Infinite Exposure

by Roland Hughes

  “I'm glad you are easy to do business with. This should be a very profitable undertaking for both of us.”

  “I hope so. By the way, they don't handle blood products do they?”

  “I can ask, why?”

  “We are getting quite a supply of whole blood, clotting agent, and plasma built up. If they are supplying some hospitals it would be nice if they could take some of those off our hands while they are still fresh.”

  “I will make a call now.”

  “Thank you.”

  Nikolaus hung up the disposable phone, looked at the battery level, then tossed it in the trash. No sense keeping something like that around or recharging it, he thought. Never know when this will all blow up.

  When he returned to his desk, he got back to work on his new mission in life, building a secured camp in China. Abel had provided him with additional information about the area where the existing gauze factory was. There was already a worker dormitory on site. The odd thing about building in China was that housing was so scarce you had to build a company town to set up a factory, at least if you weren't Chinese.

  There was a very large plot of land the generics company had an option on and it was about the right size for a smaller second secured facility. He already had his people approach their contacts in the Chinese government about building a facility on that plot to house the drugs for their plan. They were all too eager to give an approval and promise to keep what the site did confidential. The Lutton bombing had them wondering about having all of this stuff stored in one place as well.

  Crazy Man was Right

  John had been walking on egg shells for the past three days. His request for new identity kits and traveling money had went unanswered. The stress of working nearly 18 hours per day, and actually having to work rather than supervise, was also taking its toll on him. The company had finally hired a few people, but they were almost non-technical by definition. They had done this to get around the union contract. They were all part-time people without any degrees. They were going to hire the maximum number of part-time people they could find at the shit wages they were offering and not replace a single union worker. The greedy bastards didn't care who keeled over in here.

  Training the new people had been a big drain on John's time. He had little time to think about his plan or to do much about implementing it. He had quietly opened up the firewall on three separate ports to allow his machine to connect from home, or literally anywhere. In theory, the attack could be carried out from his apartment, but not if the company management found the open ports in the fire wall. John had been good about covering his tracks when he did that, logging in via the generic systems maintenance account the others used to do their work. Still, it was a gamble. If they ran a security audit, they would find the ports and close them. They may or may not try to find out who took the security off those ports and why, but with the ports closed he would be forced to be in the building (along with the three others) to carry out the attack.

  A security audit was fast becoming a big risk. There was a lot of fall out from the failed data center migration. Even though the center was up and running the following day, a lot of people were being called on the carpet for it. Even John's boss had told him the Americans owned up to it being their fault. They had fired two people responsible for it and were looking at taking legal action against the data center that quit the day of the conversion.

  That was not good news to John. He had read enough Internet news and watched enough business reports on satellite TV to know just how court cases like that worked. The former employees would get lawyers to file a class-action counter suit. There would be lots of news reports and media coverage stating the data center was being off-shored. They might even identify John's data center. Management would freak and lock down this facility like a fortress.

  The Utopian vision John had for this attack was that he and the three others would enter a conference room under the guise of a software deployment meeting. This would be entered on the calendars just like any other deployment meeting. Since it was a software deployment meeting, nobody would think twice about the developers having their notebook computers in the room.

  At the start of the meeting they would start each of the jobs that transferred money out of the accounts. One of the developers had come up with a wonderful idea. Rather than begin a bulk transfer of all moneys, they had written a program which would randomly take transaction amounts which occurred on each account over the past six months. Instead of going to their original destinations these transactions would be sent to the accounts in Syria, Iran, and Switzerland. John had already tasked one of the cell leaders with getting the accounts set up and getting software in place so when the money started coming in they could instantly transfer it out via the drug-dealer, money-laundering system.

  The meeting would be held near the end of the work day. After they had monitored the jobs a little while, they would simply go home, pack their bags and disappear. Even if the banks began to catch onto the heist, tens of millions if not billions would be gone. Trying to get it all in one lump sum would send up too many red flags in the software. They would all be caught and the transactions would be reversed before the money could be snatched out of the accounts.

  One thing John had learned in doing his research for this attack is that there is less printed money worldwide than there is wealth. If every single person went to their bank and stock broker trying to all get their funds in cash, roughly half of them would have to take IOUs. They didn't have to get all of the money to start a global panic, just enough to force a run on the banks.

  This had been a hard sell for John. A lot of money had come in post-9/11 and the upper echelon of al-Qaeda did not have much interest in any attack which didn't take the lives of infidels. John had decided he was going through with this whether he got the blessing of the leaders or not. Apparently they had come to the same conclusion since they sent him employees and people to train for the email hub operations.

