"I can answer that, Joe," called Allison. "we haven't, mainly because we have never been asked to. I mean, we have submitted the post-launch polls, they were part of the statistics which John ran past you earlier today. They have always been considered to be the final check, and as was demonstrated by the answers received, the responses to the Stiletto, and the Sabre ranges, were more than satisfactory. Product awareness, which had first been stimulated by a series of low-key clips, was reinforced by the main launch series of billboards and thirty second commercials, as agreed with Harry here, and the final push came with the poster campaign States-wide, combined with the ongoing prime time commercials, which are running at present."
"I'd like to commission your agency to do just that, Allison; a attitude poll aimed specifically at product awareness, at what message is being received by the American public from the commercials and billboards presented by your agency, on behalf of Continental Motors!"
"No need to commission anyone, Mr. Kozcinski, we at Morson, Hutcheons, Drew and Zeno would be more than happy to do this survey as part of our contract with Continental." Allison gritted her teeth as she committed her agency to the extra expenditure of two hundred odd thousand dollars, but considered it cash well spent either to quiet the client, or to discover if anything came out of the woodwork.
The presentation came finally to a close late in the afternoon, and the six sat around for a wrap-up. Joe finished by rising, and speaking to all four of his visitors; "I have got to say, in front of you, that I am quite impressed, Allison. Under normal circumstances, we would be looking at an award winning set of commercials. Now as you know, our sales figures are slightly less than forecast; in fact they are damn near disastrous. However, from my own knowledge of the industry, I don't think I can honestly pin our troubles on the lapel of Morson, Zeno. Thank you for your efforts, and I hope you have a safe journey back to New York".
The team began packing their various gear together, and the two Continental men escorted them down to their rental, helped stow everything in the trunk, and waved them off towards the airport. Joe bade goodbye to Harry, made his way back to his own office, and, after about ten minutes work clearing up various documents, prepared to close his briefcase before heading down to fight his way homewards. He suddenly remembered his errand within Theater number one, and walked the long corridors to the lift, dropped down two floors, and emerged at the Theater level. He walked towards the door of the demonstration room, then paused as he realized the key he was twirling would not be necessary, as the door was splintered and cracked, and was lying open. Joe's hand pushed down on the handle, widening the door, as he peered around into the room, but it was completely empty. He moved forward into the small auditorium, and walked quickly to inspect the base of the stand, but he found absolutely nothing, either with his own eyes, or with the help of the small black case, because the small read-out numbers resolutely stayed at zero. Returning to his own office, Joe made his mind up, and scanned the entire office, both his and that of his secretary and her auxiliaries, and found absolutely nothing. He fished out the discarded box and wrapping, which had covered the black box, decided to take it all home, and pushed all the cardboard into his briefcase. The lettering on the outside of the package read, "You can ensure privacy, with the Handy Hobby BUG Detector! Detects all known surveillance devices, without warning their user! Batteries not included."
Chapter 5
The floodlights which lit up the surrounding parkland of the big Detroit hospital also cast a generous amount of light into the area where relatives of 'Emergency' patients usually sat. The young intern approached the couple who sat, close together, clutching hands as though there was nothing left to hold onto. "Mr. Larrabee, Mrs. Larrabee, might I have a word with you? Your father, well, he seemed to be doing fine at first; really fighting back after the initial heart attack. We had high hopes, because you did all the right things, the ambulance guys did their job, and he arrived in pretty good shape, but unfortunately his system just wasn't strong enough for the long haul. It may have been due to the length of time he lay in the boat hull before you arrived from your own home. We had him resting in a Intensive Care bed after the initial treatment, but he suffered two more attacks, one after the other, about thirty minutes ago. We tried our best, and when I say 'best', I mean it; but there was no coming back. I hate to be the one to tell you, but your father, Mr. Larrabee, died without regaining consciousness, fifteen minutes ago. I am truly sorry."
