Kill Code (28 page)

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of the
target. He was slightly early for their dinner date, which didn't
matter to her as she was planning on being very late. The date had
been set up in an online chat room for sexual sadists. While she
considered herself asexual, she knew enough of the kinks to play
enough of a convincing character to lure in her victims.

She looked at her face in the rear view mirror.
Tonight, she was a blond and had even dyed her eyebrows to match.
Sky blue contact lenses and heavy makeup completed the
disguise.

Running her hand through her hair, she settled in to
wait until ten minutes after the dinner reservation. Then it would
be time to get to work.

Before returning to the interrogation room, Jeff
Silver made a phone call. Luckily, the Denver branch of the FBI was
big enough to have their own HRT team with snipers. He gave the
team leader specific instructions and knew that they would be
followed to the letter when he mentioned talking with Director
Gerald. Then he stopped by the Computer Forensics Lab in the FBI
office. It was packed with piles of computer equipment and monitors
all in a disorganized mess on cheap metal shelves that were bent by
the weight of their contents.

He had dropped off the notebook found in Leo's hotel
room hoping that the technological wizards could get something from
it.

There were three of them standing over a bare
computer, glaring at a wide screen monitor. The tech guys were
contractors, not sworn agents, so he couldn't bully them around
like he could a regular agent.

Two of the men were pencil thin, the other almost
morbidly obese.

“What did you find?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

He glanced down at his watch. “You've had it for
almost four hours, what have you been doing in that time?”

“Trying to crack the encryption.”

“What encryption?”

The obese man, wearing a ratty t-shirt, said,
“First, per procedure, we did a byte-by-byte duplication of the
hard drive. Then we plugged it into our computer and have been
trying to access the data since then. It's encrypted up the wazoo
and none of us have any idea as to how to crack it.”

“How is it encrypted?” As an FBI agent, he had to
deal with all sorts of computer crime and had been through the
FBI's technology classes. Not that it got him up to the level of
the computer geeks, but he could speak the lingo.

“It's called Twofish.
Considered one of the top five advanced encryption methods, the
128-bit Twofish encryption cipher, which we have here, has never
had a successful attack reported. A 128-bit key has over 3.4 x
1038 possible combinations. Cracking Twofish trying every
possible encryption key would take 8.77 x 1017years.”

“How about the NSA?”

“Maybe a massively parallel computer, or even
quantum computers, but from experience, they wouldn't even talk to
us. I mean that the NSA knew about public key crypto 15 years ahead
of civilian researchers, so who knows what they are up to now.”

“So we couldn't obtain anything from it?”

“Not only no, but hell no. There appear to be at
least two hidden partitions, and the base operating, we think, is
some highly secured Linux variation. We'd like to meet the person
that put it together; it's not off the shelf and very
sophisticated.”

He shook his head, “I need everything back, as it
was, now. I've been ordered to release our suspect.”

“Can we keep the data image?”

“Yes. But, everything else, pack it up, I'm on a
deadline.”

They stared at him like he had grown a third
eye.

He slapped his hands together. “Now.”

Snapped into action, they scurried around packing up
the evidence. Very soon, he left them holding a box containing all
the material that they had examined. A similar visit to the
ballistics room got back Leo's rifle, ammunition and his pistol,
though not before they had been fired and a case from the .22 and
bullets from both weapons had been taken. Maybe he could tie them
into something big and have a chance to reopen this case from this
end.

A phone call got Leo's truck out of the
impound—luckily, they hadn't had time to even inventory it, much
less start tearing it apart.

Burdened by his packages, his final stop was the
Operational Technology Division (OTD) office. If it could be bugged
or tracked, these guys could do it. While technically in the same
area as computer forensics, the Denver field office was large
enough to have its own OTD unit. They worked with other law
enforcement agencies, including other federal services.

In sharp contrast to the forensics room, everything
was neatly organized, stored in numbered bins on shelves. He knew
that some of the really cool things were locked away from prying
eyes.

The guy who ran it was named Troy Castillo. He had
more degrees than an office full of medical doctors in esoteric
things such as applied mathematics, computer security, and,
strangely, French literature. He was an odd duck in a business that
thrived on standardization to the extreme all the way down to
acceptable tie widths in the employee dress code. He was wearing a
polka dot bow tie and an Egyptian cotton shirt. A Brooks Brothers
suit coat hung on a wooden coat hanger fastened to the wall.

Castillo held a soldering iron with a needle sized
tip, and was leaning over a very tiny device.

He looked up in surprise as Jeff came into the room
and the door closed with a loud clank.

“What can I do for you Special Agent Silver?”

“I need to track someone.”

He set the soldiering iron down in a holder and
said, “Case number?”

Now he was taking a chance of setting his career on
fire. Director Gerald herself had ordered him off the case. If he
was caught doing anything outside her explicit instructions, he
would not only be transferred to Alaska, but could lose his job and
pension.

“It's off the books. I'll get you a case
number.”

Castillo stared at him for a moment.

“If someone finds anything I give you, tracks down
the serial number and sees that it came from this office, I could
lose my job. Why should I help you?”

“This is a big case. I'm trying to do it right. But
I need to be able to track a very bad guy without anyone else
knowing what's really going on.”

Castillo seemed to consider it for a moment and then
said, “Okay. But I'm not going to give you anything that's FBI
issue.”

“What's that mean?”

“Nothing for you. We get samples from companies all
of the time, hoping to become vendors. I evaluate them and write up
a report if we should consider it. Some of it is better than what
we can get issued—there are a lot of people afraid of technology in
this business when they should be embracing it.”

