by Lee, Rachel
“You’re probably right,” she said, her voice strained. “But I’m the caretaker of these items. I have to know.”
When they emerged into the Alcantara exhibit, Gil wondered how she was ever going to know. Around the bones of a display in the making there were crates, some opened, some not. A couple of cannons sat in one corner of the huge room. The room was littered with tools, wood, glass, and huge screens in the process of being painted.
There were also the remnants of the previous exhibit, paintings, empty display cases, a couple of large dioramas.
“The really valuable artifacts are in the vault,” Anna said.
“Did anyone check that out last week?”
“Of course. Ivar and some of my people did. But no one can get into it at night, Gil. It’s a time lock. Anyway, nothing was missing from the inventory.”
Still, she walked around the room, as if she expected to find vandalism. After ten minutes, she was apparently satisfied. “Okay,” she said. “It’s okay. Now, what about the splinters in your face?”
Gil touched a particularly annoying sliver in his cheek. “Do you have a pair of tweezers?”
Boomer arrived at the loading dock with a satchel in hand and Dinah on his heels. Tebbins was waiting with a couple of uniformed policemen.
“Okay,” Boomer said, setting his satchel down by the door. “Let’s see if he tampered with the circuits.”
“Is that possible?” Tebbins asked. “I thought Ms. Hudson said that any interruption would cause an alarm.”
Boomer looked at him. “Hey, man, I’d’ve said nobody could get into that display case. Right now, all bets are off. No stone unturned, and all that crap.”
Tebbins held up a hand. “Fine by me. That’s what I thought was going on all week.”
Dinah frowned. “Of course it has.”
Boomer snorted. “Oh, come off it, Dinah. We’re limited by our imaginations. After we figure out how this guy did it, I want to hire him.”
Dinah surprised Tebbins by smiling faintly. “He does occasionally make sense,” she remarked to Tebbins.
“Thank God,” he said. “It’s time something about this case made sense.”
“Oh, it makes perfect sense,” Boomer remarked, kneeling down to test the current running to the laser that was positioned a foot above the floor. “We’re just too stupid to see it. I can hardly wait to meet this guy. He’s got this whole system psyched out.”
“In what way?” Tebbins asked, not because he hadn’t figured it out, but because he kept hoping somebody would say something that would open this whole mess like a can of sardines.
“Well, he figured out the best place to hide. Cameras are damn near useless in here, except to film someone who’s actually trying to steal something. You could hide for a long time if you didn’t want to take something big out of here. The motion detectors are supposed to prevent that, but if you manage to bypass them, ain’t nobody going to look for you nohow. Why? Because we all know nobody could get in without tripping the detectors. Why the hell did that cop come in here anyway?”
“Because,” said Tebbins drily, “he saw the cat move.”
Anna and Gil went back to her office. She had a pair of tweezers. “I often get splinters when I unpack crates.”
“Convenient. What about a mirror?”
“No mirror except in the rest rooms.”
He lifted a brow at her. “You don’t have one in your purse?”
She shook her head. “Sorry.”
“No compact?”
Anna shook her head again. “I don’t worry much about makeup.”
“I’m in love.”
Her startled eyes flew to his face, and a blush heated her cheeks. “What are you talking about?”
He gave her his most devastating smile. “My ex used to spend more time looking at herself in her mirror than at me or Trina.”
“She can’t be all bad. You have a lovely daughter.”
“One who isn’t speaking to me right now.”
“She’ll get over it. She’s just fifteen.”
“Yeah,” he said philosophically. “Maybe in ten or twenty years she’ll remember my phone number.”
In spite of herself, Anna laughed. “Don’t be so dramatic.”
“I’m just being realistic. Pull the splinters, will you?” He handed her the tweezers.
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
He shrugged. “Trust me, I want to hurt myself even less than you do. I’m not afraid to admit I’m chicken. Pull away.”
“No circuit interruptions,” Boomer announced a half hour later. “That means it’s Turk’s problem. I knew it!” He crowed.
At the other end of the museum, Nancy was scanning the uncompiled lines of code that scrolled slowly up the screen of Turk’s laptop. “Hey, what’s this routine called ‘normalize’? Why isn’t it commented?”
Tebbins stopped in Anna’s office on his way back to the equipment room. “It’s not the hardware,” he told Gil. “So it must be the software.”
“Nancy was right then,” Anna remarked as she tugged another splinter from Gil’s face.
“Apparently so.” Tebbins leaned over and looked at Gil’s face. “You need to go to an emergency room.”
“That’s what I keep telling him,” Anna said. “I can’t be sure I’m getting all this stuff out. He’s stubborn.” She touched the corner of Gil’s eye. “Close your eye.”
He complied.
“No way,” Anna said, tossing down the tweezers. “You’ve got a splinter that’s completely embedded in your eyelid. I’m not messing around with your eyes.”
Gil reached up and touched his eyelid. “It’s not that bad.”
“I guess you don’t have any idea how thin your eyelids are. I worked in an optometrist’s office when I was in college. Gil, you need a doctor.”
