by Bob Blink
"Maybe a car accident," Bo suggested.
"How do you arrange a car accident without involving other people, and how can you be certain it will result in her being killed?" Abe asked. "Besides, her bodyguards drive her everywhere and have been trained against just that kind of attempt."
"I've read about a number of the new cars have on-board control system that can actually be hacked externally," Bo explained. Whether this is possible would depend on what model car they drive, but I'm guessing Jason could duplicate the efforts of others that have explained how this was done. I read that two hackers were able to control a Jeep Cherokee from over ten miles away with no changes to the vehicle. Nothing to trace back to us. "
"He's right," Jason said. "It's supposedly pretty easy to do. I'm certain I could figure out how. You can control the throttle and steering remotely. Get them in the car, run it up to eighty, and turn it into a freeway abutment. That should be pretty effective, and it would look like driver error, hers or her bodyguards, or even better, her husband's."
Earl's interest was apparent. "I like that idea," he said, "especially if it were her and her husband. We'll need to do some research and see what they drive and whether Jason can create the hack. It would mean that Craig would have to be in L.A., and I don't know how many times that will happen in the time range we want to work with."
"I can think of ways she could be lured back," Abe said softly. "She has a son in college. A move against him would bring her back to California right now."
"That would be spreading the number of people involved wider than I hoped," Earl said, realizing he was potentially signing up for three homicides, "but it is something to keep in mind. Any other ideas?"
"If one of the public events she holds were to get out of hand, there could be opportunities for something to happen to her," Abe suggested. "Perhaps a shooting, or maybe even a bomb. Maybe a fire in her hotel?"
Earl shook his head. "For one thing, it's not something you can anticipate, and we wouldn't be in a position to instigate such a riot. All her appearances have been quite peaceful, and probably will remain so, at least until after the convention and she is selected. That's what might bring out the radicals, but that would be too late. Besides, I don't like the idea of indiscriminate bombs harming lots of people. This should be surgical. Also, she will be under the protection of her bodyguards, so how this kind of thing would work is unknown and the chances of success are problematical."
Abe shrugged. "That just makes it more difficult."
"What about her husband?" Jason asked. "I didn't see all that much about him. What is their marriage like, and what does he do while she is running around the country campaigning. Does he have someone on the side? A little family discord might be just the thing for a tragedy with the blame easily assigned."
"Something we need to look into," Earl agreed.
They continued to toss out ideas, but most were immediately discarded as unworkable, or clearly something that wouldn't meet the "accidental" criteria.
"I think we need to do some scouting before we are going to get very far with this," Earl suggested. "Too much of the time she is surrounded by other people making access difficult. She is most available when she is home in Los Angeles, but that is infrequent and we don't know when or if that will happen again, and while away, the times we have any kind of access to this woman look to be limited."
"So how do we proceed?" Bo asked.
"I want the three of you to tail her for the next week or so. Go to the cities she is visiting, stay in the same hotels and monitor how she does things. Go to the rallies. Check out the crowds, the security, especially her two bodyguards. All the time, keep in the back of your mind what we want to accomplish. We'll meet back here in ten days and see how what we have learned, and whether any better options have materialized."
"I can check into the car thing while on the road," Jason said. "It seems the closest thing to a plan we have at the moment."
"Good," Earl said. "Remember, no calls or talking about this over phones or any other chat network. Only discuss face-to-face, and then only when you are certain you are secure. No contact with me unless a major problem, and then call on your burner phone. Dump it after one use," he reminded them. "We'll figure out what to do from there."
"When do we go?" Bo asked.
"The three of you should head into town in the morning and make reservations for North Dakota. That's where she is headed next, and then on to Delaware. You have the list of cities. Follow her everywhere for the next week. That should be enough for us to get a feel for their mode of operation. Travel separately. You can lock your guns in the hidden strong box I showed you. You won't be needing them for this trip, and you can't carry them flying commercial anyway. Putting them in your check-in baggage could result in problems if TSA spots then, which is highly likely. This trip is meant to be simple intelligence gathering."
"What about you?" Abe asked.
I have some things I need to take care of to pave the way for being gone for a month or so. I'll be heading back to the ranch tonight."
Chapter 10
"Damn, I'm glad we're heading back to Texas," Abe said as he shoveled another mouthful of his ham and cheese omelet into his mouth. "This has been a bloody waste of time."
They were in Bridgeport, Connecticut, after nine days of following Nancy Craig and her entourage around more than a half dozen states.
"Maybe not," Bo argued positively. "We learned a lot about what we didn't know, and there have been a few surprises."
"Not good ones," Abe countered, intent on being negative. He wanted this over with. When he had agreed to signing on, he'd seen it as a quick killing, money in the bank and off to Vegas.
