For Money or Mayhem

{1} Just a Game

It’s just a game, I reminded myself. Just a game. But my hands were shaking and sweat dripped from my pits. I pulled my Dick Tracy hat down lower as I locked my eyes on the screen. All virtual. No reality.

Lines of code flew by. This was the tipping point. I nearly had her.

Just a game. I had to remind myself often because I wouldn’t be chasing a fifteen-year-old girl down a darkened alley in real life. Hell, I wouldn’t even be in a darkened alley. I spend my time behind a desk with a computer screen in front of me. It’s what I do. I don’t chase criminals through the streets. Not real streets, anyway.

There was a blinding flash and ozone stung my nose. My eyes hadn’t recovered from the lightning before I was deafened by the thunder. That was close. Lights flickered and went out, but my uninterruptable power supply and a surge protector stood between the failing power grid and my computers. The flow of information on my screen was steady. The cellular modem I used kept me connected, but my office was suddenly deathly quiet as everything but the cooling fans in my computers fell silent.

Lightning in Seattle is rare. I was waiting for another clap, but the blast had come at the trailing edge of the storm. As quickly as the lightning bolt hit, the storm had stopped. A few more drops of rain splashed in the standing water on the sidewalks.

I turned away from the window and plunged back into the alternate reality on the screen in front of me.

In the silence of my mind, I could hear her footsteps. I could almost see her, a shadow turning the corner ahead of me. But when I reached that intersection, she was gone.

I waited.

She’d been leaving tracks a noob could follow. It was almost as though she finally wanted to be caught—wanted it to be over. That happened sometimes. They just get tired of running.

There. I snatched a new receipt out of the cyberspace, looking for clues to where she was headed. But she was already gone.

Her fresh tracks led places no ordinary fifteen-year-old would go. In a space of thirty seconds, she bought automatically-renewing memberships in over a dozen different so-called dating sites—known money launderers. She’d been there before and was probably taking a commission on every sale. I was taking names and covering my tracks as fast as my fingers could move. I had user names and passwords as quickly as she created them. Jordan would have a field day with this, and in all likelihood his Federal counterparts would be sitting at his desk by morning. Except that this time, there were real police following my lead to an apartment building in the International District.

I was getting tired. I hadn’t slept in two days. I thought back to college days when pulling all-nighters to write code or party was normal and grimaced. It was a lot easier twenty years ago. Now I fueled my drive with caffeine instead of alcohol. So far I’d managed to stay off the power drinks, but two days on a steady drip of espresso was beginning to wear on me.

I knew she was out there, but I couldn’t get my eyes on her. She knew all the tricks and she was too practiced for a kid her supposed age to be. She jumped from place to place with no apparent connection, but I was beginning to see a pattern.

I rubbed my eyes and almost missed her. Damn! She’d just bought more merchandise at a trendy shop downtown than I figured the shop sold in a normal month. Thousands worth of designer clothes that would never be shipped.

I was exhausted and ready to put an end to this little cat-and-mouse game. Then she changed. I almost didn’t recognize her when she headed straight for the casino. She was disguised as a little old man about to lose his Social Security check playing on-line poker. I had a positive ID now. This was territory I knew and had charted before I started closing in on her. Online gambling is illegal in the State of Washington.

Casinos, in general, are high on security and they are quick to block exits if they believe they are being ripped off. They also hire guys like me to troubleshoot their systems. Of course, they weren’t likely to do anything drastic as long as she was dropping cash at the rate she was. I collected the account information about the guy she was playing against and sent it into the holding tank of info for Jordan. I reported the activity to the casino and they blocked her best avenue of escape with a quick maneuver. I had her cornered. Suddenly, she was a frightened underage girl and the casino ejected her. She had an escape plan and headed for the virtual rooftops of cyberspace. Bingo. As soon as she moved there, I had her physical address and signaled Jordan that it was time to move in.

When an animal is stalked there comes a point when it knows it has become prey. I’ve watched enough nature television in my life to recognize the moment when the prey understands its fate. Its eyes go wide and there is a last panicked search for refuge before the eyes lose their depth. The gaze becomes flat. No matter how it maneuvers, it knows all actions are futile—just a delay of the inevitable.

