What could that mean? He searched his mind and couldn’t think of anything he’d screwed up.
* * *
Roach started speaking as soon as the third and last invited team member arrived.
“Okay, so here’s the situation. We’re just about across the finish line on the cloud computing security bill. But now, at the last minute, the chairman of the House Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies Subcommittee has decided to hold a hearing on data center security. Go figure.
“You’d think the client should be pretty happy that I’ve sweet talked the DCSA executive director onto the hearing panel, along with WeBCloud’s own chief security officer. WeBCloud, you’ll recall, is the company that’s been funding DCSA and pulling all the strings from the beginning.
“But—and here’s the catch—the third person on the hearing panel is going to be Sara Ravitz, and WeBCloud thinks she’ll be presenting a fat report from a research institute that, taken at face value, would indicate that Congress would be crazy to adopt a bill based on the DCSA standard.”
“But I thought we were all set to neutralize that report?” the team project manager asked.
“That’s what I told Nate Mitty, the WeBCloud CEO. We should be able to start to undercut it at the hearing and trash it pretty convincingly in our written testimony, which is what really counts. We’ll have lots of third party support for what we say, too, through the articles we’ve planted and a white paper that the DCSA funded. But Mitty doesn’t want to leave anything to chance. He wants us to take Ravitz down, too. So I’m looking for ideas here.”
There was silence for a while.
Finally, the project manager spoke up. “What do we have to work with?”
“Not much. She’s a pretty straight arrow.”
Another pause.
“Anything from deep research to work with?”
“Nope. I should have said a really straight arrow. But we can spoof her email address.”
The project manager brightened up considerably. “How far can we run with that?”
“As far as the client is concerned, as far as we want. But emails leave tracks, so that’s farther than I want to go if we can avoid it. I’d like us to come up with something that gets us where we want to go but doesn’t leave any bread crumbs back to us.”
Silence again. Then another team member spoke.
“Okay, so how about this. We get a rumor started that she’s shorting the stock of one of the big cloud providers—say Orinoco. That way it would look like she’s using her non-profit as a front to manipulate the stock market for her own profit.”
“’Shorting?’” one of the other team members asked.
“Sorry. It means you sell shares you’ve borrowed, say, from your brokerage firm, when the price is high, and then cover the sale when the stock drops to a lower price, and make a profit on the spread.”
“Pardon my ignorance, but I didn’t understand a single word you just said.”
“It means you’re betting against a company’s stock price. If it drops a lot, you make a killing. If it goes up instead, you lose your shirt.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Anyway, and better yet, just by starting the rumor, it would probably lead to other investors climbing on board and shorting the stock as well. The markets track changes in short positions, so that would make it look like the rumor was actually true. And the more people hear the rumor, the lower it drives the price.”
“Isn’t that stock manipulation? Can’t you go to jail for that?”
“Not if we do it right. There are lots of stock trading chat rooms online. We can have one of the people we work with set up a few aliases out there to plant the rumor. Once it takes off, we can anonymously tip a few financial reporters to the posts in the chat room, and they’ll be sure to write up the story.”
“But what if we get caught?”
“We won’t get caught. The way they catch stock manipulators is see who the big buyers and sellers were before and after the fake story hits the market. And we won’t be doing either.”
“But in fact, neither will Ravitz.”
“That won’t matter. She’ll deny that she’s shorting the stock, which is what everyone does when they’re accused of gaming the stock market. But it’s pretty darn hard to prove the negative. By the time she convinces everybody that she’s innocent, the bill will already be signed, and then who cares?”
Roach said nothing for several seconds and then said, “I might be able to buy into that.” Another pause. “Okay, let’s run with that. The hearing’s in ten days, so you better get moving.”
Lynch saw Rob and the project manager walk past his cubicle, and grabbed the same stack of paper he’d copied fifteen minutes earlier. He followed the pair, hoping they’d pause to chat at Rob’s cubicle again. They did, and he glided unnoticed into the copier alcove to listen.
“So I can get Sean to help me plant the rumor about Ravitz shorting the Orinoco stock, right?”
“Not this time. Turns out Ravitz is an old girlfriend of his. Roach thinks asking him to help take her down might be pushing things too far.”
“Ah—got it. That’s makes sense.”
Lynch had only laid the paper in the feeder so the sound of the machine wouldn’t make it hard to hear, but he jabbed the start button now. His head was awhirl with cascading realizations. He hadn’t understood everything he’d just heard, but it was clear that the “pushing things too far” comment meant the only reason he’d been assigned to the team—and to do the dirty work—was because Roach had guessed he would leap at the chance to get back at Sara. That meant Roach hadn’t had his eye on him at all. And now Sean didn’t know whether he had a future at the firm or not.
