Replaceable: An Alan Lamb Thriller (13 page)

Chapter 16

The computer forensics
lab was located in an aging brownstone on the opposite side of the street. Computer forensics wasn’t at the heart of the GCB’s wheelhouse, but occasionally the need arose, especially in cases that involved the culling of scientific data from a hard drive or other data storage device. Because the GCB operated on what amounted to a shoestring budget, the lab was jointly shared between the GCB and the FBI.

The man in charge of the lab was Leland Buttner. In a profession that was often the realm of the younger generation, Leland stuck out like a sore thumb. He was in his mid-fifties and hadn’t aged particularly well. To Alan, he looked like a man that had been born around the same time that Alan Turing was creating the machine that would eventually play a role in breaking the German’s Enigma code. When Alan had first met the man, Leland had worn spectacles with thick lenses, but at some point in time he had traded those in for contacts. For some reason, the absence of glasses made him look even older. He was mostly bald, with a few wisps of white hair that corkscrewed wildly above either of his temples.

The fact that the computer forensics lab was located in the basement floor of the building was somehow fitting since Leland was pale as a sheet. Alan couldn’t be sure if this was the man’s natural coloring or if it was a byproduct of spending a good deal of his time in an underground room. It reminded Alan of those fish that live in the pools deep inside caves.

The lab was cramped but well-lit. Steel shelves lined the walls, all of them stacked with boxes of gadgets and other computer odds and ends. There were three long wooden tables that ran north/south in the center of the room, all of them piled with a variety of computers: desktops, laptops, tablets, cell phones, monitors. There were Dells, HP, Compaq, eMachines, Alienware, Samsung, Toshiba. All the brands were represented. The prehistoric items, mostly CRT monitors and mammoth desktop systems, had been relegated to a far corner of the room. They sat there, forgotten and gathering dust.

Leland was seated at one of the tables. A disassembled laptop sat on the table in front of him, its guts strewn around the plastic case. On first sight, there appeared to be little organization involved in Leland’s methods, but Alan had known the man for several years, and although Leland’s system was esoteric, it was still a system. God help whoever inherited Leland’s job when he retired. His system of organization required a thick manual all its own.

Leland glanced up from what he was doing when he heard the door click shut.

“Hello Alan,” he said, “I take it you received my message?”

“What have you got for me?” Alan said, careful to not bump any of the equipment as he made his way over to Leland.

Cold air was pumping out of the overhead vents, and standing fans were set up at regular intervals. Alan wished he had had the foresight to wear a jacket. The temperature in the lab always hovered just above frigid.

Leland stood up, closed the lid of the laptop, and showed Alan to another table.

At least two dozen hard drives were stacked neatly near the center of the table. Leland pointed at them and said, “The guys pulled these out of the confiscated systems. They’re all the old-fashioned platter drives with about five terabytes capacity a piece.” He pointed to a separate pile of drives, also stacked neatly off to the right of the others. “These are all solid state drives. Terabyte each.”

Alan wasn’t a Luddite. He knew the difference between a gigabyte and a terabyte, and had taken several computer classes in college, but time and experience had taught him that it was always better to come across as uneducated. His philosophy was to let the experts be the experts; his job was to stand there and play dumb.

“Is that a lot?”

“Depends on the application. For this, I’d say it’s average. Data like that is usually memory intensive. I’d be surprised if this was all of it. My guess is that they stored most of it off-site. They most likely collected it locally and then set it up to transfer data to the cloud so they could free up space on the physical drives. Pretty standard stuff. I still remember back when memory was at a premium. Anyhow, that’s neither here nor there, I suppose. All of these are garbage.”

“Garbage?”

“Absolutely worthless. They’ve been wiped clean using DoD standards.”

“Sounds high tech.”

“Not really. Bunch of different programs out there you can download for free that can do that sort of thing. The real kicker is what they did after that. They didn’t settle at wiping all the data out.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning they weren’t stupid. Usually a person wipes a hard drive, we have tools that can recover that stuff. But whoever did this didn’t stop after they wiped them. They introduced a virus to each of them that basically maxed out their capacity with useless data.”

“What kind of data?”

