Take the Fourth (36 page)
Authors: Jeffrey Walton
B
ack at the White House, Scott read the emails from Blake and Reynolds which didn’t leave much to the imagination. They were all straight to the point. He read a few of the emails between Blake and Grace and things were a different story there. They were laced with feelings and innuendos and metaphors out the ass, he felt as if he were reading a Hemmingway novel. He quickly got bored with the subtext of horny talk and focused his attention on the email addresses themselves. Reynolds was the only one who used his Beta Group email address. Blake on the other hand used an alias at hotmail to communicate with Reynolds and he used his gmail account with Grace. He had a gut feeling someone else was involved but couldn’t place a finger on it; maybe someone did a blind copy on the emails. Armed with this notion Scott opened up one of Reynolds’ emails. He then went to view tab, chose options, and saw the entire email header or the itinerary of the email message itself, where it has been and at what date and time. Although most of it appeared as gibberish to Scott, he did get a sense of the basics and didn’t see any other names within the header. He then did a few searches on Google regarding email addresses, read an article on Wikipedia, and learned a few things in the process.
Take for example, the email address
[email protected]
. There are two parts to an email address, the recipient’s actual email name—steve.jones and the part following the @ sign, the domain name—abc.com. There are usually three computers or servers involved in the mailing process. The sender’s email server, the recipient’s email server, and a domain name server or DNS. The DNS is like a library; it contains all the domain names that have been registered on the internet and the location or IP address for those domains. When an email is sent from a mailing application such as Outlook, it contacts the sender’s email server. This email server in turn, strips off the domain name abc.com and sends it to a DNS. The DNS looks up the domain name and hands back one or more IP address. The sender’s email server then uses this IP address like a phone number and dials the recipient’s email server located at abc.com. Much like calling an operator at a huge company and asking for Mr. Peters in accounting, the recipient’s email server does the same thing. It searches for steve.jones within the domain abc.com. If it is a valid email address the email server at abc.com will then ask for the complete message to be sent. It then places the entire message in Mr. Jones’ inbox. If the email address is invalid or a connection cannot be made between servers, the email is placed in a queuing system where it will try to deliver it again and again for a predetermined length of time.
After his internet search he realized he was out of luck trying to find if anyone was blind copied since he was not the administrator of the email server. He would need to place a call to his liaison in the Beta Group. He flipped open his cell and called Brickman.
“Brickman here, what can I do you for?”
‘It’s Scott Norwood I need to ask… .,” and he stopped mid sentence as he was looking at the printout from the complete header record on Reynolds’ email. “Hold on a second will ya,” as he kept him on the phone without saying a word for almost a full minute. “Can you do me a quick favor?”
“Sure, what?”
“Just send me an email, no subject or body, just an email.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes.”
“On its way.”
‘Is there anything else?”
“Not right now but I might call you back in a few minutes if this doesn’t pan out.’
“If what doesn’t pan out?”
“Umm nothing… . hey I just got your email. Thanks.”
“Not a problem, wish they were all that easy.”
Scott quickly printed out Brickman’s email with the complete header information, compared it to a Reynolds’ email, and then highlighted each IP address within the headers. The starting IP addresses were the same on both emails and he went to the web to find its domain name. The Beta Group was the owner of the IP address which made sense since that’s where both emails originated. The ending addresses were different and reasonably so since they went to different domains. The thing that he found odd was Reynolds had an extra IP address located within the middle of his header information. When he looked up the address it belonged to a server located at the CIA. He scanned another email from Reynolds and found the same thing. “The plot thickens,” he said to himself. He wanted to call his computer guru but since his last conversation almost led to a crucifixion he called in yet another favor from a former colleague at DNI.
“Sam, Scott Norwood, listen I’m trying to get information from an email server.”
“What sort of information?”
“I don’t know really, maybe some sort of log file, I need to follow a trail from a certain IP address.”
“That’s possible. What’s the IP address?”
“One zero eight dot three three dot three three dot one one.”
“Did you say three three dot one one?
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, why?”
“Well that server resides at the CIA.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Directorate of Science and Technology.”
“Interesting, very interesting, can you get the logs?”
“We should be able to get them, no problem whatsoever, wait a minute I’ll call.”
“No, no, don’t do that, listen I don’t what to alarm anyone, I need more information first, it’s a trust issue, can you get them without asking permission?”
“Sure but…”
“Not another word, just do it, you have the President’s backing.”
“It will take a few minutes maybe even longer depending on the jumps I need to make.”
