Effected Intent, page 21
“Two old guys. Sorry about that, two other guys were here when I arrived this morning but Robert picked them up and they took off in a hurry, not sure where they were going. Think their names were Mickey and Rudy but I’m not positive. Said they’d be back later but didn’t give me any idea where they were going.”
Steve half nodded in acknowledgement. “Let’s break for lunch, we can get back to the setup after.” He wanted to sit down for a while and also needed to check in with Foundation, might be something going on there he needed to be aware of. Doubtful but his corporate brainwashing made him believe he needed to check in all the time. Jay took off for lunch, probably just wanted some time alone. There was an urgent request from Rob to come in and meet with the patent attorneys, there were a few new patent applications and they wanted to make sure they had the claims right. The applications were attached to the message and Steve printed them off, along with an acknowledgement that he’d contact the attorneys as soon as he’d had a chance to review the claims. Steve had been through the process enough times that he could probably write his own patent applications. He thought about that as a futile exercise given the current plans but needed to do it in case things didn’t work out with The Cause.
He was responding to another request when the door chimed, indicating that someone had come in and there was commotion in the main area outside his office. He went out and saw the bird man and two others, both grizzly looking veterans. Introductions were made and Robert led them to the conference room. “Where’s Jay?”
“He went to get some lunch, should be back in a while.”
“We need to get going on this, we’ve got an urgent situation we need to brainstorm on. The fucking CDC guy wouldn’t give up the virus and the vaccine when I went to see him Friday, decided to call my bluff on blowing the lid off his cleanup, which was quite a bad situation. This is the hinge for the project, without the virus we might as well be a bunch of fucking dicks doing a circle jerk.” Robert was spitting as he spoke, obviously not used to rejection.
“Let’s blow his cover.” Rudy offered, a shake in his voice and his left hand, probably a stroke victim. “Maybe if we blow the lid off it there will be enough confusion that we can get the samples out.”
“More likely they’ll lock the place like Fort Knox, we can’t risk that now. What else can we do?”
“What if you produced the evidence and went to see him again? Seeing pictures might change his attitude. Offer to leave the CDC and go show them to his wife, if he has one.”
“He has one alright, they are socialite elites in Atlanta and he is a pillar of the black community there. He’s a staunch Obama supporter, which I don’t understand. How could a veteran support that guy over a war hero?” It was a rhetorical question and nobody tried to answer. “That’s actually not a bad idea, if he wants to see his brother elected president he’ll need to play ball with us. Either that or it will be on the front page of the Atlanta Journal Constitution and all that he’s worked for to build that socialite reputation will be in the ground. Good idea Steve, I better get moving on that. I want to bring you with me Myron, you can help me get the message across to our brother.”
“What about the testing? Do you want us to start without you? We didn’t take the injections last week, slipped my mind.”
“Oh yeah, let’s get the doc over here and then we can take off.” Steve was impressed, didn’t think they’d have a medical doctor on the team. Robert made a call from his cell, told the man it was urgent and said “I guess an hour will be ok.”
“He’ll be here in a bit, has a couple of patients to see first. Are you ready? He won’t be happy if he gets here and we’re still getting set up.”
“I’ll get on that now, want to give me a hand?”
“Sure, just let me hit the head.” Rudy said, limping out of the conference room. Steve didn’t wait for Robert to remind him this was urgent and went down to the lab to get things unboxed and double checked. He’d need a couple more samples in order to cover everyone, had just made a few last week. Jay came back around the same time Rudy got down to the lab and they watched as Steve put together the extra samples, making sure there’d be enough and a couple extras in case something went wrong.
Jay was taking notes as Steve went through the process. “We start with saline solution, which is used to carry the spheres into the body. The injection is given intra muscularly, meaning that it’s put into a large muscle instead of under the skin or in the vein, which is the way that a lot of other injections are delivered to humans. The saline is inert to the human body, the same way this surfactant is. I found a good surfactant that is silicone based, so it will also pass through the body without harm.” He added a few drops of the liquid to the saline solution and stirred it in. “The next step is to add the spheres, which are more durable than you’d think, given their job in the body and the process. We can dissect some spheres later so you know see what I mean. Each twenty milliliters of solution can support thousands of spheres but for this experiment we’ll only need about fifty spheres. Each one is nominally one tenth of a millimeter in diameter they pass through a common needle easily. The trick is to have the surfactant to keep them from becoming a glob, which wouldn’t work so well.”
“What’s in the spheres?” Jay asked, head cocked wondering what he was in for.
“Good question since you’re going to be injected with them. These are simply four colored dyes that will be released over a period of days. We’ll measure success by noting the color of our urine, it should go from bright yellow to green and then blue and finally black.”
“Cool.” Rudy was obviously not the deep thinker of the team.
“Have you tested this before? I don’t want to turn into a werewolf or something.”
“Nope, hasn’t been tested yet but I’m confident enough that if you all want to skip it I’ll take the injection and show you the results.”
