The Canton Connection (3 page)

By the time Jake walked into the office on Monday, he had convinced himself that the case was not for the FBI and certainly not for him.

There was no indication that the death was a federal crime. The case would never enter the files of the FBI.

As far as his personal involvement was concerned, after the funeral he had gone home to his apartment, ripped off his suit and tie and stared at the sunlight glinting off his dusty windowsills. Amber had gone to the shore on Saturday and he had been left to ponder the case. In the end, he had missed out on sharing one of the last long weekends of summer with her.

Now that it was Monday, he was ready to return to the backlog of cases that confronted him.

His boss had one year’s seniority over Jake, and never failed to remind him of that fact. Bob Snow was prematurely balding and equally driven by his job. He intercepted Jake on the way to his desk and handed him a folder.

“The case is yours, rookie,” Bob said, using a nickname that had stuck with Jake for the past fifteen years.

Jake glanced at the folder. The label read “Han Chu.”

He didn’t understand. What had happened in the short hours since the funeral? “I don’t think this case is for the FBI. Arlington County can handle it.”

Bob smiled. “Turn to the file on the woman,” he said. “They tracked her down by her license plate. I’ll give you half an hour. Then I have someone coming in to meet you.” He patted Jake on the back, smiled and left.

Jake was stunned. The case he had told himself he wouldn’t, couldn’t and shouldn’t take was suddenly his.

So what was Bob talking about? What about the woman?

He had the folder open by the time he closed his office door.

First he skimmed over the details of Chu’s murder and autopsy. There was nothing new there that he hadn’t already learned from his phone calls and data searches over the weekend.

Then he opened the profile of the witness.

He stared at her Department of Motor Vehicles photo as he sat at his desk. She was as lovely as when he had first seen her at the funeral, with a tinge of impatience, perfectly understandable in a DMV photo.

Then he looked down to read her name: Stacy Stefansson.

He reviewed a short profile of her, excerpted from a Commerce Department personnel file.

Apparently she was deep into defense contracting. She had worked for a number of computer firms, but not Quantum.

She had been an IBM trainee for a couple of years, then moved on to a series of Beltway bandit firms set up around the capital to compete for government contracts.

So she had the perfect career, with one hand in the government till and the other in private industry.

Her specialty was data collection and analysis, not one of Jake’s areas of expertise. In truth, he had had a facility with computers since elementary school, but never a fascination.

His mind was drifting, as it naturally did when the subject of computers came up. He
tried to imagine what was behind the quick trajectory of Stacy’s career.

He could imagine ambition there, as well as a self-confident drive to improve and succeed. But all the while, she was in the database field. It seemed she had been pegged for that role and she couldn’t shake it off.

He read down the list of impressive-sounding computer firms she worked for and the names of her clients. Quantum never came up.

He finally reached the bottom of the list as he heard footsteps approach. He had a few seconds before Bob stepped into his office. That was enough time to
find the name of her current employer: Verisign.

He vaguely recognized the name. He only
had a passing familiarity with the computer company.

“Ready?” Bob said through a crack in the doorway.

“Who’s your visitor?” Jake said. He checked his reflection in the poster he had framed of the fallen World Trade Towers.

Bob chuckled. “Don’t bother. It’s not a broad.”

Jake took a deep breath to calm down. He snatched up the folder and followed his boss around the corner to his office. Along the way, some in the staff looked up to study him.

What was he in for?

Bob Snow’s office was a large corner suite with plenty of sunlight penetrating the tinted glass. Below lay a canopy of trees that shaded a working class neighborhood.

A familiar figure sat profiled in the window.

Jake straightened his tie.

Werner Hoffkeit was an imposing man, a legend in the Bureau. He had worked his way up the ranks from the FBI Academy to one of the highest profile jobs in Washington: Director of the FBI. Why had the director come to see him, a lowly investigator in a third-tier field office?

“Director Hoffkeit,” Jake said, and shook the hand extended toward him. “An honor, sir.”

“Agent Maguire.”

