There was a silence in which the man from the Executive Office studied Foster, studied him staring blankly at his shoes, his nervous hands dipping briefly into his pants pockets, and his bent and reluctant pose.
“We do have whole labs staffed for this sort of thing,” said Foster at last. “I guess I don’t understand. Why me? Why me—a man in the field in his spare time—and not a hardened resource already in place? I don’t want to disappoint you, but why isn’t that a better tool? Not to mention: this is hardly my field . . .”
“I thank you for the inventory of our resources, Doctor,” said the man with a bitter chuckle, “but I think I have a very good vision for them. And besides, you should have faith! You won’t disappoint—it’s impossible for you to disappoint—I promise. We’re laying new road,” he continued, “pulling it up after us. We’re off script, and you are a systems engineer—are you not?”
Foster tried to respond but the man continued over him.
“Yes. Yes, you are—so I think between the pair of us, you’re the man for the job.” The man quickly lifted his cuff to check the time, and continued. “We’re entirely off the books, Doctor. This isn’t a line item anywhere. For now, at least, this is drawn from my own discretionary budget, and is as dark as you like. As I said: you’re all mine.” He checked his watch again. “Proof of concept, Dr. Foster. Proof of concept. That’s what I want: a prototype.” The man inhaled deeply, drew himself up, straightened his tie. “Look it over, Doctor. Look it over, find your method, gain access, and then concern yourself with a wonderful and invisible little container.”
“Have we established a point of penetration? A means—is there an angle of attack I should be looking at? A strategy, special access—anything?” Foster began to feel weightless, falling.
“Do I strike you as the hand-holding type? There is no we, Dr. Foster: no me. There is only you.” He lifted his cuff one last time. “I’ll be in touch,” he said with a saccharin, conciliatory tone. “You’re just the man for it, Doctor—I just know it. I can feel it in my bones. There’s Whistler at the National Gallery as well—it’s lovely—you should see it before you leave,” he said, and left Foster there to the sound of his heels and the footfalls of his cohort receding along the hall.
The drive had rattled around in a pocket of his briefcase for several days unminded, not unlike the little stainless folding knife which, delivered back to Saint Louis in the belly of Foster’s garment bag, hung now forgotten in the breast pocket of his suit.
It was an evening some time later—research papers strewn along the dining room table with a bachelor’s care, the windows prized open to a mild breeze, the unfolded petals of the paper rose trembling gently in the air—that the jump drive had tumbled from Foster’s reclining briefcase out onto the table, mirror-slick with polish. Between papers and the solvent fume of red correcting pen, he’d downloaded the contents of the drive to his laptop and found the man was right: the man from the Executive Office, The Familiar. He did recognize the software. It was Siemens Step-7: a package of industrial management software used to govern the lattice of machinery driving everything from amusement rides to manufacturing operations, power stations, refining medical isotopes, or—assuming the appropriate political and financial motivation—enriching weapons grade Uranium 235 from the garden variety vapors of Uranium 238.
But while contributing to such a system was well within Foster’s ability, merely recognizing, designing, or coding were a matter quite apart from weaponizing its zero-day vulnerabilities—defeating it without breaking it, or manhandling it without leaving bruises, much less prints. It wasn’t impossible, he thought, but the scope of the thing ran to—and it seemed to him—beyond, the comfortable edges of his conception—his slightly, perhaps increasingly, addled conception. For this reason he’d come to courting Jeffrey Sachs—the young graduate student and gifted programmer—and for this reason come to find himself seated in a wear-marked, tobacco-stain booth beneath the failing light of day and a menagerie of trophy heads and jukeboxes on chalk-blue walls in a dusky corner of Blueberry Hill.
4.
Sachs landed the pitcher and nested pint glasses before Foster, who hadn’t moved in his absence, nor had he been served.
“Expecting company, or just keeping one for each hand?” said Foster at last sliding the phone into his pocket.
