For Money or Mayhem

Other Titles
by Nathan Everett

City Limits

Gee Evars wandered into Rosebud Falls on Independence Day just in time to rescue a toddler from the rushing torrent of the Rose River. And to lose his memory. In an attempt to make Rosebud Falls his home, Gee becomes a local hero and inadvertently leads a revolt that changes the balance of power in the town. But will he ever know who he really is?

For Blood or Money

Computer forensics detectives Dag Hamar and Deb Riley discover secret files and hidden code can be as dangerous as dark alleys and flying bullets as they track a missing man and the billion-dollar fortune that went with him. Fourteen years after For Money or Mayhem.

The Gutenberg Rubric

Two rare book librarians race across three continents to find and preserve a legendary book printed by Johannes Gutenberg. Behind them, a trail of bombed libraries draws Homeland Security to launch a worldwide search for biblio-terrorists. Keith and Maddie find love along the way, but will they survive to enjoy it?

The Volunteer

Journey inside the head of a chronically homeless man. In a less politically correct time, he might have been called a hobo. But what keeps him wandering, hitching rides, and eating handouts? Piece together the story through his memories to find what made him volunteer.

Read Excerpts at http://www.NathanEverett.com

Copyright ©2012 2018 by Nathan Everett

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover Art licensed from Shutterstock.com

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted via e-mail to ElderRoadBooks@outlook.com.

Second eBook Edition

ISBN 978-0-9856606-5-9

{1}
Just a Game

It’s just a game, I reminded myself. Just a game. But my hands were shak-ing and sweat dripped from my pits. I pulled my Dick Tracy hat down lower as I locked my eyes on the screen. All virtual. No reality.

Lines of code flew by. This was the tipping point. I nearly had her.

Just a game. I had to remind myself often because I wouldn’t be chasing a fifteen-year-old girl down a darkened alley in real life. Hell, I wouldn’t even be in a darkened alley. I spend my time behind a desk with a computer screen in front of me. It’s what I do. I don’t chase criminals through the streets. Not real streets, anyway.

There was a blinding flash and ozone stung my nose. My eyes hadn’t recovered from the lightning before I was deafened by the thunder. That was close. Lights flickered and went out, but my uninterruptable power supply and a surge protector stood between the failing power grid and my computers. The flow of information on my screen was steady. The cellular modem I used kept me connected, but my office was suddenly deathly quiet as everything but the cooling fans in my computers fell silent.

Lightning in Seattle is rare. I was waiting for another clap, but the blast had come at the trailing edge of the storm. As quickly as the lightning bolt hit, the storm had stopped. A few more drops of rain splashed in the standing water on the sidewalks.

I turned away from the window and plunged back into the alternate reality on the screen in front of me.

In the silence of my mind, I could hear her footsteps. I could almost see her, a shadow turning the corner ahead of me. But when I reached that intersection, she was gone.

I waited.

She’d been leaving tracks a noob could follow. It was almost as though she finally wanted to be caught—wanted it to be over. That happened sometimes. They just get tired of running.

There. I snatched a new receipt out of the cyberspace, looking for clues to where she was headed. But she was already gone.

Her fresh tracks led places no ordinary fifteen-year-old would go. In a space of thirty seconds, she bought automatically-renewing memberships in over a dozen different so-called dating sites—known money launderers. She’d been there before and was probably taking a commission on every sale. I was taking names and covering my tracks as fast as my fingers could move. I had user names and passwords as quickly as she created them. Jordan would have a field day with this, and in all likelihood his Federal counterparts would be sitting at his desk by morning.

Just a game. Except that this time, there were real police following my lead to an apartment building in the International District.

I was getting tired. I hadn’t slept in two days. I thought back to college days when pulling all-nighters to write code or party was normal and grimaced. It was a lot easier twenty years ago. Now I fueled my drive with caffeine instead of alcohol. So far I’d managed to stay off the power drinks, but two days on a steady drip of espresso was beginning to wear on me.

I knew she was out there, but I couldn’t get my eyes on her. She knew all the tricks and she was too practiced for a kid her supposed age to be. She jumped from place to place with no apparent connection, but I was beginning to see a pattern.

I rubbed my eyes and almost missed her. Damn! She’d just bought more merchandise at a trendy shop downtown than I figured the shop sold in a normal month. Thousands worth of designer clothes that would never be shipped.

I was exhausted and ready to put an end to this little cat-and-mouse game. Then she changed. I almost didn’t recognize her when she headed straight for the casino. She was disguised as a little old man about to lose his Social Security check playing on-line poker. I had a positive ID now. This was territory I knew and had charted before I started closing in on her. Online gambling is illegal in the State of Washington.

Casinos, in general, are high on security and they are quick to block exits if they believe they are being ripped off. They also hire guys like me to troubleshoot their systems. Of course, they weren’t likely to do anything drastic as long as she was dropping cash at the rate she was. I collected the account information about the guy she was playing against and sent it into the holding tank of info for Jordan. I reported the activity to the casino and they blocked her best avenue of escape with a quick maneuver. I had her cornered. Suddenly, she was a frightened underage girl and the casino ejected her. She had an escape plan and headed for the virtual rooftops of cyberspace. Bingo. As soon as she moved there, I had her physical address and signaled Jordan that it was time to move in.

When an animal is stalked there comes a point when it knows it has become prey. I’ve watched enough nature television in my life to recognize the moment when the prey understands its fate. Its eyes go wide and there is a last panicked search for refuge before the eyes lose their depth. The gaze becomes flat. No matter how it maneuvers, it knows all actions are futile—just a delay of the inevitable.

I sometimes play darts with a local team. They talk about being ‘in the zone’ when they play. It’s a moment when the bullseye seems to expand in front of them and there is no way they can miss it. It’s like throwing a peanut through a basketball hoop. Time slowed as I crept closer to her. My target was going to be hard to miss.

By now she could tell something wasn’t right. She knew the moment was near. I had a lock on her.

“Funny, but from here you don’t look like a fifteen-year-old girl,” I muttered. “More like a middle-aged cross-dresser with a two-day beard.” I was delaying. Everything had to be perfect. There was no room for error. I needed her in exactly the right position. I watched her typing in the codes that would wipe her computer.

The rest of the team was in place. I raised my hand.

It was only a game, but this was when the game turned to reality—when somebody goes down. The red haze a gamer sees when victory is imminent settled across my eyes. She heard the knock at the door.

I took a deep breath.

And pulled the trigger.

She could have been a fifteen-year-old girl partying with her parent’s credit cards, I suppose. Stupid, but essentially innocent. In reality, the perp was a thirty-year-old identity thief whose latest victim was still in high school and had no idea her credit had just been trashed. He was a thief.

I hate thieves. And I’m a badass in cyberspace.

When the police pounded on his door he started the sequence to format his hard drive. Before he could execute the command I pulled the trigger and blue-screened the machine. I could practically hear him scream. Who gets a blue screen these days?

The truth is that if he had executed the command, he’d have succeeded in wiping the drive. I breathed a sigh of relief when Jordan called.

“CyberTalon, we have the perp in custody,” he said. I wished I was there to see it unfolding, but Jordan was the only person on his team who knew my identity. Legally speaking, I didn’t exist.

Police can’t tamper with the evidence, so I didn’t touch the drive. While we were playing our game of cat and mouse I took control of his monitor in the background. When the perp tried to erase the disk, I uploaded a blue screen image. The first key he hit was “ESC.” That served to cancel his format command. It was beautiful. As soon as Jordan told me a cybercop and witness were in place, I released the screen and the computer mysteriously cured itself. They had immediate access to a fully logged-in computer. It only took a few minutes, with a warrant in hand, to back up the entire drive to an unencrypted device, and then change the password so they could maintain full access.

It was a nice, coordinated operation.

Detective Jordan Grant, who got me into this business in the first place, put together the strategy with me as a class exercise in our Criminal Justice course. Everything worked flawlessly.

Jordan and I have been studying together under Lars Anderson at Olympic University pretty much since the day Jordan arrested me a little over a year ago. That was the day I found out my boss had gutted the employee-owned company and stolen every dime out of our stock and retirement plans. The son-of-a-bitch! After he’d already taken my girlfriend, Hope… I hate thieves. Jordan led the cybercrimes unit that came in to seize the evidence. They were going about it all wrong and all their surprise raid was going to net was more time for our precious CEO to cover his tracks. As Director of Information Technology and an employee who had just had my life savings ripped off, I offered my services to the police. The arrest was to get me out of the building without spooking the CEO before a warrant could be issued for his arrest. I was released in the parking garage.

I decrypted the entire office system backup files and nailed my boss’s ass to a wall. There were still appeals to come, of course, and right now he was sitting in a luxury condo under house arrest with an ankle bracelet. But I’m not done with him yet.

