5

 

When Lee finished his three lists, he glanced at his watch. Thirty minutes since he’d left Howie’s office. He hurried to the gate shack.

Randy stood in the doorway staring down the parking lot. “Hey, Randy, have you seen…uh…” Lee paused, searching for appropriate words to describe Jennifer, “…a young lady arrive here looking for me?”

“Do you mean the Miss Universe candidate with long, dark hair and big, brown eyes? The one who asked me where to park?”

“This is about work, Randy. It’s not a social visit.”

“That’s too bad, Lee. But I bet it’s going to be a pleasant work session.” Randy’s grin spanned the width of his face. “On a scale from one to ten, she’s a ninety-nine.”

He scowled. “Just get me a visitor’s badge form.”

Jennifer approached the guard shack.

He hurried, trying to expedite the badging process and minimize her exposure to Randy’s obnoxious remarks.

“Jennifer, we’ll need your signature here, and Randy needs to see your driver’s license.” Lee positioned the paper on the counter and turned towards Jennifer. “Please keep the badge clipped on after we enter the compound. Since you’re a visitor, you’ll need to stay with me at all times after we go through the turnstile.”

“And you wouldn’t want it to be any other way, right, Lee?”

He glared at Randy, but the security guard’s smirk remained on his face.

Jennifer shook her head at Randy’s comment and then signed the form.

Ignoring Randy, Lee directed her through the turnstile. He punched the code into the lock. After the click he opened the door and they entered the lab starting a chain of events Lee prayed he wouldn’t regret.

Once inside, Jennifer stepped in front of Lee cutting him off. When she turned to face him her laser look was back. “About what you said at the gate…because I’m your visitor, you have to escort me everywhere?”

“Is that a problem?”

Jennifer’s gaze bored into him. “If anyone tells me that applies to the restrooms I’m out of here.”

“No, it most certainly does not.”

He tried to imagine what life must be like for her. Her beauty was stunning, but she looked young and vulnerable. Evidently this combination brought her problems. He would try not to add to them.

He walked to Ram’s desk and wiggled the mouse attached to the docking station. “This laptop belonged to the contractor who accessed the classified data. I watched port and IP address usage on this machine for several minutes. It communicated with a computer outside of our firewalls. But I couldn’t locate any malware, nor could I trace where the communications were going. That’s why I need your help.”

“I see you’re still logged in…as administrator, I assume?”

He nodded.

Jennifer pulled a DVD from her carrying case and started loading software directly onto Ram’s laptop—no flash drive.

Several alarms went off inside his head. This could go very badly for him if they were caught. “What are you loading onto my company’s machine?”

“Mr. Brandt…you don’t want to know.”

“What if I do want to know, but just don’t want National Aerospace to know?”

“Trust me on this. You don’t know the details of what I’m doing and it’s best if we keep it that way. It makes you mostly innocent—well…innocent of anything really serious.” She flashed him a glance.

Was that a smirk on her face?

“Innocent of what?” He paused, but she ignored his question. “Ms. Akihara, mostly innocent means partly guilty.”

For a woman who hated deception she needed to practice what she preached.

Peering over her shoulder questions began loading like cartridges into his mind. When the magazine in his mind filled his mouth started firing. “You’re logging directly onto an outside machine. That’s not supposed to be possible. How are you getting out? You need an account on our firewall server to do that, unless you’re just logging onto a website from a browser.”

Jennifer turned towards Lee and exhaled a forceful sigh. Her eyes narrowed, piercing him with their intensity. “Look, Mr. Brandt, it’s OK if you want to keep looking over my shoulder. But please be quiet. I need to concentrate.”

The left side of his brain screamed into his left frontal lobe. Unplug the docking station, you fool, before this gets any worse!

He listened to the right side and did nothing.

Jennifer opened two windows.

Lee guessed they ran the programs she loaded onto the laptop.

One window displayed information on local port usage and the other displayed the output from something running on another computer, one outside National Aerospace.

He couldn’t be sure, but the range of IP addresses scrolling across the screen indicated she had access to a network traffic database for a huge chunk of the Internet. Was it NSA’s database?

He noticed a third program minimized to the tray at the bottom of the screen. What had he gotten himself into?

She could get them both hung out to dry, first by National Aerospace, and then by the federal government.

After three or four minutes of intense concentration, Jennifer turned. “Well, I found the malware. It was cleverly disguised. I would bet money it’s designed to replicate and spread, but I’d have to reverse engineer it to be sure. We don’t have time to do that tonight. I captured the file so we can fingerprint the malevolent code.”

“Is that what’s displayed in the window on the left—the malware information?”

She nodded.

“And the window on the right?”

She squinted and frowned. “That one is going to take a while. It looks like the malware is communicating with an unknown hacker at some unknown location. The problem is he, or she, is hiding behind some compromised machines.”

He rubbed his chin and thought about his initial findings. “The compromised machines wouldn’t happen to be in Texas and Colorado, would they?”

