For Mayhem or Madness
5
FinCEN
GOING TO MINNEAPOLIS after I’d installed everything in the Fort Myers website was a letdown. People were still wearing parkas and boots. It took me five days to make the needed changes at corporate before I could get back home. I walked in the door of my apartment feeling exhausted and just a bit frustrated. I was beginning to think I needed a girlfriend.
There is something, though, about being met at the door by a fifteen-pound ball of energy and joy that makes coming home feel like coming home. Maizie bounced around me until I got my suitcase settled and then jumped into my lap as I sank into my chair. My face was bathed with a doggie tongue before she curled up in my lap and I turned on the TV. We watched the Mariners opener against Phoenix and went to sleep about half way through the third inning.
I guess I don’t need a girlfriend.
My income from the Twins was routed through my new DH Investigations bank account, establishing an adequate cushion to pay my office rent for a few months. I spent as much time lounging on the sofa in my office looking out at the gray and foggy Sound as I did drumming up new business. Committing digital suicide had a profound effect on me. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to protect myself when I was fully up again. My paranoia had extended to completely erasing the tablet I used in Florida and Minnesota and donating it to charity. I just included the cost in my bill to the Twins. I used cash to buy a new one.
Maizie and I got up around six and went for a walk, eventually heading down to the pier. Tovoni’s, a new coffee shop, was just opening up on lower Queen Anne. With Daylight Saving Time, the sun was scarcely threatening to make its first appearance of the season in Seattle.
The barista, Jackie, proudly told me I was her first customer. She asked what kind of drink I wanted and I told her I liked strong black coffee. She suggested a 50/50. It was her own variation on an Americano. She ran two shots of hot water and then gently poured two shots of espresso over the top. She told me to sip the crema—the oily foam on top—first and not to stir the coffee.
Heaven!
That first sip of the crema and straight espresso was enough to transport me to a different world. Of course, as I tipped and sipped the coffee, it gradually mixed with the water beneath it, but the first sip was enough to set my taste buds right for the rest of the cup. I was so absorbed in enjoying the cup that I failed to notice Jackie when she came out front and started petting Maizie. Next thing I knew, Maizie had a little doggie biscuit and was primly nibbling on it next to my chair.
“Sorry. I should have asked if dogs were welcome. Maizie and I walk to the office this direction most mornings. I think she loves you,” I chuckled.
“Well, I love her,” Jackie said. “She’s always welcome here. And so are you.” That last was sort of an afterthought and implied that I was welcome as long as I brought Maizie.
I gladly paid the two dollars for my drink and left a dollar tip. Maize and I continued our walk to the office with a little spring in our step.
Try finding yourself on the Internet sometime. People do it all the time. You simply search for your name and Google or Bing starts flashing up a million and a half results. If your name is unusual or you are extremely active online, you might appear on the first page of results. Along with half a dozen notices from websites that collect and sell information about people. ‘We Found Dag Hamar.’ They offer my name, phone number, last ten known addresses, affiliations, friends, photos, family relations, and genealogy. But if your name is James Smith, good luck. There are more than thirty-one thousand of you out there.
Those big search engine services that we use so frequently present another problem for people who don’t want to be found. They catalog searches. The more often people search for Dag Hamar, the larger the catalog becomes. And the link they click on most frequently rises to the top of the results list. Of course, it’s all more complicated than that. Those services have legions of programmers working on making searches more efficient and results more usable, but it all spells trouble for a person who doesn’t want to be found.
So, I write my own search bots.
Getting results is slower, but those results are more relevant. The bots gather information. A filtering program removes results that are irrelevant. For example, show ‘Dag Hamar’ but not ‘Dag Hammarskjöld’. And not people named Dag who live in Hamar, Norway. Ten results, not one point four million. Good for the search engine. Bad for me.
I’m easy to locate as long as I have a computer registered to my name or an alias that can be identified as me. The answer is to create a digital identity that cannot be tracked back to a physical reality.
I had a lot of work to do.
It was nearly Memorial Day when Jordan Grant walked into my office. It was the first time I’d seen him since our sting on the Mexican drug lords almost a year ago and the first time he’d set foot in the new office. He entered without knocking and whistled.
“Nice digs…” he started. He was suddenly being faced down by a growling miniature guard dog.
