From Filth & Mud

by J. Manuel

  CHAPTER 32

  Aiden came back from the office tired and annoyed as usual. Politics! He’d spent the afternoon like most, on conference calls with D.C. trying to stay on top of the lobbying efforts for his government assistance, as he called it.

  Irina ambushed him with a worried look and an extensive file on Mayfield and Eckert. “You’ve got to see this Aiden,” she exclaimed, as she shoved the tablet into his chest, and then whirled around in her chair to get back to her furious research.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “Read!”

  “Who are they?”

  “Read!”

  “Jesus, have you been following this woman for a few months now? She’s not on the main system is she?”

  “She came in as a possible target a few months back in a batch of a couple hundred. She caught my eye. I deleted her file.”

  “You what? You know the system is designed to track any tampering effort…” Aiden stopped himself because he knew better.

  “Please. I tracked her to a meeting today with this Eckert guy. It looks like he’s getting ready to blackmail her. She’s doing some pretty interesting work on a biotech project that Eckert’s company owns. It looks like they want to steal her work.”

  “So what? How does this concern us?”

  “Well she appeared as a target on Yente.”

  “I’m tired Irina. Didn’t you just say she appeared in a batch along with a couple hundred others?”

  “Our Yente!”

  Aiden was now paying attention. He cleared his mind and focused on the screen.

  “I’m sending you this now.”

  Aiden watched as a new name popped onto his screen.

  “This is Dr. Emmanuel Monte-Alban. He’s a researcher at BioSyn working on something called Project Lilith. Mayfield had been working on his project for about a year. It appears that she provided a breakthrough for his work and it’s something big, some kind of new treatment.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “So I don’t understand the mystery here. BioSyn is a biotech company with a greedy CEO who wants to steal work from an ideological scientist. That’s pretty cut and dry.”

  “Well here’s the problem. One of Mayfield’s research colleagues died suddenly a few months ago and now Dr. Monte-Alban has disappeared off of the web, his digital life has been deleted, and all of his accounts have gone dark. Here is the kicker. You’re going to love this. BioSyn has only existed as a company for ten years and in ten years they’ve come out of nowhere and turned into one of the leading biotech firms, in terms of capital, but they have relatively few employees and facilities, one in Syracuse and one in Silicon Valley. Wall Street has been courting them aggressively, but they’ve stayed private. I did find one intriguing note on them, and that is that they have somehow managed to secure Chinese government backing to the tune of five-billion-dollars-worth of debt.”

  “Still not that unheard of, capitalism is a shady business.”

  “Well, here’s the cherry. Eckert plays the role of aloof, eccentric, New York CEO quite well, but he does have one hobby that is especially curious. He is listed as a member of XPS Services LLP, which is a joint-venture partnership between a subsidiary of BioSyn, Inc., and XPS, Inc., the latter being a private security contractor whose website reads docile enough, but whose company balance sheet and expenses resemble that of a mercenary army.”

  Aiden shook his head trying to follow the trail that Irina was so obviously laying down. “So why would this biotech company have a joint-venture with mercenaries?”

  “Weird right? And now for the coup-de-grace, I ran Eckert against our special access database, through my backdoors to Yente 2.0, and found this.” Irina pulled the image from her screen and sent it to Aiden’s tablet with a wave of her hand. “You see that? Our boy CEO is on a CIA list, for what I can tell, is a project designed to open back-channel communications between the CIA and sources within the Chinese government and industry. Look here, there are logs in spreadsheets detailing drug shipments and money transfers throughout China, all being pushed through Hong Kong.”

  “Fuck me!” Aiden mumbled as he stared in disbelief. “Fuck me!” He glared at Irina now more worried than he’d been since being stranded in Russia. “Are you sure that there’s no way that you can get back-hacked, and that no one knows you’ve got this stuff?”

  “Not possible. All of my stuff goes back to Tovarich at best. If there are leftover artifacts from the access, then it will all look like a random brute-force attack that failed. That will leave enough evidence to generate suspicion that China was behind the attack.”

  “So what do we do with this?” Aiden asked half-afraid of what Irina had in mind.

  “I don’t know what you’re going to do Aiden, but I’m going to stay on Mayfield and Eckert until I figure out what is going on.”

  “Well I’m going to keep this under my hat, since all of this information was gathered illegally, and beyond our mandate. Keep me updated with what you find.”

  Aiden tried to fall asleep after his shower while Irina’s screens glowed faintly in the bathroom. It was her habit to move her setup there while he slept. He assumed that it gave her a sense of being back in some lowly, Slavic motel. Maybe it kept her on edge and sharpened her creativity? He battled for sleep despite how tired he was, but his mind raced with thoughts of covert drug running operations, and the faces of Karen Mayfield and Eckert. He was so preoccupied with his newfound worries that he forgot to tell Irina about a few new college interns that had applied to work at the company.

  The background checks had returned clean on all of the intern candidates so he didn’t see the problem in hiring them, besides none of them would be coding for anything important. They were going to be working with Rhea on some social network software, something Collier Analytics was pursuing in order to create a credible front for the company as a software firm, plus it had the added benefit of being potentially profitable. Rhea had agreed to babysit for a few months in return for three months paid vacation, wherever and whenever she wanted. As he finally fell asleep with the help of a few Ambien, Aiden’s mind was incapable of focusing on anything that would cause worry, let alone one Dimitri Karadenkov, who was among the candidates for the internship.