Jordan and I have been working together ever since. He took me to class with him one day, where my former Navy C.O. walked into the class to stand at the front. Lars Anderson took one look at me and said, “I’ve been waiting for you, Hamar.”

I’m not going into police work like Jordan, though. I have my own business and it’s no way related to the Police Department. Sometimes they hire me to do forensic analysis of a computer. Occasionally, after hours, I’m happy to assist with a tricky sting. Pro bono. No official capacity. No paper trail. Usually legal. Mostly.

I slept most of the day on Friday. I’d been working on cracking that guy’s computer for two days and wanted nothing more than a hot shower and sleep. Afterward, I’d think about eating something other than cold pizza. That opportunity would be my usual Friday night meet-up at the faculty lounge. I showered and put on a clean pair of jeans and a fresh t-shirt then set off for the Blue Bastion on Capitol Hill.

For several years before pulling the plug on my former employer, I’d taught a couple of classes at the Community College. There was a big push a few years ago to get professionals in a field to teach certain classes instead of academicians. I had one of those late Friday afternoon Computer Theory classes that only the desperate and determined ever took. It was easy to tell one from the other. After one grueling class trying to explain why the latest, trendy scripting language was not the same as writing real computer code, I stumbled out of the classroom and practically collided with an attractive young English professor.

“You look dragged down and beaten up,” she quipped. “Tough class?”

“Not the easiest class. These kids know absolutely nothing.”

“Why else do you think they’re in your class?” she asked.

That brought me up short. Of course, they expected to learn something they didn’t know. My job was to teach them, right? Wow! So simple.

“Dag Hamar,” I said, offering her my hand.

“Andi Marx. It looks like you could use adult company. A bunch of us meet on Friday after class as a sort of faculty lounge. Why don’t you join us?” I looked at her with a fair amount of astonishment. Was she asking me out? I was flattered, of course, but actually I was in a relationship. She could see I was hesitating and started to laugh. “It’s a faculty group, not a date.” She rolled her eyes and I glanced down to see a wedding ring on her hand. There were times when I was such a typical man. Well… I guess I am a typical man.

I’ve seldom missed a faculty lounge night since. There is a tacit agreement among those who are regulars that the goal is diversity, not departmentalism. I hadn’t been teaching this year, but I was still welcome. We meet at the Blue Bastion because, even though there are dozens of fine restaurants on Capitol Hill, the majority of us are hardcore meat-eaters and wouldn’t set foot inside one of the vegetarian restaurants, no matter what the nationality of their cuisine.

Jan Garrick was in line ahead of me and greeted me warmly as I walked in. “You look tired, Dag. Everything all right?”

“Thanks, Jan. Surprisingly enough, teaching isn’t the only tiring profession.”

Jan ordered his meal and waited while I ordered mine. Then we walked to the big table where the faculty lounge was convening. He’s a full professor in physics at the U, but is one of the most down-to-earth guys I’ve ever met. Most of us at the lounge are community college instructors and many are part-time. It’s nice to see somebody who has made tenure.

As we approached the table, I saw Andi and smiled. She immediately scooted over on the bench and I slid in beside her. She gave me a good once-over and shook her head exaggeratedly.

“When are you going to get adult clothes and quit playing teenager?”

“Hey! If I worked in a big office I might consider dressing up, but I work out of my little one-room up on 15th and don’t see anyone but a barista or pizza delivery guy all day. Why choke myself with a tie?”

“Even us baristas still have to look at your mug each day,” Dick Wagner said as he and his wife Paula pulled up chairs at the table.

“How many student interns are managing your coffee shops this year?” I asked. The guy was great at getting low-cost help from his business class.

“Just four, and every one of them dresses better than you do.”

Well, just because he liked to serve an upscale clientele didn’t mean I was going to shave anytime soon.

“You might all get your wish sooner rather than later,” came the gruff voice of Lars Anderson from behind me. He hadn’t gone through the food line, so I didn’t see him come up to the table. It was unusual for Lars to come to the faculty lounge, but not unheard of. I’d introduced him to the group a few months earlier—Professor of Criminal Justice at SCU.

I had a strange relationship with the man. He’d been my superior officer in the Navy while I was working in the Intelligence Center in the Gulf. He’d given me a lot of instruction then, but I’d been more interested in serving my time and getting out with money for college. It was a real shock to me to find out he was in Seattle and teaching in the criminal justice program at Seattle Cascades University. But it went deeper than that. He was my mentor and still my superior officer. In the State of Washington, you can’t get an investigative agency license unless you can show at least three years’ practical experience investigating or pass a licensing exam from the State. I was still two months from taking my agency exam. You can, however, get an Unarmed Investigator License if you are employed by a licensed investigative agency. Lars, having been in the business for years, employed me in his agency and held my license. For all practical purposes, I functioned on my own, but any kind of work that required me to be licensed and bonded had to be funneled through him.

Before I could welcome him to the table, Jordan strode up with two beers and handed one to Lars.

“I hope you will forgive Jordan and me for inserting a different agenda into the faculty meeting this evening,” Lars said, “but we’d like to toast our investigator for assisting in the capture this morning of one of the area’s most prolific cyber-criminals.” The folks at the table turned to me. Most of them, knowing me as a computer nerd and general support guru, were surprised when they heard about the collapse of my former employer, a year ago and the role I played in it. Now they were beginning to look at me as though I actually had some street cred.

“What’s the story, Dag?” Lisa asked. “Can we get an action pose for class?” Lisa McIntyre is an art teacher at Pacific College of the Arts and Design, PCAD. We joke a lot about the fact that she sees more naked men and women each week than most people see in a lifetime. She’d kept suggesting that I come in to model for her class.

“Sorry, Lisa,” I said. “All the action takes place with my fingers on a keyboard. Not an interesting subject.” It wasn’t so much that I’m shy about my body as that I didn’t think I could hold still long enough for someone to draw me.

“Computers. They’re the death of art and writing.” I noted Andi didn’t disagree with her.

“So what happened?” Jan asked.

“It wasn’t much,” I said. “I just tracked the location and then distracted the perp long enough for Jordan’s gang to break in and arrest him.”

“That distraction meant that we got his entire hard drive as specified in the warrant without having to go through the process of decrypting the security on it,” Jordan said. “Dag’s an unsung hero for Seattle.”

There was a lot of general conversation about what happened and a ton of questions—most of which none of us could answer because of due process. Jordan jumped in with a tidbit that piqued all of our interest.

“Darnedest thing is, though, we don’t know who the guy is.”

It turned out that the perp had been stealing and adopting identities for so long that he’d pretty much erased all evidence of who he was. His fingerprints had been sent to the IAFIS division of the FBI. But even though the FBI averages only about 27 minutes to identify a fingerprint, they’d come up with a blank on our John Doe. DNA scanning was possible but was costly and time-consuming. There was still a question as to whether the DA would even want to proceed with prosecuting the case. So far, five different identities had all proven false.

An intense conversation rose up at the table regarding the need to protect and defend vs. basic privacy. Should the individual be allowed to be completely anonymous as far as the government was concerned? It was a tough call and the police department often found themselves caught between the need to enforce the law and an individual’s personal rights.

Eventually, it was Andi that brought the conversation back to Lars original statement.

“Lars, why will we get our wish to see our resident geek cleaned up?”

“I’ve got a request for an investigator at a large financial firm downtown,” Lars said. “It seems I have an expert at identifying and tracing nearly invisible signs of computer tampering on my staff, so I’m contemplating sending him in on the mission.”

“I’ve got a couple of cases I’m working on,” I said. “And you know how I feel about big corporations.”

“Don’t worry. This has a remarkably flexible work schedule,” Lars said. “And I think you’ll like the challenge.”

Lars promised to send me the details by email and told me to look presentable by Monday morning. He took off fairly early, but Jordan was hanging around to see if there was any action going on later. He’d been flirting on and off with both Lisa and Andi, but I think he was hoping I’d set something up. That’s when Andi started picking up her things and said she needed to get home and feed the teen.

Since she introduced me to the group seven years ago, we’d become friends, then neighbors, then best friends. She’d made it clear that she was interested in nothing more than friendship, even though her wedding ring proved to be from her deceased husband. She was a single mom and needed no men to complicate things. With that as the ground rule, we’d become close friends, especially after my disastrous breakup with Hope.

“Can I offer to walk you home?” I asked, standing from the table. Home was only a few blocks, but up on the hill, nobody drove anyplace if they could help it. I’d moved into the apartment complex next door to her duplex, so walking to school or home from the lounge together was comfortable and almost expected.

“I’d feel hurt if you didn’t.” She smiled at me and I shook my head. It was my turn to roll my eyes. We’d both adopted the expression from her daughter and it always made us laugh.

