Proportionate Response

by Dave Buschi

  Outside Rudnitsky exhibited nothing. While inside was another story.

  You will be avenged, my child. Even if I must do it myself, with my own hands, slice by slice and piece by piece. That I promise.

  96

  “IS that you Marks?” Lip said. He rose from his seat.

  “Thomas?”

  It was his mother’s voice coming from the kitchen. Lip breathed out, relieved, annoyed and worried at the same time. He’d told his mom to stay in the house. She shouldn’t have stepped outside without letting him know. That’s the reason she had his phone number.

  “Hey Ma. You should have called first.”

  “That’s silly, I’m right next door. I’m not going to call you. I’d feel ridiculous. I don’t want to disturb you, but I forgot to give you this. You received some mail yesterday. At least I think it’s for you.”

  Lip walked out of his office in his bunny slippers. He never received mail here. Not even junk mail.

  “Is it addressed to me?” Lip said.

  “No.”

  “Then why do you think it’s for me?”

  His mother pursed her lips. “Just a hunch of mine.” She handed it to him with a disapproving look.

  “Really Thomas, I felt so embarrassed getting this from the postman. I really don’t approve. And those posters in there… hmmmf. Don’t get me started.”

  Bemused and a little befuddled, Lip looked at his mail. It was a postcard that said “Costa Rica Mission Trip” in gaudy pink and purple letters. There was a picture of a very attractive brunette with dark olive skin. She was tanning on a beach, wearing a floppy straw hat and not much else. On the bottom of the postcard it said “Mission: Get Laid!”

  “At your age.” His mother shook her head and left him standing there. “Lunch will be ready soon. And please don’t wear those ridiculous slippers in my house.”

  Thoroughly chastened, Lip turned the postcard over. He recognized the handwriting immediately.

  Bobby,

  You missing out, bro’! Girlies everywhere. Big Johnson is on the prowl!

  Vic “Guns” Garbonzi

  P.S. Fiesta en mia casa! Pero, come se dice, “casa”, en ingles?

  Lip burped a laugh. Johnny Two-cakes! Lip went back in his office and picked up the jump drive. He plugged it in the USB port, and waited till the screen popped up requesting the password.

  He looked at the postcard and read it again, just to make sure. Johnny Two-cakes, I didn’t think you had it in you.

  Lip typed in the password.

  97

  LISA felt like crying. It just wasn’t fair. She felt like such a failure. A simple task like researching, and she couldn’t even do that. Ummph! This darn computer!

  She pushed herself from her desk. She’d been going at it for nearly an hour. Mr. Lipkin would be calling any moment now, and she wasn’t going to have anything to share with him.

  Diebold. Even the word seemed to mock her. Die… bold.

  It was in her face. She’d typed it into Bing, Google, and Yahoo search. All of them had yielded links. The only thing was when she went to click on most of the links, an error message appeared.

  [Error 404. No results found.]

  Or something annoying like:

  [We are sorry, but that link is no longer available in our database. Please try typing in another search.]

  Ugghh! Lisa wanted to throw her computer out the window. What was so frustrating was that on Bing she could read little snippets when she scrolled over the arrow. There were two articles in The Wall Street Journal that were showing up in the ‘Results’. But she could only read the headings and a sentence or two of the article. And that was it. Not enough to glean anything at all.

  It just didn’t make sense. Her computer seemed to be working fine with everything else. She wished she had someone to call. Someone that knew computers, but she couldn’t think of anyone. Only her ex, and there was no way she was calling him for anything. He was a conceited jerk and had lost the best thing that had ever happened to him. She didn’t need the drama and there was no way she could ever forgive him. Calling her snuffleupagus a “stupid monkey dog”.

  Lisa walked into the waiting room getting peeved all over again just thinking about it. Mr. Lipkin was going to be so disappointed. She wondered if she’d lose her job. Not that it was that great of a job, but the pay was nice. More than nice, actually. She was making more money than any of her friends working in retail.

