When the Devil Whistles
By Rick Acker
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Prologue
Something Wicked This Way Came
Samuel Stimson made his last two mistakes on March 23. Boredom caused the first. He had run the last network diagnostic on his task list, the servers were all up and running smoothly, and none of the marketing staff had crashed their computers or forgotten their passwords all day. So Samuel played solitaire and minesweeper for a while. He IMed his gaming buddies, but none of them had time to talk. And then he did what he had always done when sitting in front of a computer with nothing to do: go looking for trouble.
He didn’t have to look far. Two floors above him in a secure room sat his employer’s secure server, the S-4. Samuel didn’t have access to it. In fact, the only person in the IT department authorized to work on S-4 was Franklin Roh, an ex-Microsoft drone who had half of Samuel’s skill, but double his salary. Not even Franklin’s little toady, Rajiv, knew what was on it.
Guessing what the mystery server held was a favorite pastime for the IT staff, particularly when Franklin and Rajiv were in the room. Speculation ran the gamut from classified government contracts to evidence of executive tax fraud, but Franklin never reacted to any of their theories, no matter how serious or outrageous. He just sat there watching them with that cool arrogance of his. Maybe Franklin Roh learned that look growing up in Korea. Maybe they taught it at Microsoft. Whatever—it bugged Samuel.
The image of Franklin Roh’s impassive Asian face gave Samuel the final little push he needed to act. He had been an accomplished hacker in college and grad school—so accomplished that he had never been caught. He didn’t vandalize systems or steal data files like some other hackers, but always left the phrase “Something wicked this way came” buried in some unobtrusive spot to unnerve whatever systems engineer later found it. Four years had passed since his last foray into forbidden cyberspace, but he had kept up on recent developments in computer security, and he was pretty sure he could beat anything that Franklin could create.
He went to work. As he expected, the server was well protected by top-of-the-line commercial security software, which had been configured with perfect competence, but no creativity. Just what he expected from a Microsoft guy.
He didn’t even bother with a direct assault on the server. Conventional firewalls were good at spotting and stopping those kinds of attacks. Careless users were much easier targets, and careless senior executives were easiest of all. He did a couple of discreet searches and found a list of the six senior executives with access to the S-4 server. Then he ran a user log and found that four of them were on the system. One, Richard Addison, had been logged in for seventeen days and fourteen hours, but his computer had been inactive for almost two days.
Samuel grinned. Time for a little stroll.
He got up and walked out of the warren of IT cubicles, grabbing a handful of random tech gear on his way out the door. He took the elevator up to the executive floor and held up his ID as he approached a security station manned by two alert, rock-jawed guards wearing body armor and toting M-16s. He licked his lips and felt tiny drops of sweat prickle his forehead. Those guys always made him nervous—the way their eyes locked onto him every time he got off the elevators and followed him across the lobby, the no-nonsense way they held their guns, the over-the-top SWAT team gear. He always had the feeling that they were just looking for an excuse to blow away a bike messenger or something. But they buzzed him through with only a perfunctory glance at his ID and the computer parts clutched in his hand. For once, he was grateful for the fact that IT staffers are invisible in the corporate world.
He walked down the oak-paneled hallways, his footsteps silenced by the rich burgundy carpet. He scanned the brass plates on the office doors for Addison’s name. There it was. He slowed down as he passed Addison’s office and glanced in. It was empty and dark, but a green spark gleamed from the power button on the computer on his desk.
Samuel’s grin returned as he continued down the hall. As he had hoped, Richard Addison had decided to ignore the memo about turning off his computer when he left for the day. Easier to just leave it on and not have to waste two minutes waiting for it to boot up in the morning, right, Dick?
Addison’s unattended computer was a wide-open door in the pricy firewall Franklin Roh had built. This was going to be easier than Samuel had thought—disappointingly easy, in fact.
Samuel went back to his cubicle and pulled up the keystroke logging program Franklin had installed. Getting into that was easy enough since he was on the IT staff. The keystroke logger had, of course, recorded all of Addison’s passwords as he typed them in. Two minutes later, Samuel had the one for the S-4 server: “Richrocks1.”