The machine was done copying, but he still stood there staring at the blank wall behind the copier. Now what?
There were now no voices to be heard behind him. He picked up his copying and returned to his cubicle, trying to remember exactly what he had heard—something about taking Sara down by starting a rumor that she was “shorting” Orinoco stock, whatever that meant. It didn’t take him long to figure that out online. Clearly, Roach was taking things up a notch, trying not just to counter what the RTF was doing but to destroy Sara’s reputation as well.
He leaned back and the same question pushed its way forward again.
Now what?
He grabbed his coat and left the Roach & Drye office. It took two hours of walking for him to come up with the right answer.
* * *
20
Why Didn’t you just Say so the First Time?
Frank peered over Tim’s shoulder as he called up the SlipMeFive.com website.
“It works like this,” Tim said. “All you have to do is sign up as a user and then describe what you want someone to do. Just about everyone who signs up to provide goods or services is from a developing country and agrees to charge just five dollars to take on your project, whatever it is. People use the site to buy custom logos, or book cover designs, or just about anything else that can be delivered on a virtual basis.”
“Including drone services in Myanmar?”
“You’d be amazed. Anyway, it can’t hurt to find out, right?”
Right, Frank thought. Because they might not have enough time to hop on a plane and hopscotch their way to Myanmar and back before Foobar launched his attack.
“How does this sound? Wanted: quad drone with video camera operator for harbor assignment in Yangon, Myanmar.”
“I guess that pretty much says it. Here’s hoping someone bites.”
When Tim emerged from the bathroom the next morning, Frank was standing by Tim’s computer like a cocker spaniel next to an empty food bowl. Tim suppressed a smile, half-expecting Frank to use his nose to nudge
the laptop forward.
“Okay, okay. I’ll check.”
There were three responses.
Frank whooped. “That’s fantastic! How fast can we get moving?”
“We’ll have to see. Don’t forget, we’re talking to people on the other side of the world who just finished dinner. What do you want me to say?”
“Let’s send the same response to all three of them and say that the first one that gets back to us gets the job.”
“Good idea. Here—why don’t you enter the job description.”
Frank took the laptop and thought for a minute. Then he typed:
You must speak English, have Skype or a similar program on your phone, and have a drone with at least a half hour’s flight time. You will need to get within visual range of a ship that we will identify which is docked near the cargo container terminal in Yangon. We will provide the URL of the site to which you will broadcast the live video feed from your drone. When your drone gets close to the ship, we will direct you where to send it. The first respondent to this message gets the deal.
They got their first response almost immediately. By the end of some spirited negotiation, their contractor had moved the price from five dollars up to twenty dollars, supposedly to cover the rental of a boat so that he could be sure to be able to get within his drone’s fuel range of the ship. They decided on three o’clock local time the next afternoon for the flight, when the crew might be taking a mid-day break from the heat.
* * *
Frank and Tim were huddled around Frank’s laptop this time, waiting for the Skype call to come through in the wee hours of the morning. It was already fifteen minutes late. At last, the signal sounded, and Frank accepted the call. They were looking at the face of the drone operator, taken by his mobile device’s camera.
“Sorry; the ship is farther from where I expected.”
“Okay. Where are you?”
The drone operator’s face disappeared, and the image on the screen turned into a smear of colors; when it once again came into focus, they were looking at a ship that was growing larger by the moment. They were almost able to read its name before the picture swung around again to show the phone’s owner.
“Great,” Frank said. “Slow down and see if you can tell whether there’s anyone on deck.”
They could hear the small boat’s engine fade. “Cranes are not moving. I am too far down to tell if anyone is on deck, but no one looks this way anyway.”
“Great. Is there somewhere you can get out of sight to launch the drone?”
There was a pause. “Yes. I see empty slip near the ship. I launch there and keep drone close to water until I get to ship. Remember—you promise we not stay long. If I lose drone, you pay for.”
“Right—don’t worry. This shouldn’t take long. Let us know when you’re ready to launch.”
Frank drummed his fingers on his thigh and looked at his watch. He looked twice more before the voice returned.
“Okay. Hovering over water. Let me know when you get video feed.”
They stared at Frank’s laptop, which was set up to receive and save the feed.
“There! We’ve got it. Now head to the bow of the ship. When you get there, take a slow wide angle shot of the bow from the waterline to just below the deck.”
Frank was drumming with both hands now as the video climbed the hull; as they hoped, they could see eight feet of darker paint below the fully loaded waterline. The ship was carrying a light cargo.
Frank pressed the mute button. “There it is! Just like we hoped!”