Jennifer looked up and her eyes widened. “Uh…yes…well, two of them are. We’ll get back to that subject in a moment. As I was explaining, my algorithm utilizes a little graph theory along with heuristics derived from Internet-wide communications patterns, to resolve the circuitous path that a line of communication like this one is using.”

“Would you please just tell me what it is you actually do to wade through that mess and find the bad guy?”

She smiled.

What would life be like if he woke up every day knowing he would see that smile on that face? He was being ridiculous.

“Mr. Brandt?”

“Uh…yes. We’re finding the bad guys.”

“And we do that by running my algorithm for Internet-scale analysis using data queried from one of NSA’s computers—data that was collected from servers on the backbone of the Internet and some other carefully selected machines.” Jennifer swiveled her chair to face him. “We know a lot about both Internet topology and routing. I used that knowledge to reduce the number of servers we need to analyze to detect the bad guys doing their dirty work. I also used it to formulate some heuristics to make the required computation manageable. Mr. Brandt…do you remember those classes of complexity you learned about in theory of computing?”

“Yes. P, NP, NP-Complete, recursively unsolvable—I dreaded that subject coming up during my master’s oral exam.”

“Well, identifying heuristics that can turn some of those seemingly intractable problems into computable ones, and implementing algorithms to do so, is my specialty.”

Clearly Jennifer was working at the fringes of mathematics and computer science, pushing the limits of human knowledge. She intimidated him, but she also strongly attracted him. That intimidated him even further. “OK, assuming you and your tools do all of that, how long do we have to wait to determine where this guy is located?”

“With this algorithm and this scale of analysis, there’s no way to predict how long it will take. It may be five minutes, and then again, it may be five hours or more.”

He gestured towards the lab door. “Well then, shall we make a run to a coffee house, or grab something to eat while we wait?”

“Uh…just a minute. The intermediate printout I directed to standard output indicates we’re converging quickly to a solution. I think this run is of the five-minute variety. Let me look at what’s coming back to the screen for a minute. Maybe we’ve found the bad guys.”

“Sounds good to me.” Although going to get coffee with Jennifer sounded better.

Jennifer sat silently until more text appeared in the window she monitored. “Mr. Brandt, what software does your company use for its VPN?”

“Please, just call me Lee.”

She continued watching text scroll through the window on the laptop. “OK…Lee, what sof—rather…what protocol does your VPN client use on the company laptops?”

He noticed she didn’t reciprocate with an invitation to use her first name.

“The VPN clients all use IPSec.”

“That’s what I thought you were going to say.”

“Is that a problem?”

“No. But I think these guys hacked your VPN client and hijacked it.”

Lee gestured with his right hand, fingers spread wide. “They hijacked the software every National Aerospace employee uses for telecommuting?”

“Evidently. And that’s going to cause National Aerospace a lot of problems, especially if the bad guys start grabbing account information from infected machines.”

He didn’t like where this was leading. “So now I suppose you’re going to tell me a hacker can actually look like one of our employees working from home, yet be at another location and have control of an infected PC located inside the company?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. You could have a botnet inside your firewall. Or if they know precisely what they want they can just access it like an employee would.”

“Wonderful.”

This was a whole lot more than Ram looking at one classified drawing. The military side of National Aerospace had developed dozens of weapons and surveillance systems that could all be compromised by a scheme to access the classified engineering data from DEDS. The commercial side had trade secrets, proprietary information, and employee identity data.

Lee could certainly say “I told you so” to Barry and their CEO, but that would give him little satisfaction, because Jennifer’s discovery transcended his worst fears by an order of magnitude.

She pointed to the laptop screen. “They can communicate right through your firewall for quite a while before you discover what’s happening. By then, they will likely have obtained what they’re looking for and will split, covering their tracks as they go.”

Lee stared at the wall. The national security ramifications were frightening to him. “And from where is our friendly hacker controlling this machine?”

“He will appear to be local.” Jennifer sighed sharply. “But to answer your question, it’s more than one place. Probably more than one hacker. Who knows how many infected machines there are in this building, or elsewhere inside National Aerospace. That’s the good news.”

“Great.” He rolled his eyes. “What’s the bad news?”

“I can sum it up in four words…Iran, Yemen, Colombia, Mexico.” She studied him as she spoke.

“Not good. Not good at all,” he muttered. “I’ve heard Iran has been increasing its presence in Latin America and that it funds the recruiting and training of terrorists there. Do you think we’ve encountered an instance of Iran’s activity a little closer to home?”

Jennifer paused for a moment, squinting and playing with the ends of her hair. “Perhaps…but we’ve still got the Yemen factor to consider. Some U.S. based companies used technology training in Yemen to try to ameliorate the situation. You know…give the guys a good career and they’ll love us. The jury’s still out on its effectiveness. But there could be a cause-and-effect relationship between the technology training and the sophisticated hacking we uncovered.”

“I see the logic. It could account for both the Trojan and the hacked VPN clients.”

“But Mexico…” Jennifer paused, fiddling with her hair again. “Seeing activity in Mexico really bothers me, especially after the recent increase in alliances between drug cartels and Islamic terrorists.”

