Keeplock: A Novel of Crime (18 page)

Parker smacked the keyboard for a moment and the computer spoke again: “And no talking!”

“A voice synthesizer,” Parker announced. “Nothing but the best. That’s what I told Eddie. Does it matter if I picked up a few toys so I wouldn’t get bored? Morasso has his dope. Avi plays with his guns. Eddie struts around like a tin dictator. I’ve got my computer. It’s all working out for the best.”

“Including murder, John?” I kept my voice calm.

His mouth tightened and he looked away. “I had a problem with that, but I worked it out. Look, Pete, suppose a soda company asked me to write a program that would allow them to schedule deliveries. Suppose the company was located in Chicago and wanted to deliver as far away as Los Angeles. Would it make sense for me to write a program that only gets the soda bottles to Phoenix?”

What he could do was write programs for a company that didn’t commit murders. I didn’t mention that, of course. What I said was, “Ya know, Eddie says it doesn’t matter for him and me. With our records, we’ll do twenty-five years whether we kill the cop or not. But you? You’re not in that position.”

“Come on, Pete. I was busted for a homicide. I pled to manslaughter and I’m on lifetime parole. If I get popped for a million-dollar armed robbery, I won’t see daylight until I’m sixty-five. At the earliest.”

Maybe I had some small fantasy of using Parker and Avi to convince Eddie to forget the cop, but I gave it up on the spot. “John, my boy,” I said, “when you’re right, you’re right. Now, weren’t you about to show me something?”

“Not so fast, son. Let me begin at the beginning. I want you to get the whole picture.”

“This I already figured out.”

He ignored me. “You remember how we talked about breaking into a computer? When we were stoned on the courts? You remember what I told you?”

“You said it was almost impossible if the company took reasonable precautions.”

“Right. You remember what those precautions were?”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t. I lost interest when you told me it was impossible.”

“Allow me to refresh your memory. The first precaution is the use of multiple access codes. Note that I don’t use the term ‘passwords.’ Access codes are random numbers, usually five digits. Let me show you a real example.”

He slid his chair over to the computer and typed:
C:MODEM
. The computer searched its memory, beeping away merrily, then displayed:
ENTER NUMBER HERE
. Parker typed in a phone number and the modem began to work. Finally, a single sentence appeared on the screen:
ENTER ACCESS CODE
.

“Note that the system has
not
identified itself.” He entered a series of numbers and the modem stopped flashing. “The system hung up on us. That’s what it’s designed to do. If you don’t enter something within thirty seconds, or if you enter the wrong code, the system automatically disconnects. Now let’s assume that you
know
the phone number of the system you want to penetrate and you
know
the number of digits in the access code. You could write—hell, you could
buy
—a program that would keep calling back and entering codes until it found the right one, but it would take several years to do it. Meanwhile, most sophisticated systems, like the one owned by Chapman Security, trace calls back after a given number of disconnects.”

It was the first time I’d heard the name of the armored car company. Chapman was one of the biggest. Not as big as Wells Fargo or Brinks, but still a national company.

“Chapman? Eddie doesn’t aim low.”

“Actually, Eddie didn’t aim at all. You have to start with a company large enough to need phone access to their system. For most of the little guys, the computer is no more than a large filing cabinet. With an operation like Chapman’s, you have salesmen on the road, executives working out of their homes on weekends. Chapman has thousands of trucks and they rotate their schedules. A computer can write a new schedule in a couple of minutes.
Without
having eight trucks show up at the same place at the same time. It would take a hundred man-hours to do it manually.”

He leaned back in his seat and lit a cigarette. “The computer’s second line of defense is a callback system. When you enter the right access code, the computer hangs up, then calls you back, using a number you’ve left in its memory. This way, even if you’ve learned the access code, you’d have to use it from a phone known to the computer.”

“So it’s impossible,” I said.

“That’s what I told Eddie when he first brought it up. I told him, ‘Forget about it. Put it out of your mind. There’s no magic formula that can pluck an access code out of thin air.’”

“Did he accept that?”

