by Steve Jordan
I knew the sharks wouldn’t be likely to go that far in. All they wanted was to block the site. So, other than probably looking at the cover, they wouldn’t bother going any further in trying to find out how to make their own, or read beefcake gossip. That page would be ignored by them, and visited by everyone else. Which is why the link to the real site would be embedded in that page, where the sharks would never see it, but every fan would. The real site would provide a date for the beginning of the sale, and a link to a fresh bookmark (and a warning that the old bookmark would be no good before the sale date) that would bring them to the new page, while the sharks would have a link to the bogus page, and wait for the moment to launch their DOS attack in the wrong place.
Pete watched me work, occasionally making comments as to how to make the Photoshopped cover more salacious, or the text more likely to draw in the fans (think ‘fratboy humor’) and turn off the sharks. In this area, Pete was good. By lunchtime, I had a site, and some wicked cover art, that would’ve made Penthouse sit up and take notice.
And finally, came the coup de grace: The distraction. Today’s distraction would be brought to the bad guys courtesy of the letters “java” and “script.” And there were plenty of places to go online to find custom-made and customizable scripts designed to do everything from force-feed you dialogs and naughty pictures, to siphon everything off of your computer, and everything in-between. What I had in mind was a bit more elegant that those, but it would be just as interesting. I started to work on that, just as a ring came from the door, and Pete let in Gail and Fritz.
“How’s it going, guys?” Gail greeted us. Well, she said it like it was us, but she looked directly, and only, at me when she said it. Pete saw it, too, but he only grinned and rolled his eyes. One of these days, I’d have to understand how their relationship worked. But today was not the day… I had better things to do.
In the meantime, Gail came around me from one side, and Fritz on the other, and peeked over my shoulder at the website I’d created… and the salacious cover art. Fritz’s eyebrows instantly shot up above his hairline, while Gail’s eyes popped (hey, there’s a reason I picked that particular porn star… reaction is everything). Then Gail looked at me and said, “You boys really are all alike, aren’t you?”
“All part of the plan,” I said, and explained it in detail to them as I continued to work. Once I was done explaining, everyone seemed to agree that it was a great strategy. Gail even tousled my hair from behind, a sign, I suppose, that she approved of me.
“You’re evil,” was her actual comment. And then: “So, what’s next?”
“That’s what I’m doing now,” I replied. “Just a little javascript for the bogus site, and another for the real site. The script from the real site is designed to find the script from the first site, the bogus site, which everyone will hit first, and render that script non compos mentis.” Yeah, even I didn’t know what I’d just said, but I think I got the point across.
“And those who don’t go to the real site?” Pete asked.
“Those people will get a surprise on the release day,” I explained. “The first script will execute, and they’ll be too busy dealing with that to worry about anything else.”
“Busy doing what?” Gail asked.
In return, I looked back at her and smiled. “What? You think I’m gonna ruin the surprise? Wait and see, babe. Wait and see.”
And with that, I was done with my scripts. Just one thing left to do, and for that, I turned to Fritz. Pointing at the mouse, which had its cursor hovering over an “Okay” button, I said, “Care to do the honors?”
Fritz just smiled, extended a finger, and slowly lowered it towards the mouse.
11: Gail’s Place
About two hours later, I sat in Gail’s Eclipse as she got back in the car. We were in front of Fritz’s place, where we had just dropped him off after the four of us had had lunch, in celebration of the execution of The Plan. Then Gail had offered to take Fritz home, and asked me to come along. That’s right. Right in front of Pete, she asked me, and not him, to come along. And Pete didn’t mind a bit. One of these days… but I’d already thought that earlier. Right then, I just said “sure,” and rode along.
So now, Gail put the car in gear and headed back toward the Pacific. But well before we got there, she made a turn and headed into a neighborhood that so far I hadn’t seen. In no time, my eyes were bugging out of my head, as I took in multi-million-dollar mansions and hundred-thousand-dollar cars, driveway gates as tall as a house, and actual security posts, complete with suited guards.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“There’s no reason you have to hang around Pete all the time,” Gail told me.