“Absolutely,” Tebbins agreed. “One of my men will take you over to University Community. Anna, you go with him. For some reason I don’t like the idea of you hanging around here today.”
Gil groaned. “That’ll take hours.”
Tebbins cheerfully clapped him on the shoulder. “Buck up. I’ll keep you posted.”
“Nobody can get to it,” Turk said, as Tebbins entered the room behind him. Dinah and Boomer were already there.
“It’s here,” Nancy insisted. “Somebody can get to it.”
“What’s going on?” Tebbins asked.
“Oh hell,” Turk said, throwing up his hands.
Dinah spoke. “There’s a subroutine for bypassing alarms. It’s a test routine. It is not a back door.”
“It’s as good as one,” Nancy said firmly.
“But nobody can get to it but us good guys,” Turk said.
Nancy stabbed a finger at him. “If anybody can get to it, a good hacker can.”
Tebbins looked at Dinah. “What’s going on?”
She sighed. “We have a subroutine in the software for test purposes. We have to be able to check systems without setting off alarms, so it bypasses the alarms while the systems are still functioning. Instead of sending out the alarm signals that get you guys running over here, the computer logs that alarms were triggered. It’s a standard test function.” She caught Tebbins’s suspicious look and continued. “Look, you know the story of the boy who cried ‘wolf.’ If the alarms go off often enough, people get lazy about responding. This helps the security. And it’s only on the motion detectors, by the way. Not on the display cases. Those can’t be interrupted at all.”
“Okay,” Tebbins said. “Why is he saying nobody can get to it? Obviously, you folks can.”
“Because,” said Turk with a wide wave of his arm, “it’s on a secret menu.”
Nancy snorted. Turk glared at her.
“Listen,” he said, turning back to Tebbins. “To get to the menu you have to have a password.”
“Big deal,” Nancy said. “Hackers get past that all the time.”
“Yeah,” Turk said, “but ther
e are some other complications.”
“Back up,” Tebbins said sharply. “Explain to me from square one. Nancy found a subroutine or whatever that allows you to bypass the alarms. Okay. If she could find it, why couldn’t anyone else?”
“She found it,” Turk said, “because she was reading my uncompiled code.” He pointed to the screen of the laptop. “See that? It’s sort of like a bridge between English and machine language. But it’s difficult for even an experienced programmer to read because it’s not English. It’s a whole bunch of commands, and you have to trace it very carefully to see exactly what it does, and man, you could spend a hell of a long time trying to figure out just parts of this code.”
“This is why commenting is used,” Nancy interjected. “Comments are like notes, in English, used by programmers to explain what each line or subroutine of the code does.”
“Right,” said Turk. “But even so, it doesn’t matter that this can be read. Because,” he said, with a little bit of flourish, “this code is not available on the on-site system. All we have on the on-site system is the compiled code. Machine language.”
He leaned over the console beside Nancy and typed in a few commands. Moments later the menu disappeared and the screen filled with scrolling lines of ones and zeros.
“That,” said Turk, “is all anybody can get here. This is what a program comes down to when it’s in a form the machine can read. A jam-packed sequence of instructions that all boil down to telling the computer which flip-flop to turn on, which to turn off… and in what sequence. Beautiful, huh?”
Beautiful wasn’t the word Tebbins would have used, and he had to admit it was daunting. “Somebody got around it.”
“I know.” Turk sighed. “What I’m trying to do is explain to everyone that the bypass routine isn’t something anyone can just luck onto. In my opinion, nobody could have figured out this code in the amount of time it’s been installed here. Nobody.”
Dinah nodded. “He’s right. Nobody here even knew it existed until this morning. That’s part of the security, too. No one in on-site security knows the function exists.”
Tebbins stared at the screen. “Someone does.”
Turk leaned over and typed in another command. The screen went back to its previous menu function.
“So okay,” he said. “We still don’t trust that much to chance, humongous though the numbers are against anybody stumbling on it. Nancy found the routine in the un-compiled code, primarily because it looks different. Very few comments, for one thing, and the comment for the subroutine itself is misleading. So say somebody got a hand on the uncompiled code and studied it, like Nancy. She still can’t get to the point where she can actually use it.”
Nancy looked as if she disagreed, but didn’t say anything.
“In the first place,” Turk said, “she has to get into this room. Access is limited to employees of my firm, and theoretically only to the museum director. It’s supposed to be locked at all times. But assume she manages to get in. She still can’t make the on-site system do a damn thing unless she has the proper access code. To get to the so-called public menus, like this one, she needs a seven-digit, alphanumeric, case-sensitive password. What are the odds against that, Boomer?”
Boomer started to pull his calculator off his belt. “I don’t remember. Let me calculate it.”
“Forget it,” said Tebbins. “I get the idea. Astronomical.”
“Exactly. And you’d have to get to this menu first if you want to go any further. So that’s one astronomical problem. Then, once you get to this menu, you have to know how to get to the secret menu. That entails using this command here.…” He pointed to a line which said COMMAND. “You have to type in a specific command like so…” He demonstrated, selecting COMMAND. Immediately the screen switched to black with a single question mark prompt.
