Qubit, page 5
Ah. That’s right. They were in Hawaii…he had a house on the ocean…and Sophie lived with him. It was a beautiful, wandering house, with a stairway down to the beach. They had been sipping from coconuts, and Sophie had been building a sandcastle. She was the Sophie from the old dreams, the dreams he’d had while he was away…
Lock fixated on the laptop screen in front of him. What was going on there? All the terminal windows, the scrolling text…he focused his eyes. The password cracker. He was running a password cracker. Actually, many of them in parallel. He looked closer.
Someone with the email of ccarraby had chosen a weak password. He now had access to their email. If he was lucky, someone had emailed an SSH key. That was unlikely—CoTech was apparently—and entirely unsurprisingly—very security conscious. Still, it was a start. It was like untangling a ball of yarn. You just started pulling on a stray thread to see what happened.
His mind wandered back to the dream.
For two million dollars, he could get that place in Hawaii. Or something like it anyway. And Dennis could put that in his pipe and smoke it. The hell with a mere two weeks. How about living there? Sophie would love that. She’d love it so much, she’d live with her dad again.
That’s how it was supposed to have been.
That’s how it could be again.
4
* * *
Southbank, Singapore • Vipul's Apartment
Monday, January 22nd
Noon SGT (Singapore Time)
Vipul had decided to indulge himself. After all, the road trip began next week. He sat cross-legged on an enormous couch, his red and yellow Singapore cricket team tracksuit standing in sharp contrast to the cream-colored upholstery. He leaned forward over the chess set in front of him and moved one of the few pieces that remained on the board, setting it down with a solid thunk. Next to the board was a small laptop with a picture of a chessboard on-screen. Vipul studied it for a moment before straightening up and extending his arms to stretch. Through the great wooden doors that led to his bedroom, he could see two of his favorite prostitutes, still sleeping, tangled up in the sheets of his oversized bed. The midday sunlight filtered in through the blinds behind, lending a soft glow to the pristine Ceylon ironwood floors. A small dish of crumbs and an empty espresso cup remained as evidence of a light breakfast, which had been served earlier by his butler, Sunil, an aged wisp of a man who had also served his late father, and who had somehow now become attached to Vipul.
He was in the midst of a complex endgame. His opponent, who was somewhere in Australia apparently, had a slight advantage in material, which Vipul had exchanged for position and tempo. The difficulty was that he hadn’t put in the time in the years since leaving college to improve his endgame play. His game had peaked when he earned his Master rating in a tournament in Boston. He hadn’t played in a sanctioned tournament in two years. But the upcoming road trip would leave him plenty of idle time to get his game back.
He decided to continue to be aggressive with his pawns, to keep the pressure on his opponent, forcing him to react to the threat of promotion. He played the move on the board, savoring the heavy feel of the piece. He’d have to use a smaller board while traveling. This is why he hated traveling—so many luxuries had to be left behind. Even the butler was too old to travel.
Vipul made the same move on the computer so his opponent could see it and respond, and then sat back on the couch, unfolding his legs, and staring back into his bedroom. He could bring the girls, but that involved additional complications. It was a business trip, after all, and he needed to be sharp.
Much like a chess game, every phase of his plan was equally important. As important as it was that they recruit an engineer to clone the Wave Nine, it was just as important to establish a network of private partnerships with brokers throughout Asia. The scale and reliability of that network was the limiting factor of his entire plan. The larger the network, the more the potential for profit; but the larger it got, the harder it was to ultimately collect—and the more likely it was that law enforcement might catch on to its existence.
Thus, the brokers had to be trustworthy, yet also comfortable doing business with the Rathod family. Fortunately, over the decades, the family had cultivated dozens of partnerships, and Vipul had been able to put together a list of candidates that they’d already worked with or came highly recommended.
The laptop beeped, and Vipul leaned forward to see his opponent’s response. Just as he’d hoped, Black had been forced to react. The problem now was that he could only keep tempo for three more moves. After that, he’d have to play defense. Frowning, he leaned over the laptop to offer a stalemate.
The upcoming trip would effectively be a whirlwind tour, beginning in the Rathod stronghold of Bihar, India, and culminating in southeast China and Hong Kong. In each city, they would meet with candidates and attempt to establish an investment partnership. He had three assistants back at his office scheduling appointments, sometimes as many as six in a single day, from seven in the morning until seven at night, including weekends if possible.
The laptop beeped again. The stalemate had been refused. Vipul pulled back away from the laptop, mildly offended. He looked over at the chess board. What had he missed? He knew he couldn’t win, and he’d been sure he could defend against Black’s potential attacks. But Black apparently felt otherwise. He leaned forward, looking down at the board. After a moment, he turned it around slowly. If Black had an attack in mind, it would have to involve some imaginative use of his remaining rook…
Vipul became gradually aware that one of the girls had emerged from the bedroom, draped in a sheet. He looked up to see Liu, her severe looks softened by half-opened eyes, tangled hair, and the filtered sunlight. She curled up next to him on the couch and placed her head awkwardly on his shoulder. She’d broken his concentration, and the clock on the game was running. He would definitely have to leave the girls behind. This trip was too important to get distracted. He’d gambled everything to redefine his family’s legacy and, ultimately, to help India take her place among the great nations of the world.