Hoffkeit was broad-shouldered and stood a ramrod straight six feet plus. His light gray eyes gave Jake the impression of windows into the man’s soul. And what Jake saw there was deep intelligence on high alert.

Jake wondered if he was up for some Bureau honor. The most he deserved might be a pay increase. He certainly wasn’t
up for promotion any time soon.

“To what do I owe this honor?” he finally said.

Bob closed the door. Then he and Hoffkeit sat down and acted as if they expected Jake to sit as well.

He edged into the empty sofa opposite their easy chairs.

Hoffkeit’s large forehead was furrowed. “I’ve been reading your personnel file. You have a clean record, worked on some tough cases, always come out on top.”

“The FBI always gets their man,” Jake said.

“I know that.” In FBI circles, it was a fact.

Hoffkeit flipped through Jake’s file and ran a finger down a page. It stopped halfway.

“You put together the evidence to finger the Pakistani boys?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“You coordinated the sting on the mini-van smuggling ring?”

“Right. I did.”

“You’ve worked on surveillance surrounding foreign diplomats?”

Jake nodded. It was a nice list of accomplishments, but nothing high-profile, notable only for its variety and lack of specificity. To his mind, his record in the Bureau was spotty at best.

Maybe this was going to result in a dismissal.

Hoffkeit turned to Bob. “Anything I missed?”

Bob scratched his head. “No. Those were the major cases.”

“I see.” Hoffkeit turned his gray eyes back on Jake. “Ever work directly for a U.S. Attorney? Put together the legal side of a case?”

Jake shook his head. “Just field work, sir.”

He had spent his career on the ground looking for evidence, putting clues together, tracking down the scum that walked the earth. He had never done the front office work that made an agent’s career.

“You’re still young,” Hoffkeit said.

“Just over forty, sir.”

“Good physical condition?”

“I stay well within physical fitness requirements.”

Hoffkeit nodded. “Traveled much?”

Jake had been born, grew up, lived and worked in Northern Virginia. College had been in Charlottesville, in southwestern Virginia. FBI Academy had been in Quantico, Virginia.

“Basically, I know Virginia.”

“Travelled overseas?”

He had to be honest. “I went to London for an interagency meeting.”

“London.”

“Yes. That’s pretty much it, sir.”

Hoffkeit shifted uncomfortably. “Agent Maguire, what do you know about computers?”

“I’ll be honest with you,” Jake said. “I understand how computers work, and I use them on a daily basis. But I’m not a computer expert.”

“Ever take a programming course?”

Jake thought back. “I learned C++ in high school. Can’t say I remember any of it.”

Boy was he bombing this interview.

Hoffkeit rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s more than I know about computers.”

Bob leaned forward. “As you know, sir, the Bureau does have experts in computers.”

“But can they perform field work?”

Bob sat back.

Hoffkeit was staring at Jake like he was the new savior for the Bureau. “What do you know about the Han Chu case?”

Han Chu? Jake had been concentrating more on Stacy Stefansson. “It’s an interesting case, sir.”

“In what respect?”

Jake thought back to the murder scene. “It was an unfortunate murder.”

“Just ‘unfortunate’? Agent Maguire, as of today the FBI has taken over this case. And I am appointing you as the lead investigator. I can assure you that this is far more than ‘an unfortunate murder.’”

“Sir, I have a general sense about who Han Chu was and what his company does. But I still fail to see how any of this makes the murder a federal crime, unless I’m missing something here.”

Hoffkeit stood up and faced the window. His eyes caught a glint of light off the city as he stared outside. “Agent Maguire, what do you know about Verisign?”

Jake remembered the file that Bob had asked him to review. “It’s the company where the witness, Stacy Stefansson, works.” In fact, he knew very little about the company, aside from having seen its logo like a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval at the bottom of web pages to verify the pages’ authenticity.

“And are you aware of what they do?”

“They’re computer-related.”

At this point Hoffkeit’s broad face broke into an ironic smile. “‘Computer-related’ is an understatement. They are the internet.”

Jake’s first thought was that Hoffkeit had no idea what he was talking about. But Hoffkeit wasn’t a man who bandied about facts loosely.