"Thanks, doctor. The old man had a pretty good innings, he had taken retirement from the Continental engine plant about four months ago, all alone but for us after Mom died, and he was looking forward to finishing off the sailboat he had always planned, he must have been trying to reach something inside the hull, which is where we found him; but now I guess....." the young man's voice trailed away, as his wife clung to him, her face streaked with tears. An auxiliary helper moved forward, to help comfort the newly bereaved couple, and to help them over the hurdle which few these days were really ready for.
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The staff doctor, who lived in the retirement complex on the outskirts of the Florida town of St.Petersburg, and was thus easily available for the care and treatment of the five hundred elderly people resident there, stood at a bedside, trying to reassure the weeping wife of the man who lay, comatose, in the bed. "Mrs. Clements, your husband has had a second heart attack, and although we were here," gesturing to his assistants, "there was not a great deal we could do. Your husband has had a history of illness, his first attack, while severe, could have been fought off by a stronger man, the second makes it more than likely that you should prepare for the worst, with your husband not being strong enough to withstand the strains imposed on his system."
The woman who stood, buffetted by the swirl of death as it crept around her life, simply asked, "Why has it got to be my Joe? He's only been retired for five months. He worked at the Grand Rapids plant for forty years, he only wanted a few years in the sun!"
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Joe Kozcinski sat in the lounge armchair, feet up on the coffee table, gazing without enthusiasm at the television screen, flicking from channel to channel, in the vain hope of finding something which was not aimed at the moronic, or the sports-mad. Alex walked in from the kitchen, carrying a tray with coffee cups, and jug. She laid the tray down, gently shoved her husbands' feet off the table, and poured the coffee. Joe took the proffered cup almost absentmindedly, as Alex picked up her own coffee cup, and sat down on the carpet beside Joe's chair. He stroked her hair, as they drank, then he switched off the television in irritation, despairing at the crap which was pumped out onto the airwaves. "Honey, you know that gadget I bought at the Hobby shop in the Mall, well, I, er; it worked today!"
"What was it you bought, Joe?" asked Alex, not really paying attention, "I didn't see it. Anyway, thats the whole idea, you buy something because it works; don't you?"
"Well, Alex, it is not just that I didn't want this item to work; it's just that the gadget showed positive. It is a device for checking if there are any 'bugs', you know, listening devices, in the office area. I scanned the demo theatre area, just because we were about to go through the whole ad agency promotion, and I was just, well, uneasy. I found at least one listening device tucked inside the lectern stand. I got the whole crew moved to next door, and we had the meeting, but when I went back, after they had gone, hell, I was just about the last one in the office; the door had been busted open, and the 'bug' was gone. Now I don't think it was Nick Cavalieri, because, as I said, he gets all the minutes, he gets his own feed-back from our task force, and a draft copy of my own report is ready to go to him right now, in advance of the task force hearing about our meeting. So, what we have, is either someone has been paid to do a first-class job of industrial espionage, or we have outsiders coming in to do the dirty work. I should have pulled the damn thing out immediately I heard that maintenance was early on the job! You wor
ked at Continental, when did they ever get off their butts less than two days after being called out?"
His wife nodded slowly, "But why would anyone want to listen in on a meeting which was going to expose possible shortfalls in the advertising?"
"The only outfit I can think of would be another ad agency. We shovel a great deal of money out, when we establish our billing with the agency. Morson, Zeno is currently in charge of around seven or eight hundred thousand dollars worth of our money. Thats to cover the commercial airtime, the poster campaign, and the marketing polls. Now if some devious bastard hears that Morson, Zeno is on the skids with Continental, they are gonna come out of the sky like vultures with afterburners."
Alex rolled her head against Joe's knee, as she gently asked, "You worried, honey?"
"Worried enough to get that damn detector out when I got home, and do a thorough walk around of every room in the house! Some of these espionage people, they are really right off the wall. We had a lecture once, must have been about two years ago, all about security, that sort of thing. Anyhow, the guy that gave the talks, he was trying to tell us that every major company and corporation has either been the target of this stuff, or is so easily penetrated that they can walk in and pick up what they want. Look at today. I must have been away from that lecture theater door less than half an hour, forty minutes tops. Someone walked straight in, jemmied the door, and pulled out the evidence really fast. They must have known that I was heading back towards my office, and took the chance to remove the 'snooper', or whatever it was. I'll have to get a thorough review of safety and plant security going, but not making a big song and dance about it. Ahhh, the hell with it for now! Look honey, I've got about thirty minutes work on the computer, then you and I can maybe have an early night, Huh?"
