For Money or Mayhem

{8} A Shining City

I slammed my laptop shut and charged out of my office. I went straight for Arnie’s office, but Darlene blocked my way.

“He’s out,” she said. I saw his laptop sitting on his desk before she closed his door.

“Where?”

“He’s with Don.” I headed off in the direction of Don’s office but Darlene grabbed hold of my sleeve. I pretty much dragged her with me. “I wouldn’t interrupt him. You haven’t been here long enough to go charging in when he’s dressing down another employee.” We were at the door to Don’s office and I could see the two men standing nearly toe to toe. It was a heated exchange, but I couldn’t hear through the door. A screen saver of one of the security cameras playing on his laptop.

“Damn!”

“Ford’s office is next. Just down the hall,” she said, this time taking the lead and dragging me along. I stopped outside the door. Ford was asleep at his desk, his head thrown back. I imagined the snores I couldn’t hear. These offices were pretty soundproof. Another camera played on his computer monitor. I turned away from his office.

“Allen?” I asked.

“Not in yet. Phil is out of town. He had some time off coming and is taking a long weekend,” Darlene ticked off my team members on her fingers.

“And Jen?” I asked. I still didn’t know exactly what Jen did.

“She’s in conference with Mr. Davenport.” Darlene stood and waited for that information to soak in.

“Davenport?”

“As in CEO.”

“What does she do here, anyway?”

“Same thing as you, apparently. She reports directly to a C-level and runs around putting her nose in everyone else’s business. When you figure it out, let me know. I’m not sure I like her all that much.” I stopped and thought about that. My heart rate was slowing down and I didn’t feel like I was going to explode anymore.

“Thanks, Darlene. I appreciate knowing what you think of me.”

“Putting your nose in other people’s business is a company policy. Let’s go get a cup of coffee.” We went out the main doors to the elevator. I thought we’d just head for the cafeteria, but she went straight out onto the street and headed for the waterfront. Two blocks from the office she went into the Daybreak Coffee Shop. “I know you’re used to better coffee up on Capitol Hill, but this is as good as it gets downtown.” I ordered a double short Americano and savored the warmth as it settled into my system. Somehow, just holding the cup in my hands brought a sense of peace and tranquility to me. I smiled at Darlene who had given me a respectful moment with my brew.

“Sorry,” I said. She nodded and we sat at the counter in the back of the shop with a view overlooking the Sound.

“Was it you?” she asked when we were settled.

“What?”

“Was it you that blew the whistle on that kid in Web Services?”

“Why would you think that?” I evaded. Darlene might be an ally in this whole thing, but I wasn’t ready to spill my guts to her.

“Crap. Even bringing you two blocks away from the office I’m not going to get any information out of you, am I?”

I just smiled in response.

“If you were easy, he wouldn’t have hired you. You’re a strange man, Dag Hamar. Almost no Internet presence. At all. No public profile. I had to raid the personnel file to find out what little I know about you. I’m suspecting that Dag Hamar isn’t even your real name. Not only that, but you are in disguise. Not your real hair color. I can already see a bit of your natural mustache color at the roots. You wear suits that beg not to be noticed. And even though you’re a fulltime employee, you have tacit permission to work offsite at will. And I’m supposed to brief you on a subject you probably know more about than I do so you can face your team meeting tomorrow.”

“You’re in a hard place,” I said. “I’ve already apologized enough, though. I don’t think there’s anything I can do to make it easier.”

“Oh, you could, but you won’t.”

“What could I do?”

“Take me to dinner tomorrow evening.”

“I can’t.”

“You won’t.”

“I have a date.”

“Just my luck.”

We walked back to the office companionably, but she stopped while we were still half a block away.

“Dag, I like you.” I must have sighed. “Not in the ‘take me to dinner’ way. I’m too old for you. I’ve worked here my entire career—twenty-four years. I just want to tell you that nothing at this company is what it appears to be. Whatever you think you’re doing here, it’s really something else.”

“Maybe my best bet is to just do nothing at all, then,” I said.

“I’ve heard worse ideas,” she laughed.

We both dutifully swiped our smartcards against the security door—one card, one entry—and got back as far as my office. A yellow sticky note was on my door with the words “C ME NOW! AD”

“Your turn in the hot seat,” Darlene said. “Good luck.”

