Death of Secrets (23 page)

His ears picked up the wail of sirens in the distance on top of
the internal building alarms. The fire department was responding to the alarm,
he assumed.

He grumbled as he finished the second floor and started on the
third. Pulling that fire alarm had been a smart move on their part. The human
tide of people stumbling out of the building made his search much harder. And
of course, if they could get in contact with the fire department, it would be a
lot harder to neutralize the threat.

He and the three other people involved in this project had
prepared for the possibility that life and death decisions might have to be
made. Once Eric died, that had become much more real.

But that didn't make it any easier to kill anyone, especially
Colleen. He was not a killer – at least, he never had been before. It was a lot
different to talk big about it in a late night bull session than to confront it
as a reality while chasing someone trying to escape. Jakarta's crimes were all
made up of bits and bytes of electronic information. It was a lot easier to
ignore any pain his actions caused when all he ever saw was text on the screen.
Killing someone face to face was going to be a lot harder.

"If I can even catch them," he muttered, finishing
the third floor and starting the fourth.

Outside, the sirens of the fire engines rose in volume. He
heard the distant noises of firemen deploying to his building as he walked the
fourth floor, trying to find Colleen and company. This was getting close. If
they rushed Jerry and got by him, they'd be home free now, and that was bad
news.

***

Michael paced back and forth in the hall, listening to Colleen
and Kathy argue. He too could hear the firemen deploying to the building, and
silently he crossed his fingers, hoping firemen would get to them before they
had to accept Kathy's plan.

"Kathy, no," Colleen said. "Look, I'm sorry, but
I just can't. I'm scared to death of heights. I am not climbing down eight
stories outside the building."

"Colleen, we don't have a choice! The stairs? Jakarta's on
'em. The elevator? I'm sure that fat slob Jerry is guarding it. If we don't do
this and do it now, we're going to get caught again."

Around them, the last families made their way to the staircase,
and the girls got more space to argue. Several people gave them inquisitive
looks on the way past, but only Mike noticed.

"The firemen might get to us first," Colleen offered.

"No way. Jakarta has a huge head start on them. Once they
realize it's a false alarm, they might not even come up."

"Yes they will! They can't tell if it's a false alarm
until they check! Kathy, I'm not going out through another window, and that's
final. I almost fell the last time. I don't want to do that again."

"Fine!" Kathy yelled, exasperated. "You stay
here and get caught. Come on, Mike, we'll…" She finished in a scream as
Jakarta emerged from the staircase.

He seemed almost as surprised to see them as they were to see
him. But the hacker recovered quicker. He grabbed Kathy and pulled her to him,
her back facing his front, and from his belt he produced a pistol. "OK,
nobody move. Let's discuss things rationally and no one has to get hurt."

Mike froze instantly, his eyes riveted to the gun pointed at
Kathy's head. Slowly, his hands went up above his head and he said, "Just
don't hurt her. I'll talk."

Colleen's reaction, on the other hand, was totally different.
"You! You! You lied to me! I could just…" And she did. Her hand
flashed across the open space between them and she slapped him across the face.

Kathy, trembling and eyes trying to look out the corner of her
eye at the gun held to her temple, said, "Uh… Colleen? Don't slap men with
guns."

"Calm down, Colleen, calm down," Jakarta said.
"I can explain everything, if you people will just give me the chance.
Now, if we'll all just take a nice, calm walk back up to our floor, we can sit
down and talk about what you saw and why you shouldn't be quite so upset about
it."

Colleen screamed. "Don't tell me when to be upset! When I
start to really like someone who turns out to be a liar, I'll be upset if I
feel like it!"

"Colleen, I didn't have a choice. You know as well as I do
that it's not enough to just sabotage their code. The only way to control a
technology like that is for everyone to have it. I had to level the playing
field. I had to do it this way."

"Oh! Oh! I see!
Everyone
has to have it! Well
forgive me for not understanding that by
everyone
you actually meant
'you and your friends!'"

Michael watched the exchange carefully. The hacker seemed to
genuinely want Colleen to understand why he'd built that infernal device. His
eyes held hers as he said, "Colleen, please, you've got to
understand!"

While he was looking at Colleen, Mike made his move. He jabbed
his hand out as if to throw a punch, but instead grabbed for the gun. He didn't
get it right away, but succeeded in pointing it away from Kathy's head and
behind her, over Jakarta's shoulder.