“Yeah. What could he do? For Eddie, it was just another trial balloon. But after he spoke to me, I began to think about it. You spend a lot of time alone when you’re in prison.”

“Gee, I think I read that somewhere.”

“The question you should be asking is how systems are
ever
penetrated.”

“How are systems ever penetrated?”

Parker ignored the sarcasm, taking a moment to lean back and stretch. I shook my head in wonder. He was so absorbed in the pleasure of telling his story that he looked like a twelve-year-old boy bragging about a Little League home run. Fifteen years ago, he’d come home to find his best friend pumping his wife. If he’d come home thirty minutes later, if he’d been delayed in traffic, he’d still be sitting in an office somewhere, the very essence of the respectable, slightly befuddled computer scientist.

“In the old days,” he said, “when passwords were still common, there were always a few schmucks who used words like ‘open sesame’ or ‘bravo’ or their kid’s first name. Now I admire hackers because I used to be one, but with thousands of computer freaks pounding away in their bedrooms, there were bound to be a few who liked to play near the edge. Some of them wrote programs that tried the most common passwords first. If that didn’t work, the program started at one end of the dictionary and worked through. Remember, the systems they were trying to penetrate didn’t trace calls back. Some of them would let you enter five or ten passwords before hanging up. That approach became impossible when the industry switched to multiple-digit access codes.”

“But computer break-ins still happen, right? I read about them every once and a while.”

“They occur because the few hackers who like to commit felonies get the access code from a third party. Usually by looking over some asshole’s shoulder when he enters it.”

“You know a worker from Chapman Security with a low shoulder?” I lit another cigarette. It was my turn to stretch it out. Parker’s story had grabbed hold of me despite my earlier indifference. It was the
big score
come to life, the collective dream of every caged human being.

“I’m just trying to let you understand my frame of mind after Eddie spoke to me. Of course I didn’t know anyone at Chapman Security, and even if I did, that person would be very unlikely to lower his shoulder for an ex-convict. I suppose I could have gotten Eddie to kidnap some executive and force him to give up the code, but that wouldn’t necessarily help us. Modern systems use multiple codes. You punch in one number to enter the system as a whole, but you need other codes to access sensitive information. The only way to be sure you have all the codes is to grab one of the top executives, preferably the director of computer operations. Unfortunately, if you beat the codes out of your director, you can’t very well let him go back to the computer and change them. Maybe Eddie wouldn’t mind killing him (and maybe I wouldn’t mind, either), but the sudden disappearance of the director of computer operations would be certain to arouse suspicion. On top of that, you’d have to use the director’s personal phone, which is clearly impossible if you’re thinking long term. How many times can you break into someone’s home? You could always change the callback number in the computer’s memory, but if you did that, the director wouldn’t be able to access the company computer.”

“There’s gotta be a punch line here,” I interrupted. “I don’t mind long stories, but this one’s a fucking novel.”

He grinned happily, then continued in the same breezy tone. “The point of vulnerability isn’t in the computer itself, it’s in the system that links the computer to the executive sitting in his den. It’s in the phone system. It came to me one day when I was in the shower—”

“While you were bending over, looking for the soap?”

He ignored that one. “Visualize the phone system as a long wire stretching between the central computer in Chapman Security headquarters and the home of the director of computer operations. If you tap into the line, you get everything going back and forth, including the access codes. I grabbed Eddie that afternoon and told him that if he could find someone who knew enough electronics to install a phone tap, I could probably do the rest. Three days later he brought Avi to my cell.”

“Avi?” I was so used to thinking of Avi as a kind of homicidal wooden Indian that I was shocked to hear that he had other potentials. Apparently Eddie had looked a little deeper.

“Avi was a trained Israeli soldier. He served in a unit that specialized in collecting information on terrorists. They taught him to bug telephones, to plant listening devices, to jam broadcasts. Didn’t you know Avi before he went inside? I thought you were friends.”

“I guess I didn’t know him well enough to ask him the right questions.”

“Well, between Avi and myself, the deal went down smoothly enough, even though Eddie’s a maniac for detail and made us work it out ten times before he was satisfied. First, Eddie and Avi went up to the Bronx and relieved a New York Telephone repairman of his uniform and identification. That’s when Morasso and I got into it.”