  I need to think here. She thought about going to the public library. But that would mean leaving the office. And she wouldn’t be by the phone. What if Mr. Lipkin called? Or someone else?

  As she thought of her options, she began to tidy up the magazines and newspapers that were lying on the coffee table. She didn’t understand why they even bothered to have reading material here. Since she’d started working here they’d only had three visitors. And none of them stayed long enough to read anything, but just spoke to Mr. Lipkin or Mr. Markston in their offices.

  Though it just stressed her out more, she did think about that fact on occasion. She didn’t understand how they were very successful selling commercial real estate if they had so few clients. And those files she’d labeled were so old. It seemed the last time they’d sold a property was over three years ago.

  Lisa picked up two of the papers and walked them into the little kitchenette that was down the hallway. The recycling bin was almost overflowing. It was full of unread newspapers and magazines.

  The sight of the bin just depressed her anew. She dreaded the idea of searching for another job. There was nothing out there, and though this job was infinitely boring, it did have its perks. She’d already taught herself Excel, and was beginning to fiddle around with Photoshop, which was on her computer. She’d gotten really good putting horns and a red tail on her ex-boyfriend. And when she got bored with that she could read her Kindle; there were so many great romance novels that only cost ninety-nine cents and some were even free! And Mr. Lipkin—who wasn’t even here that often—didn’t mind if she wanted to turn the TV on now and then. Actually, he liked the noise. Made the place feel busy, he said.

  Busy. Oh no. She wondered how long they could afford to pay her salary. Lisa was about to place the newspaper in the bin, when she put her hand to her mouth.

  Oh my goodness.

  It can’t be. But it was.

  98

  LIP looked at the word he’d just typed. Four characters; all letters. Not much in the way of a secure password. It broke all the standard rules. Not a mix of intelligible characters, like #$257Db&. No, instead Johnny Two-cakes had gone with:

  dick

  Lip laughed out loud one more time. He didn’t hit ‘enter’. He only had three chances here. He wanted to make sure he got this right. He looked at one of his Big Johnson posters. It was the one with the houseboat and bikini-clad girls hanging over the rail. The inscription below said: “Party on my deck”. Only “deck” wasn’t deck. For the ‘e’, it was the cartoon character ‘Johnson’ standing upright with his hands at his sides, with a beach ball bouncing on his head.

  The one time Johnny Two-cakes had visited, he’d commented on Lip’s collection—something along the lines of “I’d say the caves of Lascaux, but I think this predates it.”

  Lip even remembered his own Johnny-on-the-spot response, which he’d done in his best proper English accent. “Yes, very interesting. It appears Paleolithic, but it may be Pre-paleolithic. Notice the bipedal Homo hablis early mating rituals that are depicted.”

  That had actually gotten a laugh. First and only one that Lip ever elicited from the guy. It seemed Johnny Two-cakes was returning the favor, doing his best to come down to Lip’s level of humor.

  Big Johnson is on the prowl!

  Pretty clear reference there. As for the Spanish: Fiesta en mia casa! Pero, come se dice, “casa”, en ingles? That loosely translated to mean: Party in my house. But, how do you say, “house”, in English?

  En had two m
eanings. “In” and “on”. Party in my house. Or. Party on my house. Lip glanced at the postcard. Party on my ___. Not “house”, but…

  dick

  Subtlety. It was definitely overrated. Well, here goes. Lip hit enter.

  The blue screen went away and a message appeared.

  [Please type in your IQ: __]

  What?

  99

  LIP stared at the blinking text.

  [Please type in your IQ: __]

  Now this was starting to piss him off. Johnny Two-cakes was definitely yanking his chain. The cursor moved on his screen and numbers began to type by themselves.

  [000] filled in the blank.

  [That is correct!] popped on the screen.