I sometimes play darts with a local team. They talk about being ‘in the zone’ when they play. It’s a moment when the bullseye seems to expand in front of them and there is no way they can miss it. It’s like throwing a peanut through a basketball hoop. Time slowed as I crept closer to her. My target was going to be hard to miss.

By now she could tell something wasn’t right. She knew the moment was near. I had a lock on her.

“Funny, but from here you don’t look like a fifteen-year-old girl,” I muttered. “More like a middle-aged cross-dresser with a two-day beard.” I was delaying. Everything had to be perfect. There was no room for error. I needed her in exactly the right position. I watched her typing in the codes that would wipe her computer.

The rest of the team was in place. I raised my hand.

It was only a game, but this was when the game turned to reality—when somebody goes down. The red haze a gamer sees when victory is imminent settled across my eyes. She heard the knock at the door.

I took a deep breath.

And pulled the trigger.

She could have been a fifteen-year-old girl partying with her parent’s credit cards, I suppose. Stupid, but essentially innocent. In reality, the perp was a thirty-year-old identity thief whose latest victim was still in high school and had no idea her credit had just been trashed. He was a thief.

I hate thieves. And I’m a badass in cyberspace.

When the police pounded on his door he started the sequence to format his hard drive. Before he could execute the command I pulled the trigger and blue-screened the machine. I could practically hear him scream. Who gets a blue screen these days?

The truth is that if he had executed the command, he’d have succeeded in wiping the drive. I breathed a sigh of relief when Jordan called.

“CyberTalon, we have the perp in custody,” he said. I wished I was there to see it unfolding, but Jordan was the only person on his team who knew my identity. Legally speaking, I didn’t exist.

Police can’t tamper with the evidence, so I didn’t touch the drive. While we were playing our game of cat and mouse I took control of his monitor in the background. When the perp tried to erase the disk, I uploaded a blue screen image. The first key he hit was “ESC.” That served to cancel his format command. It was beautiful. As soon as Jordan told me a cybercop and witness were in place, I released the screen and the computer mysteriously cured itself. They had immediate access to a fully logged-in computer. It only took a few minutes, with a warrant in hand, to back up the entire drive to an unencrypted device, and then change the password so they could maintain full access.

It was a nice, coordinated operation.

Detective Jordan Grant, who got me into this business in the first place, put together the strategy with me as a class exercise in our Criminal Justice course. Everything worked flawlessly.

Jordan and I have been studying together under Lars Anderson at Olympic University pretty much since the day Jordan arrested me a little over a year ago. That was the day I found out my boss had gutted the employee-owned company and stolen every dime out of our stock and retirement plans. The son-of-a-bitch! After he’d already taken my girlfriend, Hope… I hate thieves. Jordan led the cybercrimes unit that came in to seize the evidence. They were going about it all wrong and all their surprise raid was going to net was more time for our precious CEO to cover his tracks. As Director of Information Technology and an employee who had just had my life savings ripped off, I offered my services to the police. The arrest was to get me out of the building without spooking the CEO before a warrant could be issued for his arrest. I was released in the parking garage.

I decrypted the entire office system backup files and nailed my boss’s ass to a wall. There were still appeals to come, of course, and right now he was sitting in a luxury condo under house arrest with an ankle bracelet. But I’m not done with him yet.

Jordan and I have been working together ever since. He took me to class with him one day, where my former Navy C.O. walked into the class to stand at the front. Lars Anderson took one look at me and said, “I’ve been waiting for you, Hamar.”

I’m not going into police work like Jordan, though. I have my own business and it’s no way related to the Police Department. Sometimes they hire me to do forensic analysis of a computer. Occasionally, after hours, I’m happy to assist with a tricky sting. Pro bono. No official capacity. No paper trail. Usually legal. Mostly.

I slept most of the day on Friday. I’d been working on cracking that guy’s computer for two days and wanted nothing more than a hot shower and sleep. Afterward, I’d think about eating something other than cold pizza. That opportunity would be my usual Friday night meet-up at the faculty lounge. I showered and put on a clean pair of jeans and a fresh t-shirt then set off for the Blue Bastion on Capitol Hill.