“I have no idea what kind of clothes to wear. I don’t have anything but jeans and t-shirts anymore. I’ll probably have to get Eric to go shopping with me,” I said as we walked down the hill.

“Or you could use the resident fashion expert living next door to you,” she laughed.

“I didn’t know you were a sartorial maven,” I said.

“Not me. Cali.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Being dressed by a teen? I’ll just go down to Penney’s…”

“You will not! Come on. It will be fun,” Andi said. “Cali would love to do a makeover.”

“A makeover?”

“Just bring money,” she grinned.

{2}
Cyberspace Knows No Bounds

It was nearly midnight and I was back on the cyberstreets. There’s a whole virtual world hidden behind the one we see with our eyes. In my mind, that virtual world is more real than the spring rain that had returned late tonight. April showers bring May flowers as the saying goes. In cyberspace I could have flowers whenever I wanted them.

I was working on a contract that I’d put off while we were tracking the identity thief. I regretted ever having taken the job. But she’d been so convincing and so vulnerable.

It’s one thing if an abused wife comes to me and asks me to investigate her husband’s online activities so she’ll have evidence that he bragged about hurting her and can justifiably sue for divorce or even press charges. I’d had one case like that in the past year. I was only too happy to help her nail her shit-bag of a husband.

But the young widow who came to me with her deceased husband’s laptop seemed so sweet. She was hanging on to the dream of her husband and wanted anything of his that she could get.

Better to stay living in her own virtual world instead of his, I say.

It was a sad story. Her husband was killed in action during his second tour of duty, just days before he was scheduled to come home. What they shipped instead was not her living, breathing love, but a flag-draped coffin and a footlocker full of personal belongings. In the trunk was her husband’s laptop computer.

It was password-protected, of course. There’s an military regulation on basic security measures in the field. I suppose a soldier’s laptop could be a security risk if it fell into the enemy’s hands. But the army is surprisingly lax about giving the same device to the family of the deceased. Apparently they place a lot of faith in the family of fallen soldiers, or in the impossibility of breaking the password.

Of course, that’s false assurance. If I have the computer, I own everything on it.

That’s what she said she wanted.

“We’ve been married two years. We were together as much as possible for four years before that. He was my high school sweetheart,” she told me. Twenty-two or twenty-three years old. Pretty in the way that all young women are pretty. Maybe fresh is a better word. The makeup she wore amounted to a little foundation to conceal the bags under her eyes. It had been a month, but her eyes were still red from crying. “We got married after his first tour of duty. We didn’t have the money before that. I thought we’d have a normal life after that. But they offered a big bonus for him to take a second hitch. It was enough that when he got back we could put a down payment on a house. It was our dream.”

I let her play out the story the way she wanted it to happen. I’ve had dreams myself—and disappointment.

“They called me last week and told me I could pick up his effects. I had to drive down to Lewis-McChord to get them. They didn’t even deliver them.” The tears dried in a streak down her cheek. She was suddenly very angry. “Isn’t that a stupid word? Effects? I gave them my husband and all they could give back was a stupid trunk full of ‘effects!’ I hate them!”

“Why do you want to do this?” I asked. “Your memories are happy. Why do you want to dig into the computer?”

“Because… I can’t help but believe that somewhere in there… he’s… he’s still alive.”

I took the laptop from her hands. I had a bad feeling. People live double lives all the time. Was he really as wonderful as she thought? Or when I opened the laptop, would I find the Sergeant Mason that was still living there was someone different than his young widow imagined?

“You know I could find out something bad. I’m not suggesting that I will, but what will you do if the husband you remember is not the same as the one I discover?” I asked.

“It doesn’t make a difference. Back it all up so I can see it and then wipe the disk and reformat it. I brought all the software. I’m going back to school and I’ll need a computer.”

“What else?” I asked softly. She hadn’t told me everything yet.

“Mike was an avid gamer and was real into social media. We used to joke about all his virtual friends. But… it really is a community, isn’t it? They deserve to know he’s gone and that he gave his life for his country.” She paused and dabbed at her eyes before she went on. “I don’t want to know who they are. I don’t need a hundred or a thousand unknown people telling me about Mike. But please tell them that I thank them for being his friend and that he is at rest.”

I suggested she see a counselor before she made a final decision. She was adamant and suggested that if I was unwilling to do the job, she would find someone else. Since she’d come on the recommendation of a mutual friend, I didn’t want to blow her off. So now, just a couple of days from when I told her I’d have it ready for her, I pulled the laptop out of its case and set it on my desk. I pulled the drapes and turned off all the lights except the keyboard lamp at my desk. The world around me went dark.

When I’d recovered from being dumped six year ago—at least recovered sufficiently to function again—I found this efficiency apartment on Capitol Hill. The SoDo loft I moved from had been designed to show off a rising star in the tech world—someone who had loud parties and beautiful artifacts. Like Hope. The little apartment I moved to was a cave where I could hide and lick my wounds. In the intervening years it had become a refuge from the real world and a gateway into whatever I wanted in the virtual world.

My new neighbor, Eric, helped move my meager possessions into the room. There was some television show about gay guys helping straight guys look good. Eric could have run that show. He made decorating suggestions. He would be very pissed that Cali was doing my makeover. His efficiency apartment the floor below mine was identical. He’d explored dozens of tricks to optimize the space.

Then he saw that all the furnishing I had was a recliner. My box of clothing, computer equipment, stereo, and one painting made the room look huge and empty.

“We need to go shopping,” he said brightly. “I have a pickup truck. Let’s go to Ikea!” I declined, politely.

“First, I want to paint.”

“Oh yes. I see you in pastels. Blue would go so well with your eyes.”

“Black.”

“Oh Honey, she really did a number on you, didn’t she?” I just shrugged my shoulders back at him, so he continued. “All right, Hamlet. Black it is. But you do not want to paint these walls.”

“Why?”

“You’ll never get them white again and your lease specifically states that you will leave the apartment in the same condition as you found it, including white walls. Just ask Jared.” I remembered my apartment manager having pointed that out when I signed the lease. I sighed.

“But I need it to be black.”

“Okay. Here’s what we do…”

It was a genius solution, a little more complex than just painting the walls, but worth it. During the decorating that followed, Eric and I became good friends. Jared even approved the plan with the stipulation that I had to restore the apartment to original condition before I left. He collected an additional month’s rent as a damage deposit in case I skipped and he had to hire painters.

We hung paintable, strippable wallpaper and painted the room. We hung black drapes. We tacked black fabric to the ceiling. When we were done, I had a black room in which even the glow of the monitor was absorbed and sound was muted by the soft surfaces.

I had my ‘mantuary,’ as Eric pointed out. He warned me that no woman in her right mind would spend the night there. I asked if there was a way to ensure that no men would, either. He had the good grace to laugh. And leave.

I was in my own little womb, and it was my gateway to cyberspace.

Who are you really, Sergeant Mason?

His widow had filled out an extensive questionnaire. She didn’t understand at first why I wanted things like names of brothers, sisters, parents, pets, schools, mascots, and hobbies in addition to social security numbers, serial number, addresses, and birthdates. Once I explained that passwords were rarely random, she filled out the form with more information than I was sure was necessary. In an effort to make a password memorable, people often use familiar names, numbers, or terms for their password.

I was prepared to enter all the information in a database and let my software do the work of cracking the password. I set the computer up on a wired network and then attempted to access it with my own computer, plugging in each potential password in succession from the database. I have secondary software that will write variants of words, substituting numbers for letters and capitalizing first letters of syllables, among other things.

I never needed to run the software.

Elaine831, his wife’s name and birthday. Testing shows a 72% strong password rating. Unless you happen to know his wife’s name and birthday and the fact that Army regulations stipulate that “passwords must be at least an eight-character string using the thirty-six alphabetic-numeric characters. At least two of the characters should be numeric.” Just like the Navy.

I entered the virtual world of Sergeant Mike Mason.

Through his journal and photos, I followed him down streets I’d never walked where every shadow could be a sniper. He ducked into a doorway, swinging his rifle left and right as the light on his helmet swept the room. In the empty silence that greeted him, he allowed himself a deep breath, shook the sweat out of his eyes, and then moved back into the street.

By the time I tracked him for a quarter of a mile, sweat was running down my own forehead. My heart was racing when I heard shots fired. He slammed himself against the wall, trying to disappear against the rough surface behind him. The shots were a street over. Not his responsibility. Another deep breath and he forced himself to move forward again.

At the next door he repeated the process. Enter. Sweep. Breathe. I was no longer certain if the droplets running down our cheeks were sweat or tears.

At the end of the street, a Humvee with a man in the turret waited for him. The door opened and he dove in. Two others joined him. They moved out, returning to base. They joked and laughed. There had been no one there in the empty buildings waiting to attack them. Got them on the run now, don’t we? They’ll never show their faces here again.

