For Mayhem or Madness
15
Sadness
I LEFT THAILAND as Stefan Nilsson and entered Singapore as Dag Hamar. From Singapore, I flew to Amsterdam and then to Stockholm. Mom was waiting for me and was ready to head home. I enjoyed an evening with the family and we flew out the next morning.
I was still upset about Char. We hadn’t developed a deep loving relationship but meeting, traveling, and making love had gotten us to the point where I thought we had potential. She was even-tempered, bold, and caring. All things I’d come to admire. What she wasn’t, in my opinion, was honest. That’s what got to me.
I know I come up short in that category. I use false identities, avoid investigation, masquerade as something I’m not. All in the name of being a detective. But I never did it to hurt another person. Maybe I was just upset that I’d encountered someone who was better at the game than I was.
Maizie was glad to see me. She jumped into my arms when I walked through the door, knocking the suitcase down the stairs as I dropped it to catch her. She placed a lot of wet licks on my face. Mrs. Prior looked at the dropped suitcase and up the stairs at the two of us.
“Someone is happy you’re home,” she said.
“Two someones,” I said. “It’s good to be home.” Maizie and I headed for my recliner and I sat with the little dog in my lap until we both fell asleep. I knew I’d be jetlagged for a while. I didn’t plan to do anything significant for a few days. My calendar for the weekend was full of dog dates and long walks. Saturday morning, Maizie and I walked to Tovoni’s for coffee and a biscuit. Jackie was happy to see us, too.
“One special Americano and one doggy biscuit coming up.” Maizie got served first. She curled up next to my chair and took dainty bites of the cookie while I sipped coffee and read the newspaper. “You look like you’ve been dragged around the world,” Jackie said.
“Very nearly. I guess, in fact, I have. I just didn’t cross the Pacific. I hit both sides of it, though.”
“Welcome home. Any fun adventures?”
“Sadly, nothing I’m allowed to talk about. It’s a hazard of my work. I have to keep things confidential.”
“Sounds very spy-like. I don’t remember any spies who had such a cute companion as you have, though. I hope you’ll be around for more regular visits for a while. I missed this little lady.”
She’d missed Maizie. I was really just the person who was leashed to her. I guessed that was okay. Jackie was nice but there was no spark between us. I thought we might become good friends, though, if I could stay in town long enough. I wondered how my office on the waterfront was doing. Monday morning would definitely be cleanup time. Maybe I’d hire a maid.
Until then, Maizie and I had some parks to visit.
Maizie was as excited to get to the office as I was. We stopped to see Jackie on the way down the hill but once we left the coffee shop, Maizie was pulling me along. The office was a little stale after almost a month of not being here. The pier is mostly warehousing and dust abounds. I was definitely going to call a maid service. I didn’t even own a vacuum cleaner. I used a roll of paper towels from the restroom to dust my desk and chair before tracking down the ‘Daily Maid’ service. They promised to have a crew to clean my office in the next day and agreed to a weekly schedule. I couldn’t justify them coming in every day. It didn’t get that dirty.
I locked my doors and checked the vault to make sure everything there was running correctly. The air filtration system and air conditioning in the room kept dust to a minimum and I cleaned up anything else I spotted. All my servers were in good shape and I ran maintenance checks on each of them.
I also placed eight unused American Express cash cards in a strong box. Save them for a rainy day.
Tuesday, the cleaners arrived at ten, happy to have a daytime cleaning to do. Two women swept through the office like a tornado, stopping only to praise Maizie and to tell her what a good dog she was. I scooped up my laptop and my dog and moved into the hall while they worked. Bathroom and two offices. It wasn’t really a lot and the two women were done in forty-five minutes. I paid them and they promised to be back at the same time the next Tuesday.
The office smelled fresh. Maizie went to her bed and pawed at it a bit to get it fluffed the way she wanted, then she lay down. I lay on the sofa, looking out across the Sound, and started catching up on the news and information that might lead to another job. It was into this homey setting that Jordan stepped.
“Isn’t this cozy,” he said. Maizie jumped up, barked once and then ignored Jordan, settling in on her bed again.
“I knew I’d hear from you eventually,” I moaned. “I sent you a report that I composed on the airplane. I don’t think there’s anything else I can do.” He sat in a chair across from me and I sat up on the sofa. “Oh, I suppose you want the docs.” I went to my desk and pulled out the manila envelope with Gregory Wright’s passport, death certificate, and birth certificate in it. Jordan glanced through it briefly.
“This is him?”
“It’s who he claimed to be. Frankly, I’ve located so many possible identities that he may have erased himself completely. This is the one he was using at the time of his death. I had enough time before I was forced out of Thailand to check with the hospital. They confirmed it. They sent the body for cremation.”
“No evidence.”
“None.”
“What about his computer? He had to be operating with some kind of power. The code for what he was doing could be valuable.”