“He didn’t seem to be doing so bad,” I commented.
“Of course not,” she said. “I paid for that apartment. But wait’ll you see how the other half lives.”
After a few twists and turns, we angled into a private driveway, and I watched as one door of a three-door garage opened up before us. The house connected to the garage wasn’t as big as most of the mansions we’d passed, but it was by no means a shack, either. We drove into the garage, and I saw a Jeep Cherokee parked in the second bay of the garage, and a bicycle in the third bay. Gail shut off the car and got out, and I followed, catching a last glimpse of the spacious front lawn before the garage door closed on it.
She opened a door to the rest of the house, and I followed her through it. Inside was almost beyond my abilities to describe… nothing like the homes I’m used to seeing, or being in. There was a lot of space, multiple levels with wide staircases bridging them, lots of chrome railings, lots of windows, and light that seemed to come in from windows I couldn’t even find. The furniture was modern and sexy-looking, and expensive-looking art hung on the walls or sat on the floors or tables. If there was an echo in the house, it might not have been from the sheer size of the place alone… I’m pretty sure sounds were bouncing in and out of my open mouth, too.
When I found my voice, I said, “Is this… really all yours?”
“Yes,” Gail nodded. “I got it cheap from a former investment banker who took what he could, then took off for Aruba.”
“I’m not going to ask what constitutes ‘cheap’,” I commented drily. “Tell me again what you do for a living… ‘cause I don’t remember you ever telling me.”
“Pete didn’t tell you I was a CPA?” Gail shook her head. “I guess he was ashamed to admit to sleeping with a corporate wonk.”
“Right. Like anyone would be ashamed to sleep with you,” I shot back amiably. “So this is why you could buy off Pete after you broke up, huh?”
“You know,” Gail said abruptly, “I didn’t bring you up here so we could talk about Pete.” She reached for my hand, and when I gave it to her, she led me to another wide, curving stairway, and we started upstairs. “You’re a smart guy, Mike,” she said as we climbed. “You could go places around here. I know people in the industry that can always use premier tech talent. And besides that, there are plenty of others that can use a bit of help now and then, but can’t afford what the absolutely criminal tech firms in this town charge.”
“Are they really that bad?” I asked.
“Don’t forget,” Gail pointed out, “San Diego is a navy town. Lots of government contractors… you know all about Beltway Bandits, being close to Washington. Here, you get the same thing… only this is a small town, so less non-government businesses around here. So the bandit contractors get to shill the locals on the side. You could make a killing as an independent IT guy in San Diego. And you could do other things as well.”
“Like what?”
Gail stopped walking, and I realized we had come to the end of the stairs, and reached a landing, beside a set of double-doors. Gail pushed the doors open, and revealed a bedroom that the porn star aforementioned in this story would actually have appreciated. Maybe not swooned over, but appreciated.
Gail said, “You can give
me a good reason not to regret staying in San Diego near your chucklehead brother.” Then she pulled me inside, not bothering to close the door.
12: Publication Day
A day later, we were on our way back to Pete’s place, where we’d all agreed to meet up for the big event, scheduled at 4 pm.
Why 4 pm?
One thing the best web guys always seem to know is what time it is in Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT. Computers, and everything related to them, are ultimately all sync’ed up to GMT, so everybody who should knows when things were happening everywhere in the world. I knew San Diego was eight hours removed from GMT, which meant that when it was midnight GMT, it was 7 pm in Baltimore, 3 am in Moscow, 9 am in Tokyo, and 4 pm in San Diego.
We’d decided that, to be as nerdy as possible, we would officially release the e-book at midnight GMT… 4 pm our time.
When we reached Pete’s place, we were surprised when someone other than Pete or Fritz opened the door. A diminutive blonde in a sun dress and sandals opened the door, took one look at me, and said, “You must be Mike.”
