Kill Process

by William Hertling

  Everyone I hired was in line with our values, but that’s a lot of money, especially to everyone here that’s a year or two out of college, struggling to pay their student loans and Portland’s astronomical rents. I’d better not say anything about amounts.

  “I’m sure you all saw, and probably heard, the scene in my office this morning. Tomo made an offer to purchase us. Our investors want to take the offer. I do not.

  “Tomo has no interest in Tapestry the federated social network. They want to buy the company because that’s the easiest way to gain control. They want control because they’re scared of how Tapestry decentralizes power. Consider this validation of everything we’re doing—our privacy and data ownership features, our partnerships with other companies in the industry, the control we’re delivering to the customer. Tomo knows all of this threatens their way of doing business.

  “If we sold to them, we’d give up everything we’ve worked for. I told the investors we will not accept any offer from Tomo. Unfortunately this means we can’t close the funding round. Our lawyers are currently investigating to determine our options. That’s what I know. Any questions?”

  One of the marketing employees raises a hand and shouts out, “How much is the offer?”

  Of course. First question. “Sizable enough the investors want to take it. It still isn’t a good deal for us. It’s counter to our values.”

  I field a few more questions, then send everyone back to work, telling them I’ll let them know when there’s more information.

  I return to my desk, my head whirling. How much is at risk? Could I really lose the company after I’ve worked so hard, not only to build it, but to ensure I would keep control? This is the very thing I did my best to guarantee wouldn’t happen.

  I call Emily, who surprises me by picking up on the first ring. Then I realize she probably assumes I’m still a mess from my breakdown this morning, which feels like it happened months ago.

  I relate everything that’s happened.

  “Sounds serious,” she says. “What does your lawyer say?”

  “I actually talked to the founder of the company for once, although I’m not sure that’s a good thing. He didn’t say much, except that he’d investigate and get back to me.”

  “I don’t understand the timing. You closed your funding round yesterday.”

  “No,” I say. I can’t explain it all fell apart because I was holed up in the storage center pursuing Theo. “The funding round didn’t close, which is the reason why I’m still in control of the company. Had I signed the paperwork yesterday, I’d be outvoted by the other investors.”

  “Well, that’s suspicious,” Emily says. “You’re about to pick up a new investor, and the next day there’s an offer which they know you wouldn’t accept, but the investors will.”

  Emily is a lot of things. Powerful, strategic, occasionally manipulative, an overachiever, and highly competitive. Kind to the few people she cares deeply about. Overly prone to suspicion is not one of her qualities, however, not the way it is for me. If she believes this is suspicious, then it almost certainly is.

  I recall Lewis Rasmussen’s first offer, almost a year ago. The Tomo CEO is influential and powerful enough that if he wanted CompEx to become a stakeholder in Tapestry, thereby shifting the voting control in the company, it wouldn’t take him more than a phone call or two to make it happen. The CompEx deal came together so quickly. I assumed it was a logical fit, two companies who could help each other. Maybe there’s more to it.

  “I need to go, Em.”

  I pack up my things, including an extra laptop, to head back to the storage facility, where I’m going to break into Lewis’s email and phone records and find out exactly what he’s been up to.

  CHAPTER 36

  * * *

  CHRIS DALY goes back to the restaurant at eleven, when the waitress gets off work. He wears a gray business suit, in keeping with the story he told her about traveling for work. It’s funny, him being single but claiming to have a wife. It gives him a ready excuse to avoid all the pesky phone calls and text messages between visits. Things are simpler this way. Friends in every town, no complications.

  He knocks on the locked door. She opens it a minute later.

  “Give me ten minutes,” she says, then kisses him quickly.

  Chris sits at a table by the door where he can watch her work, clearing the last few tables. He admires the curve of her waist, the tight fit of her skirt. Dish washing and other noises come from the kitchen as the crew finish up their last tasks for the night.

  As she passes by his table, Chris grabs her by the waist and pulls her down into his lap. She laughs at first, then tries to push him away as he grabs her tit.

  “Stop, I’m at work,” she says, but there isn’t much strength to it. Still, he lets her up. They’ll be back at the hotel soon enough. Chris likes her because she’s compliant. He can take what he wants from any woman, but over the years, he’s found it’s easier with the ones who don’t create a fuss. It’s easier to keep a low profile if there aren’t police artists sketching your face in every town.

  The cues are so easy to find: a slight inability to meet his gaze, a hesitancy to their speech, the way they hold their shoulders.

  Later, they’re in the hotel room. She’s tied to the bed with cotton cord. It’s a lot of waste for one night, but zipties are so uncivilized. He’s got three strands of cord around her neck, his right hand in the loop, twisting to restrict the carotid arteries. Her face turns that lovely purplish tint as she thrashes harder under her bonds. Chris is close to release when his phone buzzes, the double short buzz of his work phone.

  He should answer that, but . . .

  He finishes with her, then releases the neck rope and climbs off. She gasps for breath, a pleasant background noise, while he checks his messages. The origin is masked, though he can tell from the fake caller ID it’s got to be Pete in Naval Intelligence.

  “The parts you asked for came in.”

