by Mike Cooper
“You should see for yourself.”
Sean opened the clerk’s door and they stepped in, leaving Pete at his station. Inside, a large man sat by a desk, wearing Stormwall’s usual blue uniform—the jumpsuit version used inside the vault. He turned when they entered, and David suppressed a start of surprise. The man’s face was heavily bruised with a bandage over his left cheekbone and swelling around the eye.
“David Keegan. I’m the railroad’s chief of security.”
“Teller.” The guy’s voice was harsh and raspy, and David saw further contusions on his neck. “Sorry about all this.”
“So … what, you ran into a door?”
“Had a match last night.”
“Mixed martial arts,” Sean said. “Right?”
“Stormwall pays minimum wage.” The man raised one hand, like, What can you do? “Gotta make the rent somehow.”
“How’d it go?” David wasn’t exactly a fan, but he’d watched some pay-per-view with his grandson.
“Out in a guillotine choke. But that’s all right, I still got my share of the purse. Two hundred bucks.”
“That’s good, then.” David looked at Sean. “I’m missing something here.”
“The facial recognition software.” Sean seemed amused. “It’s actually pretty good—grow a mustache, put cotton in your cheeks, add a pair of eyeglasses, it sees right through all that. That’s because it relies on a set of measurements you shouldn’t be able to modify, like distance between eyeballs and nose height, and, oh, I don’t know. But Teller here”—he gestured politely—“getting smashed in the face created swelling. Along with the bandage tape, it was apparently enough to push the confidence factor below acceptable.”
Which set off an internal alarm. Pete, sitting right outside, would have known not to escalate. He’d buzzed Teller into the vault a few minutes earlier, of course, bruises and all. But Stormwall did its monitoring remotely, at some consolidated office, and when the employee there got the alert, he checked the feed, and when he saw a big, battered man inside with the computer beeping “not recognized,” he followed his own procedures and hit the air-raid button.
“Thank God for computers,” said David. “They make our lives so much easier.”
“Can I go back to work?”
“What?”
“Because, like, I don’t want to lose the pay.”
David glanced at Sean. “Did you clock him out?”
“Sorry. Rules. I know you don’t write them, but …”
The central office accountants again. David grimaced. “Yeah, of course. Put him back on, and voucher the missed time.”
“Thanks, boss.” Teller stood up. “I’m back in now?”
“I don’t know. Are we going to go through this again as soon as you walk under a camera?”
“I got hold of Stormwall’s manager just before you arrived,” Sean said. “He promised to take care of it.”
“All the same.” David opened the office door. “Give them a little more time to make sure—have some coffee with Pete or something.”
Back in the bay, David took a moment to look around. It was empty, doors to the vault closed, the only disorder a cluster of low carts pushed together at the side of the dock. A cold draft came down the ramp. Blue light from Sean’s flashers blinked on the walls near the entrance.
“This reminds me,” David said. “We probably need a few more Stormwall temps here on New Year’s Eve.”
“I already let them know.”
“Yeah?” If David were further from retirement, he might be threatened by so competent a lieutenant.
“They’re happy to send as many as we want. I talked to a VP who pitched their new special reaction force, too.”
“Oh, no.” David had an image of heavily armed mercenaries flooding his yard. “Absolutely not.”
“Of course. Be kind of awesome, though, wouldn’t it?”
“Don’t mention it to Boggs. He’d order up a brigade.”
Sean laughed. “No need for that.”
“Nope.” David started to walk up the ramp. “No need for that at all.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Computers.” Finn capped off another five-gallon container. “That’s the problem. All this technology.”
“They’re just tools.” Jake kept his eye on the outflow valve, alert for drips and spatter.
“No. A hammer is a tool. An excavator is a tool. But computers are just one big pain in the ass.”
“You having trouble with your phone again?”
