Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “I admit that I Google both my exes now and then,” Lili said unexpectedly. “Adriano and Philip. Just out of curiosity. Maybe just that I want to know if they’re still alive.”

  “They’re part of your life,” I said. “Trying to ignore or forget those years isn’t healthy. That’s what I worry about Doug and Catherine. I hope they can find some way to get along, if not for their own sakes then for the kids.”

  Poor Doug. His life had taken a sharp turn when Catherine divorced him, and he was trying to find his way forward. I hoped I’d be able to give him a helping hand, the way so many people had done for me.

  8 – Innocent and Trusting

  Early Monday morning, my phone pinged with a text from Doug. He wanted to know if I’d been able to break the password on that hyperlinked spreadsheet we had looked at on Saturday night. I texted back that I’d get on it that day, and before I left for work I dug out the laptop that had belonged to Caroline Kelly, my late neighbor. Two years before, when Rochester and I began searching for her killer, my computer use was closely supervised by my parole officer, so I had appropriated her laptop and installed a number of illicit software programs on it, ones that had gotten me into trouble in the past.

  I had used them on several occasions since, always convincing myself that my intentions were good in trying to bring criminals to justice without harming anyone innocent. In order to help Doug, I needed to see the contents of that hyperlinked spreadsheet, and the only way I knew to download it without the password was to get into the Beauceron server at the file level.

  I considered myself a hacker – in the classical definition, originated by MIT, I was a guy with an interest in how things work, and how to tinker with them. A generation ago, I might have been a ham radio operator or one of those hobbyists who met in garages to share news about those new-fangled computer things.

  A cracker was someone whose purpose was to break into systems by circumventing security measures, usually with malicious intent. While I’d done a bit of cracking in my day, I preferred to think of myself as curious. Because I was not a programmer and don’t create my own tools, just use ones written by others, some people might consider me among the script kiddies—a pejorative term referring to hackers who don’t care how the tools work, just want to use them.

  Since I was over forty, it was silly to consider me a kid. But I wasn’t about to go back to school for programming, either. So I trolled around the dark web, a series of overlay networks which use the public Internet but require specific programs, configurations or authorization to access. That’s where I found the software I needed to do what I wanted.

  A year before, Eastern had upgraded the Wi-Fi network at the campus library due to the profusion of students bringing their own laptops in to for a quiet place where they could write papers and do research. I could have high-speed Internet access there and use my hacker software to mask my IP address.

  I made a quick stop at Friar Lake to drop Rochester off with Joey and then drove to campus. At the first breath of spring, students at Eastern swing into warm-weather mode. It can be fifty degrees outside, and they’ll shuck their Canadian down parkas, their Doc Martens, and their hip-hanging jeans for t-shirts, shorts and flip-flops. I used to do that, but now that I’m over forty, I have this thing about not putting myself at risk of pneumonia. Quirky, I know, but that’s me.

  At the massive glass and stone library, I found a secluded corner of the first floor and opened my laptop, then initiated the software that I used for port scanning and information gathering. I mapped the network at the library and got a list of all the ports on user computers that were available for me. The first couple I checked belonged to students—I could tell from the names of their hard drives, and the homework files they kept on them.

  I stopped at one where the hard drive was simply called C: and where the dozens of files were kept on the desktop instead of organized into folders. A quick survey indicated the computer belonged to a professor who taught Latin and ancient history. I thought I recognized the man’s name—he was elderly and often snoozed through college-wide meetings.

  Ah, the older generation. So innocent and trusting.

  I used Telnet, a network protocol software, to connect to his computer and determine what software it was running. Once I knew that, I’d be able to tell which of my hacking tools would give me easiest access.

  I felt a momentary pang of conscience. What I was doing was against the law—breaking into a company’s internal server, with a plan to download a file of possibly proprietary information without permission.

  As I usually did, I justified my actions. I was only doing this work at Doug’s insistence, because he was worried that the company was doing something illegal. I wasn’t going to use the information I found to make a profit or to cheat anyone. Of course, it was doubtful that law enforcement would believe me, and as a repeat offender it was possible I’d be sent back to prison.

  It was extremely doubtful that anyone would notice I’d visited the Beauceron server, and even if my intrusion was noted, it would take a lot of fancy footwork on someone’s part to track my IP address back to the Eastern library. From there, it would be almost impossible to connect Caroline’s laptop to the hack—unless someone was already looking at me, and got a search warrant for my equipment and my files, the way the police had done in California.

  With all those protections in place, I proceeded.

  Cyberattacks usually require that the targeted computer have some pre-existing system flaw, such as a software error, a lack of antivirus protection, or a faulty system configuration, for a hacker to exploit.

  My elderly colleague’s computer was running an older version of Internet Explorer with some known vulnerabilities, and I was able to use that knowledge to take control of it. I doubted he’d even notice that I was running programs in the background. I just had to hope he was there in the library for a while, or I’d have to start all over again.

  I sent a series of messages to the Beauceron server, looking for a way inside, hoping it had either been misconfigured, or that it lacked up-to-date security software. Computer servers are such complicated pieces of hardware that there can be many, many settings that have to be enabled precisely.

