Reynolds didn’t make the trip directly to the address given to him by HR, instead he went to the bank in which Blake had a few personal belongings placed in a safe deposit box just in case of his demise. It was a mandate given to him and all of Reynolds’ direct reports. Reynolds was the primary holder of the box so getting the key only required his identification and signature. He went straight to the box numbered forty-two and laughed when he remembered Blake had told him it was the answer to everything as deemed by Douglas Adams in “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.” Hopefully it did contain all the answers, thought Reynolds, but when he opened it, all it contained was a set of house keys and the pin number for his alarm system. The answer would have to be in his home in order for the numerology to hold true.
When he arrived at Blake’s townhouse he was expecting to see the police or even yellow tape across the door but then again, they were still searching for Mr. Linge so there were none. Upon walking up the steps to the front door he glanced into the garage and noticed his Carrera was gone. He inserted the key, turned the lock, and immediately heard the alarm warning. He simply entered in the pin number and silenced it. Never being in the house before Reynolds was impressed of its cleanliness and proper placement of things and one word quickly came to mind—anal. There was no bric-a-brac or clutter, no piles of clothes, no dishes in the sink, no dust even; if he had a mother she would have been proud. He walked around the house as if peering beyond velvet ropes in a museum. This changed when he reached Blake’s office where his laptop’s screensaver was running in aquarium mode—exotic goldfish swimming to and fro.
Reynolds sat in the chair and wiggled the mouse. The screensaver disappeared and revealed a webpage for Google’s Gmail. On the webpage were dozens of conversations to and from Grace Carson. He clicked on one and read every word and deduced Blake could weave a wonderful web. If he hadn’t have known his assignment he would have truly believed the boy was head over heels for the senator’s wife. He clicked on the very first email to Grace Carson and read it; he did the same with the last. He read a few more and wanted to read them all but he felt as though a timer was ticking down to its last few seconds so he decided to pack up the laptop and take it with him. Reynolds couldn’t think of anything else to search for so he left through the same door he entered, setting the alarm beforehand. He quickly nixed the notion to go back to the office and elected to head to his normal hotel since it was closing in on the standard check-in time, not that he needed to wait for that given the status of his hotel rewards card.
Once in his upgraded room he moved to the desk and plugged Blake’s laptop into the hotel’s internet network and waited for it to boot. He then whipped out his cell and dialed the all too familiar number.
“I was just going to call you, what have you found?”
“Well, I was at Blake’s townhouse just outside the beltway, not much in the way of answers, however, I grabbed his laptop.”
“And?”
“And there are a ton of emails between the two parties and from what I gathered, some are pretty intimate.”
“I think that could go without saying given the positions they were found in.”
“The thing I don’t understand, his last email stated he was coming over to the house, now reading between the lines, it sounds as though it was going to be a rendezvous of a sexual nature but I never received an email pertaining to the fact… but maybe… .”
“That might be possible.”
“What might be possible?”
“You were going to say that maybe Blake did actually fall for the senator’s wife and that’s why he never called you.”
“Well… yes… but how did you…”
“That was my exact thought as well, maybe he got too close to his subject, it has happened before… when’s the last time you had communications with him?”
“About two or three weeks ago… it seemed things were going as planned, I had no reason to believe otherwise.”
“Do you still have his last email to you?’
“Yes.”
“Send it to me, in fact send all his emails to me, even the ones he sent to Grace.”
“Those are in his gmail account.”
“So?”
“Well it would be easier if you logged onto the site yourself, there’s a ton of them.”
“Then give me his login info.”
“Sure, let’s see… . shit.”
“What?”
“Hold on… . yeah… . it seems I don’t know his password.”
“What do you mean you don’t know his password?”
“Well his browser has automatic login, so it takes me straight to his email… . all I see for his passwords are eight dots.”
“What browser is he using?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Look up in the top left-hand corner, what do you see?’
“A little orange globe, then it says Blake’s email address, and Mozilla Firefox.”
Great, should be pretty easy to get this information. Follow these steps, go to tools, then options.”
“The options box appears.”
“Good, now click security and you should see a box labeled save passwords.”
‘Yep, clicked it . .wait… I see it, show passwords.”
“Look for something like gmail or google.”
“Got it, carrera nine one one, carrera with a capital c. That was easy.”
“I’ll take a peek, now that you have his other passwords for other sites besides his gmail account, I want you to do some more investigating, see what else you can learn.”
“I’ll call you if I find out anything else that might be interesting.”