They were in the galvanizing shop: a vast interior, sixty feet high, a single open floor. Finn slid another canister under the valve. He and Jake were crouched at the end of the shorter pickling tank—seventy-five hundred gallons of hydrochloric acid, enough to descale steel work twenty feet long. The shop’s owner had shut the line down for the day, leaving them to it, but the acid still seemed in slow, constant motion. Nearby, molten zinc burbled quietly in its tank. The faint swashing sounds made Finn nervous.
“Hey, careful there!” he said. Jake had reopened the valve too quickly, and a small amount of acid splashed onto the floor. “Damn, I hate this stuff.”
“You got gloves on, right?” Jake didn’t seem concerned. “You got goggles on. You even got that fancy-pants apron. Don’t worry about it.”
True enough. Finn adjusted the shopworker’s leather apron he’d borrowed and watched the gas can fill up. Jake stopped the flow at the right point, no rush.
“The scar on my leg is still dead white,” Finn said. “From fifteen years ago. Remember that?”
Jake laughed. “Have to admit, we weren’t so smart back then.” They’d stolen a tanker out of the lot of a chemical distributor in Woodbridge, not sure exactly what was inside but confident that a Class 8 hazmat placard meant something valuable. It wasn’t so different from hawking shoplifted steaks at restaurant alley doors: a hundred miles away, at the back entrance of another, less scrupulous company, Finn offered the foreman the entire vehicle for dirt cheap. The guy insisted on checking volume, reasonably enough, but when they opened the line, a sudden pressure release sprayed hydrogen fluoride everywhere. Finn, in front, got the worst of it.
“One more and we’re done,” he said now. Eleven of the plastic gas cans, red and yellow, innocuous enough. “You’ve got a closet for them, right?”
“What?”
“To store the cans.”
“These aren’t going in my shop.” Jake looked offended. “Come on, the fumes. I don’t have ventilation like they got here.”
“Where did you think we were going to put them?” Finn tightened the second-to-last cap. “We don’t have the warehouse yet, and I’m sleeping at a motel. Maid service won’t like finding a superfund site in the room.”
“Uh-uh.” Jake shook his head. “Too dangerous.”
“Too dangerous for you, so you want them next to my bed?”
They argued it out while the last can filled. In the end, all eleven went into the back of Jake’s truck.
“What do we owe your buddy?” Finn asked.
“Nothing.”
“Really?”
“He told me they go through hundreds of gallons of this stuff every month. Recyclers come by for pickle sludge and refill the entire tank. What we took is a drop in the bucket.”
The air was clean and cold outside—at first pleasant, after the chemical sting inside the galvanizing shop, then a little too cold. Finn felt a shiver and glanced at the sky.
“Might rain again. Or snow.”
“They’ll be fine.” Jake gestured at the array of canisters.
“All the same. You have a cover or something? Someone notices, it might be a little hard to explain.”
“Sure.”
Finn drove the truck fifty feet to park in front of Perricona. Jak
e went inside and came out a minute later with a blue plastic tarp. It was stained and frayed at the edges, bundled into a loose roll.
They flipped it over the truck bed and Finn began tying down the eyelets. Snow was in the air.
“So anyway,” he said. “The computers, the cameras, the sensors. We’ll need to bypass all that crap, and I’m way out of date.”
“Breaking into systems, cracking security—it ain’t so easy as in the movies.”
“Maybe we can hire some geek teenager.”
“I might know someone.”
“Is he reliable?”
“She was on a job with one of my customers. Alarms, remote monitoring, hardwired sensing in the walls—kinda like this one, actually. Sounded impossible to me. But he said she broke it as easy as taking a piss.”
Finn lashed the final eyelet to a bolt in the truck bed, tying it off with a taut-line hitch. “She?”
“Girls go to MIT, too, nowadays, I hear.”
“She’s from MIT?”
“I don’t know.” Jake shrugged. “I’m just saying. Cody liked her.”
“Not sure I know Cody.”
