Page 98 of Talk to Me
The home was already compromised. In no world had I ever thought I could return there.
“Lunch in fifteen,” Locke said from somewhere behind me. “It smells good, whatever it is.”
“It’s just a roast,” Remington said. “I was bored with burgers. You like making them too much.”
“Burgers are easy and they are quick. Also no one cares if you eat them cold.” Locke shrugged. “Liking fine cuisine and cooking it are two different things.”
“Clearly,” Remington retorted, his tone dry. “However, I draw the line at the persistent servings of ground beef. Or haven’t you noticed that the lovely Patch has not been finishing her burgers the past two days…”
“I noticed,” Locke grumbled. “I just thought maybe we were feeding her too much.”
“You two are adorable,” I said without looking away from the screen. “I get that you want to engage me in the conversation, but I didn’t finish the burger because I was simply full. I’d also had sandwiches about an hour before you made the burgers last night so I wasn’t hungry.”
A fresh set of numbers popped up on the screen. The first wave of bots returned. Quarantine programs immediately engaged. Someone had tried to attach a worm to one of the bots.
How sad for them.
I nuked that one immediately and kept it compartmentalized.
“If you want something different…” Locke began but I shook my head.
“Guys, this is going to go faster if we don’t need to keep tallying the calorie log. I haven’t eaten this well in a long time. I’m used to just cooking for one and?—”
Bingo. I forgot about the conversation as the details began to unfold about MD Outfitters. They’d been on my radar while I’d worked in the department. Military contractors, freelance and available to the highest bidder. They weren’t licensed to work within the U.S. Didn’t mean they weren’t based here.
“Do you ever feel like one minute she’s paying attention and the next we’re utterly superfluous?” Locke didn’t sound insulted.
“Yes,” Remington’s crisp reply also didn’t invite further conversation. “Then, she is doing her job and we should let her do it.”
I shuttered the conversation fully. They could talk, I didn’t need to focus on that. I needed to pay attention to what was happening on the screen.
The decryption programs were going to work. The keyword program flagged page after page for me to review and cross-reference. I continued to rock the pen as I read, only putting it down to type in new commands. Some files had to be destroyed.
A new security system, kind of like watermarking, had infected the files that had been skimmed. Not a virus, but also not a worm. It simply wanted to report back the IP address for the latest read.
Subtle, delicate work. Respect to the coder, because it was ingenious. It wouldn’t register on most virus scanners. Technically, it wasn’t even a trojan program. It was just a little executable that sent out a ping. One, tiny little ping so that it could log where the file had been opened.
Quarantined as the files were the secondary partition, the ping had nowhere it could go, but it kept trying to send it. I set the pen aside as I checked the auto logger to see where it was sending the ping to…
Sophisticated. It tried a series of addresses. When it failed to reach any of them, it started over. Sophisticated and persistent. I’d have to nuke all of it before I could open the drive again.
I created a dummy file and masked it as a server to receive the ping the file sent out and then logged the information it provided. Oh, that was clever. Now that it had logged the IP, or thought it had, it tried to add a couple of lines to the primary OS that would send another ping with updates the next time the system booted.
Insidious little program. Big brother was watching you, always watching.
It took me a few hours to find the thread of the logger, and pull it apart. The code was—elegant. It was only a handful of lines, but it took every advantage of the fact that whoever “stole” the file would have to encrypt then decrypt. So the decryption was precisely what activated those handful of lines.
Without the quarantine, there was every chance it would succeed in sending the ping without a trace. Well, the trace would have been there but only if you were looking for it. I was going to have to add another layer to the programs I ran specifically for code like this.
Instead of a poison pill it was a tainted cookie. That made me like it even less, even if it was clever.
I’d like to stab the coder in their clever little eye with my pen.
Piece by piece, I pulled out the useful data and began to build a timeline of sorts. The events I added were not defined beyond mission names unless they were target oriented. Combing through the other packets netted some details I could use to flesh out the framework.
The task took every ounce of my focus. Because of the little tags on the data, I had to go through each piece of it individually, extracting the core of what I needed before sending the actual file to be destroyed.
Tedious work. Absolutely tedious, but this was exactly why I’d built these programs, so I could locate and retrieve any file that might be related to my capture and subsequent incarceration. It also let me drill down on them to determine if the link was genuine or not.