“Whatever you get, just send it to me, I want no other eyes on this, you got that?’
“Yes and will do.”
. . .
J
orja was back in her office at the crack of dawn after making funeral arrangements for her Aunt Gracie the day before. Services were going to be held in three days giving ample time in order for family and friends in distant parts of the country to join in the celebration of her life. Jorja’s mind was elsewhere but she needed the succorance of work along with the diversion it provided. Her morning routine didn’t change. She was drinking her free cup of caffeine. She was perusing her inbox debating which emails to answer first. She was even running her IP address report and she was always going to run that report because that’s how she found GOD. She was haphazardly scrolling through the list of numbers on the report stopping only when her mind relaxed from the flashing visions of her youth. She didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary but she wasn’t looking very hard either. Just before she closed the report she double-checked the priority hit levels. There were no number ones; one being the highest priority. There were a few twos and some threes, the majority of the hits were five or below. She decided to check the twos and threes and when she did an all too familiar IP address stood out in the crowd like a red feathered penguin. It was their email server. It was always getting bombarded with spam and in a chronic hoedown between the spammers and the spam filters. Luckily they had the very best filters installed even though they were in a constant state of flux and updated almost daily. Amidst the IP addresses that had logged an incident against their email server was another red feathered penguin. This spiked her interest. She recognized the first few numbers of the IP address to that belonging to the federal government, more precisely belonging to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Her immediate thought was someone had hijacked the number somehow which was cause for concern, serious cause for concern, especially dealing with the CIA. She had a new rabbit to chase and did some more digging. She found that the IP address belonged to an individual computer located at DNI but that was all she found. A phone call was in order to her counterpart within the DNI office.
“Hi Doug, Jorja from DST”
“Hi Jorja, long time.”
“Yes it has been.”
“How have you been doing?”
“So so I guess… you know, with all that’s been happening.”
Then Doug noticed the change of inflection in her voice, put two and two together, and tippy-toed around his next question, “Jorja, were you related in anyway… to… . to Mrs. Carson?”
“She was my aunt… well more like my mom after my mom died when I was younger.”
“Jesus, I had no idea… I’m so sorry Jorja… if you need anything, and I mean anything… please… please let me know, okay?”
“Thank you Doug, I certainly appreciate that… really I do… and one thing you can help me with now is I have a question.”
“Shoot,” and as soon as he said it he felt like an ass and hoped to God she really didn’t catch it.
“Can you tell me why someone from your office was hitting our email server?”
“What do you mean?”
“This morning’s report shows an IP address originating from your walls and was pulling the log files from our machine.”
“That seems indivisible by two evenly,” trying desperately to elevate some tension in his voice after tasting his socks.
“My thought… well not exactly that thought but close. I know there are some spam filters we share but usually there is a mutual sharing of data between us, not a take and ask later sort of deal.”
“Agreed. Jorja, do you have the IP address?”
“Yes,” and as she gave it to him, she heard him typing away.
“That IP address is an actual desktop computer belonging to Samantha Green. She’s pretty good at what she does, her programming skills are on par with some of the best. Do you want to talk to her?’
“Please.”
“Can I put her on conference?’
“Yes”
“Hold on, I was never any good at this, if I lose you, just call me back at my number,” and he pressed a few buttons.
“Sam, it’s Doug, do you have a minute, I have Jorja Carson from DST on the line?’
“Okay.”
“Jorja, you still there?’
“You didn’t lose me.”
“Good, now Sam I’ll get to the point, Jorja has a report that has your IP address on it, she says your machine pulled log files from her email server, is that true?”
“Well uhhh,” searching for some words, any words, to explain her predicament and realizing Scott never told her what to do if caught, she decided in an instant to come clean. “Yes, that is true.”
“Can I ask why?”
“I was asked to”
“By who?”
“Scott Norwood.”
“The Chief of Staff?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t say.”
“And the reason you just didn’t call for the information?”
“Scott seemed in a hurry, said he didn’t want to call attention to it, he also said he had the backing of the President, besides it was just log files, I didn’t delete them or manipulate them in any way.”
“Sam,” stated Jorja, “How well do you know Scott?’
“We went to college together, I really didn’t know him that well, lab partners in a few computer classes, that’s about it.”
“Why did he contact you to pull the files?”
“I’ve helped him before with finding certain information but that was before he was the Chief of Staff.”
“Alright, I think a phone call is in order. I’m going to call Scott, Sam thanks for your time, and Doug thank you as well.”
“Again Jorja, anything you need, just ask.”
