Infinite Exposure (31 page)

“Normally, that doesn't happen, with items from there. I will have to see if that warehouse allows for it. We have what is
called a 'transfer ship' capability. We will pick and pack an order leaving it waiting on the dock for an arrival from another
warehouse before sending the truck out. I assume you want this stuff loaded in the front for when it crosses the border?”

“You would assume correct.”

“If you talk to them again, tell them to flag their orders as 'ship complete' when they place them. I will tell my people
to do the same. It is the only way the 'transfer ship' process will kick in. By default we do a split shipment, but that is
probably more than you care to know about our logistics system.”

“It is enough for me to know that you know,” grinned Nikolaus.

“I will get on this now and let you know when they have been setup,” Abel said, getting up.

“I'm surprised you didn't ask what this was all about.”

“I don't care. Right now my only concern is which distributor we are going to honk off by giving up some of their territory
to this distributor. One of their locations is in the middle of a territory held by one of our bigger distributors. I have
to get legal involved to see if we have any wiggle room in the contract.”

“We give exclusive territories for generics?”

“Generally no, but when you handle the primary product line and have an exclusive territory it is generally written into the
contract you get the same territory for the generics. When it comes time to make a case, I'm going to have to point them at
you.”

“Understood. I will simply tell legal that this distributor is participating in one of our black ops projects and they asked
to get access to the generics in order to fill out the truck with some business that customs wouldn't question.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Abel.

“It had better be good because it is the truth,” responded Nikolaus.

***

Kathryn and Marget were in the conference room till almost noon on the Monday morning after the disastrous data center migration
attempt. Finally, once all of the startup files had been verified and the new security file installed, the second Indian data
center came on-line running the application. The machine load balancing operation began and the intra-day audit job was scheduled
for about 1 PM. The communications load balancer recognized it, had another machine to route requests to, and started splitting
them off. The machine in India, which had been shouldering the entire load, had its utilization drop below 90% and response
times began to improve.

Margret told Pete to power things down in the data center and come back after the girls took him out for a sit-down lunch.
She told him to be sure and pick a nice place as Big Four Consulting was buying.

The legal team from Big Four had arrived about an hour ago and been holed up in Carol's cubical. The one brief comment Margret
heard from Carol was that these were contract lawyers and not skilled in giving depositions, they may have been deposed a
few times themselves, but they had never conducted a deposition.

At any rate it was in the lawyer's hands now. The skirt who had been helping was told she could go back to her desk. Margret
called Carol from the conference room to say it was all hers now. Kathryn told the other two to wait here and answer some
questions. If they had half a brain she expected them to try and pin everything on the one who called in sick this morning.
That wouldn't change anything. All three of them were supposed to be there on Saturday morning and contact Kathryn if there
were any problems.

Once they were out of the conference room Kathryn asked Margret, “Can I use the phone in your office with the door closed?
I need to speak with someone in HR about the process and to let them know the lawyers will be in with them shortly.”

“Certainly,” replied Margret. “I don't know if the two of them will be enough though. It depends on what Carol comes up with
for our FDIC notification letter. They may wish to come here and have a chat with us. I don't know how she is going to gloss
over the fact our entire data center staff quit in protest.”

“The one and only question I have for them is did they even show up on Sunday morning? The only explanation that makes any
sense at all is they conned the one guy into handling it who called in sick today. I don't know if he called in sick on Sunday
as well, but that would make it all fit together. I assigned all three of them, but if they thought only one needed to be
there and the one who was supposed to be there bailed on them, it would explain things. Nobody called because nobody was there,”
concluded Kathryn.

Margret went to lunch and came back to see security escorting the two gentlemen out of the building. She saw Kathryn and went
over to her. “We told them we would ship their personal belongings to them from our office. I took their badges so they cannot
get in our building. Our lawyers wanted them escorted out of your building to reduce our liability.”

“And what of the third?” inquired Margret.