He pressed his attack, pushing the man back and trying to grab
the gun. Sensing the weakened grip, Kathy tore free and stumbled to the ground.

Colleen, on the other hand, threw herself at Jakarta. She and
Mike and the hacker tumbled to the ground. In the confusion, the gun went off.

Mike didn't have time to determine anything except that it hadn't
hit him. He landed a punch on Jakarta's face, then another one.

Colleen found Jakarta's gun hand and she immediately sunk in
her teeth. The hacker screamed, but he also let go of the gun. Grabbing it,
Colleen scrambled up to her feet – right into another gun.

"OK, lady, let's drop the weapon."

His hair was cut short, almost like a soldier’s crew cut but
not quite. His business suit was well pressed, and the coat hung open to allow
access to the holster Colleen could see at his waist. From that he had
obviously drawn the gun pointed at her face. In his other hand, he held a card
reading FBI in big blue block letters.

Colleen dropped the gun.

"Alright, people, let's everybody stop hitting everybody
else, and all of you put your hands behind your head."

The fight froze at the sound of the new voice. Mike looked up,
saw the FBI badge, and swore. Kathy gasped.

"OK, did you guys pull the fire alarm?"

"There’s one more person involved!" Kathy reported.
"He's either in the suite on the fifth floor or down watching the front
door!"

The special agent brought a radio to his lips and made a
report. After a squawk from the handset, he asked, "Overweight, curly
black hair?"

Kathy nodded, and so did the agent. "Then we have him too.
I’ll have some backup here in a second, and we can hear all about this."

Kathy smiled and pointed. "This is Jakarta, he's wanted by
the FBI for computer hacking."

The hacker glared at Kathy. The FBI man’s eyes got a little
wider as he stared at him.

***

The FBI agents ran them all down to ground floor, intent on
taking all five of them in for a good, long interview. But when they walked out
the front door, Nathan Jacobs was the first person they saw.

"Nathan!" Michael said, his volume just a little too high.
The handcuffs around his wrists were a totally new experience for him, and he
wasn't happy about them at all.

Nate put a stop to the procession of agents leading prisoners,
and ran up to his friend. "Mike! What's going on here?"

Without waiting for an answer, he turned to the agent holding
Mike. "Uncuff him. And her too," he added, nodding at Kathy."

"The other girl's her roommate," Mike said.
"She's with us."

Releasing Mike was a natural. Kathy, he'd felt OK about
releasing because he at least knew her somewhat from the Neon and from the
meeting in Mike's office. He stroked his chin, considered Mike's request for a
moment, and finally nodded at the man holding Colleen's shoulder. "OK, let
her go too."

The agent holding Hugh growled, "They say this guy's
Jakarta. Want me to let him go too?"

Nathan sighed. Letting prisoners go wasn't making him popular
with the FBI agents. "No, no, look, if they're right then he's definitely
the one we want."

Stepping close enough to the agent so only he could hear, Jacobs
added in a whisper, "The man I just had uncuffed is a Congressman on the
House Intelligence Committee. If you want that cost of living adjustment to get
safely through Congress, we need to be both gentle and discreet here, got
it?"

The agent nodded, but didn't loosen his grip on Jakarta's elbow
at all.

"OK, then, stuff him in a back seat somewhere and run him
in. If he's who they say he is, this is going to be a long night for all of us.
Now, then…"

He trailed off, and turned to his friend. "Suppose you tell
me how you got mixed up with one of the most wanted cyber-criminals in the
country."

Mike hemmed and hawed. He had no idea how to explain what
they'd learned without it sounding crazy.

"It'd be easier to tell you sitting down, Nathan,"
Kathy said for him. "This turned out to be pretty amazing."

Nathan stared at them all for a while, then nodded. "OK,
then. Let's go back inside."

The crowd of building residents had mostly thinned out once the
fire department had declared the whole thing a false alarm. A few of them found
an FBI raid to be more interesting than whatever they'd been dreaming, and
stood around gawking rather than go back to bed. Nathan led them through that
crowd, to the elevator, and back up to the fifth floor. First they went to
Jakarta’s bedroom, where Colleen retrieved her pants and put them on. Then they
went to the living room to talk. Kathy figured that pretty soon she'd start to
feel at home here. Without waiting for Nathan to say anything, she dropped down
onto the couch. Mike took the place beside her, and Colleen sat next to him.
Nathan eased himself into the armchair.