  It took close to an hour to get access to the files on the Beauceron server. As soon as I was in, I navigated my way to the location of the hyperlinked file. Because I was able to get access to it at the directory level, I didn’t need the password to download it. Once I saw it had been saved on the laptop, I severed my connection to the server and released my control of the elderly professor’s computer.

  I closed the laptop and drove back to Friar Lake. I had software that could probably break the password on the file, but it would take a while to run and I had work I needed to do at the office while it did. Since the program didn’t require Internet access to run, I didn’t need to be in a protected location.

  The only vehicle in the Friar Lake parking lot was Joey’s truck, and the property seemed strangely quiet after all the activity of the weekend. I got Rochester and took him for a walk around the property. I felt like the king of my own domain, ten mountain-top acres and a cluster of buildings old and new.

  Rochester slumped on the floor beside my desk as I set up my laptop and opened a program called Snap, Crack and Pop, a silly takeoff on the Rice Krispies slogan. The splash screen looked old-fashioned, with very simple windows and amateurish icons. But I knew there was a powerful intelligence inside it, hidden behind the façade.

  Snap, Crack and Pop figured out that the password on the file was a series of twelve numbers, letters and special characters, like question marks and parentheses. It began generating possible combinations, and the display on the screen was dizzying, as one after another was rejected.

  It was hypnotic, watching that constantly changing display, and made my pulse race, as it often did when I was close to breaking in somewhere.

  My cell rang with Rick’s “Hawaii Five-O”
ring tone, and Rochester jumped up. For a moment I worried that Rick knew what I was doing and had called to check on me. That was just paranoia, though. Because of the pirate theme of the party the day before, I thought it would be funny to tease Rick—without telling him that he’d interrupted my own piracy.

  “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,” I said, as Rochester nuzzled my knee.

  “I could have used that rum after the party,” Rick said. “Those kids wore me out. I don’t see how Tamsen manages day to day.”

  “She’s a mom. AKA a super hero.” I reached down and scratched behind Rochester’s ears, and he opened his mouth wide.

  “Got that right. Anyway, I need to pick your brain. Can we get together tonight?”

  “Sure. You want to bring Rascal over for dinner?”

  “I’d rather not talk about what I have to say in front of Lili,” he said. “Maybe you and I could meet at the Drunken Hessian?”

  “Lili teaches a Monday night class, so I’m free,” I said. “I just have to feed and walk the hound before I can go out.”

  We agreed on six o’clock, and I hung up. I wondered what Rick didn’t want to say in front of Lili. Was it something about her? I couldn’t imagine he’d know anything about Lili that I didn’t know. Then I remembered Tamsen saying that Rick had been in touch with Tiffany. Perhaps that’s what he wanted to talk about, and he didn’t want to confess something in front of a woman who knew his girlfriend.

  That was almost as troubling. Tamsen was a great woman and a good match for Rick. She was smart and successful and beautiful – a lot like Lili, I thought. But there was also something vulnerable about her, the way she had lost her soldier husband to war, the way she was raising her son on her own.

  In being Rick’s friend for last two years, I’d discovered he was the kind of person who wanted to do good in the world. He was a cop because he believed in his work. His first wife was a mess, and Rick had taken care of her for years. Now he had a chance with Tamsen, who appeared to be a lot more together than Tiffany, yet still could use Rick’s help.

  What if he’d screwed up somehow? Cheated on Tamsen with Tiffany? That would be a disaster. It wasn’t what I’d expect of him, but we were only human, after all, and I knew how easy it was to slip up and do the wrong thing for the right reason.

  I forced myself to look away from Snap, Crack and Pop and focus on my to-do list. I set up the seminar survey, emailed thank you notes to all the seminar participants, filed my expense reports and filled out the forms to get Doug paid.

  By the time I finished that, either Snap, Crack or Pop had discovered the password to open the spreadsheet, displaying it superimposed over the graphic of an open padlock. I turned back to the laptop, double-clicked the file, and then pasted in what my program had found.

  I don’t know what I was expecting – that the file would crash my computer? That alarms would go off? But the only thing that happened was that the spreadsheet opened, and it looked perfectly normal.

  Why was it hyperlinked back to that first file? I opened the original file in a second window side-by-side with the first and began comparing the two. All the headings were the same, as were the dates along the left side. The only difference was in the data.

  Starting about a year before, the income from the property recorded on the protected sheet dropped to zero, while on the public spreadsheet it continued to grow.

  So whoever created that spreadsheet didn’t want the real figures to be visible. Why not? It couldn’t be for tax purposes—you’d want to hide income, not losses. And if shareholders in the fund saw that the property was making money, they’d expect to see their returns go up.

  I never went to business school, but I’d written a number of annual reports in my career and I had a basic understanding of the kind of documents a company had to release. If Beauceron was hiding losses, there had to be a reason for it. Maybe Doug would know. I’d show him what I’d found, and let him decide what to do.

