Deal Gone Bad - A Thriller (Frank Morrison Thriller Series Book 1) (11 page)

But privately, he was not
so sure.

Morrison decided to stick
around while Johnson got busy on his assignment. The hacker occupied a central
position at his big table under a bright neon wash. The rest of the basement
was sparse and dark, except for a discrete cone of light projected by a reading
lamp in a corner. That’s where Morrison retreated. He sat in a comfortable
chair with a book he’d picked almost at random from Johnson’s huge library. He
enjoyed it, but it was not an attention grabber. His gaze kept shifting between
the pages and the hacker’s table.

Johnson had seriously gotten
to work. He typed on his various keyboards in short frenetic bursts, peppering
them machine-gun style. He used all three of his laptops and kept going between
them in what appeared to Morrison as a random sequence. Knowing Johnson, it was
surely a highly efficient and focused process. But for all his drive and energy
at his desk, Johnson also seemed annoyed. He kept sighing. In a very discreet way
at first. But soon, it became more and more audible. He even started to hit the
keys with some brutality.

When Johnson turned his head
in an impatient gesture for the fourth or fifth time, Morrison asked, “Am I
bothering you?”

Johnson swiveled his chair
to face him.

“Yeah, a little,” he said.

“Didn’t know you were so
sensitive.”

“It feels like you’re
watching over my shoulder.”

Morrison raised the book.
“Just reading,” he said.

“I know, but I’m used to
working all alone in here.”

“Want me to go?”

Johnson tilted his head. “Don’t
take it bad, Morrison, but I think it would be better, yeah.”

Morrison knew where his
interest lay. If Johnson was going to work more efficiently all alone, he
certainly wasn’t going to stand in his way. He had a quick look at his watch.
It was now 6:00 p.m. anyway.

“OK, no problem,” he said.
“Call me when you find something.”

“Sure,” Johnson said. He
nodded in his direction. “You can take the book with you, if you want.”

Morrison closed it, got up
and aimed for the staircase. Johnson swiveled back to face the wall of computer
screens again.

Before he left the room,
Morrison said, “Have fun, man.”

Johnson nodded and grinned.
“Thanks, Morrison, I’m already having plenty.”

Morrison left the house
and got back to his Navigator. He had planned to stick around longer, until 7:00
p.m., but this was fine. He could now head straight to his next port of call. Most
likely, there would be some waiting around to do. But a bar was just the right
place for that anyway.

As he threaded his way out
of Johnson’s quiet neighborhood, Morrison saw that the driveways all around had
filled back up. This was Friday. After a long week of hard labor, the workers
had retreated home for their much-needed two days of respite. Johnson aside,
the people who lived there wouldn’t be sitting around to earn their money. They
wouldn’t be at the top of the food chain. Their position would mean they worked
harder, faced tougher constraints and were subjected to more uncertainty than
the average person. They had to scratch and scrabble. The mortgage, the car
payments, the grocery bills. All carried a steep price. Morrison felt deep
sympathy for them, but at the same time, he didn’t understand how anybody could
subject themselves to such a regimen. He led the life he led in part because he
needed to exercise full control over his own destiny. He relished that. Even if
it meant he was at risk of losing his freedom from time to time.

Morrison merged back onto
Main Street and headed downtown through a thin trickle of traffic. There, he found
an angled parking spot not too far from Flanagan’s Bar.

He was not a regular at
that bar. The few times he’d been there, he’d found the place OK.

But he knew it was the
haunt of the person he wanted to see next.

Morrison pushed through the
door and walked across a creaky old wooden floor up to the counter. The place
was like a million other bars all around the state: brick walls, massive wooden
posts and beams. Thin strips of clear maple or cherry wood on the floor,
polished to a smooth, dull finish by years of stepping and stomping. Flatscreens
above the central bar and on the walls. Hushed conversations mingled with a mix
of classic rock songs from the last forty years. It felt cozy and comfortable
the minute you walked in.