“And you must be?” I asked.
“The one who filled your espresso order yesterday morning,” she said sweetly.
At that moment, the door opened further, and Pete looked us over and smiled back. “Come on in, guys.” He noted our notation of the barista, and said, “This is Reilly. Reilly, Mike you guessed, and you remember Gail.” There was a strange moment, as Gail and Reilly exchanged glances, then Reilly looked over Gail and me, then back to Pete. Pete, aware of everyone staring at him, said cleverly, “Anyone want a beer?” and exited into the kitchen.
I just headed for the dining room and unlimbered my bag, which I had kept with me since yesterday, for safe keeping. (Actually, it had never left a table in the foyer where I’d placed it once I arrived at Gail’s place. But honestly, I didn’t miss it. In fact, I barely thought about it. Gail was giving me much more to think about.) I placed it on the table and booted it up, and once it was ready, started calling up the ISP control panels that would allow me to monitor the sites as things unfolded, as well as the Paypal site to monitor sales. Pete brought me my beer, and I got into the control panels to see how well my plan had worked.
Sure enough, there were a massive number of hits that corresponded to the cover art page, and quite a few fans who ha d simply downloaded a fresh full-res copy of the art right from there. And as I suspected, most of them had found and clicked on the links to the real site, as well as re-bookmarked it as planned, guaranteeing they would be back at the real site the next day… today.
There was also a huge buzz about the site (and especially about the art) on other e-book related sites, like TeleRead and MobileRead, in sites dedicated to other reading devices, and on one or two others whose names I’ve already forgotten. The link to the real site was everywhere, and as it looked exactly like the link to the bogus site, I was sure the sharks wouldn’t have even noticed had they thought to look.
In fact, I was able to do a quick search of IP addresses that had accessed both sites, through the stats programs available on each ISP’s site. You don’t always know exactly who an IP address belongs to, but using the stats, you could sometimes narrow things down. For instance, there were only seven IP addresses that had visited the bogus site, but not the real site. One of them was surely the sharks… maybe even more than one, depending on how their IT guy worked. Of those, three had gone on to the purchase page, which did not have its purchase links up live yet, and the stats indicated the purchase pages had been bookmarked. The sharks wouldn’t have done that, because they didn’t need to hit the purchase page specifically… a DOS attack to the root directory would take down the entire site. So that left four addresses. I was able to narrow down two of them to local ISPs. Beyond that, it was all guesswork, and not particularly useful for our purposes, but still worth recording for future reference.
“How soon are we going to get started?” Fritz asked. He had been chatting up the barista in the corner, unnoticed by Pete, who seemed to be watching me, watching Gail, and watching how close Gail was to me. This little vaca was getting more interesting by the day.
“The e-books are in place,” I told him, “and the on-sale pages are ready to be uploaded at the stroke of four.” I consulted my watch. “I’ll upload the sale pages at one minute to four, and we’ll just watch the rest. Oh, and speaking of watching: Pete, go get your binoculars, willya?” Pete gave me a funny look, then went to fetch his specs.
We had ten minutes. While we waited, I looked at Gail and Pete, and thought about this weird relationship that I’d stumbled into. There was something between them that I was missing, and I had no idea what. Obviously, they knew… and they had apparently gotten so good at hiding it under their ‘carefree swingers’ façade, that for someone on the outside there was no telling what either of them was really thinking. Of course, if they were playing some elaborate tennis game between each other—with me as the ball—I could just play along… I mean, it really doesn’t matter if the ball knows the rules, and besides, I was getting laid.
Maybe Gail had actually dumped Pete, and was now setting her sights on the other Schitzeiss brother. Even though Pete didn’t seem to mind, it seemed like a lousy thing to do to him, for whatever reason. Of course, he could have dumped her—oh, right. And Pabst might win next year’s international beer competitions. I couldn’t imagine any red-blooded American man dumping that girl, not even for Angelina Jolie with all of her money (and none of the kids).