Mike was just about to begin their tale when one of the agents
processing the crime scene walked in.

He wore the same short haircut and business suit so common
among those who enforced the law for the federal government. "Director
Jacobs, we found some funky stuff in their office space."

"How funky?"

"I'm not even sure what it is. Looks like some kind of
handmade computer peripheral."

"Is it a bomb?"

The agent shook his head. "No chance, but…"

"I know what it is," Colleen said. "But it takes
some explaining."

Jacobs turned to look at her. "OK, Kathy's roommate. Tell
me your name first, and then fill me in on what kind of weirdness you've gotten
my friend into."

Colleen looked over at Mike as if blaming him for Nathan's
attitude. But then she just shrugged. "My name is Colleen Christina, I'm a
computer science major at Georgetown. Kathy's had me working on that stupid
flash drive ever since she found it."

Jacobs nodded. "OK, Kathy's told me about the flash drive.
She and… oops!"

Michael looked at him.

"Mike, your friend the bouncer from the Neon is down at
the Hoover building right now. I found him at your hotel room; he'd been beaten
up pretty badly."

Kathy gasped. "John? Is he OK?"

"Oh, he'll be fine. He's a tough guy, and the only broken
bones were just ribs. He ran ten miles to McLean before he met me. But it’s
going to take a while for those black eyes to get better. I suppose he ought to
be here, might know a few things that you guys don't. He paused, then called
for one of the FBI agents.

"Could you call Meade and see if they can find someone to
run up here? I’d like them to bring John Lincoln. If you get the guys in my
department, they’ll know who he is."

The agent took out a cell phone and placed the call, walking
back down to the computer room as he did so.

"OK, Ms. Christina. Please go on," Jacobs said,
turning back to Colleen.

"Well, anyway, while Kathy and Mike here were getting
chased all over creation for that flash drive, I'm the one who actually had it,
trying to figure out what was on it. Encryption is one of my hobbies, and let
me tell you, this one was a challenge. I finally managed to decrypt the file
list on the flash drive, but that was as far as I got. Probably never would
have gotten there had I not gotten a bit of outside help."

Jacobs nodded. "From who?"

"Well, the dead guy who gave Kathy the flash drive told
her to get it to Jakarta. She thought he meant to fly it to Indonesia, which
there was no way she was doing. But I figured he must have meant Jakarta the
hacker, since it wouldn't make much sense to just name a whole city, you know?

"Besides, when Kathy told me the dead guy was Eric
Harrison, that pretty much clinched it for me. When he got arrested the first
time, the rumor online was that he was working with Jakarta."

The NSA man nodded again. "Yeah, pretty good call.
Obviously it was right."

Colleen nodded. "Yeah. So anyway, they got me over to
their hotel in McLean, and Mike had a laptop. I used that to start hunting for
the infamous Jakarta."

Jacobs' face lit up. "Ah,
you
must be KH12,
then!"

Colleen blinked. "Yeah. How'd you know?"

"I came to the hotel looking for Mike and Kathy when they
never checked in. I found the laptop still on, and your messaging software had
like two dozen messages waiting for you. I sorta read some."

Colleen slapped her forehead. "I left it on! I hope you
didn't see anything too personal…"

"Well, the main thing was one wondering if you'd found
Jakarta. But also, someone named Tony sent some personal remarks."

Colleen rolled her eyes. "My so-called boy friend. I
suppose I better call him pretty soon."

Jacobs nodded. "Anyway…"

"Right, sorry, got distracted. Anyway, the short version
is, I made contact with Jakarta and eventually he arranged to have us brought
here. We had a minor run in with some other folks who didn't seem to want us to
get here, but eventually we did.

"What Jakarta told us was kind of hard to believe until
I'd seen it myself."

"What was it?"

"Well… OK, you're Nathan Jacobs, right? Head of the
Information Assurance Directorate at the NSA?"

He nodded and a small smile spread over his face. "That I
am. How'd you know?"

"I'm a computer buff," Colleen replied. "You're pretty
well known in cyber circles."

He chuckled at that. "I always wanted to be a
celebrity."

She rolled her eyes again. "Whatever. The important thing
is that you know a bit about computers, right?"

Nathan raised his eyebrows. In a dry, laconic voice he allowed,
"A thing or two."