“In a dumpster in Chiang Mai.”
“What? You threw it away?”
“He told me, before he died, that he’d coated his SSD with a water-activated solvent capable of eating through the drive in thirty seconds. When I recovered the computer, it had been submerged in saline water for several hours. It seems his nurse didn’t want anyone else to use his code.”
“We should check out the nurse.”
“I’m pretty sure your guys already did.”
“My guys?”
“Jordan, the two who stepped between me and the two agents from what I guess was Russia, though they didn’t identify themselves. If they hadn’t arrived when they did, I’d be on the pointy end of a stick now as they tried to torture information I don’t have out of me.”
“We didn’t have an agent following you there.”
“Hmm. Someone did. If you discover who, say thank you for me.”
“So, there’s no hacker and no computer or secret code. Nothing left but rumors.”
“Rumors?”
“Very hush-hush. No one knows how deep it goes. It seems that several countries have lost the launch codes for their nuclear missiles. Everyone else is on high alert.”
“Damn.” Terry had told me he’d disabled their missiles, but I’d found that hard to believe. It seemed too much of a stretch that he could have gotten so deep into so many countries’ systems. “The Barnhouse Effect.”
“What’s that?”
“Kurt Vonnegut. First story he ever published. Told about a guy who used his mental energy to destroy all the nuclear weapons and then conventional weapons in the world. Hacker X had the same ability. Was there ever any code on his computer to start with?”
“Science fiction. He worked in a digital world and he did digital damage. Nobody’s weapons were destroyed. Even if the rumors are founded, he only took away the codes, not the weapons.”
“Erased their digital identity,” I said.
“Well, I have just one more thing to do,” Jordan said. He opened his briefcase and put the envelope I gave him in it. Then he withdrew another. He handed it to me. “A quarter of a million in Eurobonds and a certificate of paid tax from the IRS. Along with the thanks of our government. Good job, Dag.”
He left me speechless, stopping a second to scratch Maizie’s ears and then leaving without another word.
I felt I was morally obligated to make one more trip. Maizie and I loaded our supplies in the Mustang and headed for Las Vegas. I made the rounds of casinos I’d deposited funds in and cleaned out the rest of the accounts. I hadn’t left that much on deposit, but money sitting in a casino doesn’t earn interest. I had another seventeen thousand in cash cards when I left. Then I drove out to Henderson and the home of Leslie Whiteman. I rang the bell.
“Hello? May I help you?” she asked when she answered the door.
“Mrs. Whiteman, I visited you a couple of months ago,” I started.
“Oh yes. Jason Sanborn. I still get a kick out of that name. What can I tell you that I haven’t already, Mr. Sanborn?” She stood in the doorway, not inviting me in.
“I’m afraid it is what I can tell you,” I said. “I’m sorry I have to report that Terry passed away. I was with him in Thailand at the time.”
She stood there looking nonplussed for a few moments. She took a deep breath and refocused on me.
“Mr. Sanborn, I’m afraid you must be mistaken. As I told you before, my husband passed away over two years ago. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss him, but he’s gone. I scattered his ashes in Thailand. If you resurrected them, I trust you put him back to rest. Good day, Mr. Sanborn.”
She closed the door and I stood there for a moment unable to fathom what I’d just heard. She knew I knew. She had to. She’d given me the clue to search in Thailand. Yet, all the time I was there, no one had called him by name until I received the death certificate for Gregory Wright. Was it possible I was mistaken?
I returned to the hotel I was staying in and checked out in the morning. Maizie and I had a great time on the four-day trip back to Seattle.
I didn’t have much work to be done. I’d spent two months not existing so building up a clientele again was high on my priority list. I got a couple of disk recovery projects. I got a referral from the State Police asking me to verify the contents of an accused child pornographer’s computer. Doing work on this kind of thing is bound by a ton of rules. The first and foremost is chain of custody. Usually, evidence would go from a policeman to a forensics tech who analyzes the evidence for fingerprints, DNA, etc. Then it goes back to a police evidence technician who is responsible for storing the evidence securely until it is presented in court. Each of these people is an officer of the court and maintains a paper record of the chain of custody.
The forensics lab may not, and probably does not, have a computer forensics technician in the lab, which could hold up obtaining the evidence for a crime like child pornography for a long time. It also weakens the chain of custody.
So, when I’m called to do an investigation on behalf of the police for a court case, I need an officer of the court sitting beside me the whole time I’m working on the computer. That poor guy is in for a boring job. It could take me an hour before I get to the point of turning a computer on, especially one that has been dusted for fingerprints.
The case held that a woman had come upon her husband viewing child pornography. She had flown into a rage and called the police. They arrived to find Lyle Kunstler reformatting his hard drive. He was arrested and a warrant was issued to search his computer for evidence of possession of child pornography.