  - - - - - - -

  Dima walked into the bookstore café where Alexi had been waiting all afternoon with his face buried in a copy of Popular Science. Dima pulled up a chair and took a seat opposite his partner.

  “So I got it Alexi. I’m in. I will start next week.”

  “Now you have to learn something about coding,” Alexi chuckled at the thought of his hot-blooded partner doing anything desk related let alone something that required expert computer skills. Dima had barely survived secondary school.

  “I don’t have to learn anything of the sort. I’ll just do what I did at university, find a girl, romance her, and have her do all of my work for me.” Dima waved down a waitress who came by. “Excuse me can I bother you for an espresso? I know that you are probably very busy, but I’m so tired and need a little buzz.” He smiled the kind of smile that made all women instantly helpless in his presence as his baby-blue eyes twinkled to help cast the powerful spell. The young waitress returned his infectious smile, nodded shyly, while turning several rosy-shades brighter. Alexi knew that Dima would have her number by the time they left the bookstore. He’d have robbed her of her virtue by the end of the week, and today was Friday.

  “So that’s your master plan? You’re going to charm your way through security and find this girl?” Dima batted his long, fine eyelashes which fanned his espresso as he sipped seductively toward his target who was trying not to look obvious behind the café counter.

  “Focus Dima, we’ve got work to do. Collier’s been all over town the last few days. He has no routine other than arriving at his office by 1 p.m., and then he locks himself in there until evening. The girl has been locked in the house for th
e last couple of weeks. We need a way in there and a way to find out what is going on. Most of this stuff is going to be kept electronically with these people, and that’s not exactly our forte.”

  “So what’s your plan, Alexi?”

  “Stay on them for now and wait to see if we can find an opportunity to exploit them.”

  The waitress circled back with a couple biscotti, on the house, of course. Her number was scribbled on the top of Dima’s napkin.

  - - - - - - -

  Irina had worked day and night tracking Mayfield while simultaneously tugging at the loose strings that would unravel the BioSyn mystery. She had surreptitiously accessed XPS data and communications systems through a simple and clever method. Step 1: She searched employment profiles of the largest professional networking sites for current XPS employees. Step 2: She filtered through the profiles to see which ones were the most active and had the most updated information. This usually meant that the employees were polishing their resumes because they were ready to jump ship. Step 3: She concentrated on the thirty-somethings in low to mid-level management positions as these were the most likely to be disgruntled, and probably ignored security protocols since no one supervised them on a daily basis; three fit the profile. Step 4: She overnighted a package of complimentary, USB thumb-drives from a fictitious, online retailer to each of her three candidates. Step 5: She waited until she received a datalink message from one of the XPS system computers that had been infected by the malignant code she’d written onto the thumb-drives. People loved themselves some free chachkies!

  Irina waited two days before the first datalink was confirmed. Within a few hours, she had managed to bypass all but the most complex security protocols within the XPS network. She was impressed by how compartmentalized the system was. It was obvious to her as she looked at the code and network architecture, that XPS’ security protocols were written by NSA systems personnel. The software suite was off-the-shelf NSA code that was a powerful deterrent for even the best of hackers, but she had seen this stuff and its precursor editions since she was a tween messing around on the Russian Darknet. Back then, she would have launched a brute-force assault on the entire system in an effort to overload it, literally a ‘smash & grab’ job, but now she had the knowledge to deftly maneuver around all of the security to avoid any of the standard trip-wires of these cookie-cutter programs. Now that she was safely planted within the security system itself, all she had to do was sit and wait for events to unfold.

  CHAPTER 33

  Dima worked harder than any of the interns though he did not do any coding. He worked his fellow interns, at first, and then moved on to Collier Analytics’ employees. Within a couple of weeks, he was inviting a strong contingent of young programmers to the best happy hour spots in town, though he’d only known San Francisco for a few weeks longer. Dima was a skilled flirt. He never made the mistake of showing overt favoritism to any of his targets. He knew how to work one against the other without crossing the line that would cause everyone to turn against him. There were at least ten employees who would do anything for him, and one whom he set his eyes on as the most likely mark, Brian, a twenty-five year old guy who liked his men cute, athletic, stylish, and foreign. Dima was his dream-come-true.

  Dima convinced him that all of his heterosexual bravado with the ladies was just a front. They were his beard. He came from a sexually repressed culture that persecuted gays, and he’d feared for his life since his early childhood, and so he’d adopted an overly masculine persona to conceal his innermost desires. Dima confided in Brian that he could express his true self with him. Brian was hooked, and Dima was in!

  Soon Dima had access to a treasure trove of highly-classified information that included possible terrorist threats to the U.S., and quite unexpectedly, an unfathomably large database of naked pictures of millions of Americans. These he’d found were the focal point of a ‘hot or not’ game played by Collier Analytics’ employees. Dima feigned amusement for a few minutes while he stood behind Brian’s workstation, gently but purposefully leaning into him to get a closer look at the screen. Brian enjoyed the physical contact, but he was nervous about being so obvious at work.