Being in a computer is more real to me than watching a movie. I grew up in the age of text-based gaming, long before virtual reality put avatars on screen and made digital constructs of cities, zoos, and planets common. I see everything, just based on a few words or even a line of code that I read.

I tailed Mike Mason through his journal, his email, his photos—watching, seeing for the first time the threats the young soldiers saw in every shadow, every bump in the road. It took me back to my own time in the service, though I was always in the bowels of the ship whenever it saw action.

When he came off duty, he sought the comforts all soldiers seek. He read email from home and talked to Elaine on Skype. There was no beer to be had in the Muslim country and base security was tight. There was no way he was leaving the safety of his base when he was off-duty.

All he wanted was someone to talk to.

The time difference meant that Elaine had to go to work soon after he got off duty. They had to break off their conversation before he was finished talking. Again. He had lots of online friends, but there was only so much he could tell them. Every day he was frightened. Every night he was awakened by any noise. Every minute he missed his home and his wife. He was exhausted and there was no hope of rest.

“If I could just see her for a few minutes—hold her and put my face against her hair—I’d be able to sleep again. God, of course I want to make love to her, but I don’t know if I could do that—right away, at least. I’d be so caught up in just being with her that I’d fall asleep in her arms before I could do anything else. This tour is so much worse than the last one. I should never have re-upped.”

I was surprised to find that I recognized one of his aliases on a gaming site that I played. There are several million casual and hardcore gamers online at any given time, but there are comparably few of us who still do old-fashioned text-based gaming. Finding he was one of them forged a deeper kinship with him. I wondered how a guy almost twenty years younger than me got into text playing. In one way or another, we could all track our legacy to John Patterson, a local game developer who made it big, building an online empire. Patterson still maintained the biggest text-based gaming site in the world and, being officially retired, manages a huge charitable foundation. I have half a dozen sub-domains on his network to run my own games from. Instead of fancy branding and graphics, all Patterson’s text game sites bear the legend, “Remember guys, it’s just a game.” It’s the kind of guy he is.

I tapped into his game identity and told Sergeant Mason’s online friends that he had been killed in action and that his wife thanked them for being his friend during his final days. The forums were flooded with messages, condolences, memories. I set up a memorial website so that people could see a few of his pictures and leave messages. I’d ask Elaine if she wanted the address, but it was really for the benefit of the friends, not her. A few messages I downloaded onto the backup. Most I let go. I set his other online pages and forum registrations to expire in 30 days so his friends could continue their tributes and comfort each other.

But, of course, not every social forum is innocuous.

The chat room he’d chosen was like any other in the long line of sleazy and dark holes where he could get lost. His online friends were prone to joke and ask him if he’d had any bacon lately. But people shy away from too much information when an online buddy starts showing his weaknesses, fears, depression. In the stark anonymity of a not-so-popular webcam site, he’d found a confidante. She was special. The first time he saw her webcam he thought he’d just seen Elaine. Of course, Elaine would never do the things this woman did. She’d never dance like this in front of so many men. But every time he saw her, he imagined for just a moment that it was Elaine.

He was going to stop coming here. He wouldn’t come back tomorrow night. The dancer wouldn’t miss him, and if she did, he wouldn’t know about it. He just needed to spend a few more minutes with her.

I watched the public area of Angelique’s site for a few minutes, the message area saying, “your nick is guest256.” She relaxed on a bed with a college pennant hanging on the wall behind her. I saw a poster for a popular band just to the side come into view when she shifted the position of her webcam a little. She held a stuffed monkey doll in her lap, occasionally using him to bat at the camera or manipulating his long arms and legs to pet her own breasts. She wore a dark bra and panty set, not quite as trashy as some of the girls I’d seen while making my way to this room.

I watched the flow of text next to the image as she typed out messages to a dozen people who were on-line with her—the visual equivalent of a group talking around the dinner table, only she was dinner. The messages ranged from banal to risqué to rude.

“r u rl?”

“u lik cox?”

“nice ass”

Occasionally she would respond to a message if there was anything said that could be responded to. Otherwise she just read the screen and occasionally shifted her position to give the voyeurs a different angle. I’d have left without a second thought if she hadn’t looked so much like Elaine. She might not remember Mike since it had been over a month since the last time they talked according to his log. But his log had shown hours spent on the site. That wasn’t cheap.

I logged in.

“OneTinSoldier just joined the conversation.”

“Mikey! I missed you! Wanna go private?” Her response was immediate and it looked like real excitement on her face.

“Yes, please.”

In a moment the public screen went blank with a message that said “In private session.” Then the screen cleared and her image came back on. It was a higher resolution camera for the private session, and audio came on as well. I was hoping no video feed from my end came on automatically.

“Mikey, I’ve been so worried. You just dropped off the face of the earth. Tell me what’s happening.”

I pasted the message I’d prepared into the text box and pressed send.

“I regret having to inform you that Sergeant Mike Mason, whom you know as ‘OneTinSoldier’ was killed in action on March 10. On behalf of his wife, I’ve been asked to locate Mike’s online friends and let them know. She has also asked me to express her appreciation for your friendship with Mike over the course of his final days. I’m sorry to have to bring you this unpleasant news.”

I’m pretty good at reading people for genuine feelings… at least I tell myself that. What I saw on her face was an instant transformation. She looked square into the camera with tears running down her cheeks.

“That’s not funny, Mikey. Please, don’t be mean to me,” she said.

“I’m sorry to have to bring you such bad news,” I typed. “There is a memorial website at this URL.” I gave her the address and watched while she typed at her keyboard. I could tell that Angelique believed it was a practical joke until she actually saw the story. She was crying when she looked back at the camera.

“Who are you?”

“I’m just a hacker his wife hired to let online friends know he was gone.”

“She knows about me?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I look like her. He told me that, but he never showed me pictures.”

“From what I can tell on his computer, you helped him get through his loneliness while he was overseas,” I said. “That means a lot to everyone.”

“I’m just a performer. But I really liked Mikey. He wasn’t rude like most of the assholes on here. He just wanted someone to talk to. Of course, he didn’t mind if I was naked while we talked.” She smiled a little even though the tears were still flowing freely. “Sometimes I was jealous of his wife,” she continued. “I won’t leave any messages. But thank you for letting me know. I thought he was just tired of me.”

Sergeant Mike Mason’s life came to an end before his story was finished. He’d gone where I could not follow. I was snapped back into the reality of my black room, my armpits sweating and my head aching with fatigue. In front of me, only the glowing screen of his computer, the connections severed.

I finished backing up his email, his daily journal, and his photos and music onto a thumb drive and put an install disk in the drive. Then I turned to my own computer to write my report.

“Completion of project. Attached is a backup of Sergeant Mason’s personal files. Hard drive has been wiped and original system restored and updated. Additional software provided by the client has been installed. Computer is fully usable or salable with a current value estimated at $450.”

There was little chance that Sergeant Mason’s virtual life would ever impinge on the memory of his real life.

Now they could both be at peace.

{3}
Not What It Appears To Be

The pounding on my door started at ten a.m. sharp. I wasn’t happy. I’d only been asleep about two hours, having spent most of the night living another man’s life half a world away. What sleep I’d had was restless as the dreams kept flooding my sleeping brain—dreams made so vivid in my mind through his laptop computer.

People don’t realize how much of their lives are on their personal computers. Photos, email, links, music… lovers—it’s all a part of who they are. When I dive into a computer, or ferret out information on the Internet, they become so real that I can talk to them in my head and it feels like they’re answering. Getting that deep into someone else’s head makes it hard to keep track of your own. It takes a while to decompress and I do that best while I’m sleeping.

The knocking continued and I finally dragged myself out of bed, pulled on a pair of sweats, and went to the door.

A little blonde bundle of energy almost poked me in the nose with her fist as she raised it to knock again. About five-three and weighing about a buck ten, she glowed with scarcely contained élan. She smelled of something fruity that I guessed must be her shampoo and I was instantly thankful that it wasn’t floral. I’d be sneezing all over her.

“You’re not up? It’s time to go!”

“Why would I be up at ten on a Saturday morning, Cali? And how did you get into the apartment building? Go where?” I know. I wasn’t giving her an opportunity to answer as I kept asking question after question, but once she started talking, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get another chance to say anything.

“Your makeover! Mom says you should meet us at the Analog by ten-twenty. Your hair appointment is at eleven o’clock.” She wrinkled up her nose as she looked at me. My eyes weren’t quite open yet. “And shower and brush your teeth before you come down. Did you stay up all night again?” My nod was all I got out. “Mom says that kind of schedule will age you prematurely. That’s what she tells me. If I keep staying up late at night, I’ll get wrinkly. She might as well say, ‘Cali, go to bed or you’ll end up looking like Dag.’” She giggled. “Anyway, Mom’s heading down to the Analog and is going to order coffee for everyone, so you need to be there in—let’s see—twelve minutes. ’Bye!” With that she skipped off down the back stairs outside my door and was gone.