The computer went to the forensics lab where it was dusted for fingerprints, verifying it was the arrested man’s computer and not something his wife planted there. The tech also turned the computer on and found the system was installed but there were no files in the directory. Likewise, a search of browser history showed nothing. In the meantime, it was discovered the wife had already filed for divorce and was compiling evidence against her husband. The computer came to me, along with a lab tech who hoped to learn something about the process, to determine if there were recoverable files on the drive that would provide evidence in the case.
I wore nitrile gloves when I accepted the computer and took it from the evidence bag. I examined the case carefully to make sure it showed no signs of having been opened. Then, before I even opened the laptop, I plugged in a remote keyboard and mouse so I would not touch any of the surface of the laptop keyboard or touchpad. They were pretty filthy with fingerprint dust anyway and I didn’t want to clean it or get it on myself.
I didn’t know how savvy the accused pornographer was. A good computer tech can wipe a hard drive in such a way as to leave nothing there. Your average user would simply delete files or at most run a quick format of the disk. The quick format, however, doesn’t erase data from the disk. It erases the directory that connects what sector on the disk has the content being requested. The data itself isn’t overwritten until new data is saved to that sector. That was what I was hoping for.
I had to name and describe the disk recovery tools I used to boot the computer remotely and examine the drive. As I suspected, the data was there but the directory was not. The lab tech recording what I was doing sat with me for fourteen hours as I painstakingly reassembled the data on the hard drive. He wrote the report of what I’d discovered and locked up the computer again.
Here’s the dig. I didn’t find any child pornography on the hard drive. However, I did find the guy was running a scam that threatened to report another party for pornography if they didn’t come up with some ransom money. It was a pretty typical ransomware scam and there were certainly people who had fallen for it.
The warrant specifically stated that we could search the computer for evidence of possession or viewing of child pornography. It didn’t say anything about evidence of fraud. But if, in conducting the search, evidence of crimes not listed in the warrant was found, police could seize the evidence and press charges. Whether they would successfully use the evidence I uncovered was debatable. Fraud was a different division and separate prosecutor from child porn. They might or might not decide the case was large enough to prosecute.
Either way, I was now out of the picture. I’d done my civic duty and received the standard hourly rate for the time I worked on the computer. I won’t say the rate is paltry, but I could certainly have made more investigating something big—like a hacker who took out nuclear launch codes. Jobs like that don’t come around every day.
Lyle Kunstler was free on bail. During his incarceration, his wife had stripped their bank accounts and removed everything of value from their home. Her whereabouts were now unknown. Her attorney, however, was pressing to a quick divorce settlement.
I had little to do, so I decided to investigate the case further. Whether it was child pornography or fraud, I considered it pretty much the same. I needed to make sure he couldn’t hurt anyone again. I tapped into my network and ran a performance scan of all my devices. This could take all my computing power and I wanted to make sure my firewalls were in perfect condition.
As the scans were running, my laptop lit up with a message sent directly to the screen, with no email or messaging application running.
Dag Hamar,
If you are reading this, then I must be dead. It was a pleasure knowing you and discovering your formidable talents. I do hope you and Char had an opportunity to enjoy each other’s company. She is a wonderful person with a strict code of ethics. Which, sadly, I had to work around.
By this time, you have probably already discovered there was nothing on my computer and no magic coating on its drives. I needed to use it as a decoy in case Char decided you shouldn’t have that power. She did, didn’t she? I’ll bet she stole the computer and dumped it in the pool. That would be so like Char. She’s a great woman.
But all is not lost, Dag. I have concealed the code for my digital destruction virus on your network. It works in two directions, you know. Not only can you destroy an entire identity—even an entire country—you can also restore it or create a new one. You’ll find I’ve restored yours that was lost in the destruction of Philanthropolis. You did a nice job on that, but my code will let you do a better job next time.
You have it, my friend. It is up to you to choose whether to ever use it or not. It would be good if you found a backstop—someone like Char—to rein you in if the power is too much for you. I’m confident you’ll do the right thing.
Yours,
Gregory Wright
Damn! I still didn’t know if that was his real name. Or if he was really Terry Whiteman. Or if he’d invented both.
I sat back on the sofa in the office with Maizie asleep on my chest. Her weight was comforting—an anchor. I found where the code had been installed on my network. I thought of how easy it would be to use it. And then to become the person Jordan sent me out to find. Or perhaps send someone else to find me. I had few ties to this world. My mother would be the hardest to sever. I had a huge amount of money, all in negotiable securities and cash cards. I could manufacture a new identity in a matter of days. I could move anywhere in the world and set up an operation to police unrighted wrongs.
I watched the Bainbridge ferry pull out of dock as the Bremerton ferry pulled in, each rocking in the other’s churn. It was a beautiful early September evening and the sun was still shining on Rainier’s glacier-capped peak.
I dozed on and off as I thought about the code.
And then I thought of Lyle Kunstler.
The End
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