“You’re company. I didn’t figure they’d have gotten you—we’re at the witching hour.”
“I’m not much of a beer man,” said Foster.
“Every man’s a beer man, Charles. With the exception of tipplers and ‘totalers, they only come that way.”
“And what are those?” asked Foster, watching Sachs negotiate the glasses and the pitcher to fill them.
“Well the one simply abstains; the other prefers champagne and hugs,” he said with a broad unselfconscious smile.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Dunno, maybe I just made it up.”
“I suppose I have no choice, then.”
“None at all. Savor this choiceless moment while it lasts. Cheers.”
The story had been meted out in bipolarized parcels of good-natured shoulder swatting and recondite evasiveness, but as Jeffrey Sachs had come to understand it, Foster was contracting with a security consultancy tasked with providing a suite of proprietary security instruments. The client’s concern was their hardware and software products falling into the hands of competitors and unlicensed users. But rather than devising a lock-out protocol alerting unauthorized users, and supplying them opportunity to purge or dispose of proprietary material, there was a concerted interest in alternatives—allowing the machinery and software at least the appearance of normal function, if also frustrating the results and products which licensed and rightful acquisition would achieve. The concept, as described to Sachs, was merely a variation on the theme of patent and proprietary defense; in this case allowing the lawyerly rank to lace and polish their briefs, and perhaps even capture offenders, hardware in tow.
How precisely to do it was the question, and it was one for which Foster proposed to pay twenty thousand dollars for an answer. With his academic and other consultative obligations for the client, he was pressed for time and overburdened. Were Sachs to provide a viable draft of a discrete executable script, it would be well worth a small piece of Foster’s fee for the collaboration. To Sachs’ dismay, however, that collaboration never transpired. Foster provided five of the twenty thousand at the start and in the ensuing months, nothing but a compensation in fits of harassing urgency broken by spells of a silent and absent indifference. It wasn’t a mere business of brain chemistry, Sachs felt sure, but as though Foster’s very mechanisms were bi-polar—like as all his cogs were toothed on one side—so that even flat-out he would idle for half the rotation and surge with paroxysm for the other.
Sachs, however, held out hope that this chill, ebbing February day, broadcasting the flares of its final luster from beneath the brow of window cornices across Delmar might mark the completion of their relationship. But it was a hope otherwise divorced from hopefulness; his desire was fastened by a skepticism which had grown up around Foster and the whole business, and weighed upon all the buoyancy of completion.
Foster smiled as he picked up the flash drive Sachs placed on the table. “Is Adata the only company that makes these things?”
“Thumb drives?”
“I swear to god, I’ve never bought a single one of these things, and I bet I’ve got a half-dozen that are identical.”
“Everybody makes those.”
“Really?”
“Everybody.”
“Well I’d never know, mine are all the same—each and every one, I bet.”
“If they’re from the university maybe that’s not surprising.”
“No, no—I’ve gotten them other places too. It’s uncanny. Anyway—so this is it?”
“That’s it. Dinner is served.”
Foster considered his pint glass for a moment. “In the spirit of the occasion,” he said, and visited a sip.
“In the spirit of any occasion.”
“Alright, what’s in the soup?” said Foster, examining the jump drive as though he might divine its contents by close looking.
Sachs worked down an effervescing mouthful of drink and then guarded the glass with a two-handed grip. “Muddled mints, turtledoves, and partridges in a pear trees,” he said, and tried a fleeting smile on Foster. “Let me show you. Can I show you?” Sachs drew a heavy laptop from his satchel and cleared the pitcher and glasses for room. It bore a faint patina of original finish and a jumbled livery in band decals one full generation out of register and was white-silver with handling everywhere it might be clasped or touched or carried. The machine was hot with readiness and Sachs set it out and opened it and stabbed the jump drive in its flanks. He accessed the drive and a command console into it and spun it round for Foster to see: “It loads into and boots from memory rather than hard-disk. It’s five basic modules together: a carrier file used for delivery, although the physical reality of making connection with the right hardware is a question for you and your clients—I wouldn’t know where to start. There’s a loader that forks it into memory on boot-up; an access panel, concealed back door that allows you to adjust functions and settings if you choose, but also to view or cull data from the hardware itself. And there’s a key logger—I wasn’t sure if you’d want that or not, but I thought I’d leave it in—if you guys want to defeat it you can. But I would assume that more information about the ways the systems are being used is preferable to less. I mean, that’s the point, isn’t it? And then there’s the five golden rings.”