“I’ll take it, guess if we go down we’ll all go down together. Wouldn’t be much of a team without our chemist.”
Steve nodded, counted off twenty and made eight batches of the injection, getting the job done and getting the bench cleaned up just as the doctor arrived. Robert and Mickey met him in the lobby and everyone congregated in the lab. There was a brief discussion about what they were injecting today and what to expect from it. Everyone was comfortable participating, even the doctor, Rob Ravich.
“Before we begin let me tell you that this invention is incredible Steve. I can’t tell you how many sick people I’ve dealt with over the years because they didn’t come back for boosters once they’ve had initial immunizations. Add the side effects that come with bundling multiple vaccines together and this could revolutionize the way medicine is done. It’s also the perfect way to execute The Cause.”
Steve was proud that the doctor believed in his invention, thought that it would have been better if it was going to be used for good first but once the dust settled maybe it would end up getting used for a better purpose. The doctor gave the injections and then took one himself before excusing himself to go see some patients. Robert and Mickey left the building for their Atlanta visit, saying they’d be back in a few days. The plan was afoot.
Chapter 20
Homeland Security
There were no more fingernails to gnaw on, Bill had bit them all to the quick, something he hadn’t done since he was a kid. The urgency and severity of what he uncovered had killed his appetite for food and sleep. Every person he’d seen in the office the past few days had asked if he was ok, the beard growth, hollow eyes and sunken cheeks scaring them. He told them he was fighting a stomach virus and that kept them at bay, nobody wanting to get sick in the middle of summer. Mumbling to himself, he composed the draft email message to send to Darren Ward. He’d found how the department of Homeland Security named their email accounts and was to introduce himself to Ward, just needed to test the remailer program he’d downloaded. This one automated the task and allowed the user to determine how many hops the message would take before being sent, providing the ability for greater obfuscation.
After reading the content for the tenth time, Bill attached a word document to the message and sent it to himself, putting in foo@foo.org as the sender email address and asking the remailer program to go through four remailers, which would remove the origination information safely. He sent it to his gmail account and waited for it to hit, knowing that it might take several hours and if any of the servers were offline it could take longer. To his surprise, the message popped up in a few minutes. The header information was all spoofed except for the last hop, which was from a Czechoslovakian server. There was a problem though, the attachment to the message was gone. It seemed that most remailers didn’t accept attachments. There was word on the web that a few did but Bill was leery of that though he wasn’t sure why.
Bill recomposed the body of the message to include the salient points from the document he’d attached and sent it to himself using the same settings as before. The message came through fairly quickly and looked ok. It took him a while to determine what else to talk about in the message, didn’t want it to look like complete insanity. He read through it as though it was something he was going to receive, making double sure that it didn’t look like spam. The next step was going to be important, he needed to send it from an anonymous location, couldn’t chance sending it from the prison or the chemical company, even with the crutch of the remailers behind him. He thought about all the intercompany connections that Foundation has with its customers and suppliers and tried gently to see if any of them were accessible. He didn’t try too hard for fear of raising alarms and started in geographic locations that would be less likely to notice. Pay dirt was found in his new favorite country, Czechoslovakia, where there was a supplier to Foundation that had the same security philosophy as its customer. Bill was able to log on to their web server using the default username and password combination and had full administrative access. He created an anonymous email account from a free provider and sent the message from a web browser located on the company’s server. It was past lunch time and he planned on sending another one in a couple of hours, nothing to do now but start chewing on the cuticles of his fingernails.
Darren sat in his little office at the Department of Homeland Security, itching for something to do. “Sucks being between cases” he said to himself as he monitored the real time chatter that was captured from around the world, ninety nine percent of it complete garbage. He’d been looking for additional fraud terms, thinking that someone might want to jump at the vacancy that was left from his recent bust. Smiling at the thought of busting down the door on those scumbags who had bilked innocent Americans out of hundreds of millions of dollars, praying on their desperation with the economy and the fact that they were naïve or dumb enough to take on mortgages they couldn’t afford. Poor economic times brought out the creeps and these times were getting pretty serious, in fact most of the threat these days came from our own soil, not the middle east, which had been the case for Darren’s entire career with Homeland, almost five years now.
Darren was an undergraduate computer science major at Rutgers when 9/11 happened. He had planned on going to Harvard to pursue an MBA but decided that he was going to use his talents to help America. The next wars would be fought on the cyber front, information being the key to new attacks and collaboration between conspirators. There were offers at graduation from the CIA, NSA, FBI and Homeland Security. He chose the new department because he thought it would be a younger man’s world over there, being a relatively new agency. He was partially right, finding that some of the upper level directors were old boys but there was a different sort of vibe to the department, one where there was a possibility to advance and also to take risks when warranted.
“Hey Darren, want to go to lunch at that Italian place in Falls Church? I’m dying for some polenta.”
