Borderless Deceit (9 page)

So he knew for certain that, no, Carson never lived anyplace other than here, and his wife grew up next door.

“Kinky.”

More facts acquired by the snuffling bear: Carson joining the Service and showing dedication; Carson, still young, deciphering the Warsaw Pact's fall-back strategy in the event of a major conventional military confrontation in central Europe; Carson figuring out the intended deployment by the Soviets of an improved sonar net in the North Atlantic; Carson studying decrypted Soviet data and concluding they had discovered the holes in NORAD's radar cover over the high Arctic (useful for a surprise Deep Strike); Carson's work standing up to all cross-examination; Carson causing the Yanks to be hellishly impressed.

“Cool.”

More facts still. Post Cold War. Volumes of incisive work on links between the politicians, the financiers and the traders of embargoed arms. Deep down, the snuffler knows he's overdoing this. He should be more prudent and say less. But the addiction to spinning yarns trumps restraint and if anything the speed picks up. Carson's attitude pissing most everyone off; Carson becoming untouchable because, by popular demand from below the 49th parallel, he's named keeper of a certain gate, whereby coordination of the intelligence relationship with the Americans falls into his lap. And what happens next? The intelligence genius gets to be so full of himself that he looks down on all and sundry as useless and inferior beings.

“How someone that smart,” the Czar concluded, “gets life that ass backwards is beyond me.”

“Gothic.”

The stair climbing was getting the better of Heywood. He was stopping frequently to wheeze, allowing Jaime's thoughts to go back a bit. How had the glowering eyes in the far corner seen her? Or into
her? As someone inferior? As competition? Or as an outcast like himself? Was there a game in that? Maybe one day they would play it. No problem thinking of a name: Cloven Hoof and Fallen Angel.

The Czar and his young acolyte finally stood before a thick steel door. But even as Jaime punched numbers into a wall pad and an electronic lock clicked and the entrance to her new domain gave way, she continued thinking of the infernal countenance at the back. Only when a switch was flipped and a great cavern sprung to life did the brooding analyst's image fade.

Jaime never imagined that one day she'd have a place like it. Sure, it was an overnight job that got a bit rushed. Yet it was mostly finished. Enormous computing power had been assembled in record time and only she had access. “Come clean, Irv, who'd you bribe?”

The Czar shrugged.
Carte blanche
.

Now
he
had questions. What was the plan? What happened next? “Keep it simple,” he muttered. “On matters of technology I'm quickly out of my depth.”

The first line of attack – as the Czar understood Jaime – would be thus:

The bug had been sophisticated and so had to have been big, a wallop of a program. Somewhere in the network a burst of data would have entered and the perturbation should have registered. Such back-up processes as might by chance have been running that moment would have stored at least part of it, that is, before the servers began self-destructing. Jaime planned to copy the back-up tapes into her flashy new computers. That might take a day. A comparison of the time-lines of digital peaks on different tapes, even with millisecond intervals, might indicate where the virus showed up first. “So we could find out which server the bug used to get in. It won't tell us much, but it'll be a start.”

The Czar nodded. “We gotta know that. Makes sense. If there's a burglary you want to know where the thief came in. The virus was monstrous, am I right, Jaime?”

“There's one great hacker out there somewhere, Irv. How good? Don't know. Not yet. But I'm betting he was inside your network for
weeks figuring out how it worked. Wanna see how it gets done?”

Heywood hesitated. “Not sure, Jaime. I know you kids love doing it, but I understand sometimes someone gets caught. Don't think that's for me.”

“Relax. It's fun. We won't do much, just go in somewhere, browse around, get back out. No one will know. Let's do a police department? Always cute stuff to look at there. Pick a city.”

“Not sure, Jaime. Really. Playing Peeping Tom? On the police?”

“Hey, come on. We'll open a few files. See what's in them. Close them. No one will be the wiser.”

Peeking into files – the lure was strong. Jaime saw the Czar was wavering and so she picked a city. Dallas. A mouse clicked and a flurry of symbols appeared on a screen. Jaime made them come, then made them go away. The rapidity of it, a true visual assault, made the Czar feel giddy, and he decided to blink – as an antidote to hypnotism. His eyelids began going up and down, as regular as a sweeping lighthouse beacon, Jaime describing what she was doing. Heywood tried to grasp her flow, her account of how the records of the Dallas Police Department were being bared, but it sounded like a truckload of jargon which made no sense.

