Authors: Michael Connelly
I smiled again. Chavez looked at me, adjusted her horn-rimmed glasses and asked for the letter from my new employer. I pulled
it out of the inside pocket of my jacket and handed it over. Chavez said she would be back to collect us for the tour in ten
minutes.
Rachel and I sat down on the couch beneath one of the windows and read the waiver form attached to the clipboards. It was
a fairly straightforward waiver with check boxes stating that the signer was not an employee of a competitor, would take no
photographs during the tour of the facility and would not reveal or copy any of the trade practices, procedures or secrets
revealed during the tour.
“They’re pretty serious,” I said.
“It’s a competitive business,” Rachel said.
I scribbled my signature on the line and dated it. Rachel did the same.
“What do you think?” I whispered, my eyes on the receptionist.
“About what?” Rachel asked.
“About McGinnis not being here and the lack of a solid explanation why. First he’s ‘unexpectedly detained,’ next he’s ‘home
sick.’ I mean, which is it?”
The receptionist looked up from her computer screen and right at me. I didn’t know if she had heard me. I smiled at her and
she quickly looked down at her screen again.
“I think we should talk about it after,” Rachel whispered.
“Roger that,” I whispered back.
We sat silently until Chavez returned to the reception area. She handed us our driver’s licenses and we gave her the clipboards.
She studied the signatures on each.
“I spoke to Mr. Schifino,” she said matter-of-factly.
“You did?” I said a little too un-matter-of-factly.
“Yes, to verify everything. He wants you to call him as soon as possible.”
I nodded vigorously. Schifino had been blindsided by the call but must have come through.
“We will as soon as we finish the tour,” I said.
“He’s just anxious to make a decision and to get things going,” Rachel added.
“Well, if you follow me, we’ll get the show on the road and I’m sure you will make the right decision,” Chavez said.
Chavez used a key card to open the door between the reception area and the rest of the facility. I noticed that it had her
photo on it. We stepped into a hallway and she turned to face us.
“Before we go into the graphic design and web hosting labs, let me tell you a little bit about our history and what we do
here,” she said.
I pulled a reporter’s notebook out of my back pocket and prepared to take notes. It was the wrong move. Chavez immediately
pointed to the notebook.
“Mr. McEvoy, remember the document you just signed,” she said. “General notes are fine but no specifics or proprietary details
of our facility should be recorded in any manner, including written notes.”
“Sorry. Forgot.”
I put the notebook away and signaled our host to continue the presentation.
“We opened for operation just four years ago. Keying on the growing demand for high-volume, secure data management and storage,
Declan McGinnis, our CEO and founding partner, created Western Data. He brought together some of the best and brightest in
the industry to design this state-of-the-art facility. We have almost one thousand clients, ranging from small law firms to
major corporations. Our facility can service the needs of any size company located anywhere in the world.
“You may find it interesting that the American law firm has become our most common client. We are strategically designed to
provide a full raft of services specifically aimed at satisfying the needs of the law firm of any size in any location. From
web hosting to colocation, we are the one-stop shop for your firm.”
She made a full turn with her arms outstretched, as if to take in the whole building, although we were still standing in a
hallway.
“After receiving funding from various investment blocs, Mr. McGinnis zeroed in on Mesa as the place to build Western Data
after a yearlong search determined that the area best met the critical location criteria. He was looking for a place where
there were low risks of natural disaster and terrorist attack as well as a ready supply of power that would allow the company
to guarantee twenty-four/seven uptime. In addition and just as important, he was looking for a location with direct-access
bridges to major networks with massive volumes of reliable bandwidth and dark fiber.”
“Dark fiber?” I asked and then immediately regretted having revealed that I did not know something I possibly should have
known in the position I was supposed to be in. But Rachel stepped in and saved me.
“Unused fiber optics,” she said. “In place in existing networks but untapped and available.”
“Exactly,” Chavez said.
She pushed through the double doors.
“Added to these site-specific demands, Mr. McGinnis would design and build a facility with the highest level of security in
order to meet compliance demands for hosting HIPPA, SOCKS and S-A-S seventy.”
I’d learned my lesson. This time I just nodded as if I knew exactly what she was talking about.
“Just a few details about plant security and integrity,” Chavez said. “We operate in a hardened structure able to withstand
a seven-point-oh earthquake. There are no distinguishing exterior features connecting it to data storage. All visitors are
subject to security clearance and recorded while on site twenty-four/seven with the camera recordings archived for forty-five
days.”
She pointed to the casino-style camera ball located on the ceiling above. I looked up, smiled and waved. Rachel threw me a
look that told me to stop behaving like a child. Chavez never noticed. She was too busy continuing the rundown.
“All secure areas of the facility are protected by key cards and biometric hand scanners. Security and monitoring is done
from the network operations center, which is located in the underground bunker adjacent to the colocation center, or ‘farm,’
as we like to call it.”
She went on to describe the plant’s cooling, power and network systems and their backup and redundant subsystems, but I was
losing interest. We had moved into a vast lab where more than a dozen techs were building and operating websites for Western
Data’s massive client base. As we walked through, I saw screens on the various desks and noted the repeated legal motifs—the
scales of justice, the judge’s gavel—that indicated they were law firm clients.
Chavez introduced us to a graphic designer named Danny O’Connor, who was a supervisor in the lab, and he gave us a five-minute
rap about the personalized, 24/7 service we would receive if our firm signed up with Western Data. He was quick to mention
that recent surveys had shown that increasingly consumers were turning to the Internet for all their needs, including identifying
and contacting law firms for legal representation of any kind. I studied him as he spoke, looking for any sign that he was
stressed or maybe preoccupied by something other than the potential clients in front of him. But he seemed normal and fully
plugged into the sales pitch. I also decided he was too chunky to have been Sideburns. That’s one thing you can’t do when
you are wearing a disguise: decrease your body mass.
