7
When Josh opened the door to the computer lab Friday morning, Kate stood inside facing him, hands on hips.
“It’s about time. 7:15 AM.”
“I didn’t sleep well last night. Had dreams about a scary lady.”
“This morning I’m the scary lady.”
“You were last night, too.”
“So I’m your worst nightmare?” She gave him what he was beginning to recognize as her questioning, squinting frown.
“I didn’t say it was a nightmare.”
Kate’s face relaxed. “Well then…the lady of your dreams…” the enigmatic smile appeared, “…thinks we need to talk privately, very privately.” She pulled him toward the lab conference room and locked the door after they entered.
Lady of his dreams. That pretty well described Kate. “Is this the way it’s going to be with us, always hiding in secret?”
“No. You’re coming to my house for dinner on Saturday. Jenn…uh, Mom’s orders.”
“So I don’t have a choice in the matter?”
“No. None at all.” She pressed her lips together and raised her eyebrows. “So be there. Two men want to interrogate you.”
“Who? Peterson, the FBI guy, and his partner?”
“No. My dad and my granddad.”
“Are you serious, Kate?”
“I don’t know. But evidently they think so.”
“Who thinks what? You’re not making any sense.”
“We’ve been spending time together, and we’ll probably spend a lot more this summer. So my dad and my granddad need to give you an old-fashioned father-to-boyfriend talk. You know, threaten you a little.”
“Why are they going to threaten me? They don’t even know me.”
“That’s reason enough. Then they won’t have to kill you later, though Mom would probably shoot you before they could get to you.”
“Isn’t that being a little overprotective, old-fashioned?”
“Old-fashioned, yes. Overprotective? If you were me, you wouldn’t think so. So what’s it going to be, Josh? Dinner at 6:00 PM on Saturday, or…”
Dinner with Kate was worth a lot more than a little intimidation. “It’s going to be dinner Saturday at 6:00 PM.”
“I knew you’d make a wise decision.”
“How did you know? After all the threats, I might have—”
“No. You wouldn’t have. Because then I would have threatened to kill you.” She gave him her coy smile.
This was more than mere flirting. She had invited him in a little deeper into her mysterious life, presenting him with a new look at Kate Brandt.
Very alluring. Very scary.
He could handle the man talk on Saturday. That was something he’d handled in the locker room and on the football field. The threats from Kate were an unknown quantity. Her family’s concern, however, was a good sign. They must know she had an interest in him. And he certainly had an interest in Kate.
“Joshua West?”
“What?”
“Sometimes I wonder where your mind wanders off to when I’m talking to you.” She smiled that all-knowing smile. She had made an educated guess.
Their relationship, barely in its infancy, was warming rapidly. He needed to be cautious. Kate was someone he didn’t want to lose. He would make sure not to—
“Josh?”
“Yeah, Kate.”
“You’re back.”
He nodded.
“I need to tell you about a call I received from Peterson.” They sat down side-by-side at the long table. “Peterson identified the shooter and verified that he’s a member of Boko Haram. Someone convinced a young radical Muslim to come to America with false identification and commit an act of terror. I want to know who the driving force is. I suspect Al Qaeda. But I also need to know who’s paying the bills.”
“Seems like your work gets a little scarier every day.”
“Yes. It’s getting scary. But that’s not the worst.”
“You mean there’s something worse?”
“I think so. I haven’t told Peterson yet, because you and I need to do a little probing.”
“Sounds like you mean cyber-espionage, or hacking.”
“Something like that.”
“Kate, you’re not going to get us sentenced to prison, are you?”
“No.” She grinned. “At least…I don’t think so.” Her expression grew serious. “I need to show you how to run my software. We need to target the people funding Boko Haram, especially the shooter’s trip to the USA. If you follow the money, you find, as Granddad always says, the big kahuna.”
“Do you know enough to tell me who or what to target?”
“Don’t worry about that. What you need to worry about is how to operate my software so you can’t be traced. That’s where we’ll start today.”
“What if I mess up and they—”
“I won’t give you the chance to do that.”
“But what about you, Kate?”
“Like I said, I won’t let you get the chance to do that.”
So she was going to protect him. But who would protect Kate, the scary woman who seemed to thrive on taking chances?
I guess I’ve got my work cut out for me…once I figure out what it is.
****
Kate studied Josh’s face. It looked like he understood her instructions on running her software, but she would run it by him one more time. “At the UNIX command line enter collaborate dash F, and then the parameters I showed you. When it’s done, spool the output file to the printer.”
Why did Josh have that squinting frown on his face? He wasn’t going to back out, was he?
“Kate, you’ve got to be running this program against a huge Internet traffic database. You haven’t told me where you get that much real-time Internet traffic data.”