Makeover? Oh. Yeah. Bring money. Damn.

I read somewhere that on average women who have been dumped spend $800 on a makeover. When Hope left me and cleaned out my loft, I spent $12.95 on a case of beer and didn’t change clothes for two weeks. That was the last makeover I’d had. When you do most of your work in cyberspace, who cares what color your t-shirt is?

My self-image is a cross between the dark intensity of Sam Spade and the suave sophistication of Nick Charles. Really? I’m a tall, skinny, rumpled Columbo in faded jeans and a t-shirt. I showered quickly, brushed my teeth, pulled on said jeans and t-shirt, and headed out the door to meet the mother and daughter—all the while feeling like the golden sun logo on my shirt was turning into a massive target on my chest.

On the street corner outside the Analog Café, a guy dressed almost like me was tacking posters to a utility pole. The broadsides were stapled from the ground to as high as he could reach and all the way around the pole. About twenty posters, I guessed, each for a different band or venue. He stepped back and took pictures of the pole from all sides on his cell phone, then closed up his kit and walked over toward Denny. I shook my head, knowing that by noon, Jared would come out and tear them all down while muttering about how he’d call the police if they didn’t already have too much to do. He and the owner of the Analog, across the street from our apartment, were vigilantes when it came to keeping the neighborhood clear of flyers and playbills.

Just inside the door of the Analog, a couple in matching, studious black-rimmed glasses, tight black jeans, and army surplus jackets sipped coffee and read. He was reading Tolstoy. For pleasure. Intellectual. She read Still Life with Woodpecker. She typed messages into her phone one-handed without looking. She might have been transcribing the book for all I could tell.

Andi turned away from her conversation with the barista and held out a cup of coffee for me. Hot, strong, and black. Cali was right beside her, sipping something that looked sweet and chocolaty with a big dollop of whipped cream on top.

“Finally,” Cali declared. “Let’s go!”

Andi smiled and greeted me. “She’s kind of excited about the shopping expedition today.”

“Why would she be excited about getting me a new pair of pants?”

“Oh, she just figures that if we are shopping there is a high likelihood that she’ll be able to divert the purpose to her own benefit. I know she has her eye on a sweater she saw at Candy’s. And Candy’s just happens to be next door to the Men’s Wearhouse.” Andi pulled her keys out of her purse as we left the café. “I’ll drive. Nothing we want is within walking distance of here.”

I tried to think of what was around. Well, there were more costume shops per capita on Capitol Hill than anyplace except Reno, but aside from a few vintage clothing stores there isn’t much in the way of actual clothing—at least not if you’re over twenty. Granted, if you wanted to dress like a vampire or a zombie, this was the place to come, but neither of those would go over well at a finance company.

Fifteen minutes later we walked into an upscale hair salon in a fancy hotel. I was pushed into a chair in the waiting room while Andi and Cali walked back to where I could see half a dozen stylists clipping at their customers. I was trying to remember when I’d last had a haircut. I usually kept it pulled back in a ponytail and just whacked enough off the ends to keep it above my shoulder blades. I hadn’t really been into short hair since my Navy days, though I’d gone through various lengths when I was a rising star. I just quit caring about it a few years ago.

My beard was thin. Blondes have lousy beards. My Swedish heritage showed up in my skin and hair tones. Granted, the beard wasn’t really long. I had a pair of hair clippers my mother gave me years ago and once a month I put the longest attachment on them and buzzed my face. I picked up one of the magazines and flipped through it. The pictures were of men that all looked fifteen years younger than me and several millions richer. They’d all either walked off the pages of GQ or had just come from performing with the Chippendales. My boney ass wasn’t going to measure up to these guys no matter how they cut my hair.

Andi and Cali came out to sit with me and said it would be a few minutes before Sinclair was ready to see me. Somehow I pictured a big green dinosaur lumbering around grazing off what was once on my head. Andi and Cali got busy with the magazines, pointing and then shaking a head and turning the page. Before long a middle aged woman just over five feet tall and just under that wide came into the waiting room from the studio. She was not, however, green. When she said my name it sounded like a frog had dragged itself out of a particularly filthy swamp and taken up residence in her throat.

“Dag Hamar?” I stood. She looked at me and then threw a questioning look at Andi. “Turn around.” I rotated. She pushed on my arms to make me turn further. Then she motioned me to follow her as she lumbered back into the salon and pointed to a chair in front of a sink. “I should have scheduled a longer appointment,” she muttered.

It was an hour and forty minutes later that I was finally allowed to look in a mirror after having been scrubbed, scraped, clipped, dyed, massaged, and blown dry.

I almost didn’t recognize the face that looked back at me. It was shaved completely smooth except for a pencil thin mustache. Even that had been darkened slightly. Sinclair called it chestnut, but that made me feel like a horse. My hair was short and I’d forgotten that at that length it curled slightly. It didn’t have a part, but was just swept back. My nose twitched a bit and I realized my chin was cold. And a little lopsided. Cali reached up and felt my cheek.

“Ooo. Baby smooth,” she giggled.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said. “It looks great, thank you.”

“Be back here in two weeks and I’ll keep it looking that way,” Sinclair rasped. “You’ve got a good head. If it weren’t for that…” She shook her head sadly. “…disaster.” Two weeks? Fortunately, Sinclair took a credit card because in spite of what Andi said about bringing money, I was nowhere near prepared to pay $160 for a haircut. Plus tip. But I had to admit, I was beginning to feel a bit more like Nick Charles. If only I liked martinis…

We stopped for lunch before serious shopping. I’d been to Andi and Cali’s house with friends when Cali was watching a makeover show on television, and I could tell by the way she kept eying me over lunch that she was calculating what she was going to do to me. Andi and I were having a reasonably adult conversation during the meal—she asking me test interview questions. I bit into my BLT and saw Cali with her cell phone sending text messages.

“No phones at the table,” Andi reminded her daughter.

“I was just sending myself a note,” Cali replied. “I didn’t want to forget the colors I see him in.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, coming to full attention. I could see where this was going if I didn’t set some boundaries. “You are not turning me into a fashion plate. Neither I nor anyone I might work for would be impressed or comfortable with that. I don’t want to stand out. I want to blend in.”

“Even conservative business wear has some things you can do to make it a little edgy,” Cali said. “You’d be so cool in…”

“No.”

“What?”

“No edgy. No colors. Simple blacks or grays and white shirts. Blend in, don’t stand out.”

“Can we at least have colored ties?” she pled.

“Only if it doesn’t make any difference what I wear it with,” I said adamantly. “I don’t want to have to think about what I’m pulling out of the closet to wear. I reach in, pull out pants, shirt, tie, and I’m dressed. It should make no difference which of each I put on.” I didn’t want to mention the fact that I’m colorblind. If the girl put different colored clothes in my closet, there was no question that I’d end up wearing the wrong ones. People would notice.

“Boring!”

“Cali,” Andi jumped in, “it is his life and his image. We’re only making over his appearance, not who he is.”

“I like who he is, but all that black clothing he wears is just so blah.”

“Hey!” I said. “He is right here. And he thought all you kids were into wearing black all the time.”

“Men!” Cali humphed. “You just don’t get it.”

“Cali, we’re supposed to be helping Dag. Be nice,” her mother soothed. “I’m sure he won’t object to you getting something colorful that makes up for his… uh… monochromicity.” I was pretty sure Andi was going to say something like drabness or plainness, but she took a diplomatic view.

Andi and I have an easy relationship. I don’t have many friends. Jordan and I are pretty close, but between his police shifts and my night-work, we don’t get together that much unless it’s to bring down a criminal or to study. The guys I called friends at Henderson, suddenly became scarce after I blew the whistle on our boss. They seemed to think that they wouldn’t all be out of work if I had just let the CEO keep robbing the company. He ripped them off, but in their eyes, I was to blame for the company’s collapse.

And Cali… Well, she was just Cali. I’d known her since she was ten and now at seventeen she was turning into a young woman, but still had the brightness and energy of the ten-year-old I’d first met. And she wasn’t much bigger. I could indulge some of her whims about making me a dress-up doll. It’s just that I really couldn’t do colors.

I ended up with two gray suits that I could tell apart by the texture, two pairs of black slacks, and three white shirts. Cali had assured me that the five ties I bought—“You can’t wear the same one every day!”—would go with any combination of the suits or slacks and that I could wear either jacket with the black slacks. She’d let her mother pick out one of the ties and I instantly found that it was my favorite. I’d picked up a nice gray cashmere sweater that I could wear when I dressed down that reminded me of petting Eric’s cats.