  The only thing Pete’s working on is Angie, so there must be a breakthrough.

  Crap. He was looking forward to hours more fun. He slips his Benchmade folder out of his pants pocket and flicks the blade open with one hand. He sits on the bed next to her, and caresses her face and neck with the outside of the hand holding the knife. She’s sweaty, merely panting now, as her color returns to normal.

  “I’m sorry. Something critical has come up.”

  She flinches as the blade nears her eye and tries to pull away.

  Chris laughs and cuts the rope from her neck, then frees her wrists and legs.

  She pulls the sheets up to cover her body, then turns onto her side. Her mouth twitches like she wants to say something, but whatever it is, she can’t bring herself to speak. He sees this in them sometimes. The regret, the self-loathing. It’s good the call came when it did. It’ll spare him having to listen to whatever it is she wants to unload.

  It takes him a few minutes to clean up and dress, and still she doesn’t get out of bed.

  “Feel free to hang out, use the hotel room. I won’t be back tonight.” He walks to the door. “I’ll come by the restaurant tomorrow night, if I’m free.”

  * * *

  Chris briefly wonders what the waitress gets out of their rendezvous. Some weird combination of attention and validation. Probably the boys in psych could tell him, although he doesn’t care that much.

  He pulls up outside a chain hotel, piggybacks on their wi-fi signal, and calls Pete on an encrypted channel.

  “Daly here, what do you have for me?”

  “I’m fine, thanks for asking,” Pete says. “Hope you are well, too.”

  Chris is silent. Best to wait him out.

  “Your girl, Angie. She’s in the middle of a funding round for her company, and her company received an acquisition offer from Tomo.”

  Chris mentally reviews what he knows of Angie and her work, and doesn’t see why this is worth calling him. “So what?”


  “So she takes the time out of her busy, busy day to visit the website of a Brazilian newspaper this morning. She clicks on one and only one article, about a teenager named Theo, arrested in São Paulo for breaking into a number of women and girls’ accounts and blackmailing them into sending him sex videos. Then she installs an encrypted voice calling app on her phone, and calls one of her employees.”

  “Could we decode it?” Chris asks. Considering all of Pete’s resources, he bets Pete has the sex videos from the Brazilian. Would it be too weird to ask for them? Probably.

  “Of course we can decode it,” Pete says. “Don’t interrupt. Anyhow, she tells the employee ‘she’s fixed the image acquisition bug’ and it’s safe to come back. Then she goes back to dealing with her investors and Tomo offer, then disappears off the grid.”

  “What?”

  “Exactly. It gets better. I go backwards in time. Is there any previous connection between Angie and the teenager in Brazil? No. On the other hand, there is between the employee she called and Theo. In fact, Theo has photos of the employee’s sister on his computer. Two nights before, Angie goes to the employee’s apartment, spends a couple of hours there with her, then disappears off the grid.”

  “Where does she go when she disappears?” Chris asks.

  “Are you gonna let me tell the story?” Pete says. “The first time she disappeared off the grid, I wasn’t watching too closely. I figured maybe stress from the job drove her to turn off everything electronic. This time around, I thought something she was doing something connected with the kid Theo. I check all the incoming traffic into his computer for the last two weeks.”

  The breadth of data they’re recording impresses even Chris. The odds of them singling out some random teenager in Brazil for observation is minimal, so the implication is the NSA has historical records on every data connection over every router on the planet. How is that even possible?

  “I found an inbound connection that retrieved the photos from his computer, and then, a few minutes later, added photos of the Vice President of Brazil’s daughter.”

  “That wasn’t Theo?” Chris asks.

  “Nope,” Pete says. “He was in school. I’ve got complete logs for his phone’s data traffic and geocoordinates, and I’ve got him on a school security camera at the time the connection was live. It definitely wasn’t him.”

  “Who was it? Where was the connection from?”

  “Ah, that’s where the story becomes interesting,” Pete says. “The connection is a dead-end from a coffee shop in Amsterdam.”

  “Why a dead-end?”

  “Because there was no traceable client data. We couldn’t track the browser back to any known person. No tracking cookies. Someone connects with a burner laptop, uses the coffee shop wi-fi, connects to Theo’s computer, and then no evidence of them again.”

  “Do we have video for the coffee shop?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Pete says. “The coffee shop wasn’t open at the time of the connection. It was eight at night. The coffee shop closes at 4 P.M.”

  “Street cameras pick up anyone nearby, using the wi-fi?”

  “No, although there was an oddity about the network traffic. The connection was really slow, consistent with an onion routing network.”

  “NSA has TOR logs, doesn’t it?” Chris asks. “Got anything matching your profile?”

  “No, I checked. She’s using a different onion network, maybe even something she built.”

  “She? You’re convinced it’s Angie?”

  “It’s too much of a coincidence,” Pete says.

  “I need more than coincidence,” Chris says. “I need proof, and I need to figure out what else she’s doing. If she was involved with the kid, it wasn’t a solitary activity. She has to have done more. Can’t you correlate her data traffic with other wi-fi access points? Find other routers sending the same data at the same time? Back track that way?”