So that’s his problem. He thinks this might be illegal.
“It’s not real-time data, Josh. There are several delays.”
“But I thought only groups like NSA, the CIA, and—”
“You’re correct for the most part. But if you know where all the real-time monitors are, and where people send that data, you can sniff and filter out what you need. The data’s not classified or encrypted so—”
“Sniff it?” Josh’s voice rose. “Wouldn’t that be like sticking your nose in NASA’s supersonic wind tunnel and trying to take a breath?”
“Josh, it’s not like I can walk into NSA headquarters and ask for database access.” She smiled. “I do my best at scrounging data. I manage.”
Josh shook his head. He was either unconvinced or unsatisfied.
She stuck a thumb out toward the server room. “Why do you suppose our biggest UNIX server in the lab is busy most of the time?”
“You mean you’re collecting this stuff, continuously?”
“Yes. Well, since I started work on my dissertation I’ve kept the server really busy. Of course, in my hodgepodge of collected data streams things frequently break. I lose some data. But since I’m only working with packets, I catch enough over a period of time to see the origins and destinations of the traffic.”
Josh looked at her with a wary expression in his eyes.
“Look, Mom gave me a lot of information about who collects what on the Internet backbone. That’s not classified, neither the information, nor the data. It’s legal, just difficult to do on a shoestring budget. Changing the subject…remember the big event I thought was being planned?”
“Yeah. Got any ideas about what and when?”
“It’s not immediate, but soon. However, I don’t have a handle on the scope of it. That’s where you and I have some work to do.”
“This doesn’t sound like work on a PhD dissertation, Kate. It sounds like spying, cyber-espionage.”
“Are you losing interest?”
“No.” He gave her a sly grin.
“Would you like to work for the FBI, NSA, CIA, or ugh…the DHS, someday?”
“I’d certainly consider it. But I would like that sheepskin with those three letters on it first.”
“You’ll get your degree. But you’re going to get some experience here that’s worth a whole lot more than the degree to the organizations I just mentioned.”
“Kate Brandt, you are one beautiful, scary woman.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. Let’s hope we’re both scary to some terrorists plotting who knows what. Come on, I’ll get you started on a list of IP addresses. You just run the software like I showed you, print out the reports, and bring them to me. I’ll work from another list, and we’ll log the report information at 11:00 AM. Then you can take me out to lunch.”
“Did anybody ever tell you you’re presumptuous? And bossy, too.”
“No handsome young man ever has before.”
Her remark brought a smile to his face. “Did anyone ever tell you you’re a flirt?”
“Only if that’s what you’re calling me.”
“Forget it. I’ll take you out to lunch.”
“And tomorrow, I’ll take you. Let’s get to work.”
****
Before Katie realized it, three hours had passed and Josh had printed out an inch-high stack of reports.
He walked over to her desk and laid several reports side-by-side. “This is pretty interesting. If we can identify these organizations by their real IP addresses, we’ll know who’s communicating with whom.”
“Normally, we would need some classified documents from NSA or the CIA to identify the organizations. But I’ve created my own database. It isn’t classified…yet. At some point, we’ll need to give it to the FBI, but I’m not sure they could use it in its present form. Maybe when our software is a little more user friendly.”
“Are you saying the FBI doesn’t have the resources to—”
“They cannot currently replicate my work. Not to my knowledge. This is original research, Josh. It has to be, or I have no dissertation. I keep my database encrypted, locked up, and hidden on a tiny flash drive and you have to keep my little secret.”
“Like I said, you’re a scary woman, Kate.”
“What happened to beautiful?”
He scanned her face. “Nothing.”
She smiled back at him. That wasn’t her normal response to a flirtatious man. She was Katie Brandt, the girl who used to throw rocks at boys who ogled her. With Josh, things were different, much different. “Before lunch we’ll run these correlated nodes against the database. That should give us one more cluster of conspirators. But identifying them still doesn’t tell us what they’re planning.”
“Something tells me you’ve already come up with an idea for doing that.”
“Maybe. But I’m going to need your help. First, let me show you what I found out about communications with our Boko Haram shooter.”
“So he wasn’t a lone wolf?”
“No. He was funded by a terrorist group and manipulated into attempting a mass murder of children. But in the grand scheme being plotted, he was only a peon. I was able to decrypt the final message they sent to him. It was clever, but not sophisticated. They coded their messages in the text sent via HTTP, so they can penetrate a lot of barriers, like firewalls and proxy servers.”
Josh rubbed his chin. “But that means the encryption scheme is probably pretty simple. So we should be able to decode it.”
