Effected Intent, page 18
Bill was working on extending the purchasing program to now deal with the accounts payable side, making sure that they were integrated. Don had successfully pitched the purchasing program to the other prison managers before he left for vacation and now Bill was working with some of the other IT people across the prison district to get them to adopt the system. Ultimately they would all be connected so that better leverage and coordination could be done. There was substantial cost savings projected and Don was looking to Bill to help drive the effort. One of the other prisons had brought a prisoner into the office to do some programming and it had felt strange to Bill the first time he talked to him. Kathy had asked Bill to work with him and help him acclimate to the job and Bill had to think back to what it was like that first few months, how apprehensive the other office workers were and how protective they were of their personal items, thinking that any inmate was going to steal anything that wasn’t locked down. Tim was facing the same things that Bill had gone through so long ago and he tried to relate how to deal with the situation by staying calm, not taking things personally and build up trust slowly, one action at a time.
“Hey son, you seem distracted today, what’s on your mind?”
“My brain has been on overdrive lately, there is so much happening. Do you have a few minutes to talk?” she nodded that she did and they went to the conference room and closed the door. Bill sighed and rewound his brain to see where to begin. “I had visitors yesterday. My mom and Ellie came down but you’ll never guess who came with them. It was Mrs. Watts, Mike’s mom. And the strangest thing was that Saturday night I had the nightmare of the wreck and lost about half the night’s sleep.”
“So what happened with Mrs. Watts?”
“She told me that she forgave me for what happened and she made me promise to forgive myself. It was very emotional but at the same time it did cause me to think of things in a different light.”
“How long have we been telling you the same thing Bill? You’ve heard this message from everyone in this office and your family for a lot of years. Even Shannon sees that you have to move on from what happened. We all want to see you walk out of here one day.”
“Talking to Tim down at Chillicothe is also bringing back a lot of memories, this is such a dramatic time all around.” Bill was holding back tears and his head was starting to hurt.
Kathy put her hand on his shoulder and rubbed his back to calm him down. “Take some time to let everything sink in Bill, you can’t possibly absorb everything that’s been happening too quickly. The timing is probably good with Don out of the office for you to let your mind wrap around some of this and forget about the work for a few days. I’ll bring you some special food too, maybe that will help. You’ve been here a long time, don’t make big decisions without taking some time.”
Bill thought about it and thanked her for the talk. Kathy left the conference room and he took a few more minutes to think about everything that’d been going on. Talking to Kathy hadn’t settled anything but still made him feel better. He went back to his desk and tried to concentrate but couldn’t so he wrote an email to Mike to ask him what he should do. This seemed a bit stupid to Bill but for some reason he felt like he needed to do this right now. It took almost an hour to get all the thoughts and feelings on to the page and when he was done he’d made a decision. There was no point in sending it off to the ether so Bill deleted the draft message, not wanting to look at it again.
After lunch Bill was ready to get back to work. He spent about an hour reading about anonymous remailers and some of the ways that they could be leveraged without coming across as spam to the recipient. Most were in countries that wouldn’t cooperate with the United States in an investigation, primarily in Eastern Europe. There was also the possibility of finding an unpatched or misconfigured mail server that could be used to spoof the source address of a message, which is what a lot of spammers do.
Bill decided to study the messages coming and going from Foundation’s mail server to see what typical corporate email traffic looked like. They had some rudimentary spam filters in place and Bill studied the messages that were blocked, most of them had content in the subject line or body of the message that referred to sex, drugs or some combination of both. It was pretty obvious how to avoid the spam filters, most of them seemed to use basic keyword matches or ran checks on the source address of the message to see if it was on a blocked list or what was commonly referred to as being “black holed”, which can be quite detrimental to conducting business if nobody else will accept emails from your domain.
Bill moved to the mail server and checked their logs, which revealed all of the sender mail addresses, recipient mail addresses and subject of the message. It also contained the mail header information, which was the routing information of the mail messages. He scrolled through thousands of messages before deciding to download them to a file and sort through them programmatically. He did a frequency count on senders and recipients, looking to see if there was anything interesting. Most of the mails were between Foundation and their suppliers or their customers. A number of employees subscribed to mailing lists, which caused quite a bit of traffic across the company gateway. Bill was getting bored when he came across a count of twelve inbound and fifteen outbound messages that were sourced from or intended for cia.gov, the mail server for the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Suddenly Bill wasn’t bored anymore and wanted to know more.
Chapter 17
An Evil Plan is Born
The wakeup call was a shock to Steve and he woke up wondering where he was and then wondered how he’d slept all the way through the night. There was plenty of time before his meeting with Robert so he brewed coffee in the room’s miniature pot and splashed water on his face. He looked ok, didn’t look like a man approaching sixty and felt like he was deciding whether to go to college or into the service. This was similar to that decision in the fact that it was a major fork in the road.
