THE DEAD AMERICAN (The Inspector Samuel Tay Novels Book 3)

by Jake Needham

  “Never mind,” Tay said.

  They walked along the river and passed under the Coleman Bridge. Tay didn’t speak again until they were almost alongside Parliament House.

  “I want to talk to him, Robbie.”

  “Sir?”

  “I want to talk to the Wangster right now. I don’t have much time. If he can even guess at what’s on that drive, it might help. Do you know where he lives?”

  Kang looked at his watch and sighed. “You don’t know many computer geeks, do you, sir?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Computer geeks don’t live like regular people. They’ll still be at work. They’re always at work. They probably sleep on the floor of their office more than they go home. You’ll see, sir.”

  Kang had parked his car in a garage off New Bridge Road so within ten minutes they were driving north right behind the Raffles Hotel. They passed the corner where the three men in the white van had attacked Emma and Tay, and Tay shook his head at the sheer chance by which he had placed the drive in his pocket rather than leaving it in the plastic bag the men grabbed. He had learned long ago how often cases got solved that way. Sheer chance trumped careful planning far more often than he liked to admit.

  They took Serangoon Road north to McPherson Road, and then followed it west until they were in an industrial area so ugly and utilitarian that Tay could hardly believe they were still in Singapore. At a nondescript looking five-story building surrounded by a chain-link fence, Kang slowed and turned into a driveway. The building was constructed entirely of concrete with the floors painted in alternating bands of orange and pink in what was probably a misguided effort to make the place look cheerful. Tay now had a new candidate for the hotly contested title of ugliest building in Singapore.

  An elderly guard in a wrinkled blue uniform examined Kang’s police warrant card with undisguised skepticism, but he eventually opened the gate and allowed them to drive into the parking area. The place was so bleak Tay almost wished the guard had refused to let them in.

  From the tiny lobby, they took a creaking elevator to the third floor and Tay followed Kang down an unadorned corridor painted a shade of green that could only have been created with the intention of inducing mass nausea. All the way at the end, they stopped in front of a plain wooden door with a company name lettered on it in black paint: Oh Kui Tao Partners.

  “What does that mean?” Tay asked.

  “It’s Chinese, sir.”

  “That much I could guess, Sergeant.”

  “The Wangster says it’s the Hokkien dialect. Oh kui tao means someone who guards others.”

  “A pretty good name for a computer security company.”

  “Yes, sir, but…” Kang looked away and seemed on the verge of laughing out loud. “You don’t recognize the initials, sir?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You mean you never heard anyone mention an OKT when—”

  Then Tay suddenly realized what Kang was getting at. OKT was local slang for a pimp.

  “Never mind, Sergeant. Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

  Kang opened the door without knocking, and Tay followed him inside.

  The space was a single huge room with three long rows of tables pushed together end-to-end. Each row of tables contained half a dozen computer workstations, and each workstation had two or three flat-screen monitors, a keyboard, and various other devices that Tay had no idea how to identify. At each station was a black Aeron chair, and a young Chinese woman sat in every one of them. All the women had long black hair and most of them were wearing jeans and shirts and black-rimmed glasses. They looked so much alike that Tay wondered for a moment if they were all sisters. No, of course they weren’t. That was ridiculous.

  “This way, sir,” Kang said.

  Tay followed Kang behind the back row of tables to the other end of the room. The women were so totally focused on whatever they were doing that none of them paid the slightest attention to Tay and Kang. Tay caught glimpses of the computer screens as he passed behind them, but the lines of jumbled numbers and text displayed on them meant nothing to him.

  Kang stopped in front of a door on the other side of the room that Tay hadn’t noticed because it was painted to match the wall. He made no move to knock, but just stood quietly in front of it and waited.

  “There’s a camera up there, sir.”

  Kang pointed to the wall above the door, but Tay couldn’t see anything where he was pointing.

