Free Radical (3 page)

On his rig he had stored everything he knew about TriOp, including the employee roster for this office. He brought it up and scanned though the list. He needed someone high enough on the company food chain to have the keypad code, but low enough to be easily intimidated. Anyone in middle management would be a good target. He scanned the list and found the person with the most distant address. He looked up their phone number and dialed using the phone on the reception desk.

"Hello?," came a wary voice. This guy obviously wasn't used to getting phone calls at 10:30pm.

Deck adopted his best arrogant prick voice for this one, "Is this Neil Paulson?"

"Yeah, who is-"

"I'm Richard Holgate, personal assistant to Lawrence Diego," Deck paused for a second to let the name of TriOptimim's CEO to sink in. "I'm trying to collect the copyright documents needed for Mr. Diego's Tokyo trip. That information was supposed to be overnighted to him yesterday. So I'm here at your office looking for it and I notice everyone is gone for the day." He seethed with indignant anger.

"Well I don't -"

"I can get it myself, but you need come in and open the lobby door for me."

"Come in to the office right now?," his voice was nervous and shaken. He didn't want to piss "Richard" off, but he also didn't want to drive an hour just to open a door.

"Richard" sighed to show how patient he was trying to be, "YES. You. Come in. Right Now. How else would you suggest I get in?," Deck hoped he wasn't over-playing it. If he did, the guy might actually come in, and then he would have a whole new set of problems to deal with.

"Look," Neil said, trying to gain some sort of composure, "How do I know you're really -"

Deck cut him off again, "Oh Yes," he began in a sarcastic voice, "I broke into our branch office so I could sit at the front desk and talk to YOU" Deck knew that Neil could look down at his display and see that the call was indeed coming from the office.

After a brief pause Neil relented, "I'm sorry, I... I'm on my way - I can be there in an hour."

Crap. This was not what Deck wanted.

"What? I need in NOW. I don't want to be waiting around here all night for you to show up," he snapped. "Look... isn't there.. isn't there just a password or something?" Deck knew he was pushing it now. His target might catch on if he was too explicit.

"Well, you can use my password, but you need a key and I - "

Deck cut him off again, "I have my key, I just need a stupid password. Look, can you help me or do I have to call..," Deck glanced down at his screen to find Neil's boss, "Mr. Price and get him up as well?"

Neil crumbled, "No, no - I have it right... right here." Deck heard the shuffling of papers on the other end. After a few seconds, "It's Z-9-0-P-D-4-0-4-4-L".

Deck typed this into his rig before replying, "You didn't just read that off of a piece of paper did you? Why do we spend all of this money on a secure lock when you idiots just write your passwords down where anyone can read them?"

"I'm... I'm sorry I thought -," he blurted out.

Deck hung up on him.

He moved over to the door and stabbed the guard's key into the lock. Again the keypad lit up and Deck moved the UIU out of the way to enter the password.

There was a long, annoying pause before the screen displayed:

INVALID PASSWORD

Deck winced. He guessed that the keys and passwords went together. So, he either needed the guard's password or Neil's key.

It occurred to him that perhaps the guard was just as careless with his password as Neil had been. After replacing the UIU he retrieved the guard's wallet and emptied it out on the reception desk. He looked at every card in the wallet, but didn't find anything that looked like a password. He pocketed the $50 or so the guard had been carrying and returned the wallet to his reeking pants.

He felt a vague stab of guilt at lifting the cash. Last year, it would have been beneath him. He used to pride himself that he only stole from corporations, not people. Being broke and desperate over the past few weeks had shaken his standards.

Deck checked his rig to see how the decryption was going. There were a number of common fast-encryption schemes used by various password devices. His program had managed to determine which one was in use, and was currently offering an estimate of 174.3 minutes.

Deck stopped the program. There was no way he could stay here for another twenty minutes without getting caught, much less three hours. He started up a different program, called KEYPDSRCH3. He took Neil's password and fed it to his program, and then set it to work on the keypad. Now that he knew one password, he could use that piece of information to help him decrypt the rest. Since he knew what one fragment of memory should look like (the password Neil gave him) he could have his program look for that specific string of values. Once this was found, the program would have enough information to decrypt the rest of the keypad's memory. It was still looking for a needle in a haystack, but now the program knew how to tell a needle from hay.

The program started up and after a few moments offered a time estimate of 17.5 minutes. These estimates were notoriously inaccurate. It was really like trying to predict how long it takes to catch a fish. However, the program could look at how fast it was interfacing with the device, how much memory it needed to scan, what type of encryption was in place, and how strong the encryption was, and come up with a very rough estimate.

17.5 minutes was still too long.

This type of program functioned better if it had more information to work with. Deck could speed things up a lot if he had just a little more data. Using the needle-in-a-haystack analogy, this would be like making the needle bigger and thus easier to find. He decided to gamble. He assumed that the plastic keys were related to employee number, and that employee numbers were tied to the passwords. Therefore, the employee number could be next to the password in memory. The risk was, if he was wrong the entire search would run all the way to the end and never find a match. If he was right, the search would be much faster.

He looked up the guard's employee number in his database and entered it into KEYPDSRCH3. After a few moments the program gave a time estimate of 6.7 minutes.

This was it. He had been sitting in the lobby, in full view of everyone on the street for almost half an hour. If KEYPDSRCH3 failed he was going to have to bail. That would mean several weeks of preparation down the tubes. Even worse, nobody was paying him for this gig. He was hacking TriOp for his own purposes, and paying for everything himself. It would be weeks before he pulled together enough money to try again. Even worse, he would probably have to try a different branch of TriOp, since it would be suicide to try here again. That would mean more money, temporary relocation expenses... He shook his head. He needed to keep his mind on the moment.