Last night seemed surreal. Steve went to the window and pulled back the heavy drapes, revealing a grey and misty morning in the capital city trying to sense if the world had changed in any way since he came back to the hotel last night. He remembered the wall, the touch of the cold black granite and the flood of emotions as he saw the names. Today he’d go back and see if he could find names of others, maybe take some pictures. It was unbelievable that Robert was quietstorm, someone that he had shared all of his thoughts and memories with over the past few years on the message boards and in private chat rooms.
The coffee helped bring Steve back to the moment. He showered and shaved, thankful he’d brought the raincoat and umbrella as he glanced outside again and saw that the skies had opened up. Today’s weather was turning into a good metaphor for his life, cleansing what was and hopefully bringing sunshine behind it. The bellhop offered to call a cab and Steve took him up on it then remembered he wasn’t sure where he was going. He called Robert’s cell phone and the bird man gave him an address and said he’d be there in thirty minutes. The cab took a few minutes to get there and the driver had to make a phone call to see where the address was, he’d never heard of it. Turned out to be about fifteen miles outside the city in a semi-rural area of Virginia. Steve wondered if this was Robert’s house, had at first expected to meet in his office but apparently people don’t discuss treason against the United States government in the offices of the CIA.
The house was isolated and Robert’s car was parked in the driveway. Steve paid the cab driver and walked to the front door. He knocked out of habit and the bird man annoyingly said “come in, you think the butler is going to answer the door?”
“Sorry, habit. How are you today?”
“Let’s skip the bullshit and get down to business. Have you had a chance to think about last night? I mean really think about it? This isn’t some child’s game, this is our chance to really stick it to the American government and to the people who treated us and those who followed like shit.”
“I understand how serious this is and yes, I’m committed.”
“Before I tell you anything else you need to be positive. You know some things but I’ve got plausible deniability on my side at the moment and we could cut ties and walk away from each other. You’re at the line right now my friend and if you cross that line there will be no going back. Failure to commit will result in you vanishing from the face of the earth and if we think there are others who are aware we’ll make sure to take care of them too.”
Steve’s face became hard and didn’t give any indication as to which direction he was going to choose. His face changed shape as he worked through the implications in his head. It wasn’t easy to make such a decision with limited information, what if he was expected to blow himself up in some terrorist plot? He wasn’t foolish enough to believe in the promise of seventy two virgins or anything after his life here was done. The things he’d seen in his life had taught him that this was the only chance he had, that God was a crutch for those without the intelligence and the constitution to believe in the truth. One thing he knew from his dealings with Robert until now was that it was going to be something big, quietstorm wouldn’t spend years working on a plan that would be a letdown, this had to be something big and since he’d recruited Steve for his bioresorbable polymer sphere work there must be a key role for him here. He deliberated some more, the bird man watching with his beady, black eyes and furrowed brow, imploring him to give an answer.
“I’ll do it Robert, it doesn’t matter what it is. I have confidence that if you’ve been working on a plan it’s going to be a good one and there will be an impact to the government. The visit to the wall last night cemented any doubts I would have had previously and though I suspect this was intentional on your part I’m on board.”
“I’m glad you’ve joined the cause, this is the crowning achievement of twenty years of planning, networking and seeking the perfect opportunity. I know I told you most of this last night but I want to make sure you know that the pieces are lined up and you’re joining at the right time, the time of action. Now I want to give you one more chance to back out before I tell you the plan, if you want to walk away this is the time, I’ll drive you back to the city and you can sightsee for the next few days and then fly back to Cleveland and your work at Foundation. Take your time Steve, don’t underestimate the importance of your decision.”
Steve didn’t hesitate “I’m in, let’s get to work.”
Robert looked into his eyes, seeking any wavering or doubt and not finding any, walked Steve over to the dining room table, where his briefcase sat. He took a deep breath, trying to decide where to begin and how much to give the chemist in his first dose. There had been a couple of recruits who decided they didn’t want to participate after Robert gave them the overview and their bodies were never recovered. Robert had access to locations and means of disposal that weren’t pleasant but were very effective. He hates using them because he understood what each of these people had been through and didn’t want to be the one to take a survivor of so much and turn them into a victim but they’d all known too much and there was too much at stake.
“I’m going to start at the beginning. In the mid eighties I started thinking about revenge on the government but I couldn’t make the right plan. Over the years in the CIA my specialty was working at an ugly job called cleaner, which is about what it sounds like. I was the best in the government at cleaning up messes and as I did I kept evidence and collected favors. Some forgot about what I’d done for them and many people that I’d helped have risen to very high places in the government. During the early nineties I became a bit desperate and even tried to reach out to bin Laden to forge a partnership but he completely nuts, which forced me to go in a different direction.”