"I like the 'early night' sounding bit, although the last time you made that sort of proposition, you climbed into the sack with me, and twenty seconds later you were snoring your pretty head off!" grinned his wife, as she rose to collect the coffee things, and took them through into the kitchen.
The Marketing V.P. rose to his feet, walked through to his den, which had wall shelving filled with files, surveys, reports and data. On the desk was the usual desk computer, plus modem, so that Joe could, as he did regularly, sign on to the big mainframe in the basement of Continental, and access whichever file he needed for his work. He powered up, hit the keys which gave him remote access to the big VAX set in the Detroit office, set his second and third passwords in to play, and the screen blinked back "section file, please?" Joe keyed in the file name sabresales, and the screen, after a delay of about three seconds, flashed up the spreadsheet which had been compiled to give all possible variations of information on the sales of the smaller of the two new Continental automobiles. He checked the 'returns' numbers, as well as the complaints listings against various problems which had cropped up in previous model launches, but found that the figures gave him parameters well within the 'acceptable' figures. He converted the listings into a series of graphs, and gazed glumly at the same answers. The buying public had no direct access to information listings like these, and the news which the screen gave him was that the numbers of 'complaints' and 'returned' autos, which had a problem bad enough to warrant a return to the Franchise holders workshops, were if anything, smaller than those of the previous model.
He signed off the file, and called in the same file listings for the Stiletto, but failed to notice that his finger, as it hit the 'S' on the keyboard, also touched the 'X' key, and watched as a spreadsheet, but a sheet with a very different layout, flashed up on the screen. The column headings seemed to be in months, and the hundreds of row inputs were coded to be incomprehensible, but gave target dates, and space where a '+' sign seemed to be the target, from what Joe could see of the sheet on the screen. A secondary column, listed 'forward assessment' listed the same coded column, but the dates were in the future, running from the next month forward by a year. The spreadsheet had opened up at the very base of the sheet, so Joe was able to read the line number, which was 1005. A panel flashed up on the screen, which said, "Unauthorised Access. This file is classified. Your entry has been noted. Your terminal is not listed. Please key your Terminal code in, so your name may be taken for disciplinary action!"
Joe sat gazing at the screen, wondering what the hell he had broken in to. He had clearance, through his three passwords, to all the company data, with no restrictions whatsoever, but he remembered the advice given by a college buddy, who was into computer hacking in a big way, "If you ever get into a system, and you think that they can trace you, just pull the plug; the lot. The system can be logged, and tested for access, but if you have a modem, and remain on line, no-one can check until you log out; so you don't! Just switch everything off, the modem first, and they can't trace you! You may think I am wasting your time, but everyone gets problems now and again. I pushed through once into the main Norad center computer, God, what a fright I got! They were down my throat before I could hit a key, so I just pulled the plug, and no-one ever found out." Following the instructions of his friend, Joe simply pulled the power plugs of the modem, computer and printer out of the wall sockets, and let the disc drive noises die completely away.
He reset the power, switched on and re-booted his computer, hit the modem keys and logged on once again to the Continental VAX mainframe, sent his passwords through, and asked for the StilettoSales file. The familiar logo flashed up, followed by the spreadsheet for the sales of the flagship model, followed by all the variations. The young executive played around with the information, the same as he had done for the Sabre model, and got virtually the same answers, but he had lost interest in his task, as his mind worried with the strange file he had inadvertently broken into. Whatever it represented, there had been a hell of a pile of work just to set the system up, and the coding seemed to be part of the whole spreadsheet. Joe had never seen anything like it, in his time working on computerised information systems, because what it meant was that there were two levels of clearance, with the higher level both password and terminal user-protected against unauthorised entry. The speed of response of the denial system, had been of the order of five seconds, which meant that the file had tried to identify one terminal out of over four thousand in that time, and presumably because he had wrongly keyed in the code call, the system could not trace his entry. He logged out of the Continental system, closed down his own computer, and went towards his bedroom, but with a brand new worry to compound the others which nested in his mind.
