computer.

  I walked out of the agency with the entire operation in my pocket, past and present, with a direct feed into all that would happen in the future. A decent harvest of information, and only my nervous system the worse for wear.

  CHAPTER 13

  The nex
t morning a little alert from my computer woke me up as it often did. It was telling me that the agency’s system administrator had logged on. I watched with oddly little satisfaction as he ran through a series of checks on the agency’s servers. I turned away and let the spyware carry on with its relentless surveillance.

  After showering and eating a breakfast of yogurt and granola, I went clothes shopping. This was something I truly knew nothing about, having been an awkward geek my entire life, a status that thoroughly excluded any gift for sartorial aplomb.

  I was on the hunt for two types of outfits. One casual, yet sophisticated, the other baldly pretentious and predatory, extravagantly expensive, yet in a way that only the fashion cognoscenti would know.

  So it was no charade for me to walk into a small shop in Westport that stank of wool, silk and leather, and completely give myself over to the predacious attentions of a tiny whitehaired man named Preston Nestor.

  “Imagine a roomful of investment bankers who can also claim advanced degrees in classical languages and ancestry back to the Mayflower. No one is better, nor more appropriately, dressed than I,” was basically how I put in my order. “Two versions.”

  “So that would be two shades of grey,” said Nestor.

  “If you say so.”

  Having set clearly defined criteria, the process was fairly brief and efficient, especially after I told him not to bother describing the clothing’s physical properties and pedigrees. He wasn’t offended. Armed with precise measurements of my body, we moved from custom-made to off-the-rack casual wear and accessories. I accepted every recommendation and rationale, in whole cloth if you will, with the exception of a yellow cashmere sweater.

  “It’ll be too distracting,” I told him, “and I’ll probably end up dribbling Coquilles St. Jacques down the front.”

  A little over two hours later I left the store with the only items not in need of fitting and tailoring, and a renewed appreciation for the power of pretension in the confiscatory pricing of luxury goods.