Daniel Ganninger - Icarus Investigations 01 - Flapjack (7 page)

“
Is that the network room?”  He asked pointing to some closed doors by the elevator.  As the guard turned he quickly grabbed the drive and threw it in the bag.

“
Uh, I don’t know.  Do you need to find it?” the guard inquired.

“
No, I don’t think so.  Let me just check the other offices and if they look alright, I think we’ll be done.  The IT guys must have inadvertently fixed the problem,” Galveston fibbed.

The pair
moved to the other offices.  Galveston entered each one and jiggled some wires, pulled out a voltmeter, and checked the wiring, having no clue what he was doing.

“
Yup, everything looks good.  I think we’re done.  I don’t see any problems,” Galveston shrugged his shoulders and grabbed his bags. The pair made their way to the elevator and took it back down to the lobby.  As the door opened on the bottom floor, another guard was standing at the door.

“
Damn it,” Galveston thought, “it’s time to pull a rabbit out of the hat.”

“
Hey,” the first guard said, “we’re all done up there.”

“
I didn’t know we had any maintenance scheduled,” said the second guard, whose identification tag read Jeff.

“
Yeah, me neither, that’s why I’m six hours late,” Galveston interjected, giving a quick laugh, “and there’s nothing wrong,” he added, taking hold of the conversation.  “I tell you what. I’ll just cancel out the work order.  My bosses won’t like me doing that, but I know you guys have to keep a record of who was here.  Somebody won’t be happy getting a bill for work that wasn’t done, or needed,” he lied.  “If you give me the work order I’ll call the IT guys tomorrow.”

Galveston
needed that work order to make sure there was no record of him being there and to ensure a bit of safety.  He hadn’t counted on dealing with two guards, but that was par for the course.  Guard Jeff looked thoughtful.

“
I don’t know.  I don’t care if they get charged, but if the work needed to be done, we need a record of it, even if it wasn’t needed,” guard Jeff responded.

“
Well to be honest with you, I want to cover my own ass too.  I mean, I am six hours late.  I was supposed to be here no later than eight and here I am at,” Dan looked at his watch, “two-thirty in the morning.” Galveston was pandering to the blue collar tendencies of the men to help a poor schlub out.

“
I don’t see a problem with that,” the first guard answered.

“
Yeah, it’s okay, I guess,” guard Jeff said, after thinking for a moment.

They gave
Galveston the work order he brought with him and he asked for the IT department number just to make it look like he gave a crap.

“
Thanks fellas,” Galveston said while he gathered all his things.  He hiked his bags onto his shoulders.  “I’d say it was fun, but at this point I still have a long night ahead.”  Galveston moved toward the front door and opened it.  “Thanks again for the help.”  He gave a friendly wave and turned to leave.

Guard Jeff said loudly,
“how’s Mike doing over there?” 

Without flinching
Galveston turned, “Mike Fletcher?  He’s alright.  Damn fool broke his leg falling off a ladder.  He’s in a cast up to his neck.  You a friend of his?”

“
Uh, no,” guard Jeff stammered.  “I meant another Mike.”

“
Who?  Mike Jones?  That’s the only other Mike I know.  I haven’t been there very long though.”

“
No, you must not know him.  Have a good night.”

“
You guys have a good night too.  I hope you don’t get too bored.”  Galveston gave another friendly wave and closed the door behind him.  “Amateurs, but nice guys,” he thought.  He had played off of confusion and empathy to get the job done.  Lesson 112, he told me later.  Galveston walked to the van and got in the front seat.

“
Professor, Mary Anne,” he announced to us, “we’re out of here. “

-Chapter 15-

We quickly began the long drive back to our fortress of solitude in San Diego.  Unfortunately, we still had a lot of work to do.  Alex set up his computers in the office living room and began pecking on the keys, as the clock passed 5 o’clock in the morning.

He managed to get into the Genesis system easily using the
“Annie Oakley” virus.  Alex weaved his way through a series of backdoors and open ports allowing him to get into internal workings of the system.  It was an easy task with the intricate knowledge Alex had of security systems.

“Annie Oakley” masked our every move and we were just another computer, out of thousands, bouncing off their servers.  Alex provided another source of security by masking our computer’s address to various cities around the world, from Prague to Amsterdam to Seattle.