And neither Cali nor Andi objected when I paid Cali for her fashion-consulting services by buying the sweater at Candy’s that she’d had her eye on.

I still couldn’t get used to my naked chin, though.

I was raised in a traditional family. My father went to work every day of his working life at the same company and had risen from a wiper on a fishing vessel to dock foreman. He’d retired with a pension and was rewarded for his many years of service. And when he died the next year, he left my mother with a modest but comfortable nest egg that ensured her security for the rest of her life. It was the American ideal.

Well, the dying part sucked.

I was among those who held that same dream when I came out of college. I joined a firm, and worked my butt off to ascend to my level of incompetence. My years of loyalty were rewarded with a bankrupt company from which the bastards at the top had stripped out every cent of our retirement plans, most of which was held in company stock.

I swore I’d never work for a corporation again, unless I owned it. The only thing that made this situation palatable at all was that I would only be pretending to work for them.

I spent the better part of Sunday with Lars, getting briefed on the job and the background of the company I was going into. He was suitably impressed with my new look, though I cringed when he suggested I looked just like “one of them” in my black slacks and gray cashmere pullover. Lars reminded me, however, that I needed to keep up with the shaving. I realized I didn’t currently have any shaving equipment, just my clippers. That was going to take some getting used to.

Not to mention that I hadn’t been on a job interview in fifteen years.

{4}
A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing

Evergreen Financial Corp., or EFC, was one of a number of independent credit card issuers that had sprung up about twenty-five or thirty years ago. It had never made it as big as its chief rival, because it adamantly refused to align itself with any mainline bank. Instead, it issued credit cards under private labels for various associations, unions, and even churches. It looked like a prime take-over candidate to me, but miraculously it had staved off attempts by big banks during the great consolidation wave. It kept to its niche market, offered good services, and was semi-privately held. Though technically a publicly traded company, the vast majority of its stock was held by a small number of large investors who seemed of like mind when it came to maintaining their independence.

To those in the right circles, it was also held to be a fortress regarding personal information and computer security. The very thought that the company had become vulnerable to cyber-attack grated on the nerves of management and IT. Lars suspected the company’s unusually proactive movement had other motivations as well. Financial organizations are not required to report incursions into their systems unless customer data has been compromised. Most do what they can to cut off the threat and silently swallow the losses rather than have them made public. The fact that EFC was calling in a consultant meant they thought the threat might be internal.

Monday morning, I was up and dressed by eight, having taken care not to cut myself with my new razor. It was going to be difficult to maintain the little strip of whiskers on my upper lip. Shaving close to it without cutting it off would be a daily challenge.

At half past nine, I was sitting in the plush twenty-third floor offices of Evergreen Financial Corp. on 3rd Avenue in Seattle. I’d checked in with the receptionist, a woman about my age with an extraordinarily pleasant voice. She asked me to have a seat and I heard her call to say I was in the lobby. Her tone in dealing with the person on the other end of the line was one that would calm a tornado. I heard her answer another line in the same calm, reassuring tone.

“Evergreen Financial. I’m sorry, Mr. Drake is out of the office until two o’clock today. May I take a message?”

Take a message? No connecting to voicemail? If I ever have a business that involves a lot of incoming phone calls, I want her answering them. Well, that day was so far away I couldn’t even see it on the horizon.

A woman came through the security doors on the left and stopped to speak to the receptionist. They conversed in low tones for a minute before she approached me. She wore a dark suit and white blouse with one of those long collars that tie into a bow at the neck. Her skirt was cut scarcely above her knee and the one-inch heels she wore clearly stated that she was here on business. I silently thanked Cali for my new suit and stylish tie as I stood to greet her.

“Mr. Hamar? I’m Darlene Alexander, Mr. Dennis’s admin.” Well, that answered my first question. She wasn’t the executive I was interviewing with. “His meeting is taking a few minutes longer than expected and he asked that I get you situated in his conference room. Would you come with me, please?” I acknowledged her greeting and agreed to follow—almost before she turned and marched back to the security door. She waved her badge at a black box on the frame and the door clicked to allow us through. On the way to the conference room we passed a small kitchen and she asked if I would like a cup of coffee. I stopped myself from automatically saying yes. I asked if I might have a glass of water instead and she quickly showed me the cooler and glasses. I filled a glass and continued to follow her to a room next to the corner office with a round table and four chairs. I selected the chair that faced the door and after I sat down the admin departed. It was a great view, out across the Sound. I turned away from it and faced the door, relaxing in my chair.

The executive who was going to walk through that door any minute now was the crook. I’d decided that even before being told exactly what the job was. As far as I was concerned, the guy was guilty just because he was a vice president. That’s my version of “the butler did it.” I supposed I’d have to investigate everybody in the company in order to prove it.

I didn’t have long to stew about it. The door opened and a slightly balding man a little shorter than me strode through the door with purpose. He closed the door and then turned to me.

“Hamar? I’m Arnold Dennis. Don’t get up.” I’d begun to rise when he entered the room, but settled back. This was not a man who beat around the bush. I needed to hang on for the ride. “Good references. Let’s talk about Henderson.”

“Okay.” That wasn’t what I expected. Why would he be interested in my former employer?

“It’s one thing to identify that a fraud is taking place. How did you pinpoint who was moving the money?”

“I see,” I said. “Officially, I held the encryption key to the back-up data at Henderson. When the police took the disks, I decrypted them. The evidence was there.”

“Data isn’t knowledge. What led you to believe it was the C-levels who were doing the work?”

“There are confidentialities involved.”

“You don’t want me to know the how.”

I looked at the guy. This was not the interview I was prepared for. I didn’t really want to go into my techniques for nailing the CEO. Evidence appeared. It was turned over to the police.

“I use a combination of techniques that fit the parameters of the job I’m assigned. If one technique fails to produce results, there are others that I can fall back on. The real question is what you want me to find and what you don’t want me to find,” I said. I kept my voice even and pitched low. Arnie Dennis was leaning forward to hear me better. He was buying and I was selling. He didn’t strike me as a man that many people stood up to. He paused as he considered me and I looked him in the eye.

He smiled.

“Good. Here’s the situation. Our losses due to fraud are increasing. Every credit card company assumes some risk of fraudulent card usage. We expect it and plan for it. Most fraud losses would cost us more to prosecute than the loss itself. Frankly, you can’t even call it fraud most of the time. Usually it’s a spur of the moment decision by someone who is desperate and sees what they think is an opportunity. Could be as simple as finding a credit card and charging a shopping spree to it. Sometimes we still get the captured number and signature used by an unauthorized person. Occasionally it’s something more serious like a raid on a series of card numbers for charging porn. The Internet makes it more difficult to track some of those uses, but we are vigilant about protecting the customer and where we can make an impact we prosecute the offender.”

It was what I expected. Both State and Federal Laws are specific about the responsibility of financial institutions to protect their customers from fraud. But they weren’t required to press charges. Business crimes occur every day and wasting their money on small cases isn’t profitable for an institution’s shareholders. But losses are something every manager at every level is responsible for—whether they are in banking, designing software, or selling shoes. If losses were increasing, however moderately, it was going to raise red flags.

“A basis point is one-hundredth of a percent of the company profit. It is a tough market out there and a downward shift of a single basis point could mean millions of dollars in losses. I’ve been given the authority to investigate and remedy the situation.”

“Why, if I may ask, does that fall to the Chief Technology Officer and not to the Chief Financial Officer?” I asked.

“Good question, with two answers. First, we believe our losses are specifically tied to incursion into our systems. It’s my job to plug that kind of leak. Secondly, technology is now fundamental to every job in our company. Every single employee has a computer and is tied into our network. Our employees and our network are our greatest vulnerability. Finance will be watching my every move on this, but Tech has the ball.”

“Don’t you have inside people who can trace network use?” I asked.

“Yes. But anyone inside the company could be a suspect. And that pisses me off. It pisses me off that I’m a suspect. You are here to get into the network and sniff out the vulnerabilities,” he said. Apparently, I’d been hired. “I’ll call you my Technical Assistant. That will give you unfettered access to everything on the network. Everything. You will have read access for every single computer and server on the network. I want to know whose pocket every missing penny lands in.”

I’m licensed and bonded, but it was sounding like I was just being given the keys to the kingdom. What company was going to give an outsider complete access to their financial documents, strategies, marketing, and technology? Not only that, but this company had an entire division that handled fraud. Those folks certainly wouldn’t be happy about having an outsider looking over their shoulders. There had to be a catch somewhere. Arnold’s smile was back on his face. He looked like he’d just caught me with my fingers in the till.