That was news to him. “I know Mexico is littered with drug cartels, but who reported their cooperation with Islamic terrorists?”

She studied him again. “General Pace testified to Congress about this trend a few years ago. At the time, the activity was confined to South America. More recently, a Navy admiral reiterated General Pace’s concerns saying the activity was moving north.”

He could sure conjure up some frightening possibilities from Jennifer’s discoveries. “So what was the congressional reaction to the warning—the more recent one?”

She exhaled sharply. “Basically…our politicians either pooh-poohed it, or shrugged.”

“That’s all?” Lee frowned and gave her a palms-up shrug. “Not even any saber-rattling?”

“That’s it.” Jennifer sighed. “Even after we exposed the link between Iran and Hezbollah in Latin America.”

“That link sounds like it might explain what we saw tonight, especially if the cooperation has extended northward into Mexico.”

The look in her eyes became intense. “Explain it by which, the military’s warning, or the politicians’ shrugs?” She was testing the political waters.

It was good to see they were on the same page. The left side of Lee’s brain jumped all over his deduction.

Why does that even matter?

When the schizophrenic conversation in his mind ended, he answered her question. “I’d say by both the warnings and the shrugs. But I hate to think about the implications for the USA. Mexico is pretty close to home and the border is open to anyone who has a will to cross it.”

“I don’t think Mexico will do much to remedy that problem. Intelligence shows the cartels bought off the police and many government officials. Or assassinated them as examples. The drug cartels are in control across much of Mexico and they’re recruiting gangs on our side of the border. In addition, we’ve observed them trafficking not only drugs, but also people, chemical, and biological warfare materials, and now we’ve even detected the movement of some nuclear materials.”

“Nuclear materials?”

What were her sources of information? It was probably best not to ask. “Wow. Mix that stuff with terrorists and you’ve got—”

“Maybe Uncle Sam’s funeral if we don’t wake up and act now. Lee, we don’t know what part of all that we stumbled onto tonight. This needs a lot more analysis, so we’ve got to report our findings to DHS, the FBI, NSA—”

“And we need to pray somebody listens, connects the dots, and is willing to take action.” He stared at the compromised laptop.

Jennifer shrugged. “You can pray if you want to, but I don’t put much stock in that sort of thing. I’m more into doing it myself.”

A shrug—do it myself—doesn’t pray. Either she’s been burned by some church, or she’s an honest-to-goodness agnostic.

If the opportunity arose he would ask her a few questions about her views. The left side of his brain repeated its previous question.

Why does it matter to you?

The right side threw a right cross to the jaw. It KO’d the left side. The fight was over. There would be ramifications, but he shoved that thought from his mind.

“I think it’s time for me to call Joe Morrison at Computing Security. He’s a good starting point. Joe has contacts within the FBI, DHS, and the police departments. He’s part of the Metropolitan Area JTTF. You know, the Joint Terrorism Task Force.”

“Sounds good.” Jennifer positioned her hands on the laptop keyboard. “And while you’re calling him I’m going to eliminate this little Trojan. Then I think I’ll call my contact at NSA.”

“Yes. Please eliminate it. Now, let’s see…the FBI, DHS, NSA, and Computing Security—that should just about cover the bases.” He dialed Joe Morrison’s Computing Security cell-phone number. Joe would respond to a call on that phone anywhere, anytime.

“Joe Morrison here.”

“Joe, it’s Lee. I’m at work and I’ve got some bad news. I need to tell you this in person.”

“Is it that serious?”

“I’m afraid so. Are you at home?”

“Yes. Why don’t you come over? We can meet in my study.”

“I’m on my way.”

Jennifer continued talking to someone at NSA. A few seconds later, she hung up and sat for a moment, staring across the room.

“I told Joe there was some bad news I needed to tell him in person,” Lee said. “I haven’t told him about your role yet, but I need you to explain what you found. You’ll be a lot more convincing than me.”

She squinted and frowned. “Since Joe doesn’t know about me yet, he could—”

“Completely flip out and have us both locked up.”

Jennifer straightened in her chair. “Wonderful. You will tell him you brought me in on this and that I am cleared for any level of information we might be dealing with?”

Lee noted the change in her posture. Though they hadn’t dealt with any classified data he should have anticipated her response. “Locked up” could end her career.

“Of course I will. And Joe’s a sensible guy. Officially, he’ll chew me out. But unofficially he’ll be tickled pink that I brought you in. If anyone gives us any flak you can count on me to take whatever blame they throw our way.”

“I guess I have to, don’t I?”

“Have to what?”

“Count on you.” Jennifer stared into his eyes.

Her penetrating gaze turned his brain inside out.

He looked away. He was mentally and emotionally exposed to her, including the thoughts coming from the right side of his brain.

Jennifer was far more than a pretty face. She was incredible in every sense of the word and he was drawn to her by a magnetic force so powerful it scared him. He hadn’t a clue where all this would lead—the security breach, the investigation, Jennifer—any of it.