“Thank you.”
. . .
N
ow the gears in Jorja’s mind were spinning at an unprecedented rate. She wondered why Scott wanted the logs to her email server and decided to find out before calling him. She logged onto the server, poked around some, and viewed the log files herself. The log files were huge with thousands and thousands of entries for all incoming and outgoing emails. To find anything one would need another application to analyze the data in any way. Luckily she had just the application on her computer. Jorja uploaded the log file to the application and went to town searching in the haystack. Obviously Scott knew what he was searching for, hence his specific request to Sam Green. Jorja didn’t have the luxury of searching for a particular needle, hell she didn’t even know if it was a needle. In her search for something, anything, she did uncover that her spam filters were working as they should, especially when an email had multiple variations of the same name, such as J.Carson, J_Carson, JorjaCarson, and the list goes on. She also noted who in the office had the most emails and who had the fewest. The one who had the fewest emails belonged to a numbered email address which was atypical for their system, actually it was the only numbered email for her system. The address was
[email protected]
. She couldn’t find who owned this account but spied a message from the sender in the queuing system that kept failing on its outbound connection.
She searched for all emails pertaining to 111111 and there were very few, five in total. All of the outgoing email addresses were similar in that they had the same domain name which was hotmail.com. This domain offered free email services with anonymity, very popular for the porn surfers trying to hide their already unknowingly exposed identity. The email names were very similar as well with seemingly random numbers and always the letters “sc.” There was
[email protected]
,
[email protected]
,
17400
[email protected]
.
[email protected]
, and
[email protected]
.
She clicked on the most recent email:
From:
reynolds [mailto:
[email protected]
]
To:
[email protected]
Subject:
the tree of life
For
the
grace
of
god
you
should
love
thy
neighbor
no
matter
how
righteous
they
may
be.
Travel
by
car
or
foot
but
spread
the
wealth
of
his
love
by
speech
or
written
word.
Be
his
son
in
the
shadows
and
take
his
hand
in
both
time
of
need
and
abundance.
The
newly
dead
will
rise
to
see
a
new
glory
upon
this
earth.
Go
forth;
explain
in
detail
the
heavenly
kingdom
above.
Commitment,
sacrifice,
and
complete
understanding
are
essential
to
eternal
life.
This
is
where
you
shall
sit
and
fill
your
soul
with
the
appetite
of
peace.
His
people
are
the
true
believers.
It
is
you
who
will
be
the
same
if
you
heed
his
word.
She quickly noticed the from address of jreynolds was the same company Blake Remus had worked. Interesting. Jorja then read the email encompassed in spiritual rhetoric. She was struck by the odd construction of the sentences. She read it again. She thought it might be just a bunch of text or scriptures taken from the Bible and just mashed together to form some sort of epistle She realized once she saw the word “car” that these sentences couldn’t possibly come from either the Old or New Testament. She noticed god was in lowercase and no mention of Jesus, just him or he. She looked at the subject “the tree of life” and not once was there any use of metaphors pertaining to a tree within its structure. She also noticed the word grace and immediately her mind envisioned a genuine caring smile on her aunt’s face. Then her mind started playing tricks on her. She saw the word grace and right under it she saw the word car… grace car… . then on the next line she saw the word son… . it was as though this email was talking to her personally… . grace car… son… grace car… son… grace carson. She didn’t move pass these three lines. She just kept repeating over and over again grace carson, grace carson, grace carson. She reread the email, trying to convey its true meaning but she kept coming back to the words grace, car, and son. “What are the odds,” she thought. Grace car, and son, grace carson, grace carson… then she noticed the word dead in the next line… . grace carson dead. The email was speaking to her. She shook her head as to try and clean out any cobwebs or to restart her logical skills. Grace carson dead. That was a fact, but why was this email trying to tell her that? She got up from her chair and walked around her office, still shaking her head and still uttering to herself, grace carson dead, grace carson dead. She went to the window to try to refocus her mind. The very first thing she saw was a tree, the tree of life, she couldn’t shake it. She went back to her desk. She took a deep breath and sat back down. She took another deep breath and tried to refocus her mind. She reread the email again only this time she didn’t read the first four sentences. Nothing stood out. She reread the first four lines and her mind instantly went back to grace carson dead. Then her analytical skills kicked in. She noticed each of these words was the third word in the sentence. “Was this just a coincidence,” she thought until she took the third word in each of the remaining sentences. “Holy,” and taking a word right out of Greg’s vocabulary, “fuck!” she said aloud.
. . .