“You’ll be watched,” he said simply. “I’m not about to launch anything like this without safeguards that I have personally put in place. I will know where you go and every file you touch. I can’t do the investigation myself, but I can be damn sure that you will be monitored. And challenged.” I nodded. That made sense. I’d spend the next few hours pondering exactly how they were going to watch me. Then I’d figure out how to get around it. I don’t like being watched.

“If you are ready to go to work, I’ll have Darlene get you down to HR. She’ll introduce you to my Director of Network Security, Don Abrams. He’ll get you a computer and logon. You’re going to be an employee—full benefits and the works. Of course, I’ll pay your agency a fee as well, but no one in the company is to know that you are an outside consultant or the precise nature of your job. As far as anyone else is concerned, you are doing specific technical investigations on my behalf regarding the impact of new technology on the financial world. There’s a cross-departmental team that does that and you’ll become a member. I hope you can hold your own in a conversation about the Fed’s new policies on electronic record maintenance. Darlene has the position number and employee job req.”

He stood to leave but turned to look at me once again.

“Zack Henderson was a personal friend of mine.”

Damn! Zack was my former boss’s father and the founder of Henderson Associates. And my new boss was his friend? Zack committed suicide two months after his son was arrested.

“It wasn’t what you did that killed him. It was what you found. If you find that one of my partners in this company is raiding the bank, it’ll kill me, too,” he said. Did I believe him? “I’ve been here twenty-three years and I expect to be here another ten before I retire. Just remember this company is twenty times the size of Henderson. It’ll take twenty times the work.”

All right. Maybe I was too quick to condemn corporate executives.

Maybe.

It was two o’clock by the time I was actually seated at a desk and staring at a computer. The morning had been filled with paperwork and briefings by Human Resources. I had forms for filling out 401k deductions, health insurance, and membership in the Puget Sound Health Club. I’d received my security badge/keycard, and as soon as I arrived back at Darlene’s desk she made a quick tour of the office and gathered together the other members of Arnold’s ‘team’ to head out for lunch. Wild Ginger has great food, but it’s never a quick lunch, especially when trying to meet and memorize the faces of half a dozen new people.

I paid close attention. These were the insiders and as such, prime suspects. I’d met Don Abrams earlier in the day and he assured me there would be a computer waiting on my desk as soon as I finished with HR. He was Director of Network Security and Arnold’s go-to man. Allen Yarborough sat across from me at lunch and asked an endless stream of questions that probed my knowledge of system administration. That figured since he was the Systems Admin Manager. It turned out that he was the one directly responsible for issuing my laptop and having me registered on the network. Within a few minutes, I realized I was being interviewed by Arnie’s staff, which hadn’t been given the usual opportunity before I was hired. They were testing my mettle. When Allen finished hammering me about systems admin, Phil Jackson, Manager of Fraud Detection, took over. His questions focused on my knowledge of attacks that were specific to credit fraud. As it turned out, my work on the Henderson case came in handy. Part of what brought the company down was the default on a sizable loan they’d received from a private lending company. If the loan had been through a mainline bank, there would have been a long waiting period while the wheels of justice spun up. Since the lending company was privately held, the default action went from zero to sixty in ten seconds. It didn’t give the execs enough time to hide their tracks before the police were called in.

Ford McCall took over the questioning at that point. Ford was a low-level employee compared to the managers at the table. I was still curious as to how this so-called team was put together. They didn’t seem to have a common manager below Arnold himself. They were at a number of different hierarchical levels. Ford was a researcher. His level of interpersonal skills had probably kept him from being on a management track, but it turned out that he knew something about just about every development in technology that had taken place in the past twenty years. His questions were random, sometimes asking about the credit industry and sometimes about programming in C#. He asked questions about the breakability of different operating systems and went so far as to ask me point-blank if I’d ever hacked a UNIX system. I was going to be watching this guy like a hawk.

That left the two women at the table, the admin, Darlene Alexander, and Jen Roberts. Jen didn’t give her title when she introduced herself and no one seemed inclined to fill in the blank. She asked if I was familiar with matrix management techniques. Things started to click. Most companies have a purely hierarchical structure. If you are an engineer, you work for an engineering manager who works for an engineering director who works for an engineering vice president. You know exactly how many levels separate you from the president of the company. In matrix systems, there may be a hierarchical structure on the boards, but teams are organized according to projects and the individuals on the team might be from several different departments. It turned out that Evergreen Financial Corp. was a hybrid system, but that most of the high level work was done by matrix teams who reported to a team manager and had little to do with the hierarchical structure. In fact, some team members had titles of “Director” but had no direct reports. It was far more typical of the financial industry in which directors and vice presidents were given their titles to show status and not line management. A vice president had higher decision-making authority than a director. Jen Roberts—title unknown—was our team lead.

And that brought me back to Darlene. The rest of the team jumped up from the table before the check arrived, scurrying off to various meetings, appointments, and tasks. Darlene motioned for me to stay while she took care of the check with a Platinum card.

“So, what do you think of your team, Mr. Hamar?” she asked as we left the restaurant.

“Do you prefer to be called Ms. Alexander?” I asked.

“Oh, no. Darlene is just fine.”

“Then please call me Dag.”

“Okay, Dag. But the question still stands.”

“My team. Exactly what is my role on this team? It’s not something that Arnold mentioned to me,” I said. In fact, I was beginning to wonder how I was going to carry out a covert mission in this company if I was going to be assigned a bunch of random investigations on the part of the team. I’d imagined that I would work in relative isolation—like I prefer.

“Your team is a SWAT team. It’s cross-functional and is responsible for identifying and neutralizing threats before they occur. You have a long-term project assigned by Arnie Dennis. The results of your research will be delivered to your teammates in regular weekly reports. You’ll show progress for however long it takes to accomplish the real task that he’s assigned you.” She paused and looked at me expectantly, but I decided to do no more than nod. I didn’t know yet how much she actually knew about my mission. Arnold had led me to believe that no one knew the real reason I was brought on, and certainly the lunch conversations seemed to confirm that. Seeing that I wasn’t going to provide any input at this stage, Darlene sighed.

“Well, I should have expected that,” she said. “I won’t press you for details. I’ve had stranger job requests. Here’s how it’s going to work. My job is to make sure that there is nothing standing in the way of Mr. Dennis doing his job. That means that it is also making sure there is nothing impeding your progress. I know only that your real job has nothing to do with the position on the team that you’ve been introduced to. Every morning I’ll give you a brief email synopsis of what your ‘research’ is revealing. That way if you encounter any of your teammates, you’ll have something to say when they ask you questions. Each Thursday night I’ll provide you with a short paper discussing the progress. You’ll study it that night and be able to talk intelligently about it during your Friday morning team meeting and one-on-one with Jen. Your project is Internet Protocol Security, which I take it you are reasonably well-versed in anyway, so you should be able to fill in at least a few of the blanks. Just watch out for Ford. Somehow that guy knows everything that has ever been published on every subject. I think his brain is wired to the Internet.”

“So what you are saying is that you are going to be doing my official job while I’m doing my real job?” I asked. She nodded. “Isn’t that a little beyond what an admin would normally be, uh…”

“Qualified to do?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. I hadn’t wanted to go there, but yeah. How exposed was I going to be if an office administrator was supplying all the research that I was supposed to be doing because of my high level of expertise?

“I’ve worked with Arnie for years. We were hired at the same level. Only one could rise and I hitched my wagon to his star. I left my position as programming developer to become his administrator as soon as he reached a level that allowed him to have one. We’ve been talking about hiring a technical assistant for the past three months. No matter what it might look like on the outside, the job you are filling had to be defined, vetted, a position number assigned through HR, a job description agreed upon by the executives, and budget approved for hiring. Everyone knew he had someone in mind for the position before he announced plans to hire.”

That was news to me. I’d only known about this for three days. Arnold Dennis was rising on my list of suspects again. If he was devious enough to plan three months ahead of time, then he would have had plenty of time to hide his tracks, or even point evidence at someone else in the company.

“During that time, he also directed me to research the latest in Internet Security Protocols and I have an unending list of resources and papers. I’m familiar with all the data and I’ll be cross-checking it against any new developments over the past three months, but all the heavy lifting has already been done.” Darlene paused and we walked the rest of the block in silence. Before we entered the building, though, she stopped me.

“Something has been bugging Arnie for the past six—maybe eight—months,” she said. It was the first time I’d heard her use his first name. She looked at me with an intensity that I found unsettling. “Whatever you are here to do, it’s supposed to put his mind at ease. I will do everything in my power to make you successful at that. Don’t you dare let him—or me—down.”