“He’s a good guy. Kind of a fuckup though. He just started ten-to-thirteen at Rahway.”
Finn tossed the rope end into the truck and straightened up. “That’s some recommendation.”
“It wasn’t her fault. Cody was a little too easy with the money afterward. Went to the bars and started talking. Dumb, considering a reward was out.”
“I’m not impressed.”
“Well, he went to jail and she didn’t.”
Finn sighed. “We can’t do it without a hacker.”
“Nancy, Nicki—something like that. Want me to call her?”
The first snowflakes began to fall. Finn pulled on his gloves. “Get me the number, okay?” he said. “I’ll sound her out.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
At the first meeting, when Nicola Juravik was selling the project, she had way overshot the dress code: a fitted suit in dark gray, her most professional outfit. The CFO had shown up in khakis and a half-tucked polo shirt. One of his underlings actually wore flip-flops. So today, for the final presentation, it was motorcycle boots, a purple blazer, and a Rolex Daytona heavy enough to punch a guy out.
Naturally, the CFO strode into the conference room in chalk stripe and wingtips. A gold company pin gleamed in his lapel.
Nicola sighed.
“You’re late.” His name was Mark Kells, and he had thirteen inches and seventy pounds on her, all of it muscle. Last December, he’d broken an opposing player’s cheekbone in a charity hockey match. “The board meeting’s already started.”
“Someone forgot to give my name to security.” Nicola had spent ten minutes in the tower’s lobby, waiting for visitor-badge authorization.
“Never mind that.” Kells looked at his smartphone. “We have to go straight in. You good?”
“Um.” Nicola, who’d just sat down, stood up. But her laptop case snagged, nearly tipping the chair over. She grabbed for it, and the laptop bag swung on its strap, knocking a folder off the table. Documents spilled.
“Damn. Sorry about that.”
Kells looked at the papers, then at her. “Never mind.”
Nicola felt her confidence start to wither. It didn’t help that Kells looked like a Men’s Health model. Other girls could have done the sexy-kitten thing, but Nicola had inherited her East European peasant genes undiluted. She was short and wide, and though endless hours in the gym kept her waistline more or less in check, she was also about as graceful as a wildebeest.
Fuck him. She ignored the mess on the floor. “Did you read the report?”
“Yeah, sure.” He shrugged. “The main servers are secure, right? The network’s fully patched and armored? All the procedures documented and ISO compliant?”
“Yes, but—”
“So everything’s fine. Just what I expected.” Kells made an impatient gesture. “Come on.”
“That was just the first paragraph of my executive summary.” Nicola suspected he’d read no further, even though she’d emailed him the final copy a week earlier. “There’s more than just hardware policy—”
He cut her off again. “Yeah, yeah, I know. The board might have questions, but I’ll handle all that. My IT guys gave me a prep packet this morning.”
“I really think you ought—”
“We have to go.” He opened the door and steered Nicola through. “Tell the board what they want to hear. You’re only one of six items on the agenda, we’ve got plenty more to do today.”
Which was certainly true. Gladco Enterprises had retail operations in fifty countries, and according to a tsunami of investigative reporting a month earlier, they had bribed officials, subverted justice, hired thugs, and generally taken illegal shortcuts in every single one of them. Weak, fumbled apologies from the chairman hadn’t helped. Senators were calling for hearings.
Nicola’s contract, to test and verify that the firm’s computer operations were properly secured against hacking, was part of the board’s response. She didn’t know whether they wanted to stop the leaks, find the leakers, simply prove to the world that they were taking responsible action, or all of the above. And she didn’t care. Her job was to see if she could break in, and if so, to explain how.
Today, she was a white hat.
They were on the executive floor, thirty stories up, all sounds hushed. Through broad windows in rooms they passed, Nicola could see sunlight reflecting off the US Bank Tower, its glare cut by polarized glass. Her boots clumped and slid on the glass-smooth hardwood floor.