He perched up on a stool,
locked his feet on the foot rail and dropped his jacket on the stool next to
him. There were two other patrons beside him at the angled bar. Two men, each
sitting alone. He ordered a pint of IPA, took the book he’d borrowed from
Johnson from his jacket pocket and got right back to it.

While he was reading, he
could hear the comings and goings. Friends greeting each other. Sudden bursts
of laughter. All in all, not a very busy place, but not a dead spot either. He
kept on reading without paying too much attention to his surroundings, only
raising his head to order another beer.

The book was getting
better but at ten to seven, he folded down the corner of the page he was at and
put it down on the counter. Then he swiveled on the stool to scan the room.
There were more people than when he’d arrived. And they kept coming. A steady, if
sparse, trickle. Morrison stayed with his back to the bar. He wanted to have a
clear view of the entrance.

A group of excited students
came in next. Three girls and two boys. He was convinced that they carried ID
that made them at least twenty-one years old. But he was also convinced they
were fake. They looked like teenagers barely out of high school. Their
enthusiasm to get into such a simple country town bar belied them. They swept across
the floor in a tight pack and huddled together in a booth.

Seconds later, a woman
came through the door with a folded copy of the
New York Times
under her
arm. She was alone. Not very tall. Black hair. Late thirties. Not a beauty
pageant queen, but not a plain woman either. Far from it. Her features may have
been ordinary, but the confidence that oozed from every pore of her skin made
her stand out. She looked vibrant. Radiant.

What also struck you was
the way she walked. She had slightly arched legs and she moved forward with her
hips in an almost masculine way.

Morrison hadn’t seen her
in more than three years, but here she was.

His good friend, Cowgirl.

After Morrison’s
departure, Johnson interrupted his hacking work to go upstairs and lock up the
front door. He used the opportunity to raid his kitchen. He came back down at
the helm of his brightly lit ship with a bag of mixed jellybeans and a big
bottle of soda.

He was on a roll. During his
first meeting with Morrison, he hadn’t been totally straight about burning all
bridges to their failed deal’s setup. Three years is a long time. He had
forgotten a lot about the intricate details of that setup. And even more about
how he had flushed them.

Turned out that he had
kept bigger chunks of them than he remembered at first. Essentially, Johnson had
been responsible for hacking his way into five banks and altering a number of
accounts so that Morrison and his partners could drain them in flash ATM
operations. Morrison had paid him two hundred thousand dollars for this work.
All up front, from his own pocket. A huge loss for Morrison. Especially when
you added three long years of hard prison after he was busted. But that was the
name of the game. Johnson had had no problem pocketing his money and enjoying
it afterward. After all, he’d performed most of the work required of him. Morrison’s
arrest and his failure to capitalize on his setup was not Johnson’s problem. Johnson
figured he’d opened the doors to a potential ten millions dollars for him. His job
stopped right there and then.

Johnson took a swig of ice
cold root beer: his fuel of choice for long hacking sessions. He just loved the
taste. And there was lots of sugar to keep him sharp and awake.

So he was able to get back
on his feet faster than anticipated, which always felt good. Good for the ego
and good for business. At the moment, with the information he had retrieved in
the last twenty-four hours, he had once again assembled the big picture of his
setup at a second bank, First Collins Bank, and at a third one, Candela Bank.
Those two were ready to be hacked into once again to perform an audit. He knew
the server names he had to aim for, how the security logs were set up, which
user IDs he had leveraged last time. A nice little package that a competent
hacker could immediately put to use.

Johnson remembered that
First Collins had proved tougher to crack than Candela. At the time, they had
extra layers of security and a very tight monitoring system. So he decided to
attack this one himself and give Candela to his sidekick. As for banks number
four and number five, they would have to wait. He wanted to see what he could
find out about First Collins and Candela Bank first.

He used a slew of
anonymous email addresses to communicate with his sidekick. They cycled through
a series of these addresses, rarely using one more than two or three times.
That made their exchanges extremely difficult to track and unlikely to be
detected. On top of that, no one email ever contained a full message. He always
divided specific instructions into numerous pieces and sent them independently.
It was up to his guy to piece everything back together and then get on with
whatever Johnson was asking him to do.