Samuel snorted and opened the utility on his computer that allowed him to take over any other machine on the system. A few seconds later, he had control of Addison’s computer. If Addison had been at his desk, he would have noticed that his monitor had woken up from power-save mode and was acting possessed. Samuel realized that someone walking past Addison’s office might look in and see the same thing. He should have turned off the monitor. His hands froze on the keyboard and for an instant he considered aborting. Then he smiled and started typing again. He felt the familiar adrenaline rush and tightening stomach muscles. He’d forgotten how much fun a little risk could be.
Addison had left open a link to the S-4 server on his computer, so Samuel just pulled it up, typed in Addison’s password, and he was in. The server held a single folder with the innocuous title “Project Docs.” Inside that were two subfolders titled “Financial” and “Operational.” The “Operational” subfolder sounded the most interesting, so he opened that one first. It held dozens of PDFs of various sizes. He glanced around to make sure nobody was watching. Then he took a deep breath and opened the first PDF. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Or maybe not. The PDF was some sort of form in an Asian language Samuel didn’t recognize. So was the second PDF, and the third.
He clicked through half a dozen more files before coming across something in English. It was a checklist titled “6/16-8/16 Winch and ROV Spare Parts,” and it cataloged various machine parts that meant nothing to Samuel. He tried a few more, but nothing juicy—no Navy memos labeled “Top Secret,” no charts marking debris fields from lost Spanish galleons, and no fake executive tax returns. He couldn’t even find a memo that would at least give him some inkling of what this project was about.
The “Financial” subfolder held nothing but a bunch of PDF invoices and a couple Excel spreadsheets. They were all in English, but it didn’t matter. The invoices were all one-line bills that said “For services rendered” followed by a number. And the spreadsheets were just lists of invoices with totals at the bottoms.
He stopped and rubbed the soul patch beard on his lower lip. The totals were each in the tens of millions of dollars, and some topped $100 million. He’d been in the company long enough to know that all marine engineering and salvage projects were expensive, but that was a lot of money.
He did a quick scan of the rest of the files, but found nothing useful. Whatever the company was getting all that money for, it wasn’t at all clear from what was on the S-4 server.
Now thoroughly frustrated, Samuel got ready to minimize the server connection again and get out of Addison’s computer. Before he did, though, he embedded “Something wicked this way came” as an anonymous tag on one of the PDFs. He also added an image to the PDF: a picture of Franklin Roh’s face Photoshopped onto the body of an enormously obese woman in a bikini.
He finished and looked at the clock in the corner of his monitor. His little adventure had only killed an hour--still two and a half hours to go until he could head out. He stretched, checked his e-mail again, and started reading a 23-page policy memo Franklin had just circulated on appropriate Internet usage while at work. After two pages, Samuel realized that reading the whole thing would just be too painful, so he skimmed it for rules prohibiting use of the ‘Net to find pictures of fat chicks who would look good with a supervisor’s head.
Five o’clock came at last. He slung his backpack over his shoulder and headed out. By the time he reached the elevator, he had already mentally left work and his mood brightened. He needed to find a new job—maybe one of his friends was putting together another start-up or something. He made a mental note to polish up his resumé over the next couple of weeks.
He was crossing the ground floor lobby and had almost reached the street when a familiar nasal voice called his name in a sharp, schoolteacher-on-the-playground tone. He turned to see Franklin Roh pushing toward him through the stream of departing workers. “Samuel!” he repeated as he got closer, his normally inscrutable face flushed and contorted. “Samuel, we need to talk!”
Looks like I’ll need to get that resumé ready faster than I thought. “Sure thing. I’ll stop by your office tomorrow morning.”
Samuel turned to go, but Franklin stepped in front of him and grabbed his arm. “No, now!”
Samuel stared at his boss. He had expected Franklin to be mad if he found his artwork, but the guy was way beyond mad. His face looked strange and wild, the bland Microsoft mask completely gone. He panted and his hand shook on Samuel’s bicep.
A cold ripple rolled over Samuel. He was tempted to yank his arm free and force his way past Franklin and out of the building. He was bigger and younger and there weren’t any security guards around, so he knew he could do it. But he didn’t. He was probably going to get fired anyway, and he really didn’t need “assaulting a supervisor” tacked onto his list of offenses. So he allowed Franklin to lead him away.
That was his second mistake.