Deck stood up and looked around the lobby. The guard was still out, and should stay that way for another hour if the keychain stunner had done its job.

He stepped behind a pillar to hide himself from the eyes of the street. He stripped off the suit he was wearing to reveal the black bodysleeve underneath. It was a semi-tight 'jumpsuit' with thick knee and elbow pads built in, along with some light padding in various other key areas. It was a favorite among people who skated, or spent a lot of time running from various security and law-enforcement groups. (There was often a lot of overlap between the two groups.) The other appealing aspect about the bodysleeve was that it had pockets - lots of them.

Deck ripped the rest of the gear out of his backpack and dropped it into various pockets where he would be able to find them quickly. He slipped the handgun into the built-in holster on his left thigh. It was made for holding tools or equipment, but the elastic straps were just the right size to keep a firm hold on a handgun.

Suddenly the speaker mounted on the guard's shoulder came to life, barking out a message that was mostly unintelligible static.

Deck froze. He figured it was some sort of central security station requesting the guard to check in. He had investigated the building security for several days before making tonight's run, but he hadn't counted on guards checking in periodically. It was a clumsy oversight, and demonstrated just how sloppy he had been getting lately.

If the guard didn't answer, they would either sound an alarm or come looking for him themselves. Either way, he was screwed.

The burst of static came again, only this time more intelligible, "(garble) central. Check In. (garble) there?"

The building must have had a ton of shielding to mess up the signal that badly. Deck grabbed the vox from the guard's shoulder and brought it over to his rig. He quickly linked the data output from the UIU to the speaker and cranked the volume. The UIU was communicating using a standard radio signal, and turning it into a plain audio feed produced a sound that was a lot like modem noise. The small speakers on his rig spat out a high-pitched sound that resembled a combination of white noise, interference, and over-compression. He held the vox close to the speaker and thumbed the "talk" button.

"Checking in, all clear."

He hoped the noise was enough to cover the fact that his was the wrong voice.

He waited.

Thirty seconds later he decided they had either bought it or were on their way to pick him up. He turned off the vox and dropped it into a pocket.

There was no way to know what they were doing. If they were on their way, he needed to make a break for it right now if he wanted to have a shot at getting away.

Just then his rig lit up, and the door slid open.

Deck took his rig and slapped it onto the Velcro strips on the right leg of the bodysleeve. He tossed the old suit and briefcase into the trash and pocketed the UIU before heading through the door into the main offices.

He passed though a maze of featureless, faceless cubicles. The sterile work area was almost completely devoid of personality or color. In contrast to the marble decadence of the lobby, the walls were cheap, featureless white drywall. There were no paintings, motivational posters, or any type of signs on the walls - not even the corporate logo. There were no personal items on the desks or walls to indicate what sort of people might work there. The place was so pristine it could be mistaken for unoccupied. There wasn't even a coffee machine or water cooler.

What it did have was surveillance cameras, lots of them. Spread evenly throughout the area where small video cameras, leaving no corner outside the ever-present blanket of scrutiny. It was safe to assume the other departments would be similarly monitored. These cameras were probably not really watched by actual humans, since the staff needed to process this much data would be too large. It would take a few dozen people just staring at video screens all day just to make use of this input, and then there was always the question of who would watch them.

The cameras were probably there for archival and psychological value. It was almost certain they would be watching this video after they realized he had been here.

What sort of people worked in a place like this? Deck tried to imagine himself working in one of these featureless boxes under relentless surveillance and it pissed him off. It made him feel better about what he was doing.

As he passed through the cubicles he moved swiftly and silently. If there had been a human observer watching from one of the cameras, deprived of the view of Deck's feet by the low walls, they might have wondered briefly if he was skating. His body moved with a fluid and practiced grace, sliding from one end of the soulless corporate tomb to the other. He kept his head slightly low and his legs bent, so that his body was a coil of potential energy, ready to propel him forward if he sensed danger.

He reached the rear of the office space and found the executive elevator. It had no buttons, just a simple slot. Deck tried the keys on the the guard's keyring until he found a match.

The executive elevator was a mildly ornate box that hauled Deck up through the seemingly endless levels of the corporate spire without him needing to touch a button. The surveillance camera was conspicuous in its absence.

Deck stepped off of the elevator into the executive nirvana that was the sixty-fourth floor. The walls were done in genuine wood paneling, and the carpet was a thick shag that seemed to Deck to be a needless static hazard. There were no cameras here. Each door looked to be a featureless slab of wood, but was probably reinforced steel simply encased in wood. Beside each door was a flat black scanner, ringed in brass, inset tastefully into the wall. Small brass light fixtures were set into the wall, casting small, tight pools of light over various plaques and flattering paintings of old executives long gone.

He moved carefully now, pausing and checking around corners as he darted from one corridor to the next. As he approached his target his left hand slid into his breast pocket and retrieved a small homemade card the size of a TriOp employee ID. Deck had encoded the magnetic strip across the bottom with data he believed would identify him as one of the high-level executives. He slapped the plastic card onto the featureless black scanner beside the door and it was accepted. The doors slid open to reveal a darkened office.

He paused for a moment to allow his eyes to adjust to the dark. There was mild light coming in the huge window that comprised an entire wall of the office. The light came mostly from below, as part of the ambient noise of the city.

The large flat screen on the desk blinked to life as Deck dropped his rig in front of it. A few seconds later it found what he was looking for - a network node. It negotiated with the node and connected him to the TriOp corporate network. The node would give him access to the massive communications hardware on the roof, which was the whole point of tonight's exercise.

He checked the time... 11:05pm. He was slightly behind schedule, but he had allowed for delays. He went to work.