Ratattat. Ratattat. Ratattat. Guests turned from their activities to gaze at the two men in overalls pushing a large luggage box across the foyer.
‘Can I help you gentlemen?’ The tone was cold, condescending. Her hair was tied up in a bun, and she was dressed in a black suit, the trousers falling neatly over, and hiding, her four-inch stilettos.
‘Suitcases,’ Marshall said.
‘Where are the passengers?’ she asked, her brown eyes looking over the top of her glasses.
‘Lady, how am I supposed to know that? I’m told to deliver suitcases, I deliver suitcases. I don’t get paid to ask questions.’
She shook her head. ‘Wait over there in the corner, near that potted palm tree. I’ll send someone over to you.’ She strode away. Marshall watched as her slender legs and firm buttocks disappeared through a recessed door in the wall.
Marshall pulled the box over to the palm tree and sat down in a plush leather chair. ‘You in yet?’ he said in a whispered tone.
Sean slid behind the luggage cart and sat cross-legged on the floor. He pulled out his laptop from his shoulder bag. After a few seconds, ‘Almost there. It’s amazing how many places like hotels don’t take security vulnerability warnings seriously. It is so easy to break into one of their servers with a simple buffer overflow. OK. Got it. We’re in,’ Sean said without looking up from his laptop.
Approaching footsteps alerted Marshall to the short, stocky, balding man with a poorly fitting shirt and tie bustling over to them. ‘Heads up,’ he whispered. Sean hurriedly placed the laptop on the floor behind the cart.
‘Can I help you?’ the stocky man asked. He wiped sugar from his moustache with the back of his hand.
‘Yeah. Suitcases.’ Marshall rose and greeted the man, making sure he was blocking the stocky man’s line of sight to Sean.
‘Which flight?’
‘Tokyo I think. Grounded for some technical issue.’
‘Where are the passengers?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Let me see the paperwork.’
Marshall handed over a clipboard.
‘This looks in order, but we can’t accept the luggage without the passengers.’
‘OK. We’ll leave it here.’ Marshall beckoned to Sean, who started to get up off the green and white checker-tiled floor.
‘Hold on. You’re not taking the suitcases?’
‘We were told to deliver them. We deliver them. No one said anything about taking them back.’
‘You can’t do that.’
‘Well we can’t stand around waiting. We don’t get paid to wait.’
The stocky man stood looking at the suitcase cart and back at the front desk. ‘Wait here.’ He bustled towards the front desk.
Sean hurriedly sat down behind the luggage cart and continued working.
‘You finished?’ Marshall asked.
‘Just adding the final touches.’
‘He’s almost at the desk.’
‘Nearly.’
‘He’s at the desk.’
‘Almost.’
‘He’s looking over at us now.’
‘Just one more detail.’
‘He’s reaching for his radio.’
‘Finished.’
The stocky man hesitated, shifted his hand from the radio to his back pocket, took out a handkerchief and wiped his face as he tapped away at the keyboard of the terminal. He banged the screen a few times, then read the screen for a few seconds before returning to Marshall.
‘OK. Sorry about the delay. The damn computer seems to be giving some trouble. I see a notification that the passengers are already here, and that these are additional pieces that were misplaced. You can put them in the storeroom. I’ll show you where it is.’
Marshall and Sean followed the stocky man through some lime-green-coloured corridors before coming to a double door. He unlocked the doors and flipped a switch inside the doorframe. Long tubular florescent lights flickered on in sequence, stretching towards the furthest point of the large storeroom; the last one finally coming on thirty yards away. He picked up a manifest off the table near the door and ran his finger down the paper.
‘OK. The Tokyo flight should be over there.’ He pointed towards the right of the rectangular room. The room had the hallmarks of an old, unused conference room. The carpet was a garish pattern of colours, and the smell suggested that it hadn’t been cleaned this decade. There were numerous piles of suitcases spread throughout the room.
‘Put these bags with those,’ their portly chaperone said, again gesturing in the general direction of the right side of the room. He stood and watched as Marshall and Sean pushed past him. The phone on the wall outside the storeroom rang.
‘Hello. Yes. Yes. What now? How does this happen? OK. I’ll be there shortly.’ The stocky man put down the phone. ‘I have to go back to the front desk. I’ll be back to collect you in a few minutes.’ He turned and closed the doors behind him.
Sean quickly opened the luggage box and Janet jumped out. ‘You need to hurry. It won’t be long before he is back.’
‘That was you?’ Marshall asked, nodding in the direction of the door.
‘That was my finishing touch.’ Sean grinned.
‘Nice.’
‘Do you remember what the bag looks like?’ Sean asked Janet.
‘I think so. It was a Samsonite bag. Black. Leather. Just a little larger than a large handbag,’ Janet said quickly.
There were grey, floor-standing metal shelves against the four walls of the room, and the shelves stretched from the floor to the ten-foot high ceiling. As far as they could see, every shelf was packed with suitcases. The floor piles seemed to be strewn across the floor in a random pattern, each encircled by ropes suspended by the stanchions.
‘These look like the most recent flight delays,’ Sean said, pointing to the piles on the floor, as he quickly walked between the piles, reading the tags hanging from their protective rope.
‘And it looks like the shelves are holding older cases,’ Marshall added, as he scanned the suitcases on the shelves, noting the dates written on labels that were untidily stuck on the shelves. Marshall stopped and pointed above his head.