He pushed Liu aside and refocused on the game in front of him. She whimpered before getting up and calling irritably for Sunil. Vipul’s mind wandered as he stared at the board, fragments of his father’s endless lectures playing in his head. He could see the old man’s immaculately groomed salt-and-pepper beard and the mole under his left eye. The world is changing Vipul, he would say. We must change with it. The old man wanted to get out of narcotics, gambling, and prostitution, and into what he called legalized crime. But even his father would not have understood what he was doing now. He would never have approved of his deal with Li Mun — but Satish would have killed him if he hadn’t struck first! — and he wouldn’t have understood the implications of the Wave Nine.
There it was. Black was planning to sacrifice the rook to gain tempo. And it was a forced move on top of that, because not taking the rook would lead to a checkmate. In his eagerness to stay on the offensive, he’d missed it. Surely, though, there was still a way to win, or at least gain a stalemate. His single bishop was useless, except as something for his king to hide behind. Perhaps he could force a stalemate that way…
His mind wandered again. Maybe his father wouldn’t have approved of his methods, but he would certainly appreciate his objective. With the Rathod family possessed of incalculable power and influence, he could help lead not just his family but all of India into that new world. He looked down at the wood floors, toward the gurgling fountain in the corner, and over into the kitchen where Sunil was making espresso for the girls, both of whom were now awake and wearing the expensive silken robes he’d bought for them. He’d lived a life of luxury that was literally unimaginable to most people in India. He understood poverty viscerally because his family had forged it like a great sledgehammer, offering a better life to those who were willing to do whatever was asked of them. And he understood it intellectually, having studied the work of economists like Amartya Sen and Kaushik Basu.
All his life he’d concealed his true horror at the source of his family’s power, and of the depth and scale of India’s poverty. Even his father hadn’t known his true feelings. He’d grown accustomed to luxury and learned to mingle with the elites without ever forgetting the sight of the illegal shanty towns that arose near every running factory, the open sewers, the cripples deformed by leprosy, the gangs of bony children in rags.
The sledgehammer had served its purpose—it had produced him. And now it was time for him to redeem his family…and make his father proud.
Vipul made a quick move to position his bishop properly and leaned back again, spreading his arms out on the couch. He’d allow himself some more time with the girls this afternoon, and that would be it. From that point on, for the next several months, he would be completely focused on his mission. He would be well rested and prepared. He was ready.
The laptop beeped. Vipul leaned forward. Black was offering a stalemate. Vipul grinned in satisfaction and accepted. He hadn’t won, but he’d played a difficult endgame correctly and avoided a loss. He was getting his form back from his college days. He stood up and stretched again, this time with his entire body, getting up on the tips of his toes. He came back down and gestured to the bedroom.
“Let’s go, girls,” he called. “Back to bed.” The girls cheered and giggled, as they were being paid to do, and headed toward the bedroom.
“Do you need anything, sir?” asked Sunil, who was in the middle of some sort of culinary operation in the kitchen that presumably the girls had instigated.
Vipul turned at the great doors, preparing to close them behind him. “No, Sunil. Why don’t you…sit down for a while. Rest.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“It’s nothing,” said Vipul. He closed the doors with a satisfying whump and eyed the girls, who were already on the bed, with their legs folded neatly underneath them, looking up at him expectantly. “Take good care of me, girls,” he instructed. “After this, I’ve got to go save the world.”
Lafayette Park, Detroit • Lock's Apartment
Monday, January 22nd
4:00 p.m. EST (Eastern Standard Time)
The phone was ringing again. Lock didn’t bother to check the display. He was supposed to have been at work an hour ago. What did it matter to him now? He’d be rich soon enough.
He’d compromised the CoTech network. In another two hours, he’d have everything. Or at least everything that was on the network. The only question that remained was whether that was, indeed, everything, or at least everything required to build a quantum computer. He returned his gaze to his laptop and began typing. An uneven column of nearly unintelligible text began forming on his screen in front of him, like cigarette smoke.
He found himself sitting in the darkness again. It got dark so damn early this time of year. He got up, flipped on the light in the kitchen, and grabbed another Coke. He thought about dinner. He was out of pizza and Pop-Tarts. And nearly out of Coke. He was getting tired of all three, but he couldn’t stop now. He’d order another pizza and a two-liter Coke.
Half a box of pizza later, the phone was ringing again. Again, he ignored it. The way the magnetic fields were stabilized…the specifications for the diamonds used for their nitrogen-vacancy centers, which made it possible to isolate individual electrons…the process of annealing the diamonds…it was all there.
The phone rang again. And again.
ψ
A loud knock at the door. Lock opened his eyes. When had he closed them? The light from the kitchen was overpowered by the clouded daylight streaming through his windows. He felt his stomach rumbling with hunger. He got up and went to the door and tried to look through the peephole. His vision was still too blurry to see who it was. “Hello?” he yelled out.