Twice today, I’d been admonished to not let someone down—the second time with a passion that I thought of as intimate. I’d seldom seen such intense devotion to an employer and I wondered if there was more to their relationship than met the eye. It would bear investigation. But more, I’d realized that people here liked to meddle in other people’s business. Every person I’d met today could potentially be the person “keeping an eye on me,” and most of them had the ability to use techniques that would be hard to spot. Whatever I did, someone would be watching me, just as I was watching them.

Darlene showed me to my desk. I had a small but comfortable window office just down the hall from Darlene and Arnold. That made sense, I supposed. I was his direct report, even if my team functioned in a matrix. What really surprised me was that my name and title were already on a placard on the door. On the desk was a large laptop computer docked to an even larger flat-screen monitor. A sheet of instructions for initial registration on the network was next to the computer. The rest of the room was sparsely furnished. One desk. One desk chair. One guest chair. One credenza. One lamp. The view out my window was not of the Sound, though if I looked as far left as I could out the window, I could get a glimpse between the buildings. Directly out the window, across the street, was another tall office building and I could faintly see movement behind some of the windows.

It wasn’t an executive desk. Like most tech companies, EFC issued the same basic furnishings for every office and every cubicle. It was a flat surface with metal legs and a wrench that would adjust the height by cranking a bolt in a hole on the top. The desk faced the window so my back would be to the door when I sat at it. That was the first thing that would change. I swung the desk around perpendicular to the window with my back to the wall. The window was on my right and the door on my left. I could see both. I pushed the credenza against the other wall and pulled the guest chair around to the end of my desk so visitors would sit beside me with their back to the door.

In the process of moving the furniture, I surreptitiously checked under the surface of the desk for any listening devices or electronics that might go unnoticed. That’s a nice thing about this kind of furniture—there’s really no place to hide anything unless they hollowed out the desktop and inserted something or it was hidden in a leg. I tapped on the solid surface just to make sure.

Satisfied that the furniture was secure, I turned to the computer itself. I suppose I was being paranoid, but after my lunch and briefing with Darlene, I was inclined to distrust everyone. I turned the device over and examined it closely, from the RFID asset tag on the back to the stickiness of the keys. Without actually starting the computer, I opened it and began typing on the keyboard, testing the touch of the keys to see if the keyboard had been tampered with. When I turned the computer on, I made sure no fields were selected before entering my alias and a fake password. After a moment, I typed Darlene’s alias and a brief note: “Thank you for lunch today and for introducing me to the rest of the team. I’ve got my team meeting and one-on-one with Jen on my calendar. Could you set up a weekly one-on-one with Arnold for me? I’ll keep my schedule clear, but will not be in the office on Wednesdays. Please let me know what would be convenient.” I figured that would be an adequate amount to be picked up if there was a sensing device attached to the keyboard of my computer. I shut the computer down and popped the battery out of the computer to examined it and the channel it fit in. I carry a toolkit in my briefcase, so I grabbed a screwdriver and opened the memory slot. The computer was well-equipped with RAM, but that’s where I found the bug.

It was tiny. Whoever had planted it knew a lot about electronics and cutting edge tech. I suspected this baby might even be black market. The device was just below the keyboard and could record and transmit every keystroke.

It confirmed my suspicion that someone was watching me electronically. All that someone needed was a computer set up to receive my keystrokes and they would be able to see on screen everything I typed.

By the time I’d finished my physical examination of my office and computer, it was nearly five. I suspected that this group would be looser about the hours they kept, but we were in the financial industry and experience told me that most of the office would close up and go home before six at the latest. Someplace in the building, people would just be arriving who were in synch with the Japanese markets. I was pretty sure a contingent was leaving about the time we got back from lunch, indicating a shift that was synchronized with New York. And then there were the twenty-four-hour customer service and security teams. Tomorrow I’d do a floor-by-floor tour of the entire building. But I was about ready to call it quits for today.

“Dag? Excuse me, but I couldn’t help but notice you haven’t logged into the network yet. Is there a problem with your computer?” Allen Yarborough was poking his head through my doorway. Couldn’t help but notice? Right! As Systems Admin Manager, he would know who had logged into the network if he was watching. That he’d been watching for me to log in gave me the creeps.

“No problem, Allen. HR just gave me a ton of paper to go over after orientation this morning. You know, benefit elections, policies and procedures, all that. I just never got around to logging in.”

“Well, it’s almost quitting time for today. Let’s get you logged in so I know everything works and go have a beer.” I’ll bet he wanted to know everything works. Okay, I can play this game. I powered up the computer again and it came immediately to the log-in screen. “It goes more quickly if you use your smartcard the first time you log in. You’ve already set a password when you got your ID,” Allen said helpfully. I slotted my ID card into the reader on the computer. It identified my user name and I typed in the password. The screen went directly to the official EFC desktop and I was on the network. I smiled at Allen.

“Looks like everything works.”

“Great. The first time you open email, it will install and record your settings. Takes about five minutes to get the test message sent through. By this time, you probably already have a day’s worth of email backlog, so you’ll have your work cut out for you tomorrow. Now let’s go get that beer.”

“Oh. Hey, sorry about that. I can’t make it tonight. I’ve got an appointment at six to… uh… see a dog I’m thinking of adopting. Let’s make it another evening. Anytime but Wednesday or Friday.”

“No problem! I’ll see if there’s some other guys I can introduce you to. Maybe Thursday. What kind of dog?”

“A, uh… greyhound. Rescue, you know?”

“Oh yeah. I’ve heard about that. Let me know how it goes.” He left, looking for all the world like he was just a helpful teammate. Hmm. New candidate at the top of my list.

As soon as he was out of sight, I changed my password. There are easy passwords to remember that are almost impossible for a computer to guess. I called up a virtual keyboard on screen and used the mouse to click on each character. My physical keyboard was bugged, but it was a lot harder to track mouse clicks.

When I was satisfied that I had thwarted any attempts to capture my log-in information, I sat back in my chair to contemplate my first day at work. I had a whole list of suspects, and I had a feeling Arnold had put this team together specifically for me to watch. It probably included his entire list of suspects plus whoever was assigned to keep an eye on me. I decided to leave the keyboard bug in place in the computer and to bring a detachable keyboard into the office with me tomorrow. I’d just let my spy stare at a blank screen for a day and see if anyone poked his head in to find out what was wrong. While I was contemplating this, my screen went dark and then switched to screen-saver mode. Didn’t take long—less than five minutes. One of the company policies that had been driven into my head during orientation this morning was the importance of not leaving your desk with an active screen. The screen saver, however, surprised me.

In place of my desktop, I saw a video feed. Of me. Sitting at my desk. Right now. I didn’t immediately swivel around. I could see the direction of where the camera was located as it was shooting straight through the glass door and sidelight of my office. What I was looking at was a live feed from a security camera in the hallway just outside. After about twenty seconds, the camera panned to the right thirty degrees and held that position. Then right another thirty degrees so I was looking across the cubicles across the hall.

If I had left my desk in the position it was in when I arrived, whoever monitored that camera could have seen everything that appeared on my screen. Someone was serious about watching.

But why show me the video?

{5}
Once a Hacker

Being a hacker, I’ve always had an impulse to hide my identity. As a result, I’ve never put my real name on the Internet. I’ve never put my own photo on a social site. I’ve never indicated in my profile where I live, how old I am, or even my sex. I have very few ‘friends’ online and they mostly know me by one of my aliases and not by name.

Amazingly, I’m still pretty active and think of myself as even a little vulnerable online. I have a dozen email addresses, carefully concealed behind various identities. My passwords for those accounts are changed every thirty days. I create temporary email addresses through anonymous host sites and then create permanent addresses using the temporary one as a reference. Then I delete the temporary account. My security software is the best I can find, but because I’ve cracked it myself, I place little trust in its ability to keep my systems safe.

I don’t use WiFi in my office or my home. I use a cellular modem to connect my computers through encrypted packet data on a virtual private network. That makes my activities almost undetectable as my IP address changes with every location from which I connect.

It also makes everything damned inconvenient.

I am a digital fortress, and even so, I am afraid of being spied upon. It really irritated me that in my first day at EFC, I’d found two devices set to spy on me as I worked. And I figured there would be more.

I hadn’t opened email after logging. I’d simply stared at the computer screen watching the security camera outside my office continue its 360 degree pan every four minutes. Who monitored that camera? As I left for the day, I wandered aimlessly down the corridor. All through the office I could see monitors on people’s desktops displaying images from security cameras. Occasionally, I would see myself on a screen as I walked by, which meant the cameras were located all through the building. That amount of visual data would take truckloads of digital space to store, even after high compression. But I had to admit, the simple reminder that I was being watched at all times had a Big Brother effect on my willingness to commit any grave sin in the office. It probably had the same effect on every other employee.

That was a preview of For Money or Mayhem. To read the rest purchase the book.

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