  Ha ha. Very funny. A program was running here. Lip watched the rest. The blue screen disappeared and a list of folders and subfolders appeared. No more moving cursor and no more program. Okay, let’s see what he had here.

  After taking a quick inventory, he realized the folders all corresponded with the numbered bins they’d found back at Johnny Two-cakes’s house. The very same bins that were burned in the fire: 487, 499, 511, 73, 109…

  It got even better. The folders contained the original emails in those bins. They were bundled together in Outlook Data Files.

  Lip opened one of the emails. It had a PDF attached. He clicked on it. It was a recipe. He opened several of the other emails. It was the same for them as well, just like had been in the bins, recipes were attached?

  He wasn’t sure what to make of them, but he’d come back to them later. Right now he was more interested in the emails themselves. Emails could be traced. Just took a little effort.

  With three rapid clicks he opened the header of one of the emails. He did some dragging and dropping. The email’s hostname was c-62-134-45-61.hsd1.co.comcast.net

  From the host name, the .co part, he could tell the email originated from Colorado. And comcast.net provided him the ISP. Using a specialized program, he converted the hostname into its numerical IP address.

  That number allowed him to dig a little deeper. First blush, he could tell that there was a lot of misdirection that had been done. These routing paths—the Colorado and ISP tags—were all bogus. From the look of it, after breaking 62-134-45-61 down into its binary values…

  11001000.00011000.00011101.10011000…

  and parsing that apart, comparing it against its loopback address, and reconciling it against some other values, he was able to determine that the email had bounced from server to server.

  It took him a few more moments to determine that the sender had used the ‘TOR network’ to disguise the email’s true origin. TOR was developed by the US Navy and was an anonymity network of “onion routers”. Essentially, the network made it impossible to trace where an email came from. In this case the servers used were only providing pseudomains. Not the actual IP address.

  TOR was pretty cool. Lip used it all the time for his own purposes. It was just about the best way to send something when you wanted to keep it on the down low. Only thing better was probably “JAP”, another proxy system that Lip sometimes used.

  Thing was, no matter how good something was there was always a way to beat it. TOR was kickass at keeping things anonymous, but it wasn’t perfect. It had weaknesses just like all low latency anonymity networks ultimately do. TOR protected against traffic analysis. But, it didn’t protect against traffic confirmation. If you knew what you were doing, you could infer which nodes were relaying the anonymous streams. Basically it boiled down to TOR’s inability to encrypt the traffic between an exit node and the target server. Once you got behind it, the anonymity network started to become less anonymous.

  And that, baby, got you halfway there.

  Lip did some rapid clicking and typing. It took him a bit of time, but he was able to determine the true origin of the email. He could only pinpoint its general location, which was within about a ten block radius, give or take. But that was good enough to confirm what he already knew.

  It corresponded with Johnny Two-cakes’s flight itinerary. While before he just had the country and city that Johnny Two-cakes had flown into. He’d now narrowed things down significantly. He knew almost exactly where the sender was.

  And ten bucks said that was also where Johnny Two-cakes was. Most likely being held not of his free volition.

  Lip cracked a steely smile. Don’t worry Johnny Two-cakes, I’m on it now. He glanced at his watch. Uh oh.

  Ma had said lunch, and the last thing he wanted was to be in the doghouse. He clicked the screen to put the monitor in sleep mode and left his office.

  True, Johnny Two-cakes was in trouble, but Lip would be too, if he didn’t show up for Ma’s cooking.

  I’ll eat fast, buddy.

  100

  LIP let out a belch. He’d overdone it on the white chili. But it was just so good, he couldn’t resist having seconds.

  He sat down in his office and picked up where he’d left off. So much to do, and so little time. Ma hadn’t taken it so well when he’d told her to pack, but she’d get over it. She always complained at first until she was there. Room service, nice view of the herb gardens, a special gold-gilded tea room… not quite Lip’s personal preference, aside from the room service bit, but Ma loved it, even if his wallet didn’t.

  As for their flight.

