by JM Addison
*
The persistent ring of the cell phone lying on the table seemed to gain momentum and strength with each new sound. Damian was never a fan of “ring tones” and liked his ring to be… well, just a ring. He thought he’d better answer it. After all, it could be Red. He fumbled with the buttons to answer and brought to phone to his ear. It was Red. That distinctive baritone was familiar anywhere. It said “Well, you must have something by now!”
“We’re working on it. Mogan and Stanley have thoroughly gone over the systems. He’s a pretty brilliant kid. Looks as though he’s definitely discovered the worst.” Damian said.
“That’s not a surprise, what’s really important is who else knows!” Red replied hotly.
“He’s was in the process of covering his tracks when he was abruptly interrupted by our people. We know he sent mail out through the system.”
“E-mail? He sent e-mail!? To Who!” Red’s controlled command seemed the breaking apart a little.
“Well that’s the problem.” Damian continued. “He sent the mail through an anonymous re-mailer outside the US. That much we can determine from the logs in the system. He was able to delete the contents of the message just has we yanked him off the keyboard.”
“Certainly we can tell who his intended recipient was, can’t we?” Red asked.
“We can trace the message routing all the way to the re-mailer site. But the intended eventual recipient is contained within the message itself. Once it is received by the re-mailer, it is re-sent to the correct addressee with the original mail header stripped.” Damian replied.
“I don’t like where this is heading. Are you saying we can’t tell who he might have sent a message to?” Red said.
“Well, that’s why they call it anonymous. You’re not supposed to know who sent it unless the sender identifies himself within the message. We dumped the logs of all messages buffered in the network, but we got to it too late. There’s only enough room in the buffers to hold 40-50 minutes worth of messages at the rate mail moves through our network. He sent this Tuesday night.” Damian explained.
“I don’t believe this.” Red fumed. “You mean that this kid, this kid who we evidently underestimated as a top graduate by the way, discovers our little secret and then simply e-mails someone about it? He could have e-mailed the FBI for Chrissakes!”
“Well it would likely be a short message. Coming from an ‘anonymous’ source, it would probably not be taken seriously by any law enforcement agency.” Damian said.
“Here you go with your ‘probably’ again! What about the re-mailer outfit? Do we have any leverage with them?” Red asked.
“Not directly since they are a foreign organization and don’t happen to use our equipment or products. However they have a main feed into the US through Tri-Com. As you know, through our listening post we can enable a probe to monitor just about any electronic conversation we want, however, since we didn’t know, we didn’t enable the probe in time and now it’s too late. As far as the re-mailer organization themselves, we’ve made a polite enquiry, but they pride themselves on the anonymous service they offer and aren’t likely to hand over anything.” Damian explained.
“Is this all the news that you have or does it get worse?” Red asked.
We’ve checked out the kid pretty thoroughly. We even went through his voice mail messages. We weren’t having too much success, but last night we might actually have gotten onto a real lead. Someone stopped by the kid’s apartment tonight. Let herself in and everything.” Damian said.
“Who is she?” Red asked.
“We didn’t want to grab her just yet until we take a good look into her affairs. We followed her, but she gave us the slip. We got her license tag number though so we will just pull it off the DMV computer tomorrow and we can start to further investigate.” Damian said.
“Perhaps it didn’t dawn on you dimwits” Red announced. “If she ‘gave you the slip’ then she’s been tipped off. I don’t want this mess getting any worse. We can’t just keep grabbing people off the streets or scaring the crap out of them. I suggest you and your goons do your job before we all end up in the crapper!”
Damian looked at the phone because it had just gone dead. Red hung up on him. What a prick. But he had to admit. The situation wasn’t looking very good.