  John believed the only reason he didn't get a new person to train after the hub in Pakistan had been so rudely taken out was the fact he sent an email stating the operation was to happen soon. The others on John's team had told him their cell leaders had a lot of support for this project. Weapons and people were being chewed up in Afghanistan. It cost cash to purchase small arms and explosives. Their Russian suppliers had all but stopped selling them anything good. Now they were dealing with the Muslim countries surrounding Afghanistan, but the prices were higher due to the risk for them and the fact they were buying from the Russians and acting as middle men.

  A strike like this could prove just how dangerous al-Qaeda really was. They had been unable to acquire decent biological weapons or any nuclear weapons, but the cash from this might tempt some of the more unstable governments in the region. It would also allow them to set up a disposal company for chemical and nuclear waste. They had some home-grown supporters in countries where that was a commercial business, most notably in the United States: Squeaky clean individuals who could get the licenses easily if they had enough cash lying around. As with most wars, money and industry would eventually win the day. If you had the money, you could buy the industry.

  There were only two things holding up this operation. The first thing was the lack of identity kits. Security camera's made those mandatory. They would have to get out of the country before this was discovered. The second thing was that new banking software installed for French operations. The programmers needed some time to write a separate job to handle that database and application.

  One of the programmers had lamented to John about no cell thinking of buying a black-market, credit-card imprinting machine. The database contained all of the information for nearly a billion ATM accounts along with millions of bank-issued credit cards. They could print up their own cards and take the money a little at a time.

  John was hit with a better idea. Why not create an ASCII delimited file of all the information and tak
e it with them? Since an ASCII file was pure text, which could be imported into a spreadsheet, database, or any other application they chose to use, it would be perfect. There were dozens of chat rooms on-line where people sold identities. Granted, they only got about $10 per card for them, but it would be a method of getting some cash while traveling the world in disguise. He instructed the programmer to create such an extract from every system. One file for each system, then quietly sneak it out. They would all have one or two of the files to fund their escape.

  There were few illusions in John's mind about this operation. No place in India would be safe for him no matter how much money he had. His new identity kit would need to come with an H1-B Visa to the U.S. There were so many Indian IT workers there, nobody paid attention to them. He could hide in the forest of New York for a while, then move off to the Midwest or the West Coast. Identity kits or not, John set the meeting two weeks out. It was not unusual for his schedule or the programmer's schedules to be that backlogged.

  ***

  Nikolaus used his own login to check the inventory levels of the special products for Dimitri's distributor. They had taken a couple of containers of Russian currency, a container of euros and, oddly, even a container of Indian currency. Nikolaus didn't want to know anything about what they were doing with it, he just wanted it gone. He was somewhat peeved they didn't take the one container of South African currency they had. He was about ready to burn that money. He had asked everyone in the party who ran any kind of covert operation if they had use for it and they all said no.

  It was odd to still have all of those euros. Nikolaus had taken to paying the team doing the harvesting in cash. It was a big bag of euros every week and still they had a bunch bailed up and waiting to be boxed. At least they had gotten more strict in their organ dealings. American dollars, euros, or Russian rubles were the only forms of payment they accepted. Deliveries were now accompanied by special paramilitary units who made sure the terms were met or the buyers no longer had need for organs.

  Getting rid of the odd currencies was still going to be a problem. Nikolaus had called Hans and asked him for a shipping address to send some special cargo.

  “What kind of special cargo?”

  “Local currency in containers which state it is medical supplies and not to be opened,” responded Nikolaus.

  “How many containers?”

  “Four.”

  “Will they fit in the trunk of a car?”

  “Not all four together.”

  “Ship them one per week to the apartment where the three guys are staying. The can cart the package here. This location really isn't secure to be leaving that kind of cash around.”

  “Use it to grease whatever palms need greasing. One of the sales from the other operation got paid in that currency and we aren't set up to use it or convert it. The laundry didn't leap at cleaning it. Since you are in-country you can pay your people in local currency and bribe who you must.”

  It would be nice to have a decent hotel thought Hans. I can keep a low profile and have a place with flush plumbing for a change. Be nice to take a hot shower more than once per week as well. This time the people doing the surveillance had it good and the headquarters had it bad. There was one hydrant sticking out of the ground for water and it didn't have much pressure. No way you could take a shower, even if there was a shower or a hose.

  “How is that going, if you don't mind my asking?”

  “Beyond capacity. Took the risk of bringing in new people to boost capacity, but quite risky.”

  “You need a second location.”

  “I'm already on it. Presenting to the board later today.”

  “Be a year before it is up though, won't it?”

  “Six months. Much smaller site and a much bigger construction crew.”

  “Won't that be difficult to hide?”