At this point we had been without sleep for over 24 hours, living off of coffee, highly caffeinated energy drinks
, and items with large amounts of high fructose corn syrup.

The mean little
virus program we had installed on the Genesis computer system, the “Annie Oakley”, sprung to life and unraveled itself like a giant hydra monster.  Galveston and I didn’t understand how it all worked; we just knew it did work.  We again took technology for granted, like so many others.  We never asked Alex what his true snooping capabilities were and figured it was better to leave that alone.

We could now use
Dart’s internal username and password to access the more secure areas of the Genesis system, which contained the
Adamanthea
plans.

Dart McLeod had two usernames and passwords.  One was for a general login to the system
, a simple one that consisted of,
DMcLeod
and
Ferrari442
.  Galveston joked this was obviously a little gift he planned to get for himself.

The int
ernal username and password to the secure area would have been impossible to break without the keylogger and had a complex password.  Alex typed it in slowly, careful not to make a mistake.  It read,
Dart_McLeod_RD
, and the password was,
877x4vst*779j-31st5
.

“
Well that would have been easy to crack,” Alex said sarcastically as he finished typing the string of characters.  Alex informed us that, “figuring out the string would have been like trying to pass a watermelon through a garden hose.”  The encryption of the password was accomplished by a 64 bit Blowfish cryptographic block cipher.  This was the fancy way of saying, tough security.

Alex quickly scrolled through the file folders he saw on his computer.  This was highly sensitive stuff and consisted of defense contracts and plans.  He finally located the
Adamanthea
file.  It was excessively large and would take time to move over.  Alex began uploading another nasty little virus that would lay dormant for a while, avoiding detection by anti-virus software, because technically it didn’t exist.

It would tick down after a few hours a
nd release its viral contents like a time release capsule, rendering all the files near it useless and trashed.  It was a nasty little bug.  We had nicknamed it “Grumpy”, because damn, it had a serious attitude problem.  Alex assured us that it would relegate itself only to the files in that area dealing with the
Adamanthea
project.  The last thing we needed was every geek this side of the Mississippi descending on Genesis to “oh” and “ah” over this new threat.  After “Grumpy’s” viral belch, it would go dormant again.

This would help mask what we had done
.  I was secretly feeling sorry for the employees at Genesis that would have to clean this mess up.  Somehow noting my trepidation, Galveston said quietly, “They’ll survive.  It’s a huge company.”

I knew all that, but it still hung over me.  We were
damaging work that had nothing to do with our case from behind a computer screen so we could end up making that buck even though I knew they had stolen the plans.  I had come from a different world in which I stuck my head in the sand.  In the world of academia, the worst people would do was publish or perish.  Academics who released junk research on “Danish boys who eat waffles develop elevated blood sugar levels” published in the Journal of Breakfast Dietary Habits, was the worst I had to contend with.  Guys and gals doing whatever it took to reach tenure, sit back, teach one class a year, and spend fifteen minutes a week in their office for students, while berating those same students for wasting their time.  “I’m tenured, damn it!” they would exclaim.

Galveston
by nature was much more cynical and suspecting.  He was by all accounts, a realist, having been exposed to the real world of corporations, governments and politics.  I too had experienced that governmental bubble of political horse trading, but never truly realized what went on behind closed doors.  I had been a policy developer and analyst, buffered from the dog-eat-dog world of those back room dealings.

Up close and personal was how
Galveston operated, which often opened him up to the surly underbelly of the cutthroat, greedy people he came in contact with.  I was being exposed to the same ugly element and quickly becoming jaded, slowly leaving the optimist in myself behind.

“
I’m all done,” yelled Alex, bolting me from my silent bit of retrospection.  He had already downloaded the file and waited for “Grumpy” to do its bit.  We now had proof of our work.  He deleted the original plan from the Genesis server and made some final checks that all the files we needed were copied.  The virus would unravel at any second, and those files we had just downloaded onto our own hard drive would soon be useless on the Genesis server, and useless to anyone that tried to retrieve them.

It was almost over.  I spied the couch blis
sfully, and planned to dream of beautiful women feeding me grapes like in so many Roman depictions.  Alex and Galveston continued to look calmly, but nervously, at the screen.  Galveston sat like a general finishing up a battle.  He looked swollen around the eyes, like a puffer fish.  I hallucinated that his head began to float from his body, a clear sign we hadn’t had enough sleep.  Galveston peered over Alex’s shoulder, letting a yawn give way.

