“Good call, sir. So to sum up, we’ve got plenty of eligible suspects, but nothing to lead us to focus on one over the others. And it sounds like we’re just as much in the dark on the technical side, too.”
“That’s not quite true, Mike,” George replied. “We do know they can get past our firewalls at will, even while we’re scanning our system in real time and can’t find a single unauthorized port. That means that even if they installed a trapdoor to begin with, they’re no longer using it. So they must be able to fool our system into thinking they’re an authorized visitor.
“We also know that we can’t catch them when they enter, or track them once they’re in. My best guess is that they penetrate the firewall during a time of heavy traffic, and then change their identity every few seconds once they’re inside. That way they don’t leave any breadcrumbs for us to follow. They probably visit us regularly to update the code that steals the files, or maybe they delete it and plant it again somewhere else, and then log out – all within a minute or two of gaining access. Hours later, the new code executes, and bang! – we’ve been had again.”
The CIA men absorbed that for a moment. Then Mike spoke up. “So how about your golden boy – what is it, Frank? Has he come up with anything yet?”
At the mention of Frank’s name, Carl sat up abruptly, spilling most of his still-steaming coffee into his lap.
Noticing his presence for the first time, the others turned to watch Carl thrash wildly away at himself under the table.
Suppressing a smile, George decided to cut the young man a break. “Perhaps I owe you an apology, Carl. Actually, Frank isn’t a suspect at all. Never has been. But he is a security genius. If anyone I have on staff is going to figure out what’s going on here, it’s him – but only if he really drills down on it. And that’s not Frank’s strength. Thanks to you, he’s rather more motivated to get to the bottom of this than he would be if I’d simply told him to start digging.”
Flustered, Carl forgot his junior status. “So you played me as a stooge to set him up?”
“Actually, Carl, I set him up more than you did. You see, the weekend Frank’s file disappeared wasn’t really the first time the Alexandria folks struck. We’d already been losing files for two weeks, and had no idea who was hitting us. So I recorded the contribution message, removed Frank’s file myself, and left the message for him to find. Your part came later, and you played it perfectly – just as we had hoped. We couldn’t be more pleased.”
Carl looked uncertain, but had regained sufficient self control to know that he would be smart to keep his mouth shut.
George turned back to the other men and continued, “Instead of attending to his assigned duties, Frank has been knocking himself out hunting for the Alexandria Project ever since Carl interviewed him. Starting next week, he’ll be able to do that full time without guilt, because I’ve told him I’ve got no choice but to put him on administrative leave.”
Carl was thinking rapidly, trying to calculate whether he’d been made to look stupid or not. He didn’t like the way his math was coming out. This meeting had been just one surprise after another. What, he wondered, could possibly happen next?
George obligingly supplied the answer. “Which brings me to the reason I asked you to step in, Carl. Now that you know what’s really going on, it’s time you were reassigned.”
Okay, that was a surprise, Carl thought. To what?
But George wasn’t in any hurry to satisfy Carl’s curiosity. “Among security people that matter – here and abroad – Frank is very well known. He’s a go-to guy for everyone who is anyone in cybersecurity, and he can go anywhere online and be in touch with anyone he wants to.”
“Whoever is really behind the Alexandria Project must already know that, and will take it for granted that Frank is playing a key role in trying to hunt them down. We need to assume they will be willing to do anything necessary to prevent him from doing that.”
George paused, and looked Carl in the eye. “Do you understand?”
Carl nodded, adding “Yes, sir” in response to a sharp glance from his boss.
“Good. Therefore, when you walk out of this room, your new fulltime assignment will be to protect Frank Adversego, without him knowing it, and without allowing him to guess that he’s no longer a suspect.”
Carl was stunned. A project like that was below his meager, but hard won, pay grade. But what could he say?
“One more thing,” George added. “As you know from Frank’s file, he has a daughter in town named Marla. The next best way for the bad guys to get to Frank would be to get to her. So the second part of your job is to do everything necessary to protect Marla. We’ll make sure you have the resources you’ll need to protect both of them.”