  “In a moment he’ll—”

  The door flew open before Kang had finished his sentence and standing in it was the smallest man Tay had ever seen.

  “Evening, Wangster,” Kang said. “This is Inspector Tay. He wants to talk to you about that disk drive I brought in.”

  The Wangster was several inches less than five feet tall, but his head was extraordinarily large. There was something familiar about his face. At first Tay couldn’t place what it was, but then he did and he had to bite his lip to keep from laughing. The Wangster looked exactly like Chairman Mao would have looked if Chairman Mao’s head had been transplanted onto the body of a ten-year-old boy.

  “Good evening, Inspector,” the Wangster said.

  The Wangster’s voice seemed to come from someone else’s body. It was deep and resonate. His words rolled out in a reverberating bass that sounded like the voice of God in some old Bible movie starring Charlton Heston.

  “Please come into our office. I’d like to introduce you to my sister.”

  Tay took a deep breath. This just kept getting better and better. After the Wangster, he figured meeting the Wangsterina was going to be a real treat.

  And it was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  JULIE WANG WAS one of the most beautiful women Tay had ever seen. She was almost exactly the same height as Tay and had the kind of figure he used to hear called boyish, although it had been so long since he’d had a conversation about such things he wasn’t sure if anyone called it that anymore.

  She was wearing cream-colored slacks that had wide double pleats in front and a black silk shirt with the sleeves rolled up above her elbows. Her long blonde hair was twisted up into a bun on the back of her head and held in place by a pencil pushed all the way through it. Her eyes were green, like a cat, and they seemed impossibly large. Her skin looked like Limoges porcelain, so nearly transparent that Tay could trace the net of tiny blue veins woven into the skin of her neck. Those were hopeless clichés, of course, comparing her eyes to a cat or her skin to porcelain, and Tay was embarrassed to catch himself thinking in clichés. But sometimes clichés were still true. This was one of those times.

  “This is Sergeant Kang,” the Wangster said to his sister, “and… I’m sorry, but I’ve already forgotten your name.”

  Nobody said anything until Tay realized everyone was looking at him.

  “Tay,” he said. “Samuel Tay.”

  The Wangster nodded, but it was obvious he had no more interest in remembering Tay’s name this time than he had the first time he’d heard it.

  “Sergeant Kang brought in that Wi-Fi drive, Julie, the one you’ve been trying to decrypt.”

  Julie glanced at Kang and then looked at Tay, and she bobbed her head once, quickly. She didn’t offer her hand to either of them, and Tay felt a momentary pang of disappointment.

  “Julie’s been doing all the work on the drive, Sergeant,” the Wangster said to Kang, “so she can help you with whatever you need. I’m right in the middle of something. Can I go?”

  Kang glanced at Tay, who nodded.

  “Go on then,” Kang said.

  When the Wangster had closed the door behind him, Julie pointed to a table on the far side of the room. Tay could see that the table was Julie’s refuge. It contained half a dozen large flat-screen monitors lined up side by side as well as several keyboards and a lot of other boxes Tay didn’t recognize. All the cables were neatly bundled together and all the equipment was evenly spaced and set at right angl
es. At one end of the table a yellow ceramic vase was filled with white flowers. Tay couldn’t put a name to the flowers, but then he doubted he could put a name to any flowers unless maybe they were roses. These weren’t roses, and every other flower looked more or less the same to him.

  Julie produced an uncertain half smile, then walked over and sat down in the Aeron chair behind the table.

  Tay followed her.

  Gladly.

  The little white plastic box Tay had gotten from Betty Lee lay in the middle of Julie’s table. A cable ran from the single port at its top to another plastic box that was about twice as large. Then from that box half a dozen more cables ran over the back of the table and connected to God-only-knew-what.