“
There it is,” Alex said pointing to the file named
Adamanthea
39598253
that now lay on our computer hard drive.

“
Can you open it?” Galveston asked.

“
Yeah, no problem, but why?” Alex answered and questioned.

“
I just want to see what we have, uh, borrowed.”

Alex
opened the file, revealing a window with large amounts of text followed by a page of design schematics.

“
That’s a lot of stuff.  Go ahead and print them if you can,” Galveston ordered, noticing something peculiar.

“
You’re the boss.”

The printer whirled up and revealed
20 pages, many of the first pages looking like goobly gook, no inherent pattern or meaning of words.  Galveston reached for a few of the fresh pages coming off the printer and looked at them inquisitively.

“
Is this coded or something?” he asked and then handed a few of the pages to Alex.

“
I’m not sure.  It looks like pieces of a data stream, probably a program that was made in-house by the Genesis engineers.  If we had more time I could do some snooping, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” Alex said tapping on the computer screen.

“
I agree with you, go ahead and shut her down.”  Galveston continued to study the pieces of paper.  “You know, it almost looks like it could be a cipher, you know, code.”

“
It’s called cryptology,” I interjected.

“
Thanks Mr. Science.  Here,” he handed me a few of the sheets.  “See what I mean?  There seems to be a definite pattern of some sort.”

“
I see what you mean,” I said studying the paper.  “There is some sort of sequence going on here, but I can’t figure it out.  It’s only in the first few pages too, and then it goes back to a bunch of crazy symbols.”

Alex finished exiting out of the Genesis system
, and he too set his sights on the papers, studying them closely.  Then a smile crossed his face.

“
You know what this is?” he asked as if we hadn’t been asking the exact same question.  “This is a good old fashioned Trimethius Tableau.  If I can remember correctly, it was invented around the Renaissance period.  It was an expansion, more or less of the Caesar shift.  It uses a matrix of every letter of the alphabet, twenty-six rows and columns and you read down each row to decipher or encrypt the code.”

“
You know I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Galveston chided him.

“
To put it simply for you, it’s an old cipher, an old way of writing secret code.”

“
So this is old?”  I asked like a naïve school boy.

“
No.  It’s just someone didn’t want anybody to read this part of the file, but they also didn’t want to make it too complicated that no one could figure it out.  I haven’t seen this since my training at the NSA.  Why are you so interested in this anyways?”  Alex asked.

“
I’m more interested in the file name, it looks very familiar,
Adamanthea
39598253
.  There is something about that file name, but I just can’t remember.”  He slid back in his seat with an air of contention.  “I need a stiff drink and a good nap,” Galveston said as Alex began closing the files and exiting out a backdoor in the Genesis system.

I popped open some of our finest bubbly in response to his comment, a two liter bottle of generic cola, poured out three glasses
, and added a generous portion of rum to each.

“
Three cuba libres,” I announced handing out the glasses like a pompous bartender, a job I had held in my younger days.  “Cheers gentlemen.”  I held my glass high, waiting for a ceremonial clink from my compatriots.

“
I think I’m going to cry,” Alex said dryly.

“
I think I’m going to throw up,” Galveston retorted.

We clashed our glasses together and downed our drinks like drunken alcoholics. 
Galveston put his glass down and wiped his mouth.

“
I don’t know about you two, but I smell like the stench of death.  I’m going to shower, put on my jammies, and hit the hay.  You guys can do whatever you want.  We’ll find out what damage we did tomorrow.”

We said our respective goodnights, even though it was
eight o’clock in the morning, and retired to our respective hovels.  Mine a one bedroom apartment, next to a rundown strip mall, and Alex to his four bedroom home near the coast.  Alex was doing better financially than what I had figured.  It seems he was spending time with us out of boredom and a need for a new challenge.

Galveston
stayed at the office, for it moonlighted as his home.  He fought the urge and temptation to think about anything further.  Instead he chose the better approach, get a good night sleep, finish up this job tomorrow, and then with a fresh mind, plot our next move.  He closed the curtains, blocking the available light, and with his curiosity at bay he crawled wearily into bed.

It seemed
the
Adamanthea
project was all wrapped up, but we would learn the file was just the tip of an iceberg.