“And it is.” Kate slipped a sheet of paper from a manila folder on her desk. “Here’s the message sent to the Boko Haram shooter. They simply used a five—five—five word spacing. I’m assuming it symbolizes the five pillars of Islam. These people are really into using symbolism for what, how, when, and where they do things.”
“So what steered you to word-spacing patterns?”
“I started by circling any words that seemed forced or unnatural in the text. Then I looked for patterns and for a rationale for the patterns. But let me finish identifying the organizations in these reports. I need a few more minutes.”
Josh looked over her shoulder as she worked.
In five minutes she had compiled a list of IP addresses in a text file. She queried her database using the addresses and waited.
Josh sat down beside her. “How long until—”
“Here they come, Josh. Four locations, four somewhat imprecise locations. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and somewhere in Western Canada.”
“But this is just raw traffic, Kate. Packets being routed to IP addresses. We’re only catching pieces of messages as they go by.”
“I know. Just like I did with the shooter, I have to hack into an email server to get the messages. We can identify the email server they’re using, but the hack has to be completely anonymous because—”
“Yeah. Because first, it could be illegal in whatever country the server resides, and second, it could get us killed.”
“There are no international treaties regarding espionage for national defense, because everybody does it, and no one wants to point a finger while three others point back to themselves.”
“What about the foreign country? Can they—”
“Accessing an email server used by a terrorist in a country that harbors terrorists is only illegal there. We’re not leaving the US and we’re going to remain anonymous. Satisfied, Josh?”
“You don’t belong to some hactivist group, do you?” Josh grinned, but his eyes held a glint of concern.
“Yes. And so do you—Katie’s cyber sleuths.”
“Don’t joke about it. These people are dead serious about what they’re doing. The Iranian connection is worrisome. That guy in charge is one scary dude. Even when he’s replaced, Iran will probably get someone even scarier.”
“You’ve got that right. I was listening to a documentary last week where several Israeli political and military leaders said the same thing. Iran wants to destroy Israel as soon as they can fit their ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. And they would try it despite knowing that Israel’s retaliation would decimate Iran.”
“But that’s crazy.”
“Not if you really believe you have the power to bring down the Mahdi, the Islamic Messiah, and set the stage for the new caliphate.”
“I didn’t know you were into Islamic studies, or Middle-Eastern history and politics.”
“I’m not really. I’m more into the Bible. It pretty well describes the alliances against Israel that we’re seeing form today.”
Josh frowned and stepped back from her. “So you are a Bible thumper. I hope you don’t plan—”
“I’m not going to preach to you, Josh, if that’s what you’re worried about. But this problem between the Arabs, who’re mostly Islamic, and the Israelis, goes back 4,000 years, a blood feud between sons started by a disputed inheritance. It’s documented in the Bible, as well as secular history.”
“So…how do you think it all ends, the feud?”
“You’re not ready to hear that yet. You’ll just cut and run.”
“Come on, Kate. If I’m putting myself in danger, I need to hear about all the possibilities.”
“Suffice it to say, Bible scholars don’t think the US is mentioned as a player in the final showdown. Some think we won’t even be a world power at that time. You can interpret that any way you want. Now, in a few minutes, I’m going after the big kahuna, the Iranian connection’s mail server. Do you want out?”
Josh studied her face, his expression clearly indicating he liked what he saw.
She wondered if there would be trouble for them when attraction collided with disparate beliefs. Then there was his reluctance to—
“Kate, are you listening?”
“What?”
“I said, I’m in.”
The attraction problem is already creating issues. Maybe she had made a mistake by inviting him in. “Are you a hundred percent sure? This is the point of no return.”
Josh’s eyes displayed a softer look. “Promise me you’ll be careful, because I—”
She cut him off. “I promise, Josh.”
He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m in, for better or for worse.”
She laid her hand over his. “In sickness and in health, as long or short as we both may live?” She gave him a big grin.
He shook his head. “You know, I never know what’s really going on in that mind of yours, and half the time I don’t have a clue what you’re doing when your fingers are flying over that keyboard on your laptop.”
She took Josh’s hand, pulled it from her shoulder, and held it. His hand was huge, strong. It made her feel secure. Secure…Josh’s security was in his own abilities, not in the one true God.
Katie Brandt, what in heaven’s name are you doing? Maybe it wasn’t in heaven’s name. The question returned. Was she making a mistake with Josh? Possibly endangering someone who wasn’t prepared to die?
“Kate?”
“Huh?”
“You will explain what you’re doing when you start working your magic, won’t you?”
“I’ll tell you everything you need to know.” Including some things you probably don’t want to hear. “Hand me the list of IP addresses, Josh. It’s time to take a trip to Iran.”