Effected Intent

by Alan Ross

  Chapter 20

  Homeland Security

  There were no more fingernails to gnaw on, Bill had bit them all to the quick, something he hadn’t done since he was a kid. The urgency and severity of what he uncovered had killed his appetite for food and sleep. Every person he’d seen in the office the past few days had asked if he was ok, the beard growth, hollow eyes and sunken cheeks scaring them. He told them he was fighting a stomach virus and that kept them at bay, nobody wanting to get sick in the middle of summer. Mumbling to himself, he composed the draft email message to send to Darren Ward. He’d found how the department of Homeland Security named their email accounts and was to introduce himself to Ward, just needed to test the remailer program he’d downloaded. This one automated the task and allowed the user to determine how many hops the message would take before being sent, providing the ability for greater obfuscation.

  After reading the content for the tenth time, Bill attached a word document to the message and sent it to himself, putting in foo@foo.org as the sender email address and asking the remailer program to go through four remailers, which would remove the origination information safely. He sent it to his gmail account and waited for it to hit, knowing that it might take several hours and if any of the servers were offline it could take longer. To his surprise, the message popped up in a few minutes. The header information was all spoofed except for the last hop, which was from a Czechoslovakian server. There was a problem though, the attachment to the message was gone. It seemed that most remailers didn’t accept attachments. There was word on the web that a few did but Bill was leery of that though he wasn’t sure why.

  Bill recomposed the body of the message to include the salient points from the document he’d attached and sent it to himself using the same settings as before. The message came through fairly quickly and looked ok. It took him a while to determine what else to talk about in the message, didn’t want it to look like complete insanity. He read through it as though it was something he was going to receive, making double sure that it didn’t look like spam. The next step was going to be important, he needed to send it from an anonymous location, couldn’t chance sending it from the prison or the chemical company, even with the crutch of the remailers behind him. He thought about all the intercompany connections that Foundation has with its customers and suppliers and tried gently to see if any of them were accessible. He didn’t try too hard for fear of raising alarms and started in geographic locations that would be less likely to notice. Pay dirt was found in his new favorite country, Czechoslovakia, where there was a supplier to Foundation that had the same security philosophy as its customer. Bill was able to log on to their web server using the default username and password combination and had full administrative access. He created an anonymous email account from a free provider and sent the message from a web browser located on the company’s server. It was past lunch time and he planned on sending another one in a couple of hours, nothing to do now but start chewing on the cuticles of his fingernails.

  Darren sat in his little office at the Department of Homeland Security, itching for something to do. “Sucks being between cases” he said to himself as he monitored the real time chatter that was captured from around the world, ninety nine percent of it complete garbage. He’d been looking for additional fraud terms, thinking that someone might want to jump at the vacancy that was left from his recent bust. Smiling at the thought of busting down the door on those scumbags who had bilked innocent Americans out of hundreds of millions of dollars, praying on their desperation with the economy and the fact that they were naïve or dumb enough to take on mortgages they couldn’t afford. Poor economic times brought out the creeps and these times were getting pretty serious, in fact most of the threat these days came from our own soil, not the middle east, which had been the case for Darren’s entire career with Homeland, almost five years now.

  Darren was an undergraduate computer science major at Rutgers when 9/11 happened. He had planned on going to Harvard to pursue an MBA but decided that he was going to use his talents to help America. The next wars would be fought on the cyber front, information being the key to new attacks and collaboration between conspirators. There were offers at graduation from the CIA, NSA, FBI and Homeland Security. He chose the new department because he thought it would be a younger man’s world over there, being a relatively new agency. He was partially right, finding that some of the upper level directors were old boys but there was a different sort of vibe to the department, one where there was a possibility to advance and also to take risks when warranted.

  “Hey Darren, want to go to lunch at that Italian place in Falls Church? I’m dying for some polenta.”

  “Sounds good George, going crazy staring at the chatter anyway. Anyone else around?”

