by Karl, Victor
This took about an hour and I was glad it was nice outside and not raining. I saw that Miguel had returned so I yelled to everyone that the coast was clear. On the way back from dropping the tanker off Miguel had picked up a whole Boston Market buffet of which we ate every bite. Standing up I said, “Miguel, are you ready drive us to the train station?” “Yes sir” he replied reverting to his military background training. An hour later, we were catching the regional back to Penn Station in New York City. When we got there, Fiona assumed that we would catch a local up the Morris line but I had other plans. As I started for the street exit, Fiona asked, “Where are you going?” Just keep up with me if you can I kidded and bounded up the stairs to the street. Walking about 10 blocks, I stopped in front of a small Hilton and walked in to the front desk. Reservation for Carter I said to the clerk. Five minutes later, we were 10 stories up over looking city with the sun just starting to settle over the Western side of the city, bathing the buildings with a rose colored glow.
Dropping my bag, I started to strip off my clothes as I headed to the bathroom where a nice stone tile shower awaited. As the water warmed up I felt Fiona’s arm snake around me causing me to turn and look at her. I must tell you she looked fantastic wearing just a smile. Soon we were both luxuriating under the hot jets of water feeling the tension leave our bodies.
Afterwards we worked off any remaining tension between the sheets before going to a nearby Irish Pub. We both enjoyed excellent Fish-n-Chips and some Guinness Draught. About the start of our third draft I pulled a list out of my pocket and said read this. As she read it, I caught some news on the television and saw shots of the hospital Bill was at and a group of reporters asking Agent Morgan questions. The banner headline on the bottom of the screen said ‘Terrorists Behind Killing?’ To the right side of the screen was a picture of Bill that I had never seen before. Since I could not hear from where I was sitting, I grabbed my beer and wandered closer to the screen.
The television shots changed to the studio where a male newscaster was speaking to a female newscaster where he prompted her with, “Could this be an attempt to take out competition in the energy markets Riley?” She responded “Of course Ken, just last week the headquarters of Efficio was attacked with rockets and 2 employees were killed as well as one attacker. The FBI has confirmed that the attacker was from Yemen and was in this country illegally.”
With and serious look, Ken asked, “How much of a threat is Electricus to the established power brokers?” Riley on queue continued with, “More information about Electricus is coming out every day and it appears to be a ‘Game Changer’ in the world of energy. In fact there is a press conference in South Jersey tomorrow around Trenton where an entire 100 unit low-income housing project will be unveiled and a lottery will be drawn to see what lucky families will own a home that will have no heating, cooling or electrical costs.” Ken looked straight back into to the camera and wrapped up saying, “now that is a lottery I would play and now for the weather.” I walked back to our table and asked Fiona “well?” Still looking down at my scratch sheet of the requests that have come in just a couple of days, Fiona said, “I have some ideas.”
Wrap up plans with Army
Attend opening for housing
Meet with the General on the Air Force testing
Meet with all US automobile manufactures per their request
Attend a special congressional hearing on Electricus
Detail options for US oil and gas firms
Engage Saudis per request of US administration
Visit Rome to discuss humanitarian benefits of Electricus
Start signing deals and booking revenue to pay investors and employees
“First,” Fiona said, “You have to start delegating the work and allow our friends to do what you brought them on to do and what they are raring to do. In other words unleash the dogs.” I started to interject, but Fiona just pushed her right hand in my face in her best ‘talk to the hand’ imitation and said Shhhhh. “First thing, is to let Steve become the military liaison. Let Kristen know that he can hire whatever talent she needs to get the job squared away and build for the future. Money should not be an issue since one large contract will pay all the investors back and the salary of employees for an extended period. Have everyone pass all the legal mumbo jumbo back to Julius and Iris to get all the legal details in place. Let’s have Sean be in charge of all production of Electricus and prototype developing.”