  He needed to lock that up. He made some calls to set up their visas, and then he navigated on his screen to get their tickets. After he got over the sticker shock, he just pulled the trigger. Nothing like plopping down a cool ten K a pop just to rest your fanny in B class, particularly when Uncle Sammie wasn’t picking up the tab. Oh well…that was one conversation he was going to need to avoid with Marks.

  The logistics taken care of, he got back to business. He wanted to dig as much as he could before their flight. It was going to be a long one. Whatever he didn’t figure out now, he could figure out en route.

  Lip started tapping and his fingers did what they do best. He validated some of the other emails by tracing their origins. To a tee, they were all from the same sender. TOR had been used each time. And each time Lip pulled back the curtain. There weren’t a lot of people that could do what he was doing right now. In fact, he frequently heard it discussed that TOR was infallible, unbreakable, the perfect way to hide your tracks.

  Not quite. There was a saying in the industry. The hacker’s schtick.

  I own you.

  Didn’t matter what it was, when you did what he was doing right now—that’s what it boiled down to—I own you. He sneezed and wiped his nose with a tissue. Time to figure out what these recipes were.

  Who ate chicken livers… fried okra hash…? This stuff sounded gross. Now this wasn’t so bad. Fried bananas. That actually sounded pretty good right now.

  Lip skimmed some of the folders. Several of the PDFs had been culled out from the thousands of emails and were grouped in a separate folder. He opened them. On the surface they were just recipes. The size of the PDFs, however, indicated they weren’t what they seemed.

  He ran them through the usual, trying various cipher sniffing software to see what came up. He looked for hidden files. From the sizes of the files these had to be encrypted or password protected, maybe there was something embedded?

  But nothing unusual was flagged. Nada. Zilch. Just a PDF.

  But you aren’t, are you?

  So what are you?

  Time to get serious here. Lip brought out the big guns. He didn’t use these often, but they were effective when all else failed. Some proprietary special software he’d created. Nothing off the shelf about it. Custom, baby.

  Ten minutes later.

  Now we’re talking. He confirmed what he already knew, there was an embedded file. It was just gibberish at the moment, but it soon wouldn’t be.

  Lip paused. He realized he hadn’t opened all the folders on the stick. Curious, he clicked on a subfolder within a folder that was titled:

  SuperK


  It was an .exe file.

  Now how had he missed this? He copied it and quarantined it. What do you do? Let’s see.

  He clicked. Whoa. Now that was slick. The PDF was no longer a PDF. It was an AVI file. A file typically used for video and audio data. He opened it and ran it.

  His eyes went wide as he saw what was on his screen.

  101

  THIS was a game changer.

  His eyes were blind, and now they could see. Tuchas.

  On Lip’s screen a video was playing. It was of a naked woman. A very obese naked woman. She looked to be older; not exactly a teenager here, but someone about his age. The woman was strapped into some sort of contraption. A reclining gurney that pivoted so that she was standing almost upright. A neck brace and wrist and ankle restraints prevented any movement on the woman’s part.

  She looked scared. Scratch that, she looked terrified.

  The video panned over her. Taking in all of her jiggliness. Any other time this would be a big turn on for Lip, but there was something about the video that was off.

  This wasn’t your typical BDSM porn. The video soon panned away from the woman and went to a cage on the floor. Inside it was a rat. The video zoomed in to take in the rat’s snout and teeth. It settled on its beady eyes. Zooming in, to take in just an eye… zooming in some more till just the blackness of the rat’s iris filled the screen.

  Fade out.

  The video was over. Definitely was not going to give you a chub. Lip felt chills go over him. That was some creepy ass stuff.

  Lip dragged another PDF to the quarantined area and opened it. No porn this time. Much different content.

  It was an audio file. No video. A voice neutered of emotion and gender began to speak. From the inflection and tone, it was almost robotic in its delivery. It had been manipulated, obviously, probably with some voice modulation software.