Foster scrolled down the code lines. This time of day it was onion cutting—the squinty text gave him eye water; it was all optical Braille, digital hieroglyphs. Now he was no longer seeing; now he was no longer looking—just scrolling as a decorous succession to being shown, as the necessary antecedent to speaking.
“The access panel—where is that?”
“You’re looking at it.”
“It’s all command-line?”
“It is.”
“Are all my client staff superusers?”
“I have no idea what your client staff are.”
“They’re not. Can it replicate?”
“Why would you want it to do that? I mean, no—not now it doesn’t—but I suppose you could make it. I’m not sure why—”
“What are the five golden rings, then?”
“Well, that’s your dessert, right: chocolate truffle cake—your pièce de résistance.”
“Dessert is the enduring feature?”
“I like dessert. So, I had a hell of a time trying to figure out what would let you get in, and not just observe an errant system, but affect it—but all this without rousing the guy at the keyboard with his donut fingers. It’s the clock—I mean that’s all I could think of, anyway.”
“What’d you do with the clock?”
“Well, the more you’ve daisy chained together the greater the potential effect, and less likely I’d guess to ring any bells—but basically you backend the clocks, the device clocks, so that you can still feed a user the clocking specs they expect to see, but that’s just a feed—like mirroring the telemetry they dial in, for example. You want to be able to alter the clock settings in order to slow things down, speed them up, turn them on when they should be off, off when they should be on—you know.”
“And this does that?”
“In spades.”
“In golden rings.”
“Sure.”
Foster followed Sachs’ thread despite feeling his attentions were lolling on their stem. In the moment, here opposite the young man in his t-shirt and crumpled pea coat, this electro-mechanical achievement and its metaphor of conveyance felt insoluble, unmasticated and raw. The source of his flickering attention was in part strong boredom seizing upon him in waves, and manifest principally as a sensation of being pierced through at the nasal flange. But more generally Foster recognized it as the ‘nag’: that irritated hollow of the sinus, that un-chaffed scab yearning to be peeled, to be abraded.
Foreground to this ambient physiological itch, however, was another persisting distraction, in the form of Foster’s astonishment at the casual acceptance of his fabulous pretence. So far as Foster could tell, Sachs had nothing for him but a student’s resentment for his lack of participation, and a freelancer’s tactful concern not to disturb impending monies. But whatever the static, there seemed none for premise, so that for a moment listening to Sachs’ earnest tones, he wondered that he might persuade him to deliver the bug as well.
“It’s an executable, I assume?” said Foster.
“Of course . . . I just said that. All plug n’ play. I mean I can tool it differently, make it a remote exec for example . . . if that’s what you want.” Sachs worried a mole on his cheek, and his gaze veered suddenly away as he said this. He could, but had no desire to—Foster noted from the tell—evading the alternative as though their gaze might complete the unwanted circuit.
“No. That’s fine. That’s what I wanted. Let’s just add replication—we’ll need that—and a graphical user interface for the access panel. Think ease of use. Keep it neat.”
“That’d be almost half again the work.”
Foster closed the computer and slipped it toward Sachs. “You’re a great talent, Jeffrey.” He felt oddly rejuvenated by Sachs’ onset of ill ease and drew a checkbook and pen from his coat. “Here’s another five-thousand. You don’t mind waiting till we’ve reviewed the work for the rest.”