Jason was quiet, scanning something on his laptop as they sat at the dining table in the hotel restaurant. They could afford to be completely open now as the Craig team had headed off to their next location a couple of hours earlier and they wouldn't be following. It was time to get back to the cabin for the follow-up meeting with Earl.
The past nine days had been a whirlwind, and the three men wondered how anyone could maintain such a pace over a period of weeks let alone the months until the election. Despite the constant movement, the days had been long, boring, and repetitious, offering them nothing that suggested a workable plan or a means to operate if they could come up with one. Nothing the politician and her team did seemed planned, at least to them, but then their understanding of the candidate's schedule was sketchy, only defining the major states and cities to be visited, with no indication of the plan to motor around the states visiting other locations. On top of that, some of the locations that had been listed had for unknown reasons been dropped from the tour. If they were to plan some kind of action against Mrs. Craig, they were going to have to improve their ability to monitor the planning of the group, something that Jason had been working on in his spare time.
Most of the time the group moved between nearby locations traveling in three SUVs, moving between cities that were less than a couple of hours apart, greeting the locals in town halls, small arenas and in a couple of cases local convention centers. They stayed overnight in hotels in the larger cities, once in small cabins that were secluded and difficult to monitor. When they elected to leave a state, they always had private air transportation waiting, always a different plane, the source of which wasn't obvious. Such arrangements made it difficult to keep up, and more than once the threesome had to make hurried flight arrangements on commercial airliners, arriving in the new state hours after their quarry. Once after the group had actually left the town where they'd landed in the new state.
The candidate's team was smaller than they would have thought. In addition to Mrs. Craig, the group consisted of the candidate's Campaign Manager, her Personal Secretary, the Technician who handled her web presence and news releases, the drivers, who varied depending on what state they were in, and of course, her security. The security arrangements had been an unwelcome surprise. T
he two professional bodyguards they had researched were nowhere to be seen. Instead were four, very governmental appearing Secret Service agents. Keeping with their strict limitations on communications, they hadn't informed Earl of this change, which they all saw as a major complication in any action they would eventually have to take if this effort were to be successful. They had their burner phones, but while a surprise and a complication, it wasn't an emergency situation, and was something they could discuss in detail when they met back at the cabin.
"What are you working on?" Bo asked Jason, who had been quiet for most of the breakfast. He'd noted that Jason's mind was more directed toward whatever was on his computer screen than the activities of those they were supposed to be monitoring. Bo sometimes wondered if he was one of the game addicts.
"I have managed to hack into Mrs. Craig's phone, as well as that of her two key assistants," Jason said with a hint of a smile. "We might be able to get more of an idea what their changing plans really are. This Carol Marshall seems to be handling those kinds of details. She makes a lot of calls."
"How did you manage that?" Abe asked, surprised that such a thing could be done by a lone hacker with moderate skills.
"It's taken a while, I admit," Jason replied. "The most difficult part was determining the phone number of the cells they are using."
"You couldn't just hack into some database and find out what phone is registered to her?" Bo asked.
"Tried that," Jason admitted. "Those two private bodyguards or someone set them up with unlisted phones, and apparently told them to stay off their own hardware."
"So, how did you manage it?" Abe asked, surprisingly interested in the issue.
"I started by getting a map with the cell tower designations every place we stayed," Jason explained. "Once I had that, I hacked into the local telephone company's routing computers, which really isn't that hard. In fact, several of the hacker sites I'm used to using even have coded routines you can download to handle such an attack. Once into their computers, I created a request to send my computer the phone number of everyone transmitting or receiving calls from the tower we were linked to at the places we stayed. I let that run all the while we were staying there."
"That must be a lot of numbers," Abe said.
"Yeah, it created quite a file," Jason admitted, "but computers don't care and they are great with sorting data."
"But how did you sift through the file to come up with the relevant numbers?" Bo asked.
"At first, I couldn't. "But after repeating the process for a few days, I was able to set a search routine for numbers that were present in each of the databases I had accumulated. My theory was that any numbers that appeared in multiple databases would be people that were following the same travel plan as we were, and given the oddity of our target destinations, it was unlikely to be very many. After a few days, a handful of numbers kept reappearing."
"That's amazing," Abe mumbled.
"But that just gives you the phone numbers," Bo objected.
"Ah, but with the numbers, and a bit of additional hacking, it is possible to have the phone company routing system to not only forward the call to the individual's desired destination, but to me as well. Then I can simply listen in to any calls that the numbers I select are making. It's taken a day or so to decide which numbers belonged to whom, and who was the most informative to listen to, but unless they make some hardware changes, now we can listen in and fine tune our monitoring."
"What about the Secret Service guys?" Abe asked. "Can we get an angle on what they are thinking and planning as well?"
"Sorry," Jason replied. "They appear to be using some kind of encrypted system. "I've had no luck with them, at least not yet."
