The Canton Connection (4 page)

Driving
across the Potomac always presented an inspiring sight for Jake. He looked first for the Washington Monument, then the Capitol Building, then the Lincoln Memorial. The city seemed laid out in order of importance.

As the armored Suburban turned onto Pennsylvania and they came within view of a honeycomb-windowed building, Jake felt a moment of awe and pride. It was the J. Edgar Hoover Building, headquarters of the FBI. These were his people, but he had always assumed the work at headquarters was massively more important than anything he was pursuing in the burbs.

Arriving with the director made Jake wonder if he was up to the task. What did Hoffkeit see in him that gave him any confidence that he could handle a case involving the A root server? And why did Hoffkeit think he was qualified to interview Stacy Stefansson, the woman at the heart of the World Wide Web?

Both men had to go through the metal detector, and even the director had to surrender his cell phone.

The building had once posted a color-coded terrorist warning sign in the lobby. But Jake noticed the warning sign was gone. Was it really true that the nation no longer faced dire threats? How about losing the A root server?

Jake took a deep breath. His task was to pursue the connections between Chu’s murder, Stacy
Stefansson, and recent attacks on the A root server. He hoped by unearthing what was behind Chu’s murder, he could expose any existing cyber threats.

The elevator dropped him off on the fourth floor, while Hoffkeit proceeded to the top. His only command to Jake before the elevator doors closed was, “Come to my office when you’re through.”

The elevator had deposited Jake on a floor he had visited several times before. The entire crime lab used to be situated there, but most of its work had since been moved to more spacious quarters on the Marine base at Quantico.

Now the hallway led to smaller offices behind closed doors. Hoffkeit’s aide led Jake to a room at the back of the building, where Jake had once interrogated a witness in a gun smuggling case. It was a sound-proof, surveillance-proof chamber.

Swinging idly from side to side in one of the swivel chairs sat Stacy Stefansson.

She was no longer wearing her tank top and jeans. She looked professional in a navy blue
pants suit, which didn’t fit his image of her as a computer programmer. He was having a hard time getting a fix on who she really was.

“Good morning. I’m
Special Agent Jake Maguire,” he said, reaching for his badge. But he changed his mind and offered a handshake instead.

“So that’s the name behind the face,” she said. “I saw you at the funeral.” An intelligent brightness played in her baby blue eyes.

Her grip was firm.

“Sorry about the cold hands,” she said. “There’s no control unit for the air conditioning.”

“And I’m sorry,” he said, “to have frightened you off at the funeral.”

She didn’t respond. Maybe she was just as uncomfortable about the
ir brief encounter the day before.

He decided to get right down to business.

“I understand you work for Verisign,” he began, flipping her file open.

“Do you know what I do?”

“I understand you work on something called the A root server…”

She lowered her eyes and grinned, then looked at him. “You don’t have a clue what this is all about, do you?”

“If you could fill in some background information about the server…”

“Okay. Let me know when this gets over your head.” She stood and walked over to a white board that stretched across an entire wall of the room. She picked up a black marker and drew a small box at the top center of the board. “Say this is the A root server,” she said.

He nodded.

“This computer holds all the DNS addresses for the .com domain. Most people think this is a single, physical server that sits in some office. That used to be the case. The root zone file used to reside on a single computer at the top of a hierarchy of computers.” She drew lines down to a second tier of boxes. “Our company used to have that file.”

“I thought you still did.”

“Now we maintain the file, but it resides on thirteen different servers.” She filled in thirteen boxes on the upper-most tier, and drew lines downward from each box to the second tier of servers.

“So there’s no hierarchical structure?” Jake said.

“It’s more disseminated, using anycast addressing.” She drew a bottom row of boxes. “So any computer in the world can find a domain name by referencing any one of these root servers.” She drew lines upward to demonstrate computers requesting addresses from the thirteen servers.

Jake kind of got it. If he sat at his computer at home and opened a web browser, he could type in the name of any website in the world and the internet would find the exact computer where the website was located and connect his computer directly to that website. “So all the web traffic doesn’t pass through the A root server,” he said. “You’re just a yellow pages that computers refer to when looking up addresses.”

“Right. When you type in an English word, such as ‘Google,’ it is actually a pseudonym for a numerical code that specifies an exact computer where the website resides. All we do at Verisign is maintain the Yellow Pages.”

She put the marker down and returned to her chair.

“Who, exactly, maintains this file?”

“I do.”

“But people register new addresses every hour of the day,” he said. “When you sit here, is anybody updating your file?”

She smiled. “An organization has been chosen to approve all the new addresses and remove expired addresses. That organization is ICANN, which stands for the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. I take their changes and update the root server file.”

Slowly the picture became clear. Stacy’s job was a clerical job that required some programming skill, as well as a large amount of responsibility. That was where his investigation came in. Could she be compromised?

He looked at her open expression. Honesty and transparency seemed among her hallmarks, and her most attractive features. On the other hand, he would expect a more closed, secretive person to have the job.

“Exactly how did you get your job?”

“I’ve worked on several contracts for the Department of Commerce, which is responsible for the security of the Domain Name System. Verisign has the contract to handle two of the root servers, A and J. So when the job opened up at Verisign, they gave it to me.”