I looked past him at the many techs working in cubicles, hoping to see somebody giving us the suspicious eye or maybe ducking
behind their screen. Half of them were women and easy to dismiss. With the men, I saw nobody I thought might have been the
man who had gone to Ely to kill me.
“It used to be you wanted the ad on the back of the Yellow Pages,” Danny told us. “Nowadays you’ll get more business with
a bang-up website through which the potential client can make immediate connection and contact.”
I nodded and wished I could tell Danny that I was well versed in how the Internet had changed the world. I was one of the
people it had run over.
“That’s why we’re here,” I said instead.
While Chavez made a call on her cell, we spent another ten minutes with O’Connor and looked at a variety of websites for law
firms that the facility designed and hosted. They ranged from the basic homepage model containing all contact information
to multilevel sites with photos and bios of every attorney in the firm, histories and press releases on high-profile cases,
and interactive media and video graphics of lawyers telling viewers they were the best.
After we were finished in the design lab, Chavez took us through a door with her key card and into another hallway, which
led to an elevator alcove. She needed her key card again to summon the elevator.
“I am going to take you down now to what we call the ‘bunker,’ ” she said. “Our knock room is there, along with the main plant
facilities and the server farm dedicated to colocation services.”
Once again I couldn’t help myself.
“Knock room?” I asked.
“Network Operations Center,” Chavez said. “It’s the heart of our enterprise, really.”
As we entered the elevator, Chavez explained that we were going down only one level structurally but that it totaled a twenty-foot
descent beneath the surface. The desert had been deeply excavated in order to help make the bunker impenetrable by both man
and nature. The elevator took nearly thirty seconds to make the drop and I wondered if it moved so slowly in order to make
prospective clients think they were journeying to the center of the earth.
“Are there stairs?” I asked.
“Yes, there are stairs,” Chavez said.
Once we reached the bottom, the elevator opened on a space Chavez called the octagon. It was an eight-walled waiting room
with four doors in addition to the elevator. Chavez pointed to each one.
“Our knock room, our core network equipment room, plant facilities and our colocation control room, which leads to the server
farm. We’ll take a peek in the network operations center and the colocation center, but only employees with full-access clearance
can enter the ‘core,’ as they call it.”
“Why is that?”
“The equipment is too vital and much of it is of proprietary design. We don’t show it to anyone, not even our oldest clients.”
Chavez slid her key card through the locking device of the NOC door and we entered a narrow room just barely big enough for
the three of us.
“Each of the locations in the bunker is entered through a mantrap. When I carded the outside door I set off a tone inside.
The techs in there now have the opportunity to view us and hit an emergency stop if we are determined to be intruders.”
She waved to an overhead camera and then slid her card through the lock on the next door. We entered the network operations
center, which was slightly underwhelming. I was expecting a NASA launch center but we got two rows of computer stations with
three technicians monitoring multiple computer screens showing both digital and video feeds. Chavez explained that the techs
were monitoring power, temperature, bandwidth and every other measurable aspect of Western Data’s operations, as well as the
two hundred cameras located throughout the facility.
Nothing struck me as sinister or relating to the Unsub. I saw no one here that I thought could be Sideburns. No one did a
double take when they looked up and saw me. They all looked rather bored with the routine of potential clients coming through
on tour.
I asked no questions and waited impatiently while Chavez continued her sales pitch, primarily making eye contact with Rachel,
the law firm’s IT chief. Looking at the techs studiously avoiding acknowledgment of our presence, I got the feeling that it
was so routine that it was almost an act, that when Chavez’s card set off the intruder alert, the techs wiped the solitaire
off their screens, closed the comic books and snapped to attention before we came through the second door. Maybe when there
were no visitors in the building, the mantrap doors were simply propped open.
“Should we head over to the farm now?” Chavez finally asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“I’m going to turn you over to our CTO, who runs the data center. I need to step out and make another quick phone call, but
then I will be back to collect you. You’ll be in good hands with Mr. Carver. He’s also our CTE.”
My face must have shown I was confused and about to ask the question.
“Chief threat engineer,” Rachel answered before I could ask it.
“Yes,” Chavez said. “He’s our scarecrow.”
W
e went through another mantrap and then entered the data center. We stepped into a dimly lit room set up similarly to the
NOC room with three workstations and multiple computer screens at each. Two young men sat at side-by-side stations, while
the other was empty. To the left of this line of stations was an open door revealing a small private office that appeared
empty. The workstations faced two large windows and a glass door that looked out on a large space where there were several
rows of server towers under bright overhead lighting. I had seen this room on the website. The farm.
The two men swiveled in their chairs to look up at us when we came through the door but then almost immediately turned back
to their work. It was just another dog and pony show to them. They wore shirts and ties but with their scruffy hair and cheeks
they looked like they should be in T-shirts and blue jeans.
“Kurt, I thought Mr. Carver was in the center,” Chavez said.
One of the men turned back to us. He was a pimply-faced kid of no more than twenty-five. There was a pathetic attempt at a
beard on his chin. He was about as suspicious as flowers at a wedding.
“He went into the farm to check server seventy-seven. We got a capacity light on it that doesn’t make sense.”
Chavez stepped up to the unused workstation and raised a microphone that was built into the desk. She clicked a button on
the stem and spoke.
“Mr. Carver, can you break away for a few minutes to tell our guests about the data center?”
There was no reply for several seconds and then she tried again.
“Mr. Carver, are you out there?”
More time went by and then a scratchy voice finally came through an overhead speaker.