‘That looks like the date you were here.’
‘Yes, there’s the bag!’ Janet said excitedly, and ran over to the wall. She jumped up, trying to reach the shelf, but it was much too high.
Sean frantically looked around the room and saw one of those library ladders leaning against the wall. He quickly wheeled it over. Janet climbed up the ladder, retrieved the bag and retreated to the luggage box. As they were closing the box, the door opened.
‘You finished? I have a lot of things to attend to.’
‘Yes,’ Marshall said. When they reached the foyer, Marshall handed his clipboard over for a signature. Then he and Sean pushed the luggage box out towards their van.
‘Hold on!’ They froze. ‘You forgot to take your copy.’ The stocky man handed over a sheet of paper and turned and headed back into the hotel.
Marshall and Sean jumped into the van, and did not release a breath until they pulled away from the hotel gates.
‘What are they?’ Sean was unable to discern who had whispered the question. Concerned and curious faces peered down at him as he unpacked the three boxes from the bag. Sean, still dressed in his airport overalls, emptied the boxes and found what looked like three bulky keyrings; each one had numbers flashing on a digital display. Because of the late hour, the children were in bed, but everyone else was now assembled in the living room anxiously awaiting answers.
‘Cryptographic keys,’ Sean said.
‘What?’
‘They are usually used to allow people to securely connect to internal company networks over the Internet.’ Sean picked up one of the keys. In concert, everyone leaned back. ‘It’s OK. They are harmless. See these numbers on the key? When someone wants to connect to a secure network, they use a VPN client and the client asks for a user name and certification number. This key provides the current active number that is authorised by the internal server, and then they have access. RSA were the innovators of this technology.’
‘And this is worth killing for?’ Marshall asked.
‘That’s the thing. These are used by hundreds, if not thousands of companies all over the world. So this doesn’t really make any sense,’ Sean responded.
‘And what happens if someone loses their key?’ Lisa asked.
‘A new key is issued for that user. The key is tied to a user login name as a pair. So the old key will be disabled, and the new one issued. Although, the standard key has six digits, and as you can see these have eight. So it appears that these were custom made.’
The room fell into silence. After a few minutes, Kenneth spoke.
‘Let’s think this through. A man gives Janet a bag. Why? What are the possible reasons why someone would give her the bag to take on the flight, considering the contents?’
After some time, Jenny offered, ‘He doesn’t want to attract attention to the contents.’ Heads nodded around the room.
Kenneth continued. ‘So what does that mean?’ Everyone shook his or her head in unison. Turning to Kathy, Kenneth asked, ‘Do you think the Gleaner would have any stories about any new computer security systems that were installed over the last year? Maybe this has something to do with a heist?’
‘I can check. I should be able to access the server from here. Let me get my laptop.’ Kathy left the room.
‘Is there anything else that these could be used for?’ Kenneth asked Sean.
‘They are basically a key to a lock, so they can be used for anything of that nature.’
Kathy, carrying her closed laptop, returned to the room with a frown on her face, ‘I can’t get in. It looks like I’ve been locked out of the system.’
‘Is there anyone you can call at the office?’ Kenneth asked.
‘That’s probably a bad idea,’ Sean interjected. Everyone turned to him with inquiring looks. ‘If the account has been locked, it is probably for that very reason, so you will call.’
After a pause Kathy said, ‘Hold on, let me try and login to my desktop. Maybe I can get to the server from there.’ Kathy tapped away at the keyboard. ‘OK. I can get to the desktop.’ More tapping. ‘Damn! Still can’t get to the server,’ she said in frustration.
‘Let me take a look,’ Sean said, reaching for the laptop. He tapped away for a while. ‘OK. Is there a way for the files from the server to be moved to your desktop locally?’
‘Huh? That’s what we are trying to do, isn’t it?’ Kathy quizzed.
‘No.’ Sean paused, and looked up at the ceiling fan. No one said anything; they just waited. ‘Is there a way to copy the files from the server from within the office?’
‘From here?’
‘No. In the office.’
‘How would we … Oh, I see. OK. But you just said we shouldn’t call the office. I could call Craig, my manager.’
‘Can he be trusted?’ Kenneth asked.
‘I think so. Remember he was the one who alerted me about Busha George.’
‘That’s true. Let’s give him a call.’
‘Hold on. I don’t think that is a good idea,’ Sean said.
‘Why?’ Kathy asked.
‘For one, we don’t know how Busha George got your cell phone number. Did he get it from Craig? Did he trace the call you made to Craig? Did he tap Craig’s phone?’
‘We don’t know the answer to any of those questions,’ Kenneth offered.
‘Exactly. That’s why we can’t take the risk of calling Craig. It may lead Busha George to us,’ Sean said pointedly.
‘I think I may have a solution. There is a young trainee in the Sports department that I could call. She joined the Gleaner in a mess. Dropped out of high school because she became pregnant, and then had a miscarriage. Very bright girl, but just made some bad decisions. She was extremely depressed and was on the verge of being fired when we sat down and had a talk over lunch one day. I managed to help her get her head straight and get her life back in order over a few months of life coaching. I don’t think anyone knew about my mentoring relationship with her. So it should be safe to call her.’
‘That sounds like a plan. Any objections?’ Kenneth looked around the room. ‘OK. It’s late, and I’m tired. A la mañana.’