A thin line had appeared that extended for what looked to be about forty feet in each direction across the bluff bow of the ship before making a right angle turn and extending vertically. A third vertical line equidistant between the other two was at the exact center of the bow. As the drone rose, they saw a second horizontal line appear at the ends of the three vertical lines, closing the tops of the rectangles that represented the launch doors they had been looking for. That meant there were two doors that would open like window shutters.
“What now? Are we done?” Tim asked.
“Not yet. We’re going to need to do better than that before anyone believes us.” He unmuted the phone. “Now pull back two hundred yards and then go up to five hundred feet and move slowly from bow to stern over the ship. I want to get a look from above.”
The video feed pulled back farther and farther before moving up into the sky. The camera swiveled down, and they stared at water until at last the bow of the ship came into view.
“We hit pay dirt!” Frank whispered. “Look!”
There was an open hatch.
“Stop when you get over that hatch and zoom in as much as you can.”
The image swooped downward, but as it did, the image got fuzzier and darker. Frank pressed the mute button and squinted at the screen.
“We can’t see anything from this height. The inside of the ship is in shadow. Damn it, I should have thought of that and scheduled the flight for noon.”
He unmuted. “Okay, we need to see what’s inside the ship, and it’s too dark to see from this high up. Bring the drone down.”
“I can’t too far; I won’t be able to see it.”
“That’s okay. Just take it slow and we’ll tell you what to do from the video feed.”
“I don’t like. What if you crash my drone?”
“We won’t.”
“What if I get caught?”
Frank thought quickly. “How about we pay one hundred dollars instead of twenty dollars?”
Pause. “Okay. I wait while you go to SlipMeFive and make payment.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Hurry up. Only fifteen more minutes of flight time.”
Frank punched the mute button again. “Who says piracy is dead? What’s that password again?”
Frank scrambled to open the SlipMeFive.com site and logged in while Tim coached him.
“You push that button—right—now in the menu, select ‘My SlipMes.’ Right. Now ‘Add service.’ You can skip the description and hit enter. You’re good.”
“Okay—we made the payment. How long do we have?”
“Eleven minutes—twelve, maybe. Let me check account.”
Frank put his laptop down on the table and held his head in his hands, moaning softly as he rocked back and forth. At last, the image began to get larger. He grabbed his phone again.
“Okay, keep it coming down—okay, a little more slowly. And bring the resolution back.”
The dark square below grew gradually larger. Eventually, it began to change from black to dark gray. Finally, indistinct outlines of objects began to appear.
“Okay. That’s great. Now bring the camera around to ninety degrees so we can see ahead. Keep going down slow.”
The camera swiveled and they could see they were just about at deck level.
“Okay. Slowly…slowly…slowly—and stop.” It was still too dark to see much. They’d have to move out of the sun and under the deck.
“Go forward very slowly. Don’t worry, we’re not going far.”
The picture lightened considerably. They were looking at the side of the ship from the inside. Racked against the hull were large tanks containing who knew what. Thick hoses were coiled on the floor.
“Is time to leave. Only have six more minutes of fuel.”
“Not yet! Do a slow three-hundred-sixty-degree turn with the camera first.”
“Okay, but then go!”
The video panned around toward the stern of the ship. They watched as huge crates, marching in rows back into the darkness, came into sight and then disappeared from view, followed by oversized forklifts, after which the video at last moved toward the bow. As the camera continued to tur
n, it picked up what looked like the end of a board, extending parallel to the deck, that continued to lengthen until it connected to a long torpedo-shaped body mounted on a rail extending off toward the bow. Above the body was a long canister mounted on struts, and another board extended away from the body toward the other side of the ship.
Frank grabbed Tim’s arm. “Did you get it? Are you sure?”
Tim nodded vigorously as he fiddled with the laptop.
“Now! Which way to get out!” called the voice from the phone.
“Okay. Swivel the camera until it points straight up. Good. Now go backwards—a bit farther—a bit more—and you’re good to go!”
The sky swallowed the video feed as the drone shot upward.
“Great! We got what we wanted! Thanks a lot.”
“No problem. You need more help, you get in touch. I give you good deal.”
* * *
21
You Don’t Say!
When Henderson, the chair of the Cyberattack Tiger Team did not respond to his calls by 11:00 the next morning, Frank decided to take a different tack. He attached a twenty-second video clip to an email showing the V-1 in the hold, as well as an updated executive summary of the plot as he had described it at the Tiger Team meeting, and sent it to Lieutenant Travers. Then he just sat on Marla’s couch, waiting for the phone to ring. And waited. He was so nervous he was making Thor fidgety, too.
Tim had left for work as usual, bleary-eyed from their middle of the night aerial adventure on the other side of the world. Frank called him when he couldn’t sit still any longer.
“Have you heard anything there? What’s Koontz up to?”
The Doodlebug War: a Tale of Fanatics and Romantics (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 3) Page 21