“So you have a security clearance?”

“Of course. I couldn’t work on such a contract without one.” She eyed him closely. “Are you questioning my integrity?”

“I just need to understand the hiring process.”

He stared at her scheme on the wall. “I’m intrigued by the terminology you use,” he said. “What’s an A root server as opposed to a J root server?”

She stood up and pointed at the upper tier of boxes. “Don’t confuse these with the A through M root servers. All you see here is the A root server system. Domain names are classified under top level domains such as .com, .net, .gov, .mil, .edu and all the country designations such as .uk and .fr. These classifications are divided up among different root servers. The A root server holds the .com names.”

“So what you’ve drawn here is the network of root servers for just the .com addresses?”

“That’s right.”

It took a moment for Jake to realize what he had just said. “Just the .com addresses” represented most of the internet usage in the United States, which accounted for such a large swath of the GDP.

He studied the thirteen boxes at the top of the board. “You said the root file resides on thirteen different servers. Exactly where are they located?”

“Many are overseas.”

Jake felt uncomfortable with all the openness and transparency. The whole world having access to U.S. domain addresses was great for the economy, but access to the servers handling all the domain name addresses seemed a bit risky.

So he raised his objection. “But these root servers are connected to the internet, and thus can be attacked.”

“True. Any hacker would love to meddle with the database of names.”

“Is the A root server safe?”

“Not completely. But, we have a redundant system.” She pointed to the thirteen boxes in a row.

“Yet there’s one file,” he said.

“Correct. We maintain it here in the United States.”

“At the Department of Commerce.”

She nodded.

“And where do you keep the password to the A root server?”

“
Up here,” she said, pointing to her head. “It’s not something that you would want to write down or tell someone. It’s locked inside here.”

He eyed the thirteen servers suspiciously. So those were the subjects of hackers’ interest. “Where are those servers located?”

She jotted down a name under each box. “Los Angeles, New York, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Palo Alto, Ashburn…”

“Wait a second,” he said. “We have an A root server in Hong Kong? Last I checked, Hong Kong is part of China.”

“We need people to access the internet quickly from anywhere in the world.”

“But Hong Kong?”

He could see a highly secure computer in Germany, or some bank vault in New York. But he just couldn’t see how the benefits outweighed the risks of an A root server in Hong Kong.

“Remember,” she said, “the internet is an international, nongovernmental effort.”

“But you said the Department of Commerce is responsible for the security of the A root server.”

She nodded. “Some of the servers in the U.S. are at Commerce facilities. We used to run the servers in-house, but recently we’ve gone to more secure sites.”

He looked at the last name she had written. “Where’s Ashburn?”

“It’s a small, incorporated area near Dulles,” she said, referring to Washington’s major airport located in Northern Virginia.

He had grown up in the area and still only vaguely remembered that there was such an incorporated area. “Do you work in Ashburn?” he asked.

“No. At Verisign in Reston.”

“How did Verisign get the job to handle the A and J root servers?”

“We were selected by the IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, a department of ICANN.”

The relationships between the nongovernmental organizations were murky to him. He would have to research that later. Once again, he became more suspicious the less he knew.

Only then did he realize that he was studying Stacy with outward skepticism.

“We have voiceprints that prove you were the witness who called 9-1-1 about Han Chu’s murder.”

She sat down slowly. “I know. The police questioned me
yesterday afternoon.”

“How did you know
Chu?”

She stared back at him. “I didn’t. A man approached me when I was jogging on the bike path. I didn’t know it was Han Chu.”

“Why not?”

“I’d never seen him before in my life. He was just some nice, innocent-looking Chinese man trying to get my attention.”

“Okay, you didn’t recognize him because you had never met him. But did you know of him?”

“No.”

“If he was a stranger, why was he trying to get your attention?”

She shrugged.

“Why did you go to his funeral?” he asked.

She spoke under her breath. “I was curious.”

“Why didn’t you give your name to the 9-1-1 operator?”

She didn’t respond.

She had phoned 9-1-1 to report the incident, but she was computer-savvy and wanted to remain anonymous. She had used a Voice over IP connection to make the call, eliminating any way she could be tracked down by authorities.

“You didn’t want to give away your identity, so you used a computer to make the call.”

She didn’t contradict him.

“What I want to know is why. Why didn’t you want to be associated with the incident?”

“It was horrendous,” she said.

“Is it because the perpetrator saw you?” he pressed.

“No. He didn’t see me.”

“Did you recognize him?”

“No.”

“Can you describe him
to me?” he said.

At last her eyes met his. “Tall, lean, dark hair, young. He ran in from the bushes with a baseball bat. He wore a white shirt, dark tie and dark pants.”

“Why did he kill Han Chu?”

“I have no idea.” She buried her face in her hands. “I was out jogging. I saw this nice, middle-aged Chinese man approaching me from about twenty yards away. He smiled at me and motioned for me to stop and talk. A moment later, I saw this tall American-looking guy rush in from the side with a baseball bat. He called out something in Chinese, and I crouched behind some bushes. I saw the guy bash the Chinese guy over the head with the bat and knock him out cold and then drag him into the bushes. So I slipped away and ran home.” She swallowed hard. “That’s all I can say.”