“Random stuff. Like I said – garbage. As far as I can tell, the virus’s only purpose was to keep filling the drives with garbled data until there wasn’t any more space left. It’s actually quite clever.”

Alan hadn’t thought it possible, but somehow his heart managed to sink a little more. Another dead end.

Guy had gotten it wrong when he’d said that all roads led to Graham McKay. In this game, all roads led nowhere.

“These guys really wanted to cover their tracks. I’ve tried everything. Tried erasing the data, tried removing the virus, but as soon as I do, it just mutates and begins filling them up again. So, like I said, they’re garbage. Except one.”

Alan followed Leland over to a laptop that rested on the edge of the long rectangular table. A USB cord snaked out of the laptop to a single solid state drive.

“All of the drives were corrupted except this one.”

“You think they missed it?”

Alan knew the answer to this question before he asked it, but he wanted to hear Leland say it.

“Given the level of sophistication and the precautions they took, I highly doubt it was an accident,” Leland said. “I’d say it was intentional.”

“What’s on it?”

Alan thought he knew the answer to that question, too. Not specifically, but he knew the purpose: another clue. Morrie Arti had never left them completely in the dark. Just like the crime scenes, he always left a calling card; always left a breadcrumb or two for them to follow.

“That’s the funny thing,” Leland said. “All that’s on the drive is a single text file. A story, actually.”

Alan said, “What story?”

Cc

“A Case of Identity.”

Alan thought:
The game is afoot.

“It was obviously left there on purpose.”

“I’d say that’s a given,” Alan said.

He was staring at a printout of
A Case of Identity
that he had obtained online. Leland wouldn’t let him snag a copy off the hard drive in case there was a virus on the drive they didn’t know about. Standard procedure. Nobody wanted to be responsible for introducing a virus to the secure network. Fortunately, the copyright had expired long ago and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works were in the public domain. Any number of websites had made the stories free for the taking.

“But why Sherlock Holmes?” Lucy asked.

Because our buddy Morrie Arti is playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse. And something tells me we aren’t the cat.

“Beats me.”

“And why
that
particular story? There are so many of them, there has to be a good reason he would pick that one specifically.”

“My guess is he’s sending us a message.”

“You think there’s a secret code hidden in the text?”

“I don’t know. That’s one possibility. Or there’s something in the story itself that would give us a clue.”

“Only one thing to do,” Lucy said, moving over to the copier. She fed the pages through it and when she was finished she handed the original printout to Alan and kept the copy for herself. She sat down behind her desk with her copy of
A Case of Identity
and began to read it.

“What are you doing?”

“Reading it. You should do the same.”

Alan stared at her dumbly for a moment and then sat down at his own desk and began reading.

It wasn’t a long story, and it wasn’t a particularly good one, either. He was able to finish it in just under fifteen minutes. When he glanced up, he saw Lucy had finished before him.

“Well?” he asked.

Nothing in the story had stood out to him. As far as he could tell, there were no clues to be had. But he was sure Morrie Arti had left it on the hard drive for a reason.

“I thought it was interesting when Holmes said, ‘You did not know where to look, and so you missed all that was important.’ That reminds me of our current situation. But nothing else stood out to me. I thought maybe we would find a location or something.”

“A location?”

“Yeah, something telling us where to go next.”

Something she said got him to thinking. He turned to the story again and started to skim through it.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for something.”

“What?”

“Just give me a minute.”

As happened often, without his knowing it, his mind had captured the small details on the first pass, but hadn’t offered anything up to him. It was only after Lucy had mentioned something about a location that some vague detail had sparked in his brain.

Lucy hovered over his shoulder. He could smell her breath; mint-flavored toothpaste overshadowed by what Alan guessed was probably green tea.

His eyes scanned the printed pages without focusing on anything in particular, trusting that subconscious part of his brain, the one that was good at keeping secrets, to know what it was searching for.

“Here it is,” he said, tapping at the words near the top of the third page. “This woman and her fiancé are writing letters to each other, and instead of a personal address, he has her send them all to one of the local post offices.”

“Okay, but I don’t see how that means anything,” Lucy said.

