by Dave Buschi
The technicians, whose job it was to keep this place running smoothly, should be on site. Where the heck were they?
The place was a ghost town.
28
SUE looked frantically, but the jelly jar with the keys to the minivan wasn’t anywhere to be seen. With dismay, she scanned the work area and adjacent shelves.
Over the years the place had become a storage depository for a thousand miscellaneous items. James had done a good job keeping things organized, but Sue knew it would take hours to scour the rest of the garage looking for the jar, and she didn’t have that amount of time.
Her eyes darted to the garage door. She couldn’t open that either. The clicker that opened it was locked inside the minivan. The button on the wall that used to open the garage’s rolling door hadn’t worked since they bought the place. It was on their long list of things to replace, but other things—like a new roof, furnace and air conditioning units, microwave, garbage disposal, the list was long—had taken precedence.
Sue pushed the button, but as suspected nothing happened.
Had the garage door started to open, the noise it made would have transmitted throughout the house. It would take the men a second, but once they heard it, she knew they’d come running. The men would have to unlock the deadbolt first. That would take them only a moment. She figured, at best, her and the girls would have less than a minute to get to one of their neighbor’s houses.
That wasn’t much time. Sue looked out the garage door’s small windows. The driveway was long. They had a large yard. Across the street was Mr. Steven’s house. To their left, over the dry creek bed that she couldn’t see from her current vantage point, were the Wahl’s.
Sue went to the quick-release cord for the garage door and pulled. The cord was supposed to disengage the electric motor and allow a person to manually be able to open the door. She went to the door and pulled, but it didn’t budge. She pulled harder with no success.
She checked the cord again, but there was nothing else to pull. The electric motor was at least fifteen years old. It had been in the house when they purchased it. The rolling door, she knew, weighed several hundred pounds. She’d never budge it without the help of the pulley system.
Precious time was being wasted.
She gave up on the door.
They couldn’t hide here. The men would soon figure—if they hadn’t already—that she and the girls hadn’t gone out the window, once they inspected the roof and drop-off that was involved. It would only be a matter of minutes before they searched the house.
If she broke the minivan’s window to get the clicker, the noise was sure to draw the men. They wouldn’t have enough time to run away. Sue bit her lip and made a decision. She told her girls to hide behind the minivan.
Hannah whimpered.
“Don’t worry, Katie will be with you. Katie, watch over your little sister. I’ll be right back.”
Katie nodded. She was being so brave. Katie took her sister’s hand and led her behind the minivan. Sue waited till they were hidden and then turned the deadbolt and cracked open the door that led into the house.
Taking a deep breath, she slipped inside with a lug wrench and headed towards the kitchen to get her purse, which had her car keys.
29
BY her best calculation only a few minutes had elapsed since she and the girls left the room upstairs. The men might still be up there, checking out the roof. She could only hope and pray that was the case. She paused in the hallway and listened, but didn’t hear anything.
Her heart was beating so hard she was afraid it was going to leap from her chest. She moved forward, quickly and quietly. In her hand was the heavy wrench she’d taken from James’s work bench. If anyone had asked her a day ago if she could ever hit someone with a lug wrench, she would have said never. The thought would have horrified her.
Motherhood, however, was a strange thing—it gave a person a unique perspective. Those men had bound and gagged her girls. She would do anything to protect her babies. Anything. She gripped the wrench.
Give me strength.
She reached the end of the hallway. She couldn’t hear them upstairs. She peeked in the living room. There was no one there. She moved across the rug.
The TV was playing on mute. There was a black duffel bag on the couch. She saw plastic drop-cloths and rolls of duct tape. She shivered thinking what those were intended for. If she had any doubts, they were gone. These men had no intention of letting her and the girls live.
The kitchen had cupboards and drawers open. The place looked like it had been ransacked. Her heart dropped when she saw her purse wasn’t where she’d left it. She quickly looked around and saw that it had merely been moved. It was next to the stove. She went over and was about to grab it, when she thought better.
She just took her cell phone and keys. She needed her hands; she couldn’t be encumbered with a purse that might make noise.
The phone she slipped in her pocket. She held the keys firm so they wouldn’t clink and give her away. With the wrench in her other hand, she headed back to her girls. As she entered the living room, she heard someone coming down the stairs. He was coming fast. She’d never make it to the hallway without being seen!
She backtracked to the kitchen and tucked behind the screen wall. She put her keys in her pocket so she could grip the wrench with both hands. The handle was warm and slick from her grip. She was sweating. She wiped the dampness from her hands and cocked the wrench back.
She could hear the man’s movements. He was in the living room. It sounded like he was coming her way.
Lord, give me strength.
30
ENRIQUE pulled his hair. “I swear it was here.”