“My understanding,” Jake said, “is that the internet is a vast network of connected computers spanning the entire world. How could one company be the internet?”

Hoffkeit was not offended. Instead, he stared at Jake intensely as if trying to impart knowledge ahead of the words he was about to
say. “I don’t have to tell you how important the internet is to our GDP.”

Jake had some vague idea that it was a large
percentage.

“It’s more than agriculture or energy,” Hoffkeit said. “And that number doesn’t even begin to reflect the dependency our
business community has on the internet. Every company from Fortune 500 down to your local hardware store relies on the internet on a daily basis.”

“I can see that.” But Jake still couldn’t see how one company could
be
the internet.

“So can you see how important the internet is to our national security?”

“Sure,” Jake said. “But wasn’t that why the internet was developed–to guarantee that information was spread over multiple computers?”

“Agent Maguire, I hate to shake your faith in the resilience of the internet, but sharing information doesn’t mean it’s backed up.”

“Still, the information is distributed among many computers. If one computer dies, only the information on that system is lost, not all the information on all systems.”

“That, Agent Maguire, is where you’re wrong.”

Jake had to think about what Hoffkeit had just said. He could see how a computer virus could quickly spread and take down many computers and servers, but how did all computers rely on one computer?

“Is there a particular computer that you have in mind, sir?”

Hoffkeit smiled and leaned against Bob’s desk. “Now you’re catching on.”

Jake’s mind was whirling. He wasn’t catching on to anything. If these men thought he was up to tackling a massive computer failure, they were sorely mistaken. The lowliest clerk in a Radio Shack knew more than he did.

“So you’re saying,” Jake said, feeling Hoffkeit out, “that any one computer can bring the whole system down?”

“No. Not any one.” Hoffkeit looked at Bob, who nodded. They could tell Jake the big news. “There’s one computer in particular that keeps all the domain names for .com addresses. If that computer fails or is compromised, all email and the entire World Wide Web system is in jeopardy. From your Yahoo account to your Facebook wall to your bank account to your orders on Amazon.”

“I see,” Jake said. “And what does that have to do with this case?” He tapped on the Han Chu file.

“All domain names are looked up and disseminated from a single server,” Hoffkeit said. “It’s called the A root server.”

Jake had never heard the term.

Hoffkeit returned to the window and stared at the sun-drenched landscape. “Contrary to popular belief, the internet is a public, indeed an international, organization. Its servers are not operated by the U.S. Government.”

It took a moment for Jake to comprehend the implications. “So this one big computer is maintained by the private sector?”

“I said ‘operated by.’ In fact, the A root server is physically located at a U.S. Department of Commerce facility. But yes, it’s connected to the internet, so it’s vulnerable to cyber attack. In fact, Commerce has reported a sharp rise in attempted intrusions
into the A root server.” Hoffkeit swung around from the window and faced Jake. “Agent Maguire, they think a major cyber attack is imminent.”

Jake sucked in his breath. But he didn’t exactly see how the FBI fit in. “Wouldn’t that be under, say, the military’s purview or the Department of Homeland Security?”

“You would think,” Hoffkeit said. “It turns out most of the internet is under the control of one company.”

“Which company?”

“Verisign.”

“Where Stacy works.”

Hoffkeit shook his head. “She more than works for Verisign. She runs the A root server.”

Jake was floored. Being a programmer was one thing. And working on government contracts was important. But running the heart of the World Wide Web was in a completely different league.

“Remember, Chu was also a computer expert,” Hoffkeit said. “And the Arlington police have just confirmed an alarming fact: Stacy’s voiceprint matches that of the witness on the 9-1-1 call. I want you to investigate her.”

Stacy was the murder witness? That went a long way toward explaining why she was at Chu’s funeral.

“You…want me…to investigate Stacy?”

Once again Hoffkeit exchanged glances with Bob. “We’ve arranged a secure room,” Hoffkeit said at last. “It’s down at our headquarters in D.C. She’s waiting to meet you.”