  Pete’s quiet for a moment. “Oy. I know what you want, but it’s hard. That query doesn’t exist in any good form. We need to brute-force it. Compare all the routing data to all the other routing data. It’s how we used to break TOR before we compromised the network itself.”

  “Then do it.”

  “I’ll need NSA compute time to correlate the data on a billion access points and routers. There isn’t enough computing power here. You’ll need Enso to approve it.”

  “I’ll get the approval.”

  “Then I’ll start work on the query.”

  * * *

  The NSA has more computing power than God, unless you believe the universe is a simulation, in which case there is still someone out there with a bigger supercomputer. Chris has no idea what the exact numbers are, but he’s heard they’re running somewhere over twenty million servers.

  The Utah Data Center stores more data than has ever been stored in one location before. Huge pipelines feed it information from around the world, particularly through backdoors in virtually all industry communications, from telecom companies to social networking to email. Taken from the best practices of the day, it has also been designed for parallel data retrieval. When records need to be correlated across massive data sets, the entire facility can operate simultaneously to search for the data, each of the millions of computers searching a subset of data, bubbling up results which are correlated to be organized at higher levels. What might take Naval Intelligence a year to search for will be accomplished in minutes at the NSA’s data center.

  Of course, there are only so many minutes in a day, and so any extensive requests require approval.

  Asking Enso for dedicated NSA supercomputer time could, in theory, be a problem, because his investigation into Angie with the goal of developing leverage against her isn’t government business. The client pays Daly, not Uncle Sam.

  The thing about an organization like BRI is that it’s so dark, so far off the radar or from any sort of oversight, it’s difficult to tell what might be legitimate or not. Had Enso asked him to distract the Congresswoman because of some official charter, or was that Enso’s prerogative? Nobody knows but Enso. If there were records of what they were doing, they couldn’t be dark. People in the government require plausible deniability to take care of the things that need to happen.

  The system that allows the President to influence, as a hypothetical example, the vice chancellor of Germany to ensure a particular trade vote and yet remain blissfully ignorant, works in Chris’s favor when he needs NSA computer time.

  Chris waits for East Coast business hours, then calls Enso on a secure channel.

  “What’s up?” Enso sounds distracted, rapid-fire background typing audible over the connection.

  “I need dedicated supercomputer time for an investigation into a woman—”

  “How much time?” Enso cuts him off. “I just got out of a department meeting and I’ve got things to do.”

  “We’re not sure. Pete needs to run a brute-force—”

  “Yeah, okay. I’ve got an approval number for you.”

  Enso reads off the query request code, which Daly writes down on a slip of quick-erase paper. Anti-climatic, even by Chris’s standards. He didn’t even get to use any of the multiple justifications he’d fabricated. Chris makes a note of the time. If Enso’s usually busy and distracted at this time of the week, Chris can use that to his advantage the next time he needs to make a request.

  “Thanks,” Pete says when Chris calls him back with the number.

  “No biggie,” Chris says. “Query done?”

  “Not yet. I’m going to test it in the simulator. Make sure it works before we burn through a tanker truck.”

  Chris chuckles. The Utah Data Center’s backup generators burn a tanker truck’s worth of fuel every minute. Not that they’ve ever had to use it, since there’s plentiful grid power, but it’s still their unit of measure for the enormous power of the NSA.

  “Fine. I’m going to Portland, check her out in person. I’ll be in touch later.”

/>   Chris leaves his government work in his partner’s hands, and takes their scrubbed, tracking-free car on the four-hour drive from Seattle down to Portland. Once there, he gets an AirBnB, and spends an hour making sure there’s nothing to track him. The owner of the house has a few security cameras. Chris re-angles one on the front porch so it’s staring at the ceiling, and inside he covers the Nest thermometer with a throw blanket so it won’t sense when he’s there or not. He’s got a little travel kit for secure communications, and he uses the directional antenna to find good wi-fi half a mile away on the nearest busy street.

  He initiates a video conference with Pete.

  “Anything?”

  “Not yet,” Pete says, smiling.

  “What are you so happy about?” Chris asks.

  “The largest computer on the planet’s running my code. Half a billion processor cores in parallel. I don’t experience this every day.”

  “We’ll be sure to withdraw cost of the electricity from your pay.”

  Pete’s eyes go large. “There’s goes my paycheck for the rest of my career.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Ten minutes, max. We’re loading the traffic metadata from every router in the world to find another router that sent the same sequence of packet sizes as the coffee shop router.”

  Eight minutes later, the answer comes back: another IP address in Amsterdam.

  “Well, what is it?”

  Pete types at his keyboard and curses.

  “A coffee shop on the next block over.”

  “What the fuck? That’s a hell of a search to find a coffee shop two blocks away.”

  Pete initiates screen sharing, and his video cam is replaced with a live stream of his desktop. “Look at the path here.” He mouses over a network trace route. “Angie hooked up a repeater connected to both business’s wi-fi networks at once. The data comes in at the first coffee shop, Filter Cafe, to a device on their network, and forty milliseconds later, a slightly different packet goes out over EcoGreen Coffee’s wi-fi, before hitting our boy in Brazil.”