James, resigned to hearing Enrique out, suggested they do a search. They set the parameters and focused on recent files. The search would only pull up files that had been modified in the last twenty-four hours. When that wasn’t effective they expanded their search.
Still coming up empty, James suggested they cross-reference with internal memory files. Central IQ, where Enrique had first discovered the anomalies, utilized The Vault for redundancy backup purposes. Mirrored blocks of data were kept temporarily before being overwritten. Those blocks of data should align; if they didn’t that might highlight the areas where they needed to focus.
Locating inconsistencies, differing bytes of data—the proverbial needle in a haystack—was one of those problem-solving tasks that James enjoyed. When glitches developed, it was usually old-fashioned sleuth work that resolved an issue. Some of it involved reverse engineering. He took apart the item in question and tried to recreate it.
James’s methods were a little unorthodox, but typically they yielded results. Over the years, he’d written programs that were designed to root out anomalies. His tiger team was tasked to protect ComTek’s network infrastructure. To do that, James had to put on different hats and sometimes think like a person with malicious intent.
While breaking rules was against his nature—operating in a theoretical realm was an entirely different story—he had no problems thinking like a hacker.
In fact, he more than enjoyed playing that role.
Being the hunter, instead of the hunted.
Hackers typically went for holes. Those forgotten back doors, which were intrinsic with most forms of software. Intuitively, James knew where to look, which in this business was ninety-nine percent of the challenge.
After running two sniffer programs concurrently, James came to a quick conclusion. Someone had taken elaborate measures to cover their tracks. They’d almost been successful.
Almost…
“Bingo.”
“Shit boss—that was kick-ass.”
It was only a small discrepancy, but it gave credence to Enrique’s suspicions. Time logs had been altered, James’s and Enrique’s, as well as several others on their team. Neither James nor Enrique punched a time clock—they were both salaried employees—but time logs were automatically genera
ted whenever a person logged on to the network. According to the redundant backup files, for the last several weeks James and Enrique each had shadows; meaning a third party was using their signatures to access the NAS Gateway.
Normally, it would be easy to bring up a snapshot that could effectively retrace keystrokes, but all that information had been wiped clean. Someone, who knew what they were doing, had surgically removed evidence, as well as key crypt files that would have allowed paths, key-ins and commands to be seen.
There were multiple security features that safeguarded ComTek’s network infrastructure. The fact that someone had been operating under James’s and Enrique’s signatures was cause for alarm. The NAS Gateway was central to all operations.
Granted, it was impossible for a lone operator to alter any data or programs without authorization. ComTek had safety measures similar to the military. Just like it took two officers to arm a warhead with their keys and passwords, it also took digital sign-off from two ComTek direct-line superiors to alter or access certain files.
Such checks and balances prevented confidential files from being improperly viewed, modified or misplaced. The NAS Gateway could only be accessed through Central IQ or The Vault. As James dug deeper, he realized the time log discrepancies were just the tip of it. Some of the search programs had turned up fringe material. On its face, it had nothing to do with breaches in security.
James explored the implications, clicking to several folders.
ComTek, like many companies, had strict rules on acceptable conduct. There were certain offenses that were grounds for automatic dismissal, such as inappropriately touching another employee, uttering a racial epithet, being intoxicated while working, or stealing company property. There were second-tier offenses that warranted a warning, or in some cases dismissal, if the infraction involved others. Viewing pornographic material online fit in that category.
ComTek was a zero-tolerance company. James and Enrique both knew the drill.
Don’t do anything at work you don’t want your employer to see.
HR gave that pitch to every new ComTek employee on day one. Personal emails were considered the property of ComTek and could be viewed at any time.
IT, in many ways, was Big Brother. While a person might be able to bypass filters to view inappropriate sites, masking such actions from IT was another story.
Enrique looked at James strangely. Which wasn’t a surprise, considering what James had just pulled up. In the last three months, according to the log, he’d made multiple visits to chat rooms on his company-provided laptop. He’d also accessed sites, which judging by their names, TooYoung.com, Under18XXX.com, and others similarly named, were of the pornographic variety.
James viewed some of the chat room correspondence. According to the info on the screen, his handle was ‘DaddyKnowsBest’. His chats appeared to be with underage girls. Briefly skimming the content yielded some disturbing exchanges.
James shook his head. It was becoming obvious that whoever had been using his signature hadn’t covered all their tracks. This online record could easily have been expunged, at least on the surface, but there had been no effort to do so. It had been left to easily be discovered.
“Whoa,” Enrique said.
James frowned and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “This isn’t me.”
“That’s what they all say.”
James looked at Enrique.
“I’m kidding, boss. There’s no way you’d be this stupid.”
James took the ice pack off his ankle and shifted closer to the computer. “Why would someone do this? Cop my password to surf porn? It doesn’t make sense.”