“Maybe that’s the clue. You said you thought maybe he would give us a location or something. What about a post office?”

“Subtle, but it makes sense. Which post office though?”

Alan didn’t have an answer for that. For all he knew, he was grasping at straws, trying to find meaning where there was none. “I don’t know,” he said.

He scanned through the rest of the story. Lucy did the same.

“I don’t see anything,” Lucy said.

“Dammit.”

“So it’s another dead end.”

“Maybe. We can put out a nationwide APB letting local law enforcement know that someone might be targeting post offices for a possible terrorist act.”

“You should let Gant know if you’re going to do something like that. You can’t avoid him forever.”

A wave of exhaustion hit him, and right about then the last thing he wanted to do was have a heart to heart with Gant. But Lucy was right. He couldn’t avoid the man forever.

Gant listened calmly as Alan recounted recent events, up to the point where they had discovered the Sherlock Holmes story on one of the hard drives confiscated from the warehouse in San Francisco. He was holding the copy of
A Case of Identity
that Alan had read earlier.

When Alan was finished, Gant shuffled through the printed pages, not really reading them so much as using them as a distraction while he tried to figure out what he wanted to say.

Alan said, “It’s a long shot, but putting out the APB seems like the logical thing to do. Just in case we’re right.”

“This entire case is a long shot,” Gant said. He organized the pages and then placed them neatly at the corner of his desk. “You should have seen the look on the Deputy Director’s face when I briefed him on this cloning business. He looked like he’d just checked out the bottom of his shoe and realized he’d stepped in a pile of dogshit.”

“We have evidence,” Alan said. “There’s an entire warehouse worth of equipment in storage that points to exactly what they were doing.”

“Yeah, I know. And this McKay guy you brought in is willing to testify to all of it in exchange for a plea deal. The federal prosecutor is waiting for Strickland’s feedback.”

“I’m surprised the Deputy Director isn’t jumping at the chance since it’s all we’ve got.”

“That’s exactly the reason he isn’t making any snap decisions. McKay can testify till the cows come home, but it doesn’t put us any closer to catching the real bad guy. Strickland’s under the impression that maybe McKay
is
the bad guy, and he created this whole story about some anonymous employer to keep himself out of the slammer.”

“You didn’t see this guy,” Alan said. “He doesn’t have the backbone to pull off these kinds of jobs.”

“You sure maybe he wasn’t just conning you?”

“You know me better than that.”

“Sure, but we’ve all been wrong from time to time. Even a human lie detector such as yourself.”

“Trust me. If you spent five minutes with the guy, you’d come to the same conclusion.”

Gant put his hands up and said, “I believe you. It isn’t me who needs convincing. Somebody has to pay, and it can’t be some faceless mastermind that lives in the shadows. There’s plenty of evidence against McKay. There are the funds in his accounts from Odin LLC. His name and address are connected with that company through the California Secretary of State. His credibility is already questionable given the fact that he stole company secrets from his previous employer. It wouldn’t be hard to pin the stolen equipment on him either.”

It’s just like Guy said,
Alan thought.
McKay is the perfect fall guy.

“He’s looking for an easy way out.”

“Who?”

“Strickland. McKay’s in custody. If they lay all the blame on him, then it makes it look like the case has been wrapped up with a pretty little bow tied around it.”

“And when things don’t stop? There are going to be more of them, and then what? They can’t pin them on McKay if he’s in custody.”

“Sure they can. He’s not the lone gunman. They’ll just say that it was carried out by his associates, under his orders.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“The scales of justice.”

“And I suppose he sicked the hit squad on himself, too?”

“Listen, you’re preaching to the choir, Alan. I believe you. That’s why I’m telling you to keep working this thing into the ground. If there’s something out there to find, then find it.”

Alan didn’t like it, but he knew complaining about it wouldn’t solve anything. As he stood up to leave Gant’s office, he realized how tired he was.

“Alan,” Gant said as Alan reached the door. “Sleep on it. Get your bearings. I can tell when a man has been pushing himself too hard. Rest. Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees. Take a step back. Wake up tomorrow and look at it from a fresh angle.”

Alan didn’t argue.