  “They’re all busy on their cases but claim they don’t need any help so screw it, we can go to the music store afterwards, there is a new guitar I want to check out.”

  “Your wife is going to beat you to death with any new guitar you bring through the door. How many can you possibly play?”

  “That’s not the point. You should take up playing, I could give you lessons during these slow times, even though they seem to be getting fewer and further apart.”

  “Monica will kick my ass if I start spending money, she is watching the pennies like a hawk. With the real estate market down so far she wants to buy a house and she’s too stubborn to do it any way other than the old fashioned way, twenty percent down plus closing costs and six months of payments in the bank.”

  “You’re the one who married the negotiator.” George laughed.

  Darren thought about his wife, who ran their household budget like she ran the purchasing department for the defense contractor she worked for, saving them millions of dollars a year and providing a wakeup call to fat, lazy suppliers who were used to milking government contracts. He was glad to have this stretch at home, had to spend most of the time earlier this year working his case.

  George drove to lunch and they made good time because it was early. The big guy was an ex-Marine and heavyweight wrestler, an asset to Darren, who was average size and was better with his brain than his fists. His appetite was legendary and he ate an entire appetizer, lasagna and then two pieces of tiramisu for dessert. They talked about the Nationals, both of them becoming baseball fans since the team came to the city.

  The guitar shop was dead and George spent an hour talking to the owner about guitars, which looked like toys in the big guy’s hands. George ended up getting a really good deal on a new Gibson model, even after Darren tried to talk him out of it. The store owner offered him a starter guitar set for a good price but he wasn’t interested. Golf was the only thing that got his spare time, he relished his free time with Monica too much. George claimed this would pass after another ten years of marriage but Darren didn’t think that would happen.

  The office was buzzing, seemed one of the teams had uncovered a plot against the American embassy in Bolivia and had thwarted it at the last minute. These wins were why Darren had chosen this over a corporate life. He’d never be rich but the job was saving lives of Americans and that was hard to put a price on. After a brief celebration he returned to his office to stare at the chatter some more. There was an odd email in his mailbox that had landed in the junk mail folder. He opened it because he was bored and the subject line intrigued him. It was from someone calling himself Jack, with an address of jackof@alltrades.com, telling him that he’s going to be sending him information about a terrorist plot he’s uncovered. Darren opened the header information and saw that it had come from a known remailer server in Eastern Europe.

  There’s no way to reply to the message and “Jack” has made it clear that the communication has to be one directional because he can’t give up his identity. Darren wants to delete the message and forget it but his interest in piqued. He logged in to a few of the remailer servers the department maintains in Europe but found no trace of thi
s message. He was hoping that the person on the other end would hit one of their remailer servers. Remailer servers had notoriously been used by all kinds of bad people, and was a favorite of child pornography buffs. The department had acquired some Czechoslovakian domain space and set up several remailer servers that were more robust than a lot of existing ones. The software on these systems included great backtracking capability and had helped the department crack several cases. Darren thought this was one of the most ingenious things he’d heard of and when it was combined with Carnivore, the FBI’s content matching software, they were able to pick up a lot of chatter that would normally be blind to them. Unfortunately this message hadn’t come that way, it was a dead end.

  Before he logged off the last remailer server another message popped up in his junk mail folder. The sender was Jack and this one had details about a bioterrorism plot being planned against the United States. Darren found himself sitting straighter and closer to the screen, thinking that maybe there’s something here. He decided to keep it quiet for now, didn’t want to cry wolf about something. He decided to do some detective work to find out what needles were out in the proverbial haystacks. Darren started with

  web crawler data, looking for anything that would give an indication of the potential plot or who this Jack is but came up empty.