“Sounds good George, going crazy staring at the chatter anyway. Anyone else around?”
“They’re all busy on their cases but claim they don’t need any help so screw it, we can go to the music store afterwards, there is a new guitar I want to check out.”
“Your wife is going to beat you to death with any new guitar you bring through the door. How many can you possibly play?”
“That’s not the point. You should take up playing, I could give you lessons during these slow times, even though they seem to be getting fewer and further apart.”
“Monica will kick my ass if I start spending money, she is watching the pennies like a hawk. With the real estate market down so far she wants to buy a house and she’s too stubborn to do it any way other than the old fashioned way, twenty percent down plus closing costs and six months of payments in the bank.”
“You’re the one who married the negotiator.” George laughed.
Darren thought about his wife, who ran their household budget like she ran the purchasing department for the defense contractor she worked for, saving them millions of dollars a year and providing a wakeup call to fat, lazy suppliers who were used to milking government contracts. He was glad to have this stretch at home, had to spend most of the time earlier this year working his case.
George drove to lunch and they made good time because it was early. The big guy was an ex-Marine and heavyweight wrestler, an asset to Darren, who was average size and was better with his brain than his fists. His appetite was legendary and he ate an entire appetizer, lasagna and then two pieces of tiramisu for dessert. They talked about the Nationals, both of them becoming baseball fans since the team came to the city.
The guitar shop was dead and George spent an hour talking to the owner about guitars, which looked like toys in the big guy’s hands. George ended up getting a really good deal on a new Gibson model, even after Darren tried to talk him out of it. The store owner offered him a starter guitar set for a good price but he wasn’t interested. Golf was the only thing that got his spare time, he relished his free time with Monica too much. George claimed this would pass after another ten years of marriage but Darren didn’t think that would happen.
The office was buzzing, seemed one of the teams had uncovered a plot against the American embassy in Bolivia and had thwarted it at the last minute. These wins were why Darren had chosen this over a corporate life. He’d never be rich but the job was saving lives of Americans and that was hard to put a price on. After a brief celebration he returned to his office to stare at the chatter some more. There was an odd email in his mailbox that had landed in the junk mail folder. He opened it because he was bored and the subject line intrigued him. It was from someone calling himself Jack, with an address of jackof@alltrades.com, telling him that he’s going to be sending him information about a terrorist plot he’s uncovered. Darren opened the header information and saw that it had come from a known remailer server in Eastern Europe.
There’s no way to reply to the message and “Jack” has made it clear that the communication has to be one directional because he can’t give up his identity. Darren wants to delete the message and forget it but his interest in piqued. He logged in to a few of the remailer servers the department maintains in Europe but found no trace of this message. He was hoping that the person on the other end would hit one of their remailer servers. Remailer servers had notoriously been used by all kinds of bad people, and was a favorite of child pornography buffs. The department had acquired some Czechoslovakian domain space and set up several remailer servers that were more robust than a lot of existing ones. The software on these systems included great backtracking capability and had helped the department crack several cases. Darren thought this was one of the most ingenious things he’d heard of and when it was combined with Carnivore, the FBI’s content matching software, they were able to pick up a lot of chatter that would normally be blind to them. Unfortunately this message hadn’t come that way, it was a dead end.
Before he logged off the last remailer server another message popped up in his junk mail folder. The sender was Jack and this one had details about a bioterrorism plot being planned against the United States. Darren found himself sitting straighter and closer to the screen, thinking that maybe there’s something here. He decided to keep it quiet for now, didn’t want to cry wolf about something. He decided to do some detective work to find out what needles were out in the proverbial haystacks. Darren started with
web crawler data, looking for anything that would give an indication of the potential plot or who this Jack is but came up empty.
Darren went back to the chatter database to look for any talk of smallpox or other viruses. Most of the talk was related to computer viruses, not human viruses. After some crafty keyword combinations, he was able to locate some smallpox chatter that has been going on for a couple of months that appeared to be coming from Asia, which validates what he’s been told in the email. He wondered who Jack was but learned long ago in this job not to dwell on the pieces of the puzzle you couldn’t see and focus on what was available. No more mail from Jack, he would check later, it was time to go home and surprise Monica by cooking dinner.
Monica could smell dinner when she walked in the door of their townhouse in Alexandria. “You little devil, did you play hooky this afternoon?” she dropped her briefcase and kissed him, having to reach up on her tiptoes.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes.” Darren picked her up and dropped her sweet little ass on the counter to kiss her more seriously.
“You just saw me this morning, guess someone is feeling randy today.”
“They say men think about sex seventeen billion times a day, I think it goes up by a factor of four when work is slow. And guess what, we’ve got about forty five minutes until dinner is ready.”
“Such planning on your part” she said as she got down from the counter and tiptoed toward the room. “Last one there gives a backrub first” she yelled, beating him by a few steps. Darren paid the backrub tax and they made it out just in time for dinner.