I went on to Arnie’s door and knocked. He looked up and waved me in. I closed the door, on the spat we were about to have. Our conversation took a turn for the worse as soon as the door clicked shut.

“Was it you?” Arnie snapped.

“What?” It was the second time I’d been asked that.

“Was it you that reported that breach this morning?”

“You mean you didn’t know? Yes, it was me.”

“I wouldn’t ask you if I already knew. Now Don is scrubbing the entire system trying to track down who intruded to alert his team. He knows for sure it was someone with top clearance in the company. Do you think that was the threat I hired you to find?”

“I thought it might be. I happened to stumble on it while it was in progress. It’s pretty rare to catch something like that in real time.”

“But he was no one. The damage could have been eradicated in twenty-four hours with no losses. Instead, we’ve got a federal case and a witch-hunt going on.”

“What did you want me to do?” My own voice was rising.

“I thought you’d be subtle. No one else is supposed to know you are on this.” He ran his hand through what was left of his hair. I took a moment to really see his office. It was all chrome and glass with no drawers or doors where anything could be concealed. The only paper in the room was a pad of sticky notes next to a pen. I thought about it a moment and realized I’d seen very little paper anywhere in the building. They had truly gone paperless. If you had access to the network, you could have access to everything.

“Someone already knows,” I said, lowering my voice. He looked up and raised one eyebrow. “Either that, or they just got lucky. In my mind that doesn’t happen often. I thought it was you, but it’s obvious to me now that it isn’t.” I told him what I’d found when I started the job, from the desk position with the security camera to the bugs on my keyboard, phone, and lamp, to the message on my screen this morning. Finally, I suggested that it seemed pretty common knowledge that I wasn’t here to do what my job title said and I told him about my conversation with Darlene. I left out her warning, though.

“Darlene shouldn’t be prying, but you’re right she knows you are working on something different than your job. I had to have assistance and I trust her. She’ll divert suspicion away from you and keep you supplied with a cover. But that doesn’t mean she knows what you are doing, so don’t give her any more information than you have to. Just treat her nicely. She’s sticking her neck out on our behalf.”

“I’ll bring her flowers.”

“That’s not a bad idea. Tomorrow is Secretaries’ Day—er… Administrative Professionals Day. But yeah, show her you appreciate her. And show me you can get some real results.” He waved his hand in dismissal and went back to his computer keyboard.

No paper. Where did people keep their personal items? Surely not everyone in the company was so tech savvy they didn’t need notebooks or calendars. I thought about my own life as I went back to my office. I’d stripped my life down to bare essentials when I moved into the apartment. But I still get a daily newspaper. I still get enough political flyers and advertisements to fill my recycling bin each week. And I distinctly remembered filling out a batch of paperwork in Human Resources just Monday, which apparently Darlene got access to. Where did that paper go?

I walked on past my office and continued to the stairwell at the end of the hall. I hadn’t done a physical survey of the office yet. When images from security cameras flashed on my screen, I didn’t know where they were. I was going to take a look around.

The building is twenty-six floors. It took me the rest of the morning.

When I got back to my office after lunch, I opened my computer and scanned the long list of emails I’d received in the past thirty-six hours. I’d set up a filtering system so that only mail from my team showed up in my inbox. That cut the volume to only fifty or sixty messages. Three-quarters of those I could ignore. I had the meeting requests for the team meeting on Friday morning and my one-on-one with Jen following it. That should be interesting. I accepted them and read through the remaining email. The last message was my weekly work briefing from Darlene.

That reminded me. I flipped to a local florist website and ordered flowers to be delivered to her tomorrow morning. I paid the extra to get express delivery. I’ll bet every boss and staff member in town was hitting the emergency button to get flowers for their admins tomorrow. Then I settled in to read Darlene’s report.

She’d done a good job. It was just the right amount of material to assume that a knowledgeable employee could uncover in his first week at work. I could study this and speak intelligently about it tomorrow. So, what remained was to conduct an investigation into people who were near me while one or more of them watched me doing it. I decided on a different tack.

‘Decide’ might be too strong a word. In spite of several cups of coffee, my lack of sleep was catching up with me, so it was more of a drift into P.I. mode without thinking about it.