George waited for a reply, but Carl only stared back at him blankly, looking as if he might be ill at any moment.
Losing patience, George spoke again. “Good. Then this would be an excellent time for you to get started, don’t you think?”
Carl realized that, “Yes, sir,” was the only available response. So he stood up, yes sir’ed George, and left the room, ears burning and holding his empty coffee cup in his hand.
Mary, of course, had been lying in wait for him, looking forward to his re-emergence from the conference room. “Did you have a good meeting, Agent Cummings?” she asked brightly.
For a moment, Carl tried to regain his composure, and then gave it up. Saying nothing, he set his coffee cup on her desk, took his coat from the closet, and left her sitting, puzzled, at her desk.
* * *
11
Have I got an App for You!
While cia agent Carl Cummings was being brought to heel by George Marchand, Frank was sitting at his kitchen table, tapping away at the cramped keyboard of a cheap netbook connected to a neighbor’s unsecured WiFi network. Even this was risky, he reminded himself, so this brief session would have to be his last until he moved on.
A few keystrokes more and he had logged on to the bank account of the Pangloss Game Company. Mentally crossing his fingers, he clicked on the link for an account that read “iBallZapper.” When the new view displayed, the number that immediately caught his eye was in the balance column, and that number was $147,396.78. A slow smile of victory spread across Frank’s face as he hit the refresh button. The number jumped upward by another $38.42. His plan was unfolding nicely.
Just ten days before, though, he had been sitting in the same chair wondering how he could possibly afford to execute the strategy that was taking shape in his mind. No matter how he looked at it, he needed something he didn’t have: money. And he needed a lot of it, too.
That was a problem. Frank was fiercely, if perversely, proud of his relative penury. His father had skipped out on the family while Frank was still in secondary school, and if Frank hadn’t scored a great scholarship, he never would have made it out of Brooklyn. Even so, he’d had to work at one part time job or another from the time he was fourteen until he graduated from college. He had been determined that Marla would never have to do the same. Since his salary at the Library of Congress was modest, that meant living in a pretty crummy part of town. Still, he could look forward to a pension when he retired as a civil servant – and more importantly, Marla would graduate from college and grad school unburdened by debt.
But now that wasn’t good enough. He had never anticipated suddenly needing a lot of cash. Hell, he didn’t even own a car, much less a house he could borrow against. And what he was planning now would require more money than he could run up on any reasonable number of credit cards, much less repay after the dust had settled.
Frank’s fingers drummed so hard on his table he finally became aware he was causing himself pain. But what was he to do? Where does an IT guy go when he needs big money to fund a project? Frank didn’t have any well-off friends or family to borrow from, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to be able to get money from some venture capitalist.
Or could he? Frank stood
up abruptly and grabbed his coat, making sure that one of his cheap pre-paid cellphones was in the pocket. With Lily yapping angrily at his ankles, he threw his coat on and left the apartment in a rush, shutting the door in the outraged animal’s face.
A minute later, he was walking rapidly to nowhere in particular in wet, falling snow, his hands shoved deep into his pockets and his mind spinning at top speed. The pieces of the plan cascaded into place almost effortlessly, and after a half hour of walking, he opened the cellphone to call an old MIT classmate, Archie Pangloss. Archie had kept loosely in touch with Frank over the years so he could tap him for free security advice as the need arose. Now it was payback time, and Frank was betting that the irrepressible Archie would love his idea instantly.
Luckily for Frank, Archie was available and took the call.
“Hey, Frank! What’s with the unlisted number? I almost didn’t pick it up.”
“Sorry about that. My cellphone’s dead so I picked up a cheapo at a convenience store to hold me over till tomorrow. But listen – here’s why I called. I’ve got what I think is a great idea for a new mobile game app, and I’m hoping you’ll publish it for me.”