"How come you haven't said anything up to now?" Bo asked.
"I wasn't certain how far I'd get at first, and since breaking in, there hasn't been anything important enough. I'd planned to bring it up when we brief Earl."
"Speaking of which, we best get moving," Bo said. "We have a bit of a drive to the airport, and I don't know what to expect from traffic here."
"Our situation doesn't look very promising," Earl said unhappily when the threesome had completed their summary of what they had seen. "Other than Jason's hacking success it would seem all we have managed at this point is to confirm that access to the candidate is going to make almost any idea invalid. This is only made worse by the premature and unexpected assignment of Secret Service men to the candidate."
Earl glanced around the small room, examining each of the three tired men who had only just returned a couple of hours earlier.
"Does anyone have any new ideas?" he asked. "I hate to send you off watching some more, when it seems that it is so unproductive, but it's already the middle of April."
When no one spoke up, Jason decided to share his other achievement.
"I've investigated the car hacking techniques," he said. "It is remarkable what one can do, with no physical access to the target vehicle, with a select set of vehicles, that is. The various manufacturers have become aware of the dangers and are taking steps to modify their approaches in newer vehicles."
"You could crash someone's car?" Earl asked, surprised that this potentially could really be a viable approach.
"You can control the accelerator, brakes, and steering among other things," Jason assured him. "That should be enough."
"What kind of cars do the Craig's have," Bo asked, intrigued by what he was hearing.
"He drives a five-year old Jeep Cherokee, and she has a newer Honda Civic, which doesn't get much use these days. The Honda isn't one of the cars that is very susceptible to what we are talking about, but Mr. Craig's car is on the top three most hackable vehicle's list," Jason said with a smile.
"Well, these seems like something we need to consider. How we get them in a car is secondary for the moment, but how about we buy the model car Eric Craig drives, and see if Jason can actually make this work. That might be a better use of our time in the near term, at least until the candidates head off for the next debate the later in the month of May. The location hasn't been announced for that, so we can't even begin any advanced planning to monitor her there."
That night after he'd returned to El Paso, Earl made one of his infrequent calls to the President. He'd want to know they had at least a possible plan they were pursuing.
"Remotely wreck their car?" Mark asked after Earl had brought him up to date only everything they'd accomplished and learned. "Is that really a possibility? How can we be certain that she'll be killed?"
"We will test it out carefully," Earl said, and explained his plan to buy a duplicate vehicle and have the technique carefully verified. "I'm told we can even make a test run with the target's vehicle without actually making any significant control moves, but enough to verify we have the link between our controller and their vehicle functional."
"How about getting her in the car at all?" the President asked. "From what I hear she has a very busy schedule. She might not even go home again before the convention."
"We are thinking on that," Earl explained. "Perhaps a move against her kid could be used to bring her back. That's one of the details that needs to be sorted out while the testing of the technique is on-going."
"This doesn't seem like the most robust of plans," Mark complained truthfully.
"Access isn't that good," Earl said. "The ten days we watched the subject verified that. If we come up with something better, I'll let you know."
"Okay," the President said sourly. "Just get it done. I'm counting on you here."
Then he clicked off. They didn't want long calls and there was little more to be said. Earl cursed, but had to admit, he wasn't any more certain of the plan than the President. Too much seemed like it could go wrong.
Chapter 11
Early May 2024
They had learned that the final Democratic debate was now scheduled for the middle of next week, surprisingly to be held in Stanford, California. This unexpected d
evelopment had the potential to work in their favor because Jason had been able to learn that Nancy's husband would be driving up from Southern California so they could visit their son at the college while they were in the area. Then she would be driving back to Los Angeles with him to spend a couple of days before heading out on the final leg of her campaign blitz before the convention scheduled in mid-July. There was the very real possibility that Eric would be driving the family Jeep, which was the very car they hoped to be able to control and create a fatal crash.
"Is this really going to work?" Abe asked, his face reflecting his doubt, and not a little frustration. The last two weeks had been spent focused on the kind of tasks that were of little interest to him, and which he frankly felt weren't going to get them any closer to completing the goal of eliminating Craig and getting him the second half of the money he'd been promised for this job.
Abe and Jason had been living out of the cabin while they worked on the scratched and banged up Jeep they had located and were using to develop and test the hacking interface that they hoped would work as they'd been led to believe was possible. Unfortunately, it hadn't gone as smoothly as Jason had hoped, mostly because his skills in the necessary areas weren't as polished as he wished, but now he thought he had it licked. Meanwhile, Earl and Bo were off in the Midwest, following Nancy Craig and her team, just in case they might learn something that offered an alternative if the present plan failed for unforeseen reasons. Jason was of the opinion that Earl wasn't really enthusiastic about what at the moment was their only operational option. They would be meeting in Stanford in three days.