She tried again. “Mark, the VPNs were properly passworded but I found—”
“Good.” He slowed to take a sheaf of paper from a young man who appeared beside them—another hockey player, probably, with short hair, an athlete’s build, and a suit almost as nice as his boss’s. “What’s this?”
“Q1 income statement.” The guy glanced at Nicola, not bothering to hide his disdain. “Gross is down two percent, net up five.”
“Excellent.” Kells didn’t seem cheered, though. “Come on in. Something comes up, you can answer the details.” He pushed through a pair of dark wood doors, leading Nicola and the hockey player into the boardroom.
The entire rear wall was glass, looking out over Los Angeles. An oval table gleamed, twenty feet of polished granite already cluttered with papers, binders, and blue-glass tumblers of water. High-back leather chairs on chrome rollers. And fifteen men, all white, all over fifty, all wearing suits of dark blue or gray.
All staring at her.
Right. Nicola deliberately squared her shoulders in the garish blazer and smiled blandly back at them. It almost worked, until the laptop strap slipped and she had to grab awkwardly to keep the bag from falling again.
“Sorry we’re late.” Kells dropped into a chair. A six-foot flatscreen on the wall behind him displayed the Gladco logo. “Had to wait for her to get here.”
“Let’s keep it moving.” The chairman, whose scowling and tight-lipped face had been all over the business media for weeks, leaned on his arms at the head of the table. “Who’s this?”
“We contracted a stem-to-stern security audit,” Kells said. “Part of it was full-scale penetration testing—”
“I know. It wasn’t cheap. And they send us the intern?”
Nice. Nicola fought a sudden urge to laugh. “Gentlemen.” She walked to the end of the table, opposite the chairman, and dropped her laptop bag to the polished surface. “I’m the principal, Nicola Juravik.”
“Principle penetration tester?” One of the men seemed to think this was funny.
“Yes.” She removed and opened her laptop without looking down.
“What do you penetrate?”
“Hardened firewalls.” Nicola glanced
at him. “Got any?”
A rustle of laughter down the table. Kells coughed.
“Nicola threw a four-thousand-node botnet against our network,” he said. “Didn’t make a scratch.”
“Of course not.” The chairman shook his head. “Booz Allen rebuilt our systems last year. They guaranteed we’re secure.”
She knew what they were thinking: Where’s the computer geek? She looks like my housekeeper, for Christ’s sake. How can a girl do this stuff?
“Who are you worried about?” Nicola, tapping at her keyboard, looked up long enough to see the chairman’s frown. “Competitors? The Chinese? Anonymous? It matters—they all have different styles.”
“Fuck all of them.”
“Okay, fair enough.”
A man to her left, with gray hair buzzed down to stubble, spoke up. “Is this even necessary? You said our computers are locked up tight. Why are we wasting time?”
“That’s not—”
“Covering the bases.” Kells smoothly overrode her answer. “We’ve had enough challenges in the media lately, right? We should be absolutely certain we have control over our own information flow.”
“And do we?” The chairman seemed impatient.
Kells turned to Nicola. “Let’s go through it. Any weaknesses in the network?”
“None that I was able to exploit.” She hit one final command, then straightened up. “Some unsecured data on the point-of-sale network, but it was isolated to a few batch transfers—a careless store manager in Idaho, nothing to worry about.”
“Remote access?”
“The VPN is bulletproof, and randomized password testing passed—a fifth-order dictionary attack couldn’t shake anything loose.” As she talked, back in the one realm she’d really mastered, her confidence trickled back.
“Physical security?”
Nicola hesitated. “That’s not my domain. If someone loses a phone or a computer, you could have a problem. For what it’s worth, I checked one laptop and didn’t find any obvious weaknesses—disk encryption and overlay passwords were solid.”
“Excellent.” Kells paused. “Whose laptop was it? I don’t remember authorizing a loaner.”