Steve was listening, finding it hard to believe that anyone would want to partner with bin Laden, in the wake of the 9/11, but back then it might have seemed like a good idea. He found himself working his way to the edge of his seat, the anticipation and details of the story capturing his undivided attention.
“Once the World Wide Web started taking off in the late nineties, I found the method to recruit likeminded individuals who would be willing to join a plot with me and might have some ideas on which direction to plot. Most of the people who joined the effort were small minded, thinking of foreign U.S. targets or local destruction that could cause some panic. There was one idea posed that would have been very destructive to the government, which was a Wall Street financial attack that would have crashed the stock market and created so much fear it would have imploded the economy. This would have been ideal in the wake of 9/11 but since I had not partnered with bin Laden I had no way to put this kind of plan in place. Missing this opportunity was a mistake but I was determined to continue to build the team and wait for the right chance to present itself.”
“That’s a long time Robert, I can’t imagine being able to stay so focused for over two decades. How many people are aware of the plan you’re going to talk to me about?”
“There are four of us who know the entire plot and another dozen or so in key support roles. When you extend my network to those who owe me favors and will have no choice but to help us, the number goes over two dozen total. Let me get back to the plan, we can discuss logistics of the team in a while. During our initial meetings I talked about the chatter around a bioterrorism threat. It is something that we’ve worked very hard to create over the past year, starting with some vague discussions from Asia and ramping up to include some specific information that I can use as needed. Truth be told, I don’t answer to anyone at the CIA and have been working this on my own. There is no awareness but it does make for a compelling story when I have to talk to company men like your vice president Mr. Wall.”
Robert nodded, wanting to hear more.
“The crux of the plot is to release a new strain of smallpox in America that will decimate a large percentage of the population, especially on the West Coast. The blame for this attack will fall on the North Korean government and knowing how loony Kim Jong-Il is, they will deny or not say anything about the matter. Some question the rationale for attacking the West Coast. I don’t know about you but the West Coast has always been full of tree hugging, military hating assholes who would rather save an owl than an American soldier. The epicenter of the attack will be San Francisco, the bastion of liberalism. Some have argued that they also tend to be anti-government, but if you look at the common leftist ideology they are only anti-government from a military perspective, they prefer to have government involved in every aspect of life. By creating an attack and exposing a plot to attack a major city on the west coast, we’ll be able to start the infection where it will hit the hippies hard.”
Steve hadn’t thought this was going to be a target against Americans but rather the United States government and was wondering what the hell he’d gotten himself into. He’d read ‘The Stand’ and remembered King’s eerie description of the country after Captain Trips took hold.
The bird man watched the chemist take this in, knowing that the magnitude of the plan was going to hit him like a ton of bricks. He stood up and went to the bathroom and then came from the kitchen with some coffee for both of them.
Steve’s mind was racing when Robert got up and left the room. What should he do here? Does he really want to be part of the cause of the death of millions of Americans? What about Claire? They would have to disappear together and start over, would she ever understand? Steve was cold and his skin was white and clammy at the thought of being part of a plot that would make 9/11 pale in comparison. Robert brought back coffee, as calm as if they were discussing the weather or making plans for a golf outing.
“If you need the bathroom, it’s at the end of the hallway. Let’s get back to the plan. When the news comes out that there is a new strain of smallpox that has broken out in Korea Americans will start to perk up. When the news leaks that there is information that the West Coast of the U.S. is being targeted, America will panic and the CDC will prepare to vaccinate millions of Americans using your technology as the delivery vehicle because the virility of the new strain means that we have to have a new method to deliver the vaccination in stages. The only problem for America will be that the vaccine will be the old one so symptoms of being vaccinated will still show up and the last time released dose of the spheres will be the real strain of smallpox. By the time the government realizes what has happened we’ll be long gone and hundreds of thousands of Americans will be infected, providing a launching pad for the vaccine that will cause panic and the collapse of the government, especially in the face of the current economy and lack of faith.”
“Wow, this is going to take a while to set in. The plan seems brilliant, though I would have thought we’d go after the government and not the general American public. Have you thought about targeting government workers instead, creating a cave-in of the existing government and having the vaccination plan be hushed so that when the public finds out they would have further hate and distrust of the government, essentially causing chaos or even full anarchy?
“That’s been a topic of debate but in the end the team thought it would be best to take America out and start over, creating a new set of values for society that weren’t so material based and more toward protection of our own, not shunning.”
“If this strain of smallpox is as strong as you’ve indicated, starting with the government might still have the same impact but would squarely put the blame on them. People will assume cover up and will be calling for the heads of any survivors, provided they’re not scrambling to isolate and protect themselves and their families from infection.”
“It’s much harder to get things certified for the government and the odds that we’d be able to keep it quiet are slim. Once we obtain a copy of the virulent strain and the vaccine for it we can start work on production of the fake vaccine, after our team is safe from infection.”