Once Reynolds hung up the phone he went back to Blake’s laptop and entered a world he never knew existed. He went to sites such as Facebook, Linked in, Match.com, and Myspace using Blake’s logon credentials. He spent the better part of the evening and most of the next day following tangents upon tangents and slipping further from his original goal. He was astonished to find how much personal information people just put out in the open. Sure, he read stories in the news on how a teacher was fired for posting a picture of herself drinking a cosmo on her website or how an employee was canned after his blog made headlines in the Wall Street Journal, but to realize just how stupid people could be on the internet widened his eyes like Alex Delarge in Clockwork Orange. He was so enthralled with pointing and clicking to the nether regions of brainlessness and trying to absorb the display of moronic deposition he never heard the sound of the incoming message.
. . .
Chapter 57
Back at the White House, Scott read the emails from Blake and Reynolds which didn’t leave much to the imagination. They were all straight to the point. He read a few of the emails between Blake and Grace and things were a different story there. They were laced with feelings and innuendos and metaphors out the ass, he felt as if he were reading a Hemmingway novel. He quickly got bored with the subtext of horny talk and focused his attention on the email addresses themselves. Reynolds was the only one who used his Beta Group email address. Blake on the other hand used an alias at hotmail to communicate with Reynolds and he used his gmail account with Grace. He had a gut feeling someone else was involved but couldn’t place a finger on it; maybe someone did a blind copy on the emails. Armed with this notion Scott opened up one of Reynolds’ emails. He then went to view tab, chose options, and saw the entire email header or the itinerary of the email message itself, where it has been and at what date and time. Although most of it appeared as gibberish to Scott, he did get a sense of the basics and didn’t see any other names within the header. He then did a few searches on Google regarding email addresses, read an article on Wikipedia, and learned a few things in the process.
Take for example, the email address [email protected]. There are two parts to an email address, the recipient’s actual email name—steve.jones and the part following the @ sign, the domain name—abc.com. There
are usually three computers or servers involved in the mailing process. The sender’s email server, the recipient’s email server, and a domain name server or DNS. The DNS is like a library; it contains all the domain names that have been registered on the internet and the location or IP address for those domains. When an email is sent from a mailing application such as Outlook, it contacts the sender’s email server. This email server in turn, strips off the domain name abc.com and sends it to a DNS. The DNS looks up the domain name and hands back one or more IP address. The sender’s email server then uses this IP address like a phone number and dials the recipient’s email server located at abc.com. Much like calling an operator at a huge company and asking for Mr. Peters in accounting, the recipient’s email server does the same thing. It searches for steve.jones within the domain abc.com. If it is a valid email address the email server at abc.com will then ask for the complete message to be sent. It then places the entire message in Mr. Jones’ inbox. If the email address is invalid or a connection cannot be made between servers, the email is placed in a queuing system where it will try to deliver it again and again for a predetermined length of time.
After his internet search he realized he was out of luck trying to find if anyone was blind copied since he was not the administrator of the email server. He would need to place a call to his liaison in the Beta Group. He flipped open his cell and called Brickman.
“Brickman here, what can I do you for?”
‘It’s Scott Norwood I need to ask… .,” and he stopped mid sentence as he was looking at the printout from the complete header record on Reynolds’ email. “Hold on a second will ya,” as he kept him on the phone without saying a word for almost a full minute. “Can you do me a quick favor?”
“Sure, what?”
“Just send me an email, no subject or body, just an email.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes.”
“On its way.”
‘Is there anything else?”
“Not right now but I might call you back in a few minutes if this doesn’t pan out.’
“If what doesn’t pan out?”
“Umm nothing… . hey I just got your email. Thanks.”
“Not a problem, wish they were all that easy.”
Scott quickly printed out Brickman’s email with the complete header information, compared it to a Reynolds’ email, and then highlighted each IP address within the headers. The starting IP addresses were the same on both emails and he went to the web to find its domain name. The Beta Group was the owner of the IP address which made sense since that’s where both emails originated. The ending addresses were different and reasonably so since they went to different domains. The thing that he found odd was Reynolds had an extra IP address located within the middle of his header information. When he looked up the address it belonged to a server located at the CIA. He scanned another email from Reynolds and found the same thing. “The plot thickens,” he said to himself. He wanted to call his computer guru but since his last conversation almost led to a crucifixion he called in yet another favor from a former colleague at DNI.
“Sam, Scott Norwood, listen I’m trying to get information from an email server.”
“What sort of information?”
“I don’t know really, maybe some sort of log file, I need to follow a trail from a certain IP address.”
“That’s possible. What’s the IP address?”
“One zero eight dot three three dot three three dot one one.”
“Did you say three three dot one one?
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, why?”
“Well that server resides at the CIA.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Directorate of Science and Technology.”
“Interesting, very interesting, can you get the logs?”