“Maizie, here,” I commanded. She looked once more at Jordan a little uncertainly and then scampered around my desk with her nails seeking purchase on the wooden floor before she leapt into my lap. “Good girl. He’s a friend,” I said. “I think. What brings you my direction, Jordan? Not that I’m not always happy to have you barge into my office.”
“I didn’t realize you had a new office and receptionist,” he laughed. “I always figured she’d be blonde.” I motioned him to the sofa and settled into a comfy chair opposite. He looked out across the Sound. “You’re a hard man to find. Your last known address is a parking lot. I was worried.”
“Thanks for your concern. How’s life in the nation’s capital?”
“Boring. And even more expensive than here. I’ve put in for a transfer back. I miss the excitement.”
“Not much excitement going on around here. I recovered the data from a waterlogged disk drive last week. How’s that sound?” I asked as we looked out across the water.
“I heard you did a job in Florida. Looking at you, though, one would never know you’d seen the sun.”
“News travels fast. How did that little job come to your attention?” I asked. I’d covered my tracks pretty carefully on that. Everything had gone through DH Investigations. The business contact was my attorney. It could be traced to me, but you’d have to go through the State records to see my name associated with the company in any way. I wasn’t hiding from Jordan, but I was definitely interested in how he found out about my activities.
“Sorry to say this,” Jordan said hesitantly. “I had to build a dossier on you before I could approach you with a new contract.” I stared at him. He refused to look at me, staring out at the water. He knew I wanted the details but I wasn’t going to ask. “I know what happened a few months ago.”
No. If he knew, the FBI would be here and I’d be in cuffs by now. Jordan was fishing. I still refused to say anything.
“You weren’t the only one who got bombed into oblivion,” he continued at last. “I understand your reticence to talk about it. It has to be… humiliating in a way, I guess. To think that someone could wipe out the online presence of Dag Hamar, computer forensics detective. I just want you to know that you weren’t the target,” Jordan sighed. Now I was really intrigued. Suddenly, I was just collateral damage.
“What brought you in? I mean, I’ve played against some of these guys before. Gaming doesn’t seem like a place where FinCEN would get involved,” I said.
“The gaming site was ancillary to the main attack. Maybe not even intended. The major target was a bunch of questionable charities that were housed in the same virtual world. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Use a gaming site to scam people in the name of charity. I know you know who I’m talking about. You pointed us in that direction years ago.”
“Patterson,” I said.
“He owned it. I guess he still owns what remains of it, but when he was told about the attack, he continued to recite his favorite refrain.”
“It’s just a game.”
“The only words he’s uttered since we took him in. Doctors say he’s insane. I don’t know. I think one day he’ll slip up and say something that shows he’s competent to stand trial. He’ll get tired of the little white room he’s confined to and start confessing. Everything will come out eventually, Dag.”
“So, who bombed the site?”
“That’s what we want to know. It’s not the first time.”
“It’s not?” This was news. Apparently, I’d taken down sites like this before. What a revelation!
“A year ago, Reverend Jeremy Carlisle and The Congregational Church of the Savior went bankrupt.”
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” I said. Carlisle had been one of the most hateful fundamentalists I’d ever heard of. His church and its members had protested every possible social advancement in the country. They’d picketed courthouses where gay marriages were occurring, advocated the bombing of abortion clinics and the shooting of doctors who performed abortions, been responsible for break-ins that destroyed entire production runs of infant vaccines, and even shouted hate slogans at the funerals of soldiers. Their protests and attacks had no sense. They were just against everything. But even though they claimed credit for some violent acts, no one had actually been arrested and convicted. Even Patterson’s Philanthropolis wouldn’t host him. I wondered why I hadn’t heard about him in a while.
“It wasn’t by accident that he went broke. He was attacked.”
“I didn’t read about that. Was he hurt? Dead?” I said hopefully.
“Not physically attacked. Attacked the same way you were, only worse. Every bank account owned by Carlisle or his church, all their investments, and every trace of their existence in the virtual world were erased. It was done so thoroughly that even the banks haven’t been able to reconstruct a record of his ever having been a customer.”
“Backups,” I said. “I still have all my data.”
“No doubt. The attack on the scam charities was less complete than the attack against Carlisle. Makes us think the hacker had something specific against the man and was just out to do a good deed with the charity site. The banks have had a top secret internal investigation to find the worm in their system that activates any time one of his accounts is recovered. By the time the backup has loaded, even it had been erased,” Jordan said. Now that was some heavy-duty coding. If a hacker took down the Congregational Church of the Savior so completely, he—or she—was better than me. “It goes deeper,” Jordan continued. “His social security records have been erased. No record that the number ever existed. His passport was invalidated. Not that there is anyplace he could go with it. There seems to be a spider loose on the Internet that is seeking out every mention of the man and eliminating it.”