She'd done most of the preliminary work on her laptop at home, so it went fast. With Irv looking on she reviewed the steps. “Footprinting's done.”
Footprinting?
“Sort of like casing a joint, Irv. The scanning's been done too.”
Scanning?
“Well…before you go into a bank you want to know the positions of the doors and windows. So I did a ping sweep of all the IP addresses.” Behind the blinking lids, Heywood's eyes were rolling. “And here comes an enumeration.”

Don't tell me! screamed Heywood's inner voice. I don't want to know! But what he said was: “Sure. Gotcha. I know what an enumeration is.”

Jaime's hacking fingers continued their keyboard dance. She announced they were now no longer visiting the DPD web site with its upstanding messages on recruitment, training and career advancement, but had slipped behind it, and had come up against the DPD system's firewall. Heywood saw columns of signs and words with backslashes in front and behind, screens coming, screens going, and finally a window listing names. Jaime paused. This screen was tranquil for a moment. It
didn't move. They studied it, Jaime conspiratorially whispering that these were the names of the folks with PINs for accessing DPD databases.
We're gonna ride in with one
. Jaime struck another key. In a lower corner a separate, inset screen appeared. It was blank.
Patience, Irv, someone's bound to come back from morning coffee soon
. They lay in wait. Then a quiet, low-pitched sound and the inset window showed a name.
DURHAMDL
.

Lieutenant D.L. Durham back at his station was signing in.

Seven asterisks appeared below Durham's name. The PIN. Jaime struck more keys. She told Heywood to observe the inset window. He was transfixed. Eyelids ceased blinking. The computer purred and there were three quick gong-like sounds. Jaime counted to five, her finger describing a broad arc in the air. On cue to a snapping of her fingers a script appeared:
MYMUMMY
.

She grinned.
Wanna bet Mr. Durham is one big, mean, ugly man?

Password eavesdropping. Simple really. Heywood licked his lips when Jaime declared they had hitched a ride in on Lieutenant Durham's strong back.

More pronouncements from Jaime. They were now inside the DPD network. To keep the demo straightforward she wouldn't escalate the privilege they'd gained. After an exotic display of more rapidly fingered keys, Jaime concluded D.L. Durham was doing parking infractions.
Maybe not a lieutenant. Maybe only a clerk
. Some parts of the system, ongoing criminal investigations, for example, probably had more complicated access procedures; she wasn't going to bother with them, since all this was just for fun. On the other hand, the database on closed cases containing the files of convicted criminals was available. And, as D.L. Durham began processing the sins of Dallas double parkers, his doppelgangers moved stealthily into the city's registry of convicts. They perused the collection. So many files; so many failures, so much perversion, so much to study. It was enough to enliven Heywood. “I've always maintained,” he said perkily, “that it's stimulating being a file clerk. I've given my share of pep talks on that.”

Jaime asked him to pick a file and he chose one randomly. It was on a certain Dallas all-star banker, an oil-patch financier. It turned out he had suffocated his wife by grabbing her by the neck as she slept.
Along with his latest male lover he had subsequently dismembered her, wrapped the body bits in tarpaulin, and stashed them in the hold of the company jet. The pair then flew off for a vacation in Acapulco. The pilot was requested to make a detour to the east, and over the Gulf of Mexico they discarded the woman piece by piece. The pilot was paid well and kept silent. However, a few months later, the lover sensed his role in the all-star banker's life was fizzling, that he was slowly becoming just a piece of decoration. It caused him to seethe with frustration. The fateful evening came in a San Francisco club specializing in blond boys from eastern Europe. When the all-star banker looked them up and down with a strong glint in his eye, the lover flipped. He threatened blackmail. Too bad his voice was a few decibels too loud. Justice took its course. The all-star banker was meticulously coached for the trial and consistently assumed the role of victim, saying his lover had railroaded him into everything. He got a dozen years. The lover began his testimony unhelpfully. He described his métier as
star-fucker. I do it for a living and it isn't always easy
. The statement was interpreted by the court as bringing clarity. It provided an economic motive for the murder. Right up to his end in the electric chair the lover maintained his métier was noble.