I’d told Darlene that perhaps my best bet was to do nothing. Maybe that really was a good idea. I started doing searches on cyberbullying. I pulled up the social networks my young client had given me and started tracking the messages that were posted to his accounts. Some of the material I was pulling up was definitely NSFO—‘not safe for office.’ Employees could be fired for viewing pornography at work, but I was using my own laptop and not the one issued by the company, and I wasn’t interested in the picture sites. I was interested in the forums. I was especially interested in the number of anti-gay posters in the gay forums. Sometimes these erupted into all out flame wars, and sometimes the offending thread was locked so no one could comment on it. Whoever managed these forums had to have a really huge staff monitoring their site to keep it under control as well as they did.

Still there were certain signature phrases that kept repeating. Sometimes a phrase is passed around amongst a group of people with a common connection, but sometimes a person who changes names, even IP addresses, will continue to use the same phrasing wherever they post. That’s what I was watching for. Using keywords that I gleaned from Daniel’s bullies, I modified a shareware spam-filtering software to search out the same phrases and IP addresses on various forums. There were even a few track-backs to websites that became progressively more conservative and religious. I was discounting the further-out sites. I was looking for someone with an axe to grind against gays, and a platform from which he (or she) could spout hatred.

I couldn’t execute a command on my software from behind the company firewall because of the restrictions that were on computers on the network. So I uploaded my program to a remote Internet server and executed the command from there. Just before I closed up my computer for the night, I downloaded the log of websites visited from within the company. I didn’t think there was any connection between Daniel’s case and what I was working on at EFC, but if someone thought I was investigating inappropriate web behavior on company computers, it might chase them out of the woodwork.

I left the office intent on getting a sandwich and some sleep. I’d completely forgotten about the after-work beer with the guys.

Allen and Ford caught up with me on the way down the hall and there was no way to escape being dragged to a preppy bar downtown. Don eventually dragged himself in and I was surprised to see Jen and Darlene approach as well. I was dead on my feet, but showing that would just make people suspicious of my late night activities the night before, so I bravely laughed and chatted with the guys as I sipped a beer. I don’t drink much, but I wasn’t planning on doing anything tonight but sleep, so I decided one wouldn’t hurt.

It was after ten when I left the bar, leaving a wake of co-workers behind me. We’d been joined by nearly a dozen other people from associated departments and I was introduced to everyone. Everyone had questions for me and at one point it occurred to me that a person who interviewed everyone at the bar could put together a passable profile on me. No one asked the same question as anyone else and I had the feeling I was being passed from person to person, each having an assigned task. I feigned too much to drink and caught one of those rare cabs that swing down Third at night. I’d managed to nurse just one beer all evening.

When I got home I automatically plugged my computer in and turned it on. As soon as I logged in, I knew this was not going to be a night for sleep. An identical message had been posted to each of the forums I was investigating. It was a direct, private message, not a general topic posting. The message said simply, “You missed this one,” and included an IP address. The messages were all from the same user name, registered to each of the networks. “IGotUrBak.”

I put water on to boil and fixed a strong cup of coffee. It was going to be a long night.

Every computer connected to the Internet is assigned an IP address. Originally the numeric identifiers were 32-bit codes which allowed a little over four billion unique addresses, but the Internet got so big that a new system was introduced with 128 bit codes that allowed more than 300 undecillion addresses. That’s a real number and it’s a lot bigger than the national debt. The IP address in the message was one of the new ones.

This was shiny. I had to sit down and investigate.

The world I entered was as different from the slums of cyberspace as bottled water was to the brackish slime of Puget Sound. I couldn’t help but think of The Wizard of Oz and the Emerald City as I began exploring its coded streets. I was so excited about getting into this alternate reality that I hadn’t even stopped to think about who had been tracking my movements at EFC so closely that they knew my alias at every one of the forums I’d investigated. If I’d thought about that, I might have been a little slower to plunge in.

At first glance, I was impressed with the orderliness of this world. The streets were neatly laid out in straight lines with clear markers as to where each one led. This path to administration; this one to finance; this one to social services; the next one to health and welfare. The thoroughfare I was traveling was clearly marked ‘Religion’, and seemed to be the broadest path available.