“It’s Kafka. Lock?”
Lock stepped back from the door and opened it. Kakfa stood in the hall, wearing a familiar slate-blue parka with the hood up, and sunglasses. He was bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet.
“What?” asked Lock.
“I…I called you.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Can I…you know, come in?”
“I’m busy.”
“You need a break.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I know you. I’ve seen you when you get—”
“I’m busy. I’ll call you later.”
Kafka stopped bouncing. “You’re doing it, aren’t you?”
“Doing what?”
“You know. That thing. The two million bucks.”
“What does it matter?”
“It matters because you said you weren’t gonna do it.”
“Yeah? So I changed my mind.”
Kafka looked askance and started bouncing again. “Can I come in?”
“I told you, I’m—”
“You’re busy. Got that.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“Yep.” Kafka turned and headed back toward the elevators.
Lock closed the door and then stood there for a second. He opened it again, but Kafka was halfway to the elevator. Lock could see him turn and look back just as he closed the door again.
He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. Time to get back to work.
Corktown, Detroit • Mad Dog's Tavern
Wednesday, January 24th
10:00 p.m. EST (Eastern Standard Time)
Lock was exuberant. “And drinks are on me!”
Kafka was worried. “Wait. So did your quit your job? Don’t you close tonight?”
“Vicky!” yelled Lock. She waved at him from the end of the bar. “The usual!” He turned back to Kafka. “Should we get wings?”
“Sure.”
“Vicky! Add wings to that!”
The pair settled into their bar stools. Lock looked up at the picture of old Mad Dog. Then he turned to Kafka. “Hell yeah, I quit my job. And I’m gonna be a millionaire soon.”
“So you took that gig…”
“Yeah. I’ve already got the specs. Kirin gave me a ten-thousand-dollar advance. Cash. So I’m feeling pretty good right now.”
“Ten thousand dollars?” Kafka adjusted his glasses.
“Yeah.” Lock pulled an envelope from his jacket. “Right here. Going to the bank first thing in the morning. But tonight…we’re going to celebrate!”
“That doesn’t really sound like much—”
“Man, that place—”
“—considering the value of what you’ve stolen.”
“—is locked down pretty tight.” Lock smiled. “You mean borrowed. It took some doing, though, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah?” asked Kafka.
“It started with a public IP they had for a wiki, which came up easily enough. After a bit of probing, it turned out to be LightWiki.”
“You were cloaked?”
“Of course. Although it got interesting because I had to run a cluster at one point. I almost forgot to cloak the cluster machines. Anyway, LightWiki has a known exploit in version 3.6, but you have to get a login first. They had some names on their company Web site, so I picked a few who looked like they were doing non-technical stuff and started composing likely email addresses and sending emails from a dummy address to see which ones bounced. Once I had a few legitimate emails, I ran a simple password dictionary attack against the wiki. Sure enough, I got in pretty quickly.”
“They had everything on the wiki?”
“No, no. It was a lot harder than that.” Both men leaned back in their bar stools a bit as Vicky showed up with their beer. “Hey, Vicky,” said Lock.
Vicky smiled. “Hey, Lock. You look like you’re in a good mood.”
“I am. You wanna go to Vegas tonight?”
“I would, but I’m working.” Vicky gave him a wink. “Your wings will be up in minute.” She headed to the other end of the bar.
Kafka eyed Lock disapprovingly. “You know the rule.”
“I know, I know. But I’m pretty sure she likes me.”
“You’ve got plenty of other options. Anyway…you got into the wiki?”
“Right. Where was I?”
“You got into the wiki.”
“Ah. Once I was in, I was able to use the exploit in 3.6, just a simple script-injection attack, and dumped basically the whole wiki to my laptop. That gave me more emails and a list of internal servers. And the IP of a jump box.”
“A jump box?”
“Yeah. They use that to get into the internal engineering network.”
“Ah, right.”
“It was right there in a welcome page for new engineers. I figured all the really useful stuff was on that network. But the only port open was SSH.”
“So you needed to get a key.”
“Right. I hacked into their wireless router—”
“How’d you do that?”
“The sysops guys had a page on the wiki that had the main router password.”
“That was stupid.”
“So was using an old version of the wiki software.”
“I thought you said it was locked down pretty tight.”
“Well, it was. Just not tight enough to keep me out. And I still didn’t have access to the jump box yet.”
“Whatever. So you got into the router.”
“Yeah. But I wasn’t on the internal network yet. I could see traffic coming and going, but not traffic within the network. Which is where the jump box was.”
“Okay…”
“But the wireless router itself still had the guest account enabled.”
Kafka took a sip of beer. “Beautiful.”
“So then I could monitor traffic within the network. I focused on just the engineers, which was easy to do because they kept accessing the jump box, for which I already had the address. I ran probes against their machines and found a couple of different vulnerabilities. Two of them were running iTunes—”