Frank described the game in detail. As expected, Archie ate it up. “Awesome concept, Frank! Any time you want to hang it up at the Library, there’s a concept design job waiting for you at the Pangloss Game Company. If this goes viral we’ll own the number one spot at Apple’s App Store until the fun’s over – and we’re very good at getting the word out. For this one, we’ll go all out. How soon can you get the code to me?”
Frank paused. He wasn’t a game developer by training, and he was banking on mostly bolting together a bunch of open source software he was thinking should already be out there on the Web.
What the hell, he thought, and took the plunge. “Well, as a matter of fact, I am in kind of a hurry to see this launched. If you can do the graphics by the end of the week, I’ll get the backend to you at the same time. Then we do the integration over the weekend, and with any luck we go to market on Monday. What do you say?”
“No sweat. The graphics will be the easy part. This is a lot closer to Pong than Grand Theft Auto. We can re-skin some basic point and shoot stuff we use all the time. Even with just a week to work with, we can come up with some fun animations and sound effects.”
Frank breathed a sigh of relief. “Great. Now here’s the thing, Archie. I’m, uh, having a little trouble with my ex-wife, and this would just be a really bad time for a lot of money to start coming into my bank account. You’ve been there, so you know what I mean, right? So how about we split the profits 50 – 50, and you deposit my half in a subaccount at your bank. You can just send me an ATM card and wire instructions, and if I need any cash over the next few months I can just tap into the sub-account that way.
“And hey – don’t give me any credits on the app, or name me in the copyright notice, either. My ex’s lawyer is a sneaky bastard, and for all I know, he’s got a private investigator keeping an eye on me. What do you say?”
“As far as I’m concerned, what happens in Frank Land stays in Frank Land. If you want me to get all the fame and glory for designing a killer app, well, I can deal with that. As long as we get the financial stuff straightened out before tax time, I’m cool.”
“Excellent! Archie, tell me honestly, though. Do you really think this game will be successful? I’m kind of in a spot financially.”
“No question about it, Frank. How could it be otherwise in this best of all possible game worlds?”
Archie’s perpetually upbeat attitude usually irritated Frank, but this time he was grateful for the encouragement. He had a hell of a lot of work to do, and only a week to do it in. And he had no Plan B.
* * *
The Monday that the Pangloss Game Company launched iBallZapper! Frank’s app immediately leaped into the record books of massive, multi-player on line gaming. True to his word, Archie unleashed his flaks on the Web, and they instantly blanketed the social media landscape with five star reviews. In no time, the rave re-Tweets were flying thick and fast. After that, the game sold itself, since it was as easy to play as it was competitive. And the biggest daily and weekly winners could make real prize money to boot.
The concept of iBallZapper! was as simple as you could get: just download the app, sign in, and then go hunt and kill yourself some iBalls – and iBalls were everywhere. Once you found one, all you had to do was place your cursor on it and click, thereby sending it spiraling into an awesome, swirling black hole. It was fun, too, because you could choose from a long list of sound effects to accompany each horrified iBall as it disappeared into the maw of the cosmic abyss. Soon, startled passengers on subways and buses everywhere were surrounded by a cacophony of strange sounds, from the Wilhelm scream to Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm in When Harry Met Sally. Those introduced to the game by sadistic friends got RickRolled. But whatever the soundtrack, every time another iBall winked out of existence, the player racked up more points.
And there was no end of potential players, because the app ran on all the major mobile phones – not just the iPhone, but also the Android in all its many flavors. Anyone could download the app for free. Frank and Archie could afford to give iBallZapper! away, because they were making the big money using another piece of software: the iBall Resurrection Engine, a widget they provided – again free – to the owner of any website that hosted iBalls. Just one click and the engine would automatically download and install itself.