“We should be able to get them, no problem whatsoever, wait a minute I’ll call.”
“No, no, don’t do that, listen I don’t what to alarm anyone, I need more information first, it’s a trust issue, can you get them without asking permission?”
“Sure but…”
“Not another word, just do it, you have the President’s backing.”
“It will take a few minutes maybe even longer depending on the jumps I need to make.”
“Whatever you get, just send it to me, I want no other eyes on this, you got that?’
“Yes and will do.”
. . .
Chapter 58
Jorja was back in her office at the crack of dawn after making funeral arrangements for her Aunt Gracie the day before. Services were going to be held in three days giving ample time in order for family and friends in distant parts of the country to join in the celebration of her life. Jorja’s mind was elsewhere but she needed the succorance of work along with the diversion it provided. Her morning routine didn’t change. She was drinking her free cup of caffeine. She was perusing her inbox debating which emails to answer first. She was even running her IP address report and she was always going to run that report because that’s how she found GOD. She was haphazardly scrolling through the list of numbers on the report stopping only when her mind relaxed from the flashing visions of her youth. She didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary but she wasn’t looking very hard either. Just before she closed the report she double-checked the priority hit levels. There were no number ones; one being the highest priority. There were a few twos and some threes, the majority of the hits were five or below. She decided to check the twos and threes and when she did an all too familiar IP address stood out in the crowd like a red feathered penguin. It was their email server. It was always getting bombarded with spam and in a chronic hoedown between the spammers and the spam filters. Luckily they had the very best filters installed even though they were in a constant state of flux and updated almost daily. Amidst the IP addresses that had logged an incident against their email server was another red feathered penguin. This spiked her interest. She recognized the first few numbers of the IP address to that belonging to the federal government, more precisely belonging to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Her immediate thought was someone had hijacked the number somehow which was cause for concern, serious cause for concern, especially dealing with the CIA. She had a new rabbit to chase and did some more digging. She found that the IP address belonged to an individual computer located at DNI but that was all she found. A phone call was in order to her counterpart within the DNI office.
“Hi Doug, Jorja from DST”
“Hi Jorja, long time.”
“Yes it has been.”
“How have you been doing?”
“So so I guess… you know, with all that’s been happening.”
Then Doug noticed the change of inflection in her voice, put two and two together, and tippy-toed around his next question, “Jorja, were you related in anyway… to… . to Mrs. Carson?”
“She was my aunt… well more like my mom after my mom died when I was younger.”
“Jesus, I had no idea… I’m so sorry Jorja… if you need anything, and I mean anything… please… please let me know, okay?”
“Thank you Doug, I certainly appreciate that… really I do… and one thing you can help me with now is I have a question.”
“Shoot,” and as soon as he said it he felt like an ass and hoped to God she really didn’t catch it.
“Can you tell me why someone from your office was hitting our email server?”
“What do you mean?”
“This morning’s report shows an IP address originating from your walls and was pulling the log files from our machine.”
“That seems indivisible by two evenly,” trying desperately to elevate some tension in his voice after tasting his socks.
“My thought… well not exactly that thought but close. I know there are some spam filters we share but usually there is a mutual sharing of data between us, not a take and ask later sort of
deal.”
“Agreed. Jorja, do you have the IP address?”
“Yes,” and as she gave it to him, she heard him typing away.
“That IP address is an actual desktop computer belonging to Samantha Green. She’s pretty good at what she does, her programming skills are on par with some of the best. Do you want to talk to her?’
“Please.”
“Can I put her on conference?’
“Yes”
“Hold on, I was never any good at this, if I lose you, just call me back at my number,” and he pressed a few buttons.
“Sam, it’s Doug, do you have a minute, I have Jorja Carson from DST on the line?’
“Okay.”
“Jorja, you still there?’
“You didn’t lose me.”
“Good, now Sam I’ll get to the point, Jorja has a report that has your IP address on it, she says your machine pulled log files from her email server, is that true?”
“Well uhhh,” searching for some words, any words, to explain her predicament and realizing Scott never told her what to do if caught, she decided in an instant to come clean. “Yes, that is true.”
“Can I ask why?”
“I was asked to”
“By who?”
“Scott Norwood.”
“The Chief of Staff?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t say.”
“And the reason you just didn’t call for the information?”
“Scott seemed in a hurry, said he didn’t want to call attention to it, he also said he had the backing of the President, besides it was just log files, I didn’t delete them or manipulate them in any way.”
“Sam,” stated Jorja, “How well do you know Scott?’
“We went to college together, I really didn’t know him that well, lab partners in a few computer classes, that’s about it.”
Take the Fourth Page 33