“So, what can I get? I need to be able to track
someone. GPS kind of thing.”

“How big? And what will you be tracking, a vehicle,
person or something similar?”

“A person.”

Castillo strolled over to a box in the corner and
rummaged around for a few minutes before coming up with a small
white box about the size of half-a-pack of cigarettes.

“This should do nicely. Five days of tracking on
fresh batteries, and you can track it on the company web site. Used
for tracking boxes during shipping, it will fit your purpose
nicely.”

In five days, he would either be a hero or looking
for a job—probably in the food service industry. Smiling, he dug
out the laptop carrying case. “Can you install it in here? Like
now?”

###

Jackie found herself another coffee shop and over a
triple espresso considered what to do next. She was starting to run
short of cash and, with that, wondered how Leo was doing. She hoped
that he would be all right. But the best thing that she could do
for him was to figure out how to shut down or change the software
that controlled the Children of the Constitution. She hoped that
she had the coding skills to hack into the system. If Nathan had
used any of the encryption programs that she helped develop for the
banking industry, there wasn't enough computer in the free world to
crack them open.

How about coming at it from a different direction?
The software developed by
Jared used a form of
decision tree learning. Knowing Nathan, he wouldn't spring for a
commercial version of software when he could find something for
free that worked just as well if not better than something offered
for many thousands of dollars. A lot of the free software often had
the source code, which meant that he could modify it or have it
modified to his particular ends.

With the complexity of the software involved, there
probably weren't very many programs that fit the bill—with luck,
only one or two.

The more complex the software, the more tracks it
left on the internet. Given that, she might be able to pin down the
location from where it was being run.

She found another net cafe and rented a computer
where she could have some privacy. She didn't know who had been on
this computer before and if they had installed anything that would
compromise her search. Without her security tools, there wasn't
much she could do to protect herself.

Wikipedia provided the first clues. There were two
primary languages that would appeal to Nathan; both were free. The
first, called 'Orange,' was developed at a university in Slovenia.
She looked through their web site and saw that it was more oriented
towards GUI interfaces—not something that would be required for the
Children of the Constitution application. It also ran on C++, a
language that she liked but Nathan loathed as being 'a very bad
solution in search of a problem.'

From her computer science class,
she recalled a quote from the developer of the language, Bjarne
Stroustrup,
who said, “C makes it easy to
shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it
blows your whole leg off.”

The next piece of software she saw fit the bill
perfectly. It was a called Weka, and it was developed by a
university in New Zealand, which caused her to chuckle. Some very
good software was developed in some places that you didn't much
expect, Slovenia and New Zealand.

She wished that she had her laptop so she could
download the software and tear into it. There wasn't enough storage
on the computer in front of her to even start on the close look she
would require to pick out a pattern.

No matter, she was going to have to find a computer
some place to do what she needed. Damn, she wished she had her
laptop.

###

Jeff unlocked the door to the interrogation room.
Leo looked up at him, his expression stony despite the sight of all
the things he was carrying. What a cold fucking character.

He dropped a brown paper bag with evidence stickers
on it in front of Leo and said, “Get dressed. You’re being
released. This is your stuff. Your truck will be in front in a few
minutes.”

“My rifle?”

The first two words the bastard had to say were
about his gun.

“And your illegal pistol. You must have friends in
very high places—that suppressor is usually worth five years in a
federal pen.”

Dumping the laptop case on the table, he added.
“Here's the rest of your crap, including your laptop.”

Leo tore open the bags and climbed into his clothes
without a word or even a sense of modesty. Then he folded up the
orange jump suit he had been wearing squaring up the
seams. 

Neat freak fucker.

He thrust a clipboard containing the inventory of
items taken from Leo and said, “Sign this.”

Leo sat down and read through each item, checking to
make sure that everything was present.

“You didn't fuck with my rifle, did you?”

“Nope. Sign the damn thing so you can get the fuck
out of my sight.”

“Can I borrow a pen?”

Jeff slammed one on the metal desk in front of
Leo.

Leo signed the form and handed it and the pen back
to him.

Then Jeff did one of the hardest things that he done
in a while. He pulled out a business card. Handing it to Leo he
said, “You want to talk, let me know. My cell number is on
there.”

Leo nodded and slipped the card into his pocket.

Picking up his belongings, Leo motioned for Jeff to
lead the way.

Stepping outside the doors, Leo's head never stop
moving as he constantly scanned the surrounding area.

What was he looking for?

His truck had been pulled up in front of the
building, about twenty yards away and left with the motor
running.

Leo stopped, looking all around and fixed on one
spot, probably five hundred yards away.

Turning, he knocked Jeff down.

A freight train roar tore past Jeff's ears. Concrete
dust showered him.

The HRT snipers started shooting, the rounds passing
over their heads with snapping cracks.

Keeping low behind the silhouette of the truck, Leo
brushed himself off and said, “You really think your fancy HRT
snipers could even carry this guy's lunch? He had you in his cross
hairs from the instant you stepped outside the building. And he
ain't in that tree your guys are shredding.”

Another roar and spray of concrete dust. Jeff tried
to make himself part of the pavement. Looking up, he saw that Leo
and his truck were gone.

As a man who played with fire for a living, even
Matthew Tudor was impressed with the acetylene explosion at the
Denver Police Department vehicle garage. It lit up the sky and
almost rocked him off his feet despite being at least a mile
away.

Car alarms blared and he figured that window repair
companies would be making good money tomorrow fixing shattered
panes of glass.