Fiona took a deep breath and continued with, “The toughest one here requires that you figure out a way for Sean to know the formula since Bill is not going to be available or everything shuts down if you cannot get it done. You must address it one way or another because I can tell you that the demand is going to take off just so companies can immerse themselves in their future. We also need about 100 salespeople with different language skills due to a high volume of expected calls. Let’s have Taylor start the process and I can help train them.”
While Fiona was catching her breath after rambling off her litany of ideas, I thought to myself that I think I must have been in some kind of funk for the last couple of days since what she said made unequivocal sense. Well except for the formula piece. Grabbing Fiona’s hand, I smiled a genuine smile and said, “You are a freakin genius, I knew I kept you around for a reason!” “Watch it Rico” she said, “you know I can take you so don’t make me embarrass you her in front of all these strangers.” We both laughed and I said “let’s go back to our room, we have to draw up a new responsibility chart and revised business plan to ‘unleash the dogs’ as you so aptly put it.
As we walked back, I shared a production plan that Bill and I had created back in the California days. The plan included three major production plants located on the East Coast, Texas or Louisiana and the west coast. The idea was to be near a supply of seawater and be able to ship to anywhere in North America. We would then develop locations in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. The plants are simple to construct and are basic large warehouses with a seawater intake and holding tanks and lots and lots of security. “Oh, remind me to send an email to all employees regarding Bill’s supposed demise. Houdini is top secret and no one else can know. It will be tough for our team thinking their friend and leader is no longer with us.”
It took almost as long to write a short email message to all employees regarding Bill Bates as it did to write a lengthy business plan. We wanted to address some other issues in the email such as the continued commitment of the management team to deliver on our mission statement and to also encourage and calm everyone. We gave a heads up that there would be a dramatic uptick in activity shortly. The message was sent to all employees at 2:05 AM and the revised business plan right after. The last task of the night was to set up a meeting for tomorrow at noon at the showroom. Surprisingly, I received three replies within 10 minutes of sending. All of them exuded excitement at their roles and the fact that we were going to move forward at an accelerated pace.
My first meeting the next day was with Ty and Jeremy. Jeremy was on video conference for the meeting. While Jeremy ran to get another cup of coffee, I was reading a Clavis report on our current security situation and staffing. The compensation we were paying Clavis was very steep, but it was the cost of doing business. In fact, Jeremy had discounted his pricing by 15% because he was taking some of the blame for attacks. His pride had been hurt and I know it was killing him that he had not yet delivered the level of security he had hoped.
As Jeremy came back on the camera, I referred him to the two emails I had sent out last night as I handed Ty copies. After he read them, he thought Fiona and I hit the right tone of concern and optimism to keep the staff from running to the hills. Jeremy grinned to himself and said, “I have to hand it to you Mike. I have watched you for the last two years grow into yourself, but I had no idea, a young man as yourself, could be conducting yourself as good as any war scarred corporate veteran. Instead of caving in to pressure, you grabbed the challen
ges and are moving your company forward and I have to tell you that I like it.” “If it was not for Fiona, waking me up with her ideas, I am not so sure I would have come down the same path. One additional item here is that Fiona and I will try to nail down our first large processing site somewhere along the Jersey shore. We are going on a boat ride tomorrow out of Long Beach Island and will need your assistance for the day to make sure no one picks us off.”
We proceeded to make plans for tomorrow and Ty detailed how we could move back into our office building shortly and use a different entrance while construction restores the building. He continued by saying we were lucky that no structural components were involved and most of the blast was absorbed by the internal walls. Ty then rolled out a blueprint that showed the security improvements including installation of bulletproof glass, metal pylons to limit a vehicle from getting within 50 feet of the building and the installation of a security gate at the entrance to the drive with cement barriers extending to the trees. The property owner had given us permission since we now leased the entire building for the next 10 years with an option to buy it. Clavis was supplying four additional guards to cover all the entrances to the building. I thought the plans were a great improvement and money well spent, which reminded me I need to book some income real quick. Wrapping up the meeting, I found Fiona intently peering at her laptop screen in the back of the office.