  Tay understood that the small box that had belonged to Tyler Bartlett was a disk drive and that its purpose was to hold data. Whether it actually had data on it or not, and if so how much and whether it was accessible, was another question altogether. Tay didn’t understand what the larger box was or what all the cables were connecting, and he didn’t really want to. He just wanted to know what was on the damn drive, if there was anything on it at all.

  Kang dragged over two straight chairs he found somewhere and placed one on each side of Julie. Tay took the one to her right and Kang took the one to her left.

  “I can’t tell you very much,” Julie said, glancing back and forth between Tay and Kang. “There is data on the drive, quite a lot of it, but the encryption is very sophisticated. It will be difficult to access any of the files.”

  Julie’s voice was soft, and she spoke with a slight British accent, the sort probably acquired from spending at least a few years at school in England. Tay was relieved Julie didn’t have a Singaporean accent. The sound of it, particularly from a woman, hurt his ears.

  Tay blamed the horrible sound of spoken English in Singapore on the government. Well, yes, he blamed almost everything that was wrong with Singapore on the government, that was true, but this time at least he thought the blame was placed exactly where it belonged.

  The government had campaigned for years to require people to learn Mandarin, but most Singaporean Chinese spoke Hakka or Hokkien at home and the mishmash that resulted from them trying to speak Mandarin was terrifying. Worse, the staccato rhythms of all those Chinese dialects had become incorporated into English as well as Chinese, at least English as it was spoken in Singapore. A name for the local dialect had even come into common usage: Singlish. English spoken in Chinese cadences with local idioms. Tay thought the sound of it was horrible.

  “How much do you know about data encryption?” Julie asked, not directing the question specifically to either Tay or Kang.

  “A little bit,” Kang said.

  “Absolutely nothing,” Tay said.

  Julie smiled. “Then would you like me to explain what you are up against here?”

  Tay nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

  Julie rolled her chair back away from the table until she could see both Tay and Kang without constantly turning her head.

  “There are essentially two kinds of encryption: disk encryption, and file system level encryption. Since disk encryption generally uses the same key for encrypting the whole volume all data is decrypted at the same time when the system runs. On the other hand, a few disk encryption systems use multiple keys for encrypting different partitions. In file system level encryption, as many separate keys as you like can be used to encrypt each separate file. Unlike disk encryption, file system level encryption does not typically encrypt metadata such as the directory structure, file names, file sizes, our file modification timestamps.”

  “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” Tay said.

  Julie smiled again. “Let me put it this way. You have a choice between encrypting the entire disk at once, or encrypting each file on the disk separately.”

  “That sounds like an easy choice to me,” Tay said. “Why would you encrypt each file separately if you could do them all at once?”

  “Because encrypting each file separately with a different password is more secure. If you encrypt the entire disk with a single password, the data will be easier for an unauthorized person to access. That’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “It is now,” Tay said.

  “Which is this?” Kang asked. “Disk level encryption or file level encryption?”

  “It’s both. Whoever set up this drive has a very sophisticated understanding of data security. Each file is separately encrypted with file-level security, and then the entire disk, including all the already encrypted files, has been encrypted again with disk-level security.”

  “You mean he encrypted the encryption?” Tay asked.

  Julie nodded.

  “So you are telling us it’s hopeless.”

  “Oh no, it’s not hopeless at all. This is a self-encrypting drive so the media encryption key is right here on the device. That’s an extra layer of security since a virus that’s injected directly into the operating system can’t steal the key. Having a self-encrypting drive would be a problem if we were attempting to access the drive remotely, but since we have it here in our hands, it’s no problem at all. I’ve already broken the disk-level security. It’s getting through the file-level security that’s going to take a while since it’s software based and has multiple encryption keys.”

  “I still have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tay said.

  “How do you crack the disk-level encryption?” Kang asked.

  “Brute force.”

  All at once an image came to Tay of Julie standing over the little white box banging on it with a sledgehammer.

  No, he thought, that can’t be right.

  “But I can tell you a few things about the data on the drive even if I can’t read it. Remember what I said about the metadata?”