For several years before pulling the plug on my former employer, I’d taught a couple of classes at the Community College. There was a big push a few years ago to get professionals in a field to teach certain classes instead of academicians. I had one of those late Friday afternoon Computer Theory classes that only the desperate and determined ever took. It was easy to tell one from the other. After one grueling class trying to explain why the latest, trendy scripting language was not the same as writing real computer code, I stumbled out of the classroom and practically collided with an attractive young English professor.

“You look dragged down and beaten up,” she quipped. “Tough class?”

“Not the easiest class. These kids know absolutely nothing.”

“Why else do you think they’re in your class?” she asked.

That brought me up short. Of course, they expected to learn something they didn’t know. My job was to teach them, right? Wow! So simple.

“Dag Hamar,” I said, offering her my hand.

“Andi Marx. It looks like you could use adult company. A bunch of us meet on Friday after class as a sort of faculty lounge. Why don’t you join us?” I looked at her with a fair amount of astonishment. Was she asking me out? I was flattered, of course, but actually I was in a relationship. She could see I was hesitating and started to laugh. “It’s a faculty group, not a date.” She rolled her eyes and I glanced down to see a wedding ring on her hand. There were times when I was such a typical man. Well… I guess I am a typical man.

I’ve seldom missed a faculty lounge night since. There is a tacit agreement among those who are regulars that the goal is diversity, not departmentalism. I hadn’t been teaching this year, but I was still welcome. We meet at the Blue Bastion because, even though there are dozens of fine restaurants on Capitol Hill, the majority of us are hardcore meat-eaters and wouldn’t set foot inside one of the vegetarian restaurants, no matter what the nationality of their cuisine.

Jan Garrick was in line ahead of me and greeted me warmly as I walked in. “You look tired, Dag. Everything all right?”

“Thanks, Jan. Surprisingly enough, teaching isn’t the only tiring profession.”

Jan ordered his meal and waited while I ordered mine. Then we walked to the big table where the faculty lounge was convening. He’s a full professor in physics at the U, but is one of the most down-to-earth guys I’ve ever met. Most of us at the lounge are community college instructors and many are part-time. It’s nice to see somebody who has made tenure.

As we approached the table, I saw Andi and smiled. She immediately scooted over on the bench and I slid in beside her. She gave me a good once-over and shook her head exaggeratedly.

“When are you going to get adult clothes and quit playing teenager?”

“Hey! If I worked in a big office I might consider dressing up, but I work out of my little one-room up on 15th and don’t see anyone but a barista or pizza delivery guy all day. Why choke myself with a tie?”

“Even us baristas still have to look at your mug each day,” Dick Wagner said as he and his wife Paula pulled up chairs at the table.

“How many student interns are managing your coffee shops this year?” I asked. The guy was great at getting low-cost help from his business class.

“Just four, and every one of them dresses better than you do.”

Well, just because he liked to serve an upscale clientele didn’t mean I was going to shave anytime soon.

“You might all get your wish sooner rather than later,” came the gruff voice of Lars Anderson from behind me. He hadn’t gone through the food line, so I didn’t see him come up to the table. It was unusual for Lars to come to the faculty lounge, but not unheard of. I’d introduced him to the group a few months earlier—Professor of Criminal Justice at SCU.

I had a strange relationship with the man. He’d been my superior officer in the Navy while I was working in the Intelligence Center in the Gulf. He’d given me a lot of instruction then, but I’d been more interested in serving my time and getting out with money for college. It was a real shock to me to find out he was in Seattle and teaching in the criminal justice program at Seattle Cascades University. But it went deeper than that. He was my mentor and still my superior officer. In the State of Washington, you can’t get an investigative agency license unless you can show at least three years’ practical experience investigating or pass a licensing exam from the State. I was still two months from taking my agency exam. You can, however, get an Unarmed Investigator License if you are employed by a licensed investigative agency. Lars, having been in the business for years, employed me in his agency and held my license. For all practical purposes, I functioned on my own, but any kind of work that required me to be licensed and bonded had to be funneled through him.

Before I could welcome him to the table, Jordan strode up with two beers and handed one to Lars.