Alex cuddled up to him as he slid between the sheets, but grew still as he explained what had been the result of his short foray into the computer network. "The thing was just so big, honey. The data input time alone must have consumed weeks of work for someone, and I know it is in regular use, because the updated figures were given up to last week. The first column, which could have been names, addresses, locations; I don't know for certain, they were all encrypted. The layout of the column, what I took in before I was challenged, tells me that it may have been names and addresses, but whose? Hell, Alex, you know my clearances for the computer system, I can go anywhere, look at anything, check everywhere, and I ain't seen anything like this." The couple drifted off to sleep, with Joe remaining awake the longest, as he wrestled with the latest problem to appear on his horizon.
Chapter 6
At nine a.m. the next morning, a discreet buzz sounded twice, paused, then rang twice again, in an superbly furnished and decorated executive office which looked over the Battery Park, in downtown Manhattan. The occupant of the office, who had not expected this particular signal to ring for at least another month, slid back the disguising panel, lifted up the receiver, and simply announced, "Scramble! Watcher here. Why call?"
The voice on the other end of the line sounded worried. "We had a break in on the Selection file, last night. The file-server could not identify the user, or the terminal, because we think it came on through a miss-key; one in a million chan
ce. Trouble is, whoever it was knew enough about procedure to chop his modem power, so his log-in signal was destroyed! He must have had the file in sight for maybe five seconds, what should we do, boss?"
"Nothing, do absolutely nothing! Whoever broke in could not read any of the names, because each is encrypted separately. If they can't read what is on the sheet, they don't know what they have got hold of; so we still ain't got problems. I shall simply inform our Client that there was a temporary malfunction in the security arrangements. The access was detected, was it not? The file could not be accessed further, because the server was not authorised by the fourth level password; it was simply someone fooling around. No-one knows what has been happening, and the way things are set up, as long as we do our jobs properly, no-one shall know. O.K.?" The man at the desk broke the connection, swung his armchair around so he faced the window, and relaxed back against the upholstery of the chairback, as he analyzed the call which had just been concluded. He had sold the Client on the idea of hiding the Selection file in the Continental mainframe unit, mainly because it could be so easily updated from the vital information resident within the system. Indeed, it was the only route to take, because all the information, cross-references, up-dated mailing addresses and all, being there in the first place had been the spur which had allowed the formation of his ingenious solution to a problem which had threatened to escalate out of all proportion.
He reached back to the telephone which still lay on the sliding tray, hit three fastcode numbers, and then waited until the receiver was lifted. "Yeah, what's new?" came the response from the speaker.
"Can you scramble?" Both men simultaneously pressed a separate red key on the body of their telephones, and, from then on, any words spoken by either party were broken down into a digitised code pattern, undecipherable except by the receiver, keyed as it was by the extra random input from the scramble unit. One of the New Yorkers' employees, who just happened also to be an C.I.A. communications expert, was given the task of trying to break the system open, and had been given full encouragement in his task, but had admitted defeat after five weeks of effort. Knowing that his conversation, if trapped from the ether by the aerials of the F.B.I., or the N.S.A., would just emerge as electronic mush, gave him more confidence. His office, and those of his inner associates, were 'swept' every day, with access to only cleared personnel, including cleaners. He was aware that, if locating a scrambled communication coming from his office might make him a further target for Law Enforcement Agencies did not worry him one bit; used as he was to their constant snooping. The recipient of his call had no worries either, because the original number dialled was patched through a random series of dry connections at the exchange, which effectively masked the identity of the man whose voice now spoke again.
Continental Attack: Murder and Mayhem in Detroit's Auto Industry Page 5