“You are talking about erasing an entire record of existence,” I said. “No one can do that.”
“Maybe a computer has come to life and has taken matters into its own hands,” Jordan laughed. It was a joke. We were a long way from having computers that had sapience. That didn’t mean a computer couldn’t be programmed to appear intelligent, though. What kind of a mind could master this much damage?
“As intriguing as the problem is, I don’t see any reason to waste time on it. I’m sure everything you’ve described was illegal, but who cares? If they could unmake the man molecule-by-molecule, the world would be a better place.” Unless someone innocent was being hurt, I wasn’t going to get involved in this. Good riddance to a royal pain in the ass.
“Your attitude is pretty much the same as every enforcement agency in the country. When he calls, the official word is ‘I’m sorry but we don’t have any record of you.’ Even newspaper articles that mention him have the names redacted before they can reach the market. So far, the guy is viewed as a lunatic, claiming things that simply couldn’t happen. He’s finally in the position he should have been in from the beginning—an attention-seeking crackpot with a bunch of conspiracy theories,” Jordan said. He sighed. There was something that hadn’t been said.
“Spill it.”
“He’s a credible threat to world peace.”
“Carlisle?”
“No. The hacker who took him down and appears to have taken down the Patterson empire. Since he seems to only target worthless scum and enemies of the people, we’ve only paid lip service to trying to track him down. CIA, FBI, NSA, and even Homeland Security want nothing to do with him. But you know how our current political situation is. The NRA is afraid he’ll attack them. That mobilizes congress. Russia has complained to the White House that someone, presumably an American Democrat, is attempting to interfere in their elections. Apparently, there was one vote against the guy and he wanted it unanimous. They blame us. The president wants action,” Jordan said.
“How did you get dragged into this? And why are you telling me about it?”
“Shit runs downhill. FinCEN is the lowest level of the enforcement agencies. I’ve only been with the agency for two years and I have a big success attached to my name after that Mexican drug bust last year. So, let’s make the new guy go handle it.”
“Sucks to be you.”
“I want you to go after him, Dag.”
Hmm. Jordan wants me to go out and find someone that no one wants found and who if found would undoubtedly reveal that the person who actually destroyed Philanthropolis was the person they sent out to find the person who destroyed Carlisle. This couldn’t be good. In fact, I couldn’t see a plus side for me. Not only was there a good chance that I’d be exposed, there was an equally good chance that I’d be eliminated.
I had carefully protected the people I deemed innocent, or mostly so, when I took down Patterson. The bots that took out bank accounts were targeted at organizations, not individuals. Individuals got hit with a varying degree of fallout. I’d lost my utilities, phone, T1 line, and all online accounts. I hadn’t lost my bank accounts, passport, or drivers’ license. I’d closed my bank account and credit cards ‘as a precaution’ afterward. But if this guy was as good as Jordan indicated, I could lose everything.
I would need to disappear.
“What’s in it for me?” I asked. Jordan had to know the risks he was asking me to take.
“I understand the going rate to hire an independent hacker to help a government bring down a domestic threat is a quarter million in Eurodollar Bonds,” Jordan tossed out. I looked at him sharply. There was no way he could know that I’d received that kind of payment from the Mexican government. “Tax free,” he added. I sighed.
“I’d need to completely disappear,” I said. “There has to be nothing that can be traced to me or to DH Investigations. We’ve talked about undercover jobs like I did at EFC, Jordan. This is a lot more than that—way deeper. I can’t risk a digital trail of any sort. I’d have to deal in cash and would probably need to use a false identity. I appreciate the government’s offer, but I don’t think you can keep me that deep.”
“The government doesn’t know how to deal with cash, and there are restrictions about how much cash you can carry. I’d like to say we would guarantee your identity, but we’ve already proved that we can’t do that. But in addition to the bonds, we’ll give you a hundred grand in expense money on non-sequential American Express cards with pin-only access. That should be enough to function for a year without touching any of your personal accounts.”
“You’re trying to make it look like the government is risking a lot on me.”
“I am risking a lot on you. I haven’t even told my superiors who I’m going to hire. If you screw up, I go to jail.”
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