Fiona was analyzing some very interesting information. For the past couple of hours she had been getting notifications from her command and control server of connections coming in from suspicious IP addresses. A quick trace determined the addresses where coming from mainland China. Feeling her heart race a little, she logged into her server and looked to see if any data found the way from China onto their server. Sure enough, there were a number of encrypted files sitting on our server.
Fiona was sorting through them when two more files cropped up. Using her encryption key to decrypt and decompress one of the files, she giggled nervously as she looked at the files in the payload. Surprisingly most of the files were in English and only a few in Chinese. Some of the files just contained profile information regarding the computer the file originated from. Other files were very familiar to her and were from the California servers with some of them still encrypted. The most interesting files, where the ones that contained internal Chinese government memos and other Chinese government documents. The Files originated from many different Chinese workstations and servers.
Apparently, the Chinese were too arrogant about their own skills to think that it could happen to them. “Pay back is a bitch,” Fiona thought. She decided to get Mike and just as she turned her head Mike sat down next to her and asked her what had gotten her panties in wad.
Looking at the files, Mike was impressed with the success of the malware. Not only could they export data from these machines, they most likely could control them for other purposes. Mike spent a half hour crawling through the files and figured out a lot of how the Chinese were exploiting their stolen data as well as companies and organizations. There were files deposited from the who’s who of corporate America as well as a few files that may have come from US Department of Defense sources. Looking at Fiona Mike said, “I think it’s time to call our buddy Agent Morgan and I would not be surprised if he got more three letter government agencies involved. This is dynamite stuff.” I high fived Fiona as I called Agent Morgan.
Matt Morgan was very encouraged about what Mike Carter had just told him. Trying to nail someone for the theft of equipment at the Efficio California site was looking more and more like government sponsored industrial espionage with China. The chance at any retribution against China for Efficio attacks was nil, however at least we knew who was involved. Since it was unlikely that the encrypted data at Efficio could be unencrypted and that by Mike’s own admission, there was no real sensitive data on the drives, he was going to put the Efficio issue to rest. That was not to say that they would be slowing down their investigation of the headquarter attack or the initial California intrusion. In fact in both cases they had some leads developing albeit slowly. What had him encouraged and even excited was that for the first time, the US was getting a front row seat into how China operates and was going to ride that wave as far as it would go. Already the CIA and NSA were scrambling teams together to review the data that Efficio was providing. They were so impressed with the malware code that they were knocking down the Clavis door to get Jeremy to part with the code. Matt already knew that trying to pry the malware code from Clavis would be extremely tough, since Clavis had already recognized the potential of being able to achieve this type of intelligence gathering as a huge differentiator and moneymaker for them over competitors.
Jeremy was like a kid in the candy shop. He had logged into Efficio’s server and was scrolling through what was hundreds of files now. Unknown to most, the FBI and Efficio had asked Clavis to find a way to figure out how to prove China was behind numerous hacking attacks of military systems over the last few years. The Efficio break in and theft had provided and unintended gift in the fact that China had orchestrated it and not some local corporate thief. What he was trying to do now is to pinpoint all the machine IP addresses involved to see if there are any correlations. He also had two of his most senior staff in California cataloging the data by corporation, government or military entity. About a quarter of the data uncovered so far was for non-US entities. He was trying to hurry since he already ignored two calls that he knew had come in from the CIA. He had a feeling they would try to take over access to this data very quickly. From the looks of things, his specially engineered software had even wormed its way on to one or more servers containing 10’s of thousands of files.
Chapter 22: A Ray of Light
Fiona and Mike had to pull themselves away from the mesmerizing flow of information from China and get ready for their staff meeting. Fiona could sense the heightened anticipation oozing off Mike. We were finally really taking charge of our destiny and it sure felt right. No longer was she second-guessing their path and worrying because she realized this was the only true path for them to take.