  “So what else are you working on super-spy?” Dima panned.

  Brian dearly wanted to impress Dima, and he’d never been in a position to impress anyone until now, so he played up his role. He promised he’d tell him everything if Dima came over to his apartment for some drinks and a Big Bang Theory marathon. Dima accepted the invitation. As they sat on the couch, Brian decided to make his move.

  “Dima check this out.”

  “What is it? Are you going to show me something really super-secret?” Dima swiped at Brian’s back like he was doing something naughty.

  “I’ve been coding some lines for this program. It’s my baby.”

  “Brian! You coded this? This is amazing,” Dima gushed.

  “Yeah, it’s my project,” he exaggerated tremendously. His was but a small role, but he didn’t mind letting on. “You see, this is a top secret program called, Yente. It’s designed to detect possible terror threats. Once targets are identified, we just back track all of their history and connections until we narrow down any likely accomplices and things like that. It’s like discovering a terrorist’s social network. Like, if you know one drag-queen you probably know a few,” Brian snorted at his own joke, the wine was getting to him, and he felt a little loosey-goosey—God, Dima was so hot!

  “So who does the program track down?” Dima pressed.

  Brian felt a slight pang of worry. He didn’t want to reveal too much, and in fact he’d tried to take as many precautions as possible. He wasn’t even showing the live Yente version because there were so many safeguards built into the company’s security that any breach would be automatically detected. He was using an old set of data batches that had been processed, and subsequently stored on backup servers two weeks prior. The fact was that Yente 2.0 created so much data that it quickly overran the server’s capacity, so the programmers had just started to back up the data in excess servers which were not tied to the main server. They’d requested help to resolve the issue, but management told them that they’d have to make do with the capacity they had, and so they’d just created a workaround. Once cleared, the old data was stored on backup servers—useless files thatno one ever bothered to review. The worthless data worked well for Brian’s purpose of courting hunky Dima. Brian took a last long sip of wine from his glass, and smiled longingly as Dima leaned in and kissed him gently.

  Dima held Brian firmly in his arms as he waited for the high dose of flunitrazepam to take effect. Thirty-minutes later, Brian lay unconscious on his couch, oblivious to Dima’s actions. Dima worried that he may have used too much sedative, but he needed to ensure that he was not disturbed. He inserted a flash-drive into Brian’s laptop, copying all of the files quickly. With that done, he now had the rest of the night to peruse the contents of Collier Analytics’ most secret machinations. After a few hours of diligent study, one file caught his eye, that of a red-headed woman who definitely looked out of place in the list of mostly brown-skinned, sixteen to forty-year-old men. She was also labeled a high threat. He opened the file, and reviewed her impressive resume. Attached to the file was a threat category that read: other. It appeared that she was distinguishable here as well. The file also included a tab labeled: Network, and unlike most of the other threats, her network only included one person, a Dr. Emmanuel Monte-Alban. Monte-Alban resided in San Jose, and worked in Silicon Valley as a lead scientist for biological projects at a company called BioSyn. Dima didn’t immediately see any relevance to their current task, but he knew that this was important. He gathered his things, wiped down all of the surfaces that he had touched, and dragged the still unconscious Brian off of the couch, and carried him into the bedroom where he unclothed him, and threw him under the covers. It was late, and he was eager to share the information with Alexi.

  - - - - - - -

  A
lexi was floored by his protégé’s discovery. “I’ve reported your findings to Golovkin. He nearly shat himself when I mentioned BioSyn.”

  “Why? I thought the big game here was Collier and the girl?”

  “Well, apparently not. PRYAMO has long suspected that BioSyn is an intermediary for CIA activity such as drug running, and cash payoffs to help create sources within the Russian and Chinese governments. Thanks to your work, PRYAMO now has that proof. The FSB has been running covert operations to try to intercept some of these shipments over the last year in an effort to disrupt BioSyn.”

  “Shishka! Do the Chinese know?”

  “It doesn’t look like BioSyn is currently on their radar. The relationship is protected by several high-level, People’s Party ministers.”

  “We’ve been ordered to abandon our mission with Collier and the girl, and to follow this BioSyn lead to ground to figure out what they want with Mayfield and Monte-Alban. Golovkin wants us to gather some intelligence regarding one of BioSyn’s shipments so that they can take one down, and beat the FSB to the punch. That will score a huge win for the hardliners in the Kremlin.”

  Dima looked perplexed. Alexi scoffed, “Fucking politics, Dima. We play cloak and dagger for national defense, but our superiors play to one-up each other. You’ll do well to remember that. No doubt this goes no higher than Golovkin! That politician would love nothing more than to put a feather in his cap by embarrassing the FSB, and bringing in one of these shipments would be the perfect opportunity to do so.”

  Dima shook his head in disbelief.

  “You shake your head now, but moments like these will play a large role in determining whether or not you get a senior staff assignment in St. Petersburg, or Moscow, or if you remain a field agent well into your fifties, working the Steppes, running border incursion operations against the Chinese.”