  Darren went back to the chatter database to look for any talk of smallpox or other viruses. Most of the talk was related to computer viruses, not human viruses. After some crafty keyword combinations, he was able to locate some smallpox chatter that has been going on for a couple of months that appeared to be coming from Asia, which validates what he’s been told in the email. He wondered who Jack was but learned long ago in this job not to dwell on the pieces of the puzzle you couldn’t see and focus on what was available. No more mail from Jack, he would check later, it was time to go home and surprise Monica by cooking dinner.

  Monica could smell dinner when she walked in the door of their townhouse in Alexandria. “You little devil, did you play hooky this afternoon?” she dropped her briefcase and kissed him, having to reach up on her tiptoes.

  “You’re a sight for sore eyes.” Darren picked her up and dropped her sweet little ass on the counter to kiss her more seriously.

  “You just saw me this morning, guess someone is feeling randy today.”

  “They say men think about sex seventeen billion times a day, I think it goes up by a factor of four when work is slow. And guess what, we’ve got about forty five minutes until dinner is ready.”

  “Such planning on your part” she said as she got down from the counter and tiptoed toward the room. “Last one there gives a backrub first” she yelled, beating him by a few steps. Darren paid the backrub tax and they made it out just in time for dinner.

  “Tell me about your day mister jumps his wife when she walks in the door.”

  “It was ok, things are too slow. George and I took a long lunch to Falls Church and then spent about an hour at the guitar shop. He bought another one, I think Beth is going to blow a gasket. The team that’s in Bolivia cracked a coup against the American embassy there so the mood was good around the office. Cory hasn’t been around, something about budget meetings. I’ll never figure out why it takes six months to set a budget, seems like something that should be straightforward to me.”

  “You’ve heard me talk about working with the government enough to know that’s not the case. Everyone pads all their items and then fights tooth and nail for any judgment against their budget, knowing that during the review cycle everything will get cut again. It takes several iterations but I agree with you, would be a lot easier if they set the final target up front and only went through the process once.”

  “Common sense cannot prevail in the labyrinth that is the United States government, I’m thankful to be a low level employee who doesn’t have to deal with such things.”

  “Yeah but you’re a great leader and that means you’ll likely end up running teams or a division in the future. Everyone there, regardless of age, looks up to you and appreciates the way you work and your results. That’s how most good leaders come up, not because they’re looking for it, they can do it better than anyone else.”

  “Thanks Moni.” He kissed her. “Something else interesting happened this afternoon. When we got back from lunch there was an email from someone calling himself Jack, saying that he was going to make me aware of a terrorist plot. A while later a second message came through that indicated it was a bioterrorism threat against the United States, some kind of smallpox attack. At first I was going to ignore it or dump it in the trash but I decided to do a little follow up work and there has been some chatter originating out of Asia talking about a new strain of smallpox that is much more virulent than anything we’ve ever seen in the wild.”

  “That’s scary, were you able to track down who this Jack was?”

  “No, he was pretty smart about it, not sure why he wants to remain anonymous but people have their reasons. The worst part is that I can’t answer his mail, there’s no way to know where it came from. I had hoped he might end up using some of our covert networks around the world but no such luck. Hopefully he’ll keep sending me information and at some point I’ll be able to track him down.”

  “Is there a vaccine for this new strain of smallpox? Can we get immunized against it?”

  “There’s nothing official anywhere on the subject. I’m going to call on some friends at the CDC to see what they know tomorrow but want to see if this Jack is a crackpot or if there’s something to it before I start raising red flags around the government.”

  “Probably a good idea, the last thing this country needs is something as serious as this. I remember seeing photographs in high school biology of smallpox victims, it was not pretty and the mortality rate was pretty high.”

  “Yeah, smallpox killed more people in the last couple hundred years than all other diseases, even though there hasn’t been a confirmed case in a very long time. Not sure that they’re even giving smallpox immunizations to children anymore, which makes this threat scarier. Can you imagine if only the children were dying?”

  Monica shuddered and sat closer to Darren, thinking about the horror of that scenario and thankful that they hadn’t started a family yet. She was glad that he talked to her about work but this was the stuff nightmares were made of.