"Good. So you know what's the ultimate dream of
human/computer interaction? What the entire HCI field knows the future holds,
just not how to get there?"

"You mean TR?"

Colleen nodded. "Exactly. Thought recognition."

Jacobs scoffed. "You're not going to try to tell me that
Jakarta wrote an entire TR interface all on his own!"

She shook her head. "Of course not. He stole it. "

"From?" Nathan asked.

"Electron Guidewire."

"Oh, that's an even bigger crock! I work with EG a lot,
they don't have a program like that going."

Colleen nodded. "They not only have a program, they've
done it. They built a fully functional thought recognition interface, and they
call it GigaStar."

Nathan just laughed. "I'm sorry, Miss Christina, you seem
very nice and very smart about computers, but you've fallen for some social
engineering fed to you by a very good hacker. Jakarta duped you. I work for the
NSA and the GigaStar is our project. It's not that different from a wardriving
rig.

Kathy interrupted. "Um… what? Wardriving?"

Colleen said, "Hacker slang. It’s a tool you set up in
your car, to drive around and pick up other people’s home wifi networks. But
GigaStar is a lot bigger deal than that."

Jacobs shook his head. "It’s just far better at monitoring
Internet traffic than anything we’ve ever done before. I've seen one. I know
the CEO of Electron Guidewire personally – he's a good friend of mine, and
Mike's too. They just aren't involved in anything like that, trust me."

Colleen snorted. "Yeah, right! Then how come I watched
someone being murdered there?"

"Um… murdered?"

"I peeked into their surveillance videos, they have a
plain-as-day video of some poor schlep up on the roof smoking, and this other
guy – same guy Kathy and Mike keep running into, judging by the description –
comes up behind him and shoves him off."

"Up on the roof…" Jacobs blinked. "Smoking…
Krupotnik?"

"Who?"

"Ivan Krupotnik. One of EG's programmers. Tilman told us
he died, but not that he was murdered."

Colleen folded her arms over her chest. "Sounds like this
upstanding, respectable contractor isn’t quite all that."

"Look, Miss Christina, that’s an awful big leap you’re
making there. Even if there’s some kind of trouble there, there’s a big
difference between that and saying they tried to snooker the NSA, Congress, and
most of the federal government. I still haven’t seen any proof that it wasn’t
some friend of Jakarta’s who’s behind all the murder and attacks. You have only
his word that he didn’t orchestrate the previous attacks, after all. And given
that he’s lied to you about what GigaStar is, he could easily have lied to you
about that."

Mike was shaking his head now. "Nathan, I thought exactly
the same thing. Even after that Jakarta guy explained it, I still didn't
believe it. But when Colleen showed me… Well, it's true. Jakarta didn’t lie to
us about GigaStar. It works exactly as described."

Nathan stared at him. "There's a working TR interface
right here in this building?"

Mike nodded, and Colleen stood. "It's the thing your agent
found that he couldn't recognize. Come on, I'll show you."

"This, I've got to see to believe."

Colleen led them down the hall, into the computer work area.
The cold night wind blew through the broken window, and about five FBI agents bustled
around, cataloging evidence. Colleen saw the box again, the big flat panel that
looked so much like a monitor or an overgrown touch pad. She sat down at the
computer it was hooked to, now glad that she and Mike had failed in their plan
to disconnect and destroy it. She was about to turn the box on when one of the
FBI agents stopped her.

"That's evidence, Miss. We need to take that computer
apart and catalogue it, it can't be turned on." Colleen was surprised to
see a female among this mostly male group. Her pantsuit looked every bit as
official as the other agents, though, even if she had a bit more leeway in the
hair department.

Colleen looked to Nathan, who looked back at her. "You're
not going to delete anything? Not tamper with any of the log files that are
necessary to our case?"

She shook her head. "Look, I've used this system before.
It's not password protected or anything like that. I can log on and use it
without hurting any of the files you guys need."

The female FBI agent arched an eyebrow. "Pretty lax
security for a hacker."

"Not really. I'm sure you do the same thing at home. All
of us who do this seriously protect our machines like Fort Knox from outside
intrusion. But since we use them so much on a daily basis, our on-site security
is lax enough to make it easy on ourselves."

Grudgingly, the woman nodded. Jacobs said, "OK. Any
software delete it tries won't be too hard for our labs to recover anyway. Just
don't touch anything you don't have to, Miss Christina."