The street name made my blood run cold. At least three of the hits on my search of people flaming gays came from domains owned by big religious organizations. Yet, absurdly enough, they were also organizations that had incredibly strong family services programs. Sure enough, the first cross-street I encountered was labeled ‘Children’s Welfare.’

When I turned off the Religion thoroughfare, my virtual world tilted on its side.

The streets were just as orderly if more narrowly defined. After a moment’s disorientation, I started identifying passages marked Food, Health, Population Control, Abuse, Education, Adoption, and just about anything that you could name that had to do with children.

I randomly walked through the door marked ‘Food’ and found a constant pressure to feed the hungry. It was like a big soup kitchen attempting solve world hunger. Around the kitchen there were doors that led to other kitchens marked, with the type of clientele they served: Homeless, Third World, Civic, and Science, for example. One door caught my attention. I’ve always believed in the old detective adage, ‘Follow the money,’ so when I spotted a door marked ‘Executive’, I boldly went through.

Once the momentary disorientation of shifting to a new angle and perspective dissipated, I was able to assess my surroundings.

I glanced at the exits, some leading to other kitchens and several leading to executive offices. I chose one marked ‘Board Room.’ Might as well start at the top and work my way down from there.

The adjustment to a new set of input settled as I found myself in what was more reminiscent of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table than a corporate board room. There were dozens of seats around the table and I was stunned when I started reading the names. Some of the great philanthropists of the world were listed here. It was a hub of charitable giving. These people included some of my personal heroes. I don’t know why my source suggested I come here because I was damn sure none of these people would be involved in gay bullying. I looked around at the various exits, some that led to other corporate-sounding destinations, like ‘Treasury,’ and some that had the names of streets I’d seen before I went indoors.

It was time to start over. I chose the door marked Religion and walked out on the broad street down which I had originally entered this world. I realized the exit had not taken me to the same location on the street. I was apparently much deeper in the city center than my initial entry. There were a wide variety of temples and churches on streets I came to, many that had their own international hierarchies. I decided to enter the first church I came to.

Inside, I discovered the now familiar structure of the city’s buildings. Off the large central sanctuary, a number of passageways and doors led off to the various missions, donors, programs, staff, and members of the congregation. I was beginning to get a mental map of what I was thinking of as Philanthropolis when I exited the church.

In fact, I realized that the entire complex of domains was laid out as a mind-map. The city was mapped by relationships. Someone had done an amazing job of organizing the most disorganized activity in the world—charity.

All the streets were connections between kinds of organizations. The buildings were specific organizations, and the rooms were activities within the organization. Sometimes, only the doorway to an organization was within Philanthropolis. But many were linked through several different activities as well. As a result, the kitchen could lead me to kitchens in any organization that had one. It was like the secret passage in the game of Clue.

With the overall structure in my head, I had to admire whoever had designed this domain. There was a lot of programming talent at work here. But it was an Internet portal. It might go on forever. If there was a cyberbully hiding in this environment, I was going to need assistance in ferreting out where.

I needed spiders.

I had software that I could modify to search the Internet for specific combinations of terms, not unlike what I used to locate users who were attacking Daniel. Setting it up was going to take me the rest of the night.

Search engines generally are keyed into a specific association of terms that are searched for. But that is what yields millions of results. A search for ‘gay bashing’ on any given search engine will yield over two million results in less than two tenths of a second. ‘Cyberbully’ yields nearly 700,000 results in the same time. That’s simply too many results to sift through. And people aren’t likely to put ‘stalker’ in their profile. The search engine looks at the entire page code, not just the part that is displayed on-screen. Keywords, descriptions, and other information, called metadata, are in the file but are not displayed when the web page is loaded.

Sending search spiders into the Internet, or in this case into a particular complex of domains, would let me explore every avenue in Philanthropolis and should yield only the specific information I wanted to have. Was anyone hiding in this cybercity actively engaged in harassing Daniel?

Like most jobs, the work that took the most time was designing the search parameters. I spent most of the night programming my spiders and then the first time I sent them out I discovered a flaw in the code that took me another hour to track down. Since my spiders were nowhere near as well optimized as a major search engine and had no catalog or index to work with, the search would take considerably longer than the three-tenths of a second a general search engine search would take. I executed the search and then flopped on my bed, still dressed in my suit pants and white shirt. I was asleep before the first results started showing up.

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