“Now you have to know what command to type in. But before I do that, everybody look away, huh? I don’t want to have to change all this.”
Everyone obliged, except Tebbins, who kept his eye cocked in that direction even though he couldn’t see exactly what Turk typed.
“Okay,” Turk said. The screen now displayed the prompt: p?
“It’s asking for the password,” he continued. “Another, different seven-digit code, like the first. Another astronomical guess. And on this one, you only get three tries. Do it wrong and it shuts down. And I do mean shuts down. The monitoring functions continue, but nobody can access the machine. We get a hacker alert, and I’ve got to come out here and restart the system with another code. One nobody else knows. One that’s locked up in our safe at the company.”
He pulled out one of the task chairs and sat at the computer. “Okay, say our guy lucks on the code. He types it in…” Turk did so, putting a string of seven asterisks on the screen. “Note nobody can read the password over my shoulder.”
Another menu popped up. This one was simpler, not at all pretty like the very first one, just a list of numbered words. He highlighted the one that read 9) bpa.
“That’s your bypass routine. I hit Enter and we get this screen.” Another question mark appeared. “Here,” Turk said, “I have to enter another password, an area designator, and a one or zero for bypass off or on. All concatenated.”
He stopped there. “So we’re talking about a lot of layers of protection here. First you have to know there’s a bypass. Keeping the existence of that routine unknown to anyone except a few people inside the company is the best security there is. Trust me, nobody’s going to luck onto it.
“Then it’s useless unless you know what it’s going to do anyway. But say the guy found out. He knows it’s there and that he can shut off the motion detectors region by region. He still has to have three different passwords, he still has to know the command to get to the secret menu, and he’s still got to know exactly how to enter the information the routine requires. And he can’t just muck around in here without shutting off system access. We made this thing hypersensitive to hackers.”
“What about the audit trails?” Nancy asked.
Turk shrugged. “There weren’t any from the night of the robbery. We checked the next morning. That’s another thing I can’t figure out.”
“He must have known his access would be logged,” Nancy said simply. “So… he deleted the audit file.”
“I might be able to restore it,” Turk said. “It might still be on here.”
“How?” Tebbins asked.
“Deleting a file doesn’t erase the memory,” Nancy explained. “It just changes the first character of the filename and deletes the keys in the file tree.” Tebbins put a hand up in confusion. She took a breath. “Basically, when you delete a file on a computer, the computer just hides it and marks that part of the disk as being available. Sooner or later, it gets overwritten by some other program.”
Turk had been typing away while she explained. “Damn, he’s good. There ain’t shit here. Probably re-scrambled the filename so not even the restore function can find it.” He looked up at Tebbins. “It’s gone, man. Gone gone.”
Nancy nodded. “So somebody managed to get the codes. Who knows them?”
“Me and my two assistants,” Turk said. “Nobody else. Well, except the safe at the company.”
“Then,” said Tebbins, “I need to talk to your assistants. Now.”
“But,” said Turk, reaching for the tattered remains of his dignity, “none of this explains how he got into the display case.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder in Boomer’s general direction. “That’s his problem, man.”
The watcher, established once again at a vantage point in the room across the hall, listened. And felt the first trickle of real fear that he might not accomplish his task in time.
Pretending to busy himself with papers, he looked up from time to time as other employees passed the door and hailed him. He was invisible again, protected by the fact that he was supposed to be there. But that offered him little comfort.
He had
to act soon.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Anna left her car keys with Nancy in case she needed to get home before Anna returned. Tebbins filled Gil in quickly and promised to let him know the results of the interviews with the technicians.
University Community Hospital was only a few minutes away. Anna expected to wait a long time, as was usual at emergency rooms, but Gil was in treatment ten minutes after he’d checked in. Anna and the Tampa police officer who’d driven them sat in the waiting room alone.
The officer didn’t seem inclined to make idle talk. He skimmed magazines one after another and listened from time to time as his radio crackled with messages Anna couldn’t even begin to understand.
She gathered he would rather be doing something else.
Well, so would she. Her own life had begun to make her feel claustrophobic. Everywhere she went, she was watched. Her activities were hemmed in to the point of absurdity. The hours of waiting for something, anything, to break seemed to grow longer with each passing minute.
But she wasn’t foolish. She wasn’t inclined to try to slip her guards or go places where she might be a defenseless target. Her stalker was too good at his game for her to think she’d be safe in a crowd, or that he couldn’t find her at the mall or the beach. So she submitted to the constraints.
But that didn’t mean she had to like it.
She tossed her magazine aside and began to pace the waiting room. Gil would probably want to go right back to the museum when he got out of the ER. She didn’t want to. The place was beginning to feel like a tomb to her. Her own tomb.
In fact, the only good thing she could say about this mess was that she’d met Gil and his daughter. And that didn’t amount to much because once this was over she’d never see either one of them again.
So much for looking for the silver lining in the cloud, her mother’s favorite axiom.