And who wouldn’t want to download the Engine? For every two iBalls that disappeared from a site, the Engine would resurrect one – in turn triggering a new payment by iBalls.com to the Website owner. So while the game continued to became more competitive as the number of remaining iBalls decreased, site owners cashed in big-time on iBall payments, as well as on increased ad revenues from the hoards of iBall Zappers prowling the Web for more virtual prey.
Of course, while the iBall Replacement Engine was free, The Pangloss Game Company took a small piece of the action every time it replaced an iBall. Site owners couldn’t care less, because the Engine did all the work while iBalls.com’s money flowed in.
And flow it did, as word spread far and wide, at home and abroad.
Ka-Ching!
* * *
iBalls.com founders Chad Derwent and Sanjay Shah fidgeted nervously in the posh reception area of TrashTalk LP’s offices in the heart of Silicon Valley. They were waiting for Josh Peabody, the venture capital rock star who had brought TrashTalk – and $50 million of its money – into iBalls.com. Surely, each thought, Peabody would be able to help them figure a way out of this mess. Money was literally fire hosing out of the company’s bank account, and at a faster rate by the minute. It seemed like the whole world had gone iBallZapper! mad.
“We’ve got to just shut it down,” Sanjay said for the tenth time that morning. “We won’t be able to last out the week otherwise. I don’t care what anybody says, we’ve got to throw the switch now.”
“We can’t just shut it down. Remember that stupid clickwrap license the lawyers made us use? Have you ever read it?”
“Of course I haven’t read it! It’s a frigging clickwrap license! Nobody reads a clickwrap license! It’s just something you have to get past before you can do what you want.”
“Yeah, well I read it this morning. It says that we can terminate the service anytime we want to – on ten days notice.”
“Well, screw it! We’ll just have a malfunction then. Hell, the way things are going, they ought to expect our servers to crash!”
Both of them swung their heads in unison as they heard the unmistakable sound of The Wilhelm behind them. The receptionist was clearly not attending to her day job.
“I could cry,” Sanjay moaned in a convincing voice. “It’s all crashing down around us. We should never have let that idiot Peabody persuade us to give up our original business plan.”
Just then, the great VC himself swung in through the glass doors
of TrashTalk’s offices, a travel bag slung over one shoulder. He noticed them almost immediately.
“Hey guys! Great to see you. C’mon down this way and we’ll find out what’s on your mind. Cappuccino? No? Well, give me a few minutes while I get myself set up for the day.” Sanjay looked at his partner incredulously as they followed Peabody down the hall.
Josh ushered Chad and Sanjay into a conference room and went off to the kitchen. Sanjay was becoming more frantic by the minute. “What’s on our minds? He’s crazy. He’s completely out of touch with reality.”
Chad was just as thrown by Peabody’s demeanor, but he tried not to show it. Wasn’t it TrashTalk’s money that was flying out the door? He pushed Sanjay down into a chair. “Take it easy. He’s got to be just as concerned as we are. I’m sure he’s just putting on a brave face for his staff. Once we’re alone with him we can come up with a strategy to buy some time and figure a way out of this.”
They sat in silence until Josh finally waltzed in.
“So what do you think, guys? Would you have ever dreamed you could get publicity like this? I had my assistant put this little video montage together just for you – and now here you are! How cool is that?” This time, Chad couldn’t help himself. He moaned softly in harmony with his partner.
Peabody turned on the projector and leaned back to enjoy the show. Chad and Sanjay watched in growing horror as video clip followed clip from CCBN, CBN, and Roseberg. One after another, the financial pundits wondered what the deal was with iBalls.com. Had the start-up been hacked? Was it all a gimmick, with some kind of surprise ending yet to come? Nobody could figure out what was really going on. The video ended with Glenn Beck raging against this rampant assault on capitalism, obviously launched by the Chinese or the liberals – most likely Chinese Nazi Liberals!
Josh clapped and whooped. “Did you see that! Glenn Beck! By tonight, you’ll have people that have never used a computer before zapping iBalls!”
The Alexandria Project: A Tale of Treachery and Technology (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 1) Page 10