The searches indicated other areas that weren’t aligning. More red flags.
James’s brow furrowed. “I’m going to check a few things. I want you to pull some things up.”
James told Enrique where to begin. Then he started to dig.
31
BEING on a tiger team, as they were, gave James and Enrique special clearance, even more than their counterparts in IT. Every year they were required to submit to drug tests and have background tests run. The seven members of James’s team were carefully vetted. For them, proprietary files off limits to other employees were just a few clicks away. Each of them had full administrator access, which enabled them to see almost any confidential file in the system.
On the screen were folders for each performance review James had had since he started employment at ComTek. For some reason, one of his sniffer programs indicated that several of these records had been changed in the last few weeks. He clicked open one of the files.
He’d never pulled these up before. The file he opened was over nine years old. It was one of his early performance reviews, just two years into his tenure at ComTek. He skimmed the form. It was the standard form that scored him in two areas: skills and behaviors. Those areas were broken down into various categories.
Skills and Behaviors
Integrity:
Customer focus:
Problem Solving:
Creativity:
Collaboration/Teamwork:
Taking responsibility:
Communication:
Technical knowledge:
// Leadership Assessment…
Next to each of the categories were columns with his supervisor’s numerical scores and typed-in comments. Even though the review was quite a while ago, he recognized the high marks and remarks he’d gotten. There was praise for the ‘deduplication’ software he’d created.
That had been one of his biggest accomplishments. At the time it had been a big win for the company. Big being a gross understatement.
It had saved the company tens of millions of dollars.
Each year.
It also had opened up another revenue stream for ComTek. In fact, in some ways that software was partially responsible for The Vault being what it was today. But he never got credit for it. While it had been his baby, his supervisor had gotten the recognition, and been promoted because of what it brought to the bottom line. The software improved storage capacity by almost 1,400%.
That was huge.
Beyond huge.
That was back when James was certain he was on the fast track. Make your bosses look good, and you’re sure to follow suit. Big contributions get noticed. Pay your dues.
Those adages still rung in his head. His supervisor and his supervisor’s boss, who was head of the division, had said something to similar affect.
You’re an ace.
You’ve got lots of runway son.
The sky’s the limit for you.
He’d been given a copy of his review, which was standard procedure. He glanced at the bottom of the form. There was his signature. Both he and his supervisor had to sign the form agreeing to the scores and comments. The form would be put in his permanent record, which could be viewed by the senior team at any time.
The form was identical to the one he remembered, except for one thing. The last section. It was titled ‘Leadership Assessment’. There was a small box where remarks could be placed. In that column were two words.
[Not promotable]
No explanation accompanied those two words. They stood there stark and cold. Two pairs of initials were next to those words. His supervisor’s and his boss’s boss.
James felt a lump form in his throat.
He closed the form and glanced at the change log for the file. That had to have been recently added; that couldn’t be right. ComTek’s proprietary technology kept a time-stamped log of the changes to every file. If it had been changed, he could find out. But this file’s change log had only one entry—the one noting the file’s creation. Those words were original.
[Not promotable]
James shook his head. He was getting distracted. This wasn’t what he was here for.
With some effort, he shifted gears. He concentrated on the files that had been changed in the last few weeks. He pulled up the most recent one, which happened to be
from last Friday when he had his annual review. Quickly skimming it, he recognized the part where his boss asked him to describe himself. Curiously, his response where he mentioned his “professionalism” was highlighted. James looked over at his boss’s remarks.
James had a decent relationship with his boss and had reported to him for the last five years. They weren’t what you’d consider fast friends, but their relationship was cordial and James knew his team’s success made his boss look good. His boss had recently been promoted to VP in no small part due to the success of several major initiatives that James’s team had spearheaded.
That seemed to be a theme with James’s career.
Reading his boss’s comments, however, did not reflect what James would have expected. It also did not match the form he had signed.
[James has an inability to provide an accurate personal critique. This response is disconnected from his performance. In the last few months, James has exhibited erratic behavior on multiple projects. I have concern for his mental state of mind. Let the record please note, that to date, James has been resistant to any form of counseling. This subject has been broached with him on two other occasions (see previous reports, #23-1 and #24-8). Recommendation to remove high-level clearance and initiate documentation process for immediate termination.]
James’s face flushed. There was a ‘yellow status’ tag on the file, meaning the review was still in the queue for upper level sign-off.
This was a lie. Erratic behavior? Counseling?
He reread the last word in disbelief. Termination? James took a deep breath. He looked over at Enrique. “Found anything?”
“Not yet. You?”
“Check for dual-authentications. I think you’re going to find that I accessed those key bundles you told me about earlier.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just do it!”
Enrique looked over, surprised at his outburst.
James started typing quickly. If he was right about what he was thinking, what he’d uncovered was not the worst of it.