  I texted Doug and asked him to call me when he could talk. I drummed my fingers on the desktop while I waited. I’d just had a major breakthrough and there was only one person I could share it with. Why wasn’t he as excited as I was?

  By five o’clock, when he still hadn’t called, I had gotten over my adrenaline rush.

  I was driving home when Doug finally called me. “Sorry I couldn’t get back to you earlier. Things are getting scary here, and I was in a meeting all afternoon with Shawn where he kept asking me strange questions. What did you come up with?”

  I told him about finding the duplicate spreadsheet with the real data. I waited, but he didn’t say anything.

  “This seems like something you should report to the authorities,” I said finally. “It could be an anomaly, but my guess is that it’s a way to hide money, or hide the fact that there isn’t any money coming in.”

  “Can I see it?” he asked. “I’m on my way to pitch a prospective client and I don’t know when I’ll be finished. Can we meet for breakfast tomorrow morning?”

  I suggested the Chocolate Ear café in the center of Stewart’s Crossing, run by my friend Gail, and Doug agreed to meet me there at seven-thirty. I was a little surprised that he didn’t ask for more details over the phone, but perhaps I hadn’t conveyed enough urgency.

  My bigger problem, though, was how I was going to get through dinner with Rick Stemper without bragging about my successful hack.

  9 – Unofficial Inquiries

  When I got home, I fed and walked Rochester, then took a few minutes to log in to the hacker support group I had joined a few months before. All of us had gotten into trouble at one time or another for computer hacking, and being part of the group gave me an opportunity to talk about temptation and backsliding.

  One of the regular members, Brewski_Bubba, was on line at the time, and I opened a chat window with him. I didn’t know much about him, other than that he was a Southerner, a beer lover, and a guy who’d gotten in trouble for credit card fraud.

  After we went through the preliminaries I told him that I’d hacked into a server that day in order to download a file. “It was a favor for a friend,” I typed. “So yeah, illegal, but he works there, so he figured he ought to have access to it.”

  “Sounds like you’re rationalizing,” he replied.

  “Yeah, I am. What’s scariest is how easy it was and how good it felt. Do you think we’ll ever be over this need to hack?”

  He typed in one of those emoticons I didn’t quite understand, a face with weird eyes and a tongue sticking out. “Doubt it,” he wrote. “Did you cover your tracks?”

  I explained the way I’d taken control of the other computer, used the college’s Wi-Fi and so on. “Shouldn’t be any way to get back to me.”

  “Long as your friend doesn’t rat you out,” he wrote. “Don’t tell him what you did.”

  I agreed that was a good idea, then logged off and drove down to the Drunken Hessian, at the center of Stewart’s Crossing. A plaque outside said that an inn of some kind had been on that spot since the Revolutionary War, and the décor hadn’t much changed, except for the introduction of indoor plumbing. The sign depicted one of the Hessian soldiers whom Washington had surprised at Trenton on Christmas day, looking like he’d had quite a few too many.

  The promised cold front was on its way and I shivered as I stepped out of the car. I hurried into the warmth of the Drunken Hessian and spotted Rick at a booth in the back. I slid in across from him and asked, “What’s so hush-hush that you didn’t want to talk about it in front of Lili? It’s not about her, is it?”

  “Not at all. I’m just embarrassed. It’s awkward enough to talk about it with you.”

  “If you’re having embarrassing problems you should see a urologist.”

  “Nothing like that, dufous,” he said. The waitress appeared and we ordered a pair of Yard Brawlers, the beer we’d had the other day, and both decided to opt for the grilled chicken Caesar salad – too many burgers make middle-aged men f
at.

  “So,” I said, when the waitress was gone. “Is this about Tiffany?”

  He looked up at me. “How did you know?”

  “Hey, I’m Joe Hardy, aren’t I?” I had helped Rick with a couple of cases, and while at first he’d teased me as one of those amateur sleuths from cozy mysteries, eventually I’d worked my way up in his esteem to being the younger of the Hardy Boys, Joe to his Frank. “Tamsen mentioned that you’d been in touch with Tiffany, and I figured that might be something you didn’t want to talk about in front of Lili.”

  “And I always thought the dog was the brains of your operation,” he said. Rochester had a knack for finding clues, and though Rick had resisted at first, he’d eventually come to accept my dog’s talents.

  “Ha-ha. Or should I say woof-woof?”

  The waitress brought our beers. I tipped my glass to his and said, “To problem solving.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “To problem solving.”

  “So what are we solving here?”

  “Tiffany. I can’t seem to get her out of my hair.”

  “What’s wrong now?” I knew she was the kind of woman who was attracted to danger junkies. She had married Rick because she liked the thrill of his being a uniformed patrolman, the chance that he might not survive a day at work. When he moved up to detective, she had lost interest and left him for a fire fighter. That hadn’t worked out, and she had moved through a series bungee jumpers, parachute jumpers, and petty criminals since then.

  “Tiffany is the kind of girl who always falls into bad situations.” Rick held up his hand. “I know what you’re going to say. She married me.”

  “Actually, I think that was the one good thing Tiffany did.” Rick was a caretaker, and Tiffany needed someone like that. “But go on.”