“I hope you will forgive Jordan and me for inserting a different agenda into the faculty meeting this evening,” Lars said, “but we’d like to toast our investigator for assisting in the capture this morning of one of the area’s most prolific cyber-criminals.” The folks at the table turned to me. Most of them, knowing me as a computer nerd and general support guru, were surprised when they heard about the collapse of my former employer, a year ago and the role I played in it. Now they were beginning to look at me as though I actually had some street cred.

“What’s the story, Dag?” Lisa asked. “Can we get an action pose for class?” Lisa McIntyre is an art teacher at Pacific College of the Arts and Design, PCAD. We joke a lot about the fact that she sees more naked men and women each week than most people see in a lifetime. She’d kept suggesting that I come in to model for her class.

“Sorry, Lisa,” I said. “All the action takes place with my fingers on a keyboard. Not an interesting subject.” It wasn’t so much that I’m shy about my body as that I didn’t think I could hold still long enough for someone to draw me.

“Computers. They’re the death of art and writing.” I noted Andi didn’t disagree with her.

“So what happened?” Jan asked.

“It wasn’t much,” I said. “I just tracked the location and then distracted the perp long enough for Jordan’s gang to break in and arrest him.”

“That distraction meant that we got his entire hard drive as specified in the warrant without having to go through the process of decrypting the security on it,” Jordan said. “Dag’s an unsung hero for Seattle.”

There was a lot of general conversation about what happened and a ton of questions—most of which none of us could answer because of due process. Jordan jumped in with a tidbit that piqued all of our interest.

“Darnedest thing is, though, we don’t know who the guy is.”

It turned out that the perp had been stealing and adopting identities for so long that he’d pretty much erased all evidence of who he was. His fingerprints had been sent to the IAFIS division of the FBI. But even though the FBI averages only about 27 minutes to identify a fingerprint, they’d come up with a blank on our John Doe. DNA scanning was possible but was costly and time-consuming. There was still a question as to whether the DA would even want to proceed with prosecuting the case. So far, five different identities had all proven false.

An intense conversation rose up at the table regarding the need to protect and defend vs. basic privacy. Should the individual be allowed to be completely anonymous as far as the government was concerned? It was a tough call and the police department often found themselves caught between the need to enforce the law and an individual’s personal rights.

Eventually, it was Andi that brought the conversation back to Lars original statement.

“Lars, why will we get our wish to see our resident geek cleaned up?”

“I’ve got a request for an investigator at a large financial firm downtown,” Lars said. “It seems I have an expert at identifying and tracing nearly invisible signs of computer tampering on my staff, so I’m contemplating sending him in on the mission.”

“I’ve got a couple of cases I’m working on,” I said. “And you know how I feel about big corporations.”

“Don’t worry. This has a remarkably flexible work schedule,” Lars said. “And I think you’ll like the challenge.”

Lars promised to send me the details by email and told me to look presentable by Monday morning. He took off fairly early, but Jordan was hanging around to see if there was any action going on later. He’d been flirting on and off with both Lisa and Andi, but I think he was hoping I’d set something up. That’s when Andi started picking up her things and said she needed to get home and feed the teen.

Since she introduced me to the group seven years ago, we’d become friends, then neighbors, then best friends. She’d made it clear that she was interested in nothing more than friendship, even though her wedding ring proved to be from her deceased husband. She was a single mom and needed no men to complicate things. With that as the ground rule, we’d become close friends, especially after my disastrous breakup with Hope.

“Can I offer to walk you home?” I asked, standing from the table. Home was only a few blocks, but up on the hill, nobody drove anyplace if they could help it. I’d moved into the apartment complex next door to her duplex, so walking to school or home from the lounge together was comfortable and almost expected.

“I’d feel hurt if you didn’t.” She smiled at me and I shook my head. It was my turn to roll my eyes. We’d both adopted the expression from her daughter and it always made us laugh.

“I have no idea what kind of clothes to wear. I don’t have anything but jeans and t-shirts anymore. I’ll probably have to get Eric to go shopping with me,” I said as we walked down the hill.

“Or you could use the resident fashion expert living next door to you,” she laughed.

“I didn’t know you were a sartorial maven,” I said.

“Not me. Cali.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Being dressed by a teen? I’ll just go down to Penney’s…”

“You will not! Come on. It will be fun,” Andi said. “Cali would love to do a makeover.”

“A makeover?”

“Just bring money,” she grinned.

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