  Tay shook his head.

  Kang nodded.

  “Well,” Julie continued, “once I got through the disk-level security, I had access to all the metadata and I could see the directory structure. Isn’t that great?”

  Tay had no idea if it was great or not since he had no clue what a directory structure was. So he just nodded and hoped that Julie would say something else from which he could work it out.

  “That gives us the file names, the file sizes, and all the file modification timestamps,” she said.

  Close enough, Tay thought.

  “So you’re telling me you have the names of all the files on this disk drive?”

  Julie nodded. “And we can tell how big each file is and each time it was opened and closed.”

  “Can I see those things somehow?”

  “Sure. I’ll just print out the directory for you.”

  “You mean, print it on paper?”

  Julie looked puzzled and Tay mentally kicked himself. Of course, she meant print it on paper. What else could she have meant?

  Julie rolled her chair back up to the table and pulled one of the keyboards toward her. She typed for a few moments, peered at one of the monitors, and then typed a little more. Tay heard a whirring noise somewhere behind them, and Julie swung around in her chair and walked off to the other side of the room.

  “I told you they were good, sir,” Kang whispered.

  “I don’t see how the names of files is going to help me much, Sergeant. I need to see what’s in them.”

  “But with the sizes and the timestamps, you can guess, sir.”

  “Maybe you can guess, Sergeant, but I doubt I’ll be able to.”

  “It’s easy to separate the text files from the photo or video files. You can tell by the size. Then seeing when each text file was opened and closed, and how often, can tell you a lot. It’s like looking at the call record for a telephone. You don’t need to hear the conversations to figure out a great deal about who is talking to who, and why.”

  Julie returned to her chair with a stack of paper and looked from Kang to Tay. Tay held out his hands and she gave it to him. He flipped through the p
ages quickly, but he had no idea what he was looking at. At least, he thought, whatever it was, it was printed on actual paper. That was something. That was a lot.

  “How long will it take you to decrypt the files themselves?” Tay asked.

  “I just can’t tell you,” Julie shrugged. “Maybe ten minutes, maybe ten months.”

  “I have until Monday,” Tay said. “That’s four days.”

  “I’ll do my best. Maybe I can get a few of them decrypted in four days, but it won’t be many. Certainly not all of them.”

  “Is there anything—”

  “If you can study the metadata and tell me which files you’re most interested in, that would help.” She shrugged again. “I could concentrate on those.”

  Julie grabbed a small pad on her desk, wrote something on it, then ripped the sheet off and held it out to Tay.

  “That’s the number of my personal cell phone. Call me if you want me to concentrate on any particular files.”

  Tay took the piece of paper, folded it, and put it in his pocket. He supposed that would have to do. He didn’t see what choice he had.

  At least one positive thing had come out of all this.

  He had Julie’s telephone number. It could have been worse. Much worse.

  He could have had the Wangster’s number.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  TAY WANTED TO study the printouts and he needed Kang’s help to make sense of them, so he suggested they find a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf somewhere that wasn’t too crowded. They were still in the parking lot outside the Wangster’s building and Kang stopped with his hand resting on the driver’s door and looked at Tay.

  “Don’t you ever get hungry, sir? It’s late and we haven’t had any dinner yet. Just coffee isn’t going to do it for me.”

  “What do you have in mind, Sergeant?”

  “How about the East Coast Seafood Centre? It’s not far from here, and it shouldn’t be too crowded this late.”

  The East Coast Seafood Centre was a cluster of restaurants that faced a park on the ocean side of the road between the city and Changi Airport. When Tay was a boy, the East Coast Seafood Centre had been one of his mother’s favorite places to eat. He hadn’t been there in years, but he still remembered how pleasant it had been to sit at an outdoor table on a dry, hot evening watching the ships move through the Singapore Strait while he picked the meat out of cracked mud crabs and smothered it in chili sauce.