As we were walking to our newly constructed conference room just behind the administrative offices, Rico’s phone buzzed from a text message. He stopped walking for a second to read the message and seemed to take a double take. Then he lit up with a shit-eating grin and looked at Fiona. “Look at this,” he said as he held out his phone. What I read briefly perplexed me, and confused me further, since Father Zults was the sender. I read the words carefully one more time which read ‘my eyes are fully open and I comprehend your meaning and as they say, when in Rome do…’ Mike seeing my confusion whispered in my ear “It means Bill has come out of his coma and does not appear to have any brain damage.” Squealing with delight I jumped up with my legs around Mike and my arms around his neck and gave him a nice big kiss out of sheer happiness much to the chagrin of Mike since now everyone was staring.
The meeting ended up lasting three hours. Mike was exhausted at the end of meeting since he fielded about 75 percent of the questions as well as gave detailed updates on the attacks, law enforcement progress and finally their new business targets. Julius, Kristen and Taylor were all given herculean tasks to hire almost 50 new employees, create and review hundreds of potential contracts, budget and help coordinate all the logistics of a company growing too quick for comfort, but under these circumstances a necessary evil. There were many questions on the creation of the three US production sites as well as an international one. After describing how simple the designs were, everyone got behind the effort to get it done. The design was simple, we needed access to seawater, large storage tanks, open warehouse space , high speed pumps, loading docks and security as good as Fort Knox. Yeah simple!
After the meeting, Fiona and I met briefly with the Clavis team who would escort us. They would be driving one of two brand new armored SUVs down to LBI. Fiona and I would take a rented Boston Whaler Outrage with twin 150 horsepo
wer outboards and drive along the mainland side of the bay looking for property meeting our criteria. They wanted at least one guard to accompany us, but we thought we would be safe on the water especially since I knew the bay like the back of my hand. We ended up agreeing to use long-range radios to keep in contact. Clavis would pick us up a 6 AM to be at the boat at 8 AM so we could take advantage of the rising tide.
With a portable GPS, binoculars and detailed maps we pulled away from the dock at 8:05 in the morning. The air was crisp since it was a mid-October morning, but the weatherman was predicting reaching 70 degrees during the afternoon. The bay waters were calm to the point of being flat, which is a common phenomenon in the morning before the winds pick up and as the day goes by. The sun was low but bright in the early morning sky, coming up over the ocean just over the barrier island called LBI. The powerful motors maintained a dull throb as I navigated out to the channel and away from the ‘No Wake’ buoy markers. As soon as we edged past the last marker, I pushed the throttles forward with some authority. The boat’s bow briefly lifted up and then settled down as the boat quickly planed out on the calm surface. We followed the channel that headed southwest to get to the mainland side quickly. Since there was not another boat in eyesight, we let the boat reach about 35 knots and just cruised. After a couple of minutes, Fiona came up alongside of me. I assumed that she wanted to snuggle up against me since it was even chillier with the wind and occasional spray blowing our hair backwards so I put my left arm around her. She laughed and threw my arm off and grabbed the wheel as she hipped checked out from behind the cockpit area in a deft move. Giving up any idea that I was in control of driving, I got my GPS and started to plot our touring path.
After about 15 minutes, I directed Fiona to a point of land sticking out near an area labeled as West Creek. We briefly went down West Creek itself until we realized the properties we too small for what we had in mind. Heading back out to bay we briefly stopped in front a of large reddish colored home that looked as if it was never finished, however when looking closer the architect had just opted to use plywood sheathing on the outside and seal it from the elements. I could not make up my mind if it I liked it or not, but it was obviously a bold statement. Even though there was plenty of property just past the public pier area, it was most likely wetlands, and I was trying to avoid any major construction. We continued to head south and poked ourselves into a number of coves and saw some potential areas, however the road systems behind the property would have a hard time supporting a steady trail of tanker trucks when in full production.