  “They are being provided by the government of where it will be built. They use them for much of their military construction.”

  “Oh. You managed a big hook.”

  “A whale.”

  “Good fishing then.”

  Nikolaus laughed, then hung up. His stress level was dropping. While the money laundering was going slower than he wanted it was still going to add several million to the bottom line of the company this quarter.

  That reminded Nikolaus to check the inventory of blood. He logged in again and found it had been cut in half from its previous level last week. He picked up the phone and called Abel.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello Abel, Nikolaus here. Is there any way I can see what this new distributor orders?”

  “Are you logged into your inquiry page?”

  “Yes.”

  “Along the top menu there is an option for reports. Put your mouse over it and a drop down menu will appear. Should be an option for account history.”

  “Ah, there is.”

  “Select it and key in the account number I gave you. It should bring up a list of invoices after asking you a date range. You can look at each invoice individually. That will pretty much match their order, unless we had to back order some items for them. Do you need more information?”

  “No, this is good enough. Thank you very much.”

  “Always glad to be of service to the party.”

  No wonder they hadn't taken much in the way of currency off Nikolaus' hands. Nearly half of their credit limit was used up ordering blood. Another quarter of it went to the generic products. They only had chump change left to order their private products. Dimitri wasn't kidding about this distributor starving for quality generics. They ordered enough cold formula and antibiotics to treat a city. He wondered what would happen in a few weeks when their credit limit was adjusted as a result of finance finishing their credit check. Hell, they ordered 1,000 boxes of gauze patches! Other than the blood and plasma, none of the stuff they ordered retailed for more than U.S.$5 Nikolaus was interrupted by an email notification. He opened the message as he saw it was from the contact at the new distributor.

  Hello,

  I just wanted to thank you for allowing us to distribute your products. We have been trying to find a line of quality products for a very long time. I can't wait for your credit department to finish their check on us so we can order all of the things we really need.

  We are updating our catalog now with all of your products and sending it out to all retail and hospital locations we supply. By the time our credit limit is increased we expect to have a very large order waiting for you.

  It would be at least a week before their credit limit was bumped. Nikolaus had forgotten how bad off some parts of Russia really were. He assumed Dimitri would be providing the credit references in one way or another and that this influx of generic medical supplies into the region was his method of buying off the public. Still, doing some good along the way never hurt. After all, wasn't that how the other countries were going to be sucked into this operation. They were all buying blood components and their very wealthy were buying organs to extend their greedy lives.

  ***

  The Brit was using every trick he knew to locate the actual destination of the email address which had Vladimir all in a tither. The Brit still didn't know who Vladimir was, only that someone remotely going through the outbound email had stumbled across something big. He used every mail distribution site he knew how to hack into to send every kind of spam he could think of with the ping utility embedded in it. He simply needed the remote location to get a ping to work from. The outbound email happened before the trainer's machine had been fully compromised.

  Finally, he turned to Hans and said, “Can you have your remote guru connect in and send an email to this same address from the trainer's machine? We can get the ping utility to them that way I think.”

  “I can ask, but I think he would have done it already if he could. He was never able to get all the way in to that machine. He might be able to send it from the email service directly though.”

  “Why
didn't I think of that?”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Yes, but I will have to do a full penetration of the site which he has already done. He can get the email out today. No content, just the ping utility.”

  “He's really got you going with this hasn't he?”

  “Somewhere they have an identity shop. I am assuming it is a good one and used regularly since our trainer requested a new kit. That means he was given one to come here. If they have a shop that good, it probably has to do with an intelligence service in one of these hostile countries. Given the reluctance of the man in the suit to leave Pakistan, I'm assuming he fears it is his own country. Your man is worried about that as well since he didn't want you to feed any of the tracking story to him.”

  “Just as well since it is a bust now.”

  “Still. He sounds rather seasoned. I like the whole idea he came up with about getting help from the Americans. What I would like even more is to know how he knew about that operation. I was unaware of it, but it is real nonetheless.”

  “You verified?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn't.”

  “No. I'm leaving that up to you. You are the leader here. It's a damned good idea as long as we don't have to give up too much about what we do.”

  “I would have jumped on it already, but I worry about that last little bit.”

  “Don't wait much longer. I know it sounds like limitless storage, but they do nearly a full turn over every three months.”

  Hans looked at him.

  “Yes, there is that much email on the Internet. The word search tends to pull in a lot of needless chatter and everyone is sending naked pictures of themselves around the globe. Some poor schmucks actually have to sit and wade through all of that stuff.”

  Hans contemplated the absolute torture it would be to weed through millions of emails per day and a shiver went down his body — it was visible, he couldn't control it.

  “Nasty thought isn't it?”