II.
The barn was humid with the smell of stale shit, rotting straw, the sweet tang of the M5’s exhaust, and the eternal must of forgotten places. Marek Hussar rest between the headlamps with the spade handle in his left hand and gloves knotted in his right, and surveyed what lay where the light speared the turgid air. An occasional winter breeze rattled the boards, and where they gapped, set the car-light aflame with dancing chaff. At the back of the barn, Hussar had parted the heap of moldering hay to the ground, where, unlike the masonry-hard soil outside, it had been kept warm and moist beneath the decomposing straw. In that space, he’d excavated a trough some six feet long and four feet deep, leavened the cavity with a one-hundred-sixty pound zipper-bag from the trunk, stanched the gap with its own displaced earth, and paused to mark the time on his wristwatch. Beneath the rafters and the drooping loft, it had been full dark for thirty minutes. But beyond the barn wood cladding, the brisk day was still forty minutes to dusk, and its textures flared with pink and bronze as the last flush of an ember.
Again he referred to the watch, replaced his gloves, and set to dressing the straw over the earthen gash to form a heaping, shapeless drift—much as it had been before. Now with a composite interval for the process through to the end, he fetched a pair of binoculars from the car and stepped out between the barn’s wide doors, and onto the rutted path parting the vast, untended grasses. The barn rest two-thirds up a rising and neglected pasture, and was closed on all sides by a wood, which in the rapidly changing light seemed to have barred even the aperture of the road with shadow. He circled, looking for trampled grasses, and scanned the wood again for any sign of structures with line-of-sight. He found nothing to see. And when Hussar had finally resolved to an imperfect satisfaction, he drew the car out through the huge doors, and fastened them closed with a keyed padlock.
He turned down the long aggregate drive, through the shaded portal of the trees, and eventually onto the county road where a sign nailed to a vague remnant of fence proclaimed ‘Acreage for Sale.’ The phone number listed was illegible for the height of weeds, and so far as Hussar could tell, the property had been out of use for the better part of a decade.
The two-lane switchback hove to sides and pitched blind over crests. A patchwork of amended asphalt and sudden irretrievable verges, Hussar swept along it, bending and falling, throttling up until the engine gained the breath of life; the exhaust rang in quick emphatic shouts, and the valve train spun off its lope and lethargy for snarling induction clockworks. The tires warmed through long sweepers, and the chassis danced into corners and lit on toes over the precipitous crown of rises. Occasional squat clapboard homes stumbled down toward the road, their chalky drives sailing out, as stockings from a line. Copse of wood broke between the houses, and by stages full-up against the roadside; a streaking panorama, deep invulnerable evergreen and tendril-patient deciduous brown. Only the balking punctuation of slow and unimaginative traffic disturbed his mechanical indulgence—his vestibular concentration of feet and hands—and his carefully sighting the road-line for the mount of antlers and light racks.
When at last he’d reached 44, he wound up to speed and settled into the left lane, where he moved past emerging taillights like mile markers, and for an hour and a half, slipped east toward Saint Louis and into the blue dark of early evening.
2.
The woman who left had short black hair and tattoos. The woman who returned was thick, older, wore a formless black dress, and scowled at him disapprovingly through a pair of bifocals in the guise of fashionable glasses. In the five minutes between them, Marek Hussar sat beneath the tarp-like smock, his feet on the stirrup, a bitter light swelling his unshaven pallor, his hair a swerve of damp tangle; gazed at the weary squint which peered back at him from the mirror, and decided: a competent mechanic, a good barber, and a tolerable woman are the rarest things an obsessive man will ever know.
“I’m Lauren,” said the woman whose dress fell in a line from the precipitous ledge of her breasts, much as Hussar’s smock from his knees. “I’ve excused Kim for the afternoon; I’ll be finishing your haircut,” she said into the mirror when she arrived.
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