After he finished sending
the last of his emails concerning Candela Bank, Johnson paused to grab a
handful of jellybeans. He loved to munch on them. He felt an instant kick from the
thick sugary juice. He bought the jellybeans specially made out for sports use,
the ones loaded with caffeine and minerals. Helped to keep the mind alert. To
prolong the buzz, he took a big gulp of root beer, straight from the bottle.

And now, on to First
Collins
,
he thought. Johnson sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a
moment. He had to tread very lightly. First Collins’ security was tight,
constantly monitoring every single connection made there. Log files compiled
every action performed by every user on their servers. He had to strike fast
and effectively. With his eyes closed, he assembled a sequence of actions in
his mind, then reviewed it and modified it slightly. When he thought he had
pieced together a good plan of action, he sat up in his chair and got to work.

There were a million
things to do. First, find a way to establish a connection. Then put a small
program in place to control the logs and make sure they were expunged on the
fly of any mention of his current activity. This was hard but essential work.
He had to get in, in a secure way, before he could think about perusing the
servers and actually perform his audit. That task required all his focus. Tapped
every hacking skill he’d developed since his early teenage years.

It took him over an hour
to establish a connection to a server in the First Collins landscape, a lot
longer than he’d anticipated. Since the last time, the bank had improved its procedures
a lot.
Shit, I’m not charging Morrison enough for this,
he thought as he
went along. His connection established, Johnson paused for a beat. He refueled
with another mouthful of jellybeans. Chased them down with another big gulp of root
beer.

Just when he was about to
get back to work and install his log-editing program on the server, the power
failed. The big neon lights went instantly dark above him. As did the reading
lamp at the far end of the room.

“Shit,” he muttered to
himself. “Shit.”

The only light in the
whole basement now came from his table. From the laptops and the computer
screens. The laptops ran on battery power so they would be fine, at least for a
while. As would be the screens. Since they were plugged into UPS’s, they would also
have a couple of hours’ worth of power. As for his wireless router and the
modem from his Internet provider, they were also plugged into a UPS.

But, nonetheless, a chill
ran down his spine.

He immediately checked his
Internet connection.

It was gone.

“Shit!” he shouted this
time. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

Then he thought,
Is
this happening just in my house?
He got up and paused. Looked around. Obviously,
there was no one else in the room. Then he listened hard. He didn’t hear much. Maybe
a faint car engine sound. Or a truck passing by. But nothing too close to his
house. At least that’s what he thought.

He went to one of the front
windows. Drew the curtain an inch or so. Peered outside. It was pitch dark. Then
he drew the curtain the full width and sighed. The whole street was plunged into
darkness.

Johnson always felt edgy
when he was on a hacking binge. It always tensed him up. Always made him
paranoid. He shook his head and muttered to himself,
Damn!
Then he drew
the curtain over the window and went back to his desk. There, he took another
big gulp of root beer and looked at his laptop.

The Internet connection
was still down. Some portion of his provider’s network must have been affected
by the power failure too.

He shook his head.

That was bad.

That was really bad.

It meant that at that
precise moment, a connection with a hacked user ID and password was open on a
First Collins Bank server. It was just sitting there. Idle. The logs were
picking it up. Registering it. Soon, those logs would be replicated to other
servers. They would be making their way up the chain.

Johnson wasn’t worried by
the possibility of anyone tracing back that connection to him. He was using
multiple layers of proxies between himself and First Collins. But still, if he didn’t
react fast enough, that idle open connection was like waving a red handkerchief
in front of the security guys. Didn’t necessarily mean they would pick up on
it. They could be looking the other way while you waved. But they could also be
staring right at you.

Johnson checked the screen
again for the connection icon. It was still down.

He cursed profusely. Pushed
his chair back from the desk.

Now he had no choice.

He had to hurry up and go
for plan B.