The file animated Heywood. “Pretty good story,” he said. Jaime wanted to know if the Service had any to match it. Heywood replied there were plenty with similar contours, but none with the same dramatic texture. No one, as far as he knew, had ended up in an electric chair. “No star-fuckers in the Service?” Jaime asked lightly. Heywood cleared his throat. “Heartthrobs, Jaime. That's all we get.”

She was business-like again, saying files could be pilfered, amended, or destroyed. Pilferage was easy, but amendments required an exquisite touch. Care had to be taken to cover your tracks. She described another trick, building a secret entry portal. “You do that in some unlikely location in a network and use it to ride in any time. You don't need to wait for the parking violations guy to go on-line.” They had a final peek at D.L. Durham who had finished administering the previous day's double parkers and had just started the No-Parking-Zone infractions. Jaime initiated withdrawal from the DPD. With a final click their excursion to Dallas was history.

“Hope you had a blast, Irv. Don't worry. No trace left. The point is, something like this happened to you. Someone studied your network, found a way in, established steady access, and when it pleased him, lit the cannon.”

“We're gonna get that turkey,” the Czar muttered. “We'll suffocate him by the neck, dismember him, throw the pieces into Hudson's Bay.”

“Stay cool, Irv. He's good. You don't want to destroy that. You never know, you might decide to hire him. I'll be looking for his entry point and once I've got that I'll construct models of his logic paths. Once the back-up tapes are decoded, you'll lay your mitts on him soon enough.”

“Forty million years from now,” the Czar sighed. “I look forward to the report.”

“Had a good talk with Ranjit about that,” Jaime replied. “Don't feel too dished about what he said. Listen…”

More jargon filled the windowless chamber as Jaime reviewed Ranjit's approach to decryption. She explained why she planned another way but the words were as dizzying as the fickle patterns on Jaime's computer screens. Heywood started his blinking again. Somehow all he could see was tough files and frail humans. He tried to imagine the work that star-fuckers have to do to get by. He tried to focus on Jaime's voice too, but he couldn't consistently pick up its drift.

“…two weeks to get one message on one tape deciphered?” she was saying, “…not frankly something to get too hopped up about. My brother's pioneered a new technique. Get this, Irv. Just the ticket for your generation. He calls it: Targeted Analysis of Binary Usage. TABU! Don't you love it?”

Heywood repeated the word.
Taboo
. In the partial light of Jaime's chamber, his eyes began moving from one monitor to the other, their bright colours changing, dancing, transforming. Brilliant displays, all of them – like the northern lights. He nodded at Jaime's brother's title for the new technique. He even made a little joke about working it into the title of his next report to Étienne des Étoiles. “
Taboo and Progress,
or,
Network Resurrection through Taboo
.” Jaime giggled lightly, adding her version:
TABU Saves the Service
.

Even so, questions gnawed at him. Where is this taking me? he asked silently, staring at the oscillating colours on the screens. What does this limitless peeping-tomism mean? So we get instant gratification from spying into files of bankers and their favourite fuckers. So taboos allow us to regain lost knowledge. Does that make things more perfect? In Jaime's chamber, the Czar remained outwardly enthusiastic, but certain reflections began pressing in on him.

It was because he knew about taboos. On his first posting in Lagos, he arrived with a New Brunswick barn full of them. In the steamy West Africa climate, after a quick marriage to a lively secretary at the British Council, he found himself in a partnership with a young wife who had none. She taught him to drop his taboos one by one. A night came when she was lying on her stomach and he was massaging two porcelain-white buttocks and she whispered in her lovely British accent:
Be a darling, Irving, use your imagination
. Dark fear, excitement, pleasure. A taboo confronted and swept away. It crowded in on Heywood. Were he and Hannah that different from the banker and his star-fucker? He visualised her…and them…and in Jaime's chamber, the Czar grew very calm coping with a strong sensation in his groin. “Maybe we could continue this tomorrow,” he suggested, trying to sound saintly.