So she dumped him… but over a boat? That was pretty far out there, even for Pete. One thing every web guy knows is that there’s more to a website than the flaming logos on the home page. Somewhere in the middle of friendly exes, boats, mansions and sex tapes was a truth just screaming to get out. I had a funny feeling that I’d never rest until I found that truth… and when I did, I was willing to bet I wouldn’t be able to stick around. But that, again, was another task for another day.
13: DOS Revenge
Finally, a minute to four rolled around. I made a show of floating my finger about in the air, before bringing it down on the “enter” key. Only Pete seemed to appreciate the theatrics. Gail looked at me and said, “I hope this works.” Fritz looked at me and bit his lower lip. I just smiled, and inwardly, hoped nothing would go wrong.
Of course, it was possible that their IT guy was as good as me, and may have figured out everything I was planning. He could be carpet-bombing the real site already, and truth to tell, I was a bit nervous about opening up a command prompt and checking it out. Finally, a minute after four, I opened the command prompt window and did a ping on the bogus site. As I suspected, I was getting no response from it. So I opened up the ISP control panel… or rather, I tried to. The ISP was not responding.
“They’ve started their DOS attack on the bogus site,” I announced. “So far, so good.”
“What about the other one?” Fritz asked.
“Let’s find out,” I said, trying to sound confident. I started by pinging the real site, and got a response right away. Then I went to the site’s ISP, accessed the control panel, and got right in. I started checking the site traffic, and after a moment, I grinned. “Well, for a sci-fi e-book, it seems like it’s selling pretty quickly,” I said. “Take a look.”
Everyone crowded around, and as they watched, the site registered a constantly-growing volume of purchases… in the first two minutes, it had already registered over a hundred purchases and climbing. Gail gave out a whoop of joy and hugged Fritz in congratulations, then hugged me from behind my back, while Pete pumped a fist in the air and shouted, “Look at it go, boy!”
“You did it! It worked!” Fritz looked like he was ready to hug me too, and he finally settled for pounding me on the back in glee. Then he went sober for a moment, and said, “And what about the sharks? What’s keeping them from catching on?”
“Well,” I said, handing Pete’s binoculars to him, “do you think you can find your neighbor
hood from here?”
Fritz took the binoculars and examined them, then me. “Uh, I think so…”
“Give it a try,” I urged. When he went to the window and scanned the horizon, trying to figure out the approximate direction of his house, I said, “I’ll give you a hint: Look for low-flying helicopters.”
“Low fly—?” he started, just before we all saw him stop, focus on something out there, and begin to work the specs to get a better look. “Hey, I do see helicopters! What’s going on out there?”
“Panic. The result of going to the first website, without visiting the second one,” I explained. “In exchange, I gave them something else to worry about. The script on the bogus site was set to create a zipped file of everything in its files, and e-mail that to the local branch of the FBI, along with any info as to the owner’s identity and contact info that was stored on the computer. Then it would display a pop-up, telling the owner exactly what it had done. Most people store everything on their PCs, with minimal security, or maybe a good password… but those can usually be bypassed. All it would take would be a good child-porn picture or two to send at least a carful of feds out there after them. Judging by the helicopters…”
I trailed off, in order to let Fritz, whose eyes were still glued to the binoculars, exclaim, “I count five of them!”
“I’d say they had a bit more than child-porn pics on their computer,” I finished. “So, they’re too busy trying to climb over fences and under cars, evading those guys, than trying to find your real site. You should have no problem selling your book without interference.”
I smiled to myself. I had put all of my eggs into the basket labeled “panic.” Fortunately, when it came to people operating against the law and trying to lay low, panic was usually a very effective tool… outside of television, most people weren’t sharp enough to keep their wits in an emergency that might involve entities like the FBI. When they bark… most people run, without bothering to look behind them.