“You had trouble with Tony?” I hadn’t been far off the mark. Eddie had needed me badly. It was a fact I could and would use to my own advantage.

“Pete, I wanted to kill him in the worst way. I had a knife alongside the cushion where I was sitting, but I knew that if I used it, I’d blow the job. I tried to calm him down, to tease him into a better mood, but he wouldn’t let me off the hook. He was sitting next to me, running his hand up the back of my neck, telling me I was sweet as sugar. It wasn’t a proposition, just another excuse to humiliate me. I went after him with my hands, but he was too strong. He probably would have killed me if Annie hadn’t brained him with a frying pan.”

“I don’t understand why Eddie doesn’t get rid of him,” I said. “His part isn’t that important. It just isn’t.”

Parker shrugged, his eyebrows lifting over his gray eyes. “Everybody’s got a flaw somewhere. I’ve worked with enough senior vice presidents to know. Eddie’s stubborn. He has to be the top dog and he won’t admit it when he makes a mistake. This fight happened
before
we got into the computer. We could have cut Morasso loose without killing him, because he didn’t know anything about where or when the job was going down. But Eddie refused outright. He promised to find a way to control Morasso and left it at that. Your solution, the dope thing, is perfect. I didn’t think of it myself, but I’ll bet it occurred to Eddie. The only thing was Eddie had already decided that drugs were forbidden, and he was too stubborn to change his mind.”

“That’s why I brought it without asking.” I was filing Parker’s insight away for later use. Up in Cortlandt, Eddie had always been quick to compromise. Now that he was top dog, another part of his personality had emerged. “Let’s get back to the computer. This is starting to become a two-semester course.”

“I went over to the library on Fifth Avenue and got the annual reports for several companies, including Chapman Security. Annual reports are super-slick glorifications of whoever happens to be running the company. Chapman’s included a piece on their new computer and the man who’d designed it, Dominick Spinelli. According to the report, Spinelli lived and worked in New York City.

“It took us a week, but we finally tracked him to a high-rise condo on East End Avenue. Then Avi used the telephone company uniform and the i.d. to get down to the switchboard in the basement. There were two lines—they’re called subscriber loops—running from the punch-down connectors in the basement up to Spinelli’s apartment. Avi put a bug with a transmitter on each of them. Like I expected, one turned out to be for the computer and the other for his regular phone.

“Now the thing is that the transmitter on a small listening device doesn’t have much range, so we couldn’t sit in a nice warm apartment and eavesdrop on Spinelli’s communications. Avi and I had to put all our equipment—the receiver, the modem, the computer, and the telephone—into the back of a van and sit in front of Spinelli’s building for almost a week before we got the details. The damned van had an exhaust leak. If we kept it running so we could have heat, the stink made us want to vomit. On the other hand, this was early March, so if we shut the engine down, we froze our asses.

“Avi’s from Israel, where they don’t have any winter, and he doesn’t care for the cold, but we kept at it until we got the access codes we needed. Then, still working from the van, I got into the program that controls who gets access to what part of the system and simply added an executive, complete with telephone number and personal access codes.” He reached out and tapped the computer. “Now everything comes and goes from right here, and once we have the final schedule, our fictitious executive will disappear forever.”

“Does that mean we can’t be traced?” It was too good to be true.

“Chapman or the cops could go over every phone call originating from the computer. Eventually they’d come up with our phone number. But it would take months, and the phone we’re using to communicate with Chapman’s computer actually belongs to a man who lives across the street. We took it right off the telephone pole in front of the building.”

“Avi again?”

“Right. The guy across the street lives alone and he works. That means we have all day to use his phone. Personally, I don’t think the cops’ll ever figure it out. The tap we put on Spinelli’s phone has already been removed, and the extra line from the telephone pole will come down as soon as we get the final schedule. But what’s more important is that between the Pope’s visit and the diversion with the cop, the chance that we’ll get caught in the act is so small it’s almost nonexistent.”