“I can't fire him. He did called in sick late Saturday afternoon. He called the office and both of their cell phones. They
didn't take his call, they admitted to that. They partied until 4 AM and slept through it. The third guy had a legitimate
excuse. He just called into work from the hospital still groggy. On Saturday night he was taken into the hospital with what
turned out to be an appendicitis. They did surgery early Sunday morning once they figured out what was wrong with him. His
appendix had actually burst so he will be in the hospital another three days.”

“Wow,” responded Margret. “He managed to make three phone calls with a burst appendix?”

“The wonder of youthful endurance,” said Kathryn. “It gets even better though. He didn't have my cell phone number on him
because it was in the folder at home and he was on his way to the hospital in a friend's car. The voicemail he left was for
me. Our voicemail system is supposed to either ring or text our cell phones when we get a new voice message. I didn't get
a message because it was never sent. The voicemail system was being upgraded over the weekend.”

“Carol has all of this?”

“Most of it, yes. So do our lawyers. These guys didn't even bother to try calling in sick. I guess they won't be such good
pals with the guy who is keeping his job. HR is putting it in their jacket that they were fired for cause. I believe Carol
is going to state that you were changing out machines over the weekend, a problem was encountered, but the two people in charge
of monitoring and notifying didn't bother to show up for work. Their employer has since terminated them and the new machine
was in place in a timely manner while the second data center shouldered the burden. We are going to have to adjust the capacity
of the machine at that data center so if this were to happen again it won't peg at 98% utilization.”

“Monday morning is the worst possible time for this,” volunteered Margret. “Since the bank systems are traditionally down
on Sunday, the ATM withdrawals and deposits get queued up at the service bureau all day. They hit us as soon as the systems
come back up, usually some time Sunday evening.”

“You allow withdrawals without your systems being up?” asked Kathryn.

“On Sunday, it doesn't matter what limit you set for your account, you can only get up to $200. A few have exploited the policy,
but not that many. We are not usually down that long on Sunday and usually it is one data center at a time so it is a very
narrow window for them to hit, not always at the same time of day.”

“Oh.”

“We also have a job which usually runs before shutdown suspending the cards of anyone who is overdrawn or has less than $200
in their account, so it usually isn't a problem.”

Margret went on to find out from Carol if she had all she needed.

“Yes,” responded Carol. “I have filed the report with the FDIC telling them we were changing out machines and had a problem
with a security file that took us a while to track down.”

“So you told them nothing about the machine being off-shored?”

“Didn't put it in the report, no. Will wait and see if they inquire further. We were up within the allotted time so I don't
think there will be any further inquiry.”

“Good.”

A few hours later Kent was sitting in his office when the phone rang. He feared the worst. He was surprised when the call
was from an analyst from Langston Group looking to interview him over the phone. Kent knew this was part of the arrangement.
He had a cheat sheet of things to say prepared by Kathryn. He dug it out and began responding to the questions. Odd how the
cheat sheet matched the order of the questions almost exactly. When the interview was complete Kent asked, “I take it Pytho
Corporation is about to announce their software product?”

“They announced this morning. This interview will appear in our newsletter going out next week.”

***

Vladimir was sitting in his office going through the faxes he had received from Lenny. He sent most of them on to Dimitri
and told Dimitri to contact Lenny directly. They should be able to obtain an apartment easily enough. He knew Dimitri's people
owned several buildings. The visa was a matter of greasing the correct set of palms to expedite the process.

Once that matter was dealt with, Vladimir turned to the email messages copied from the al-Qaeda hub accounts. He knew the
team was focusing mainly on the messages coming in. They were trying to locate more cells to take down and possibly another
email hub. Vladimir had been a covert geek long enough to know the outbound messages were going to hold the most useful information.

He had a particular interest in the trainer. Perhaps it was brought on by some geek bravado due to how long it took Nikolaus
to actually get a simple Trojan installed on the operator's machine. Indeed, if the trainer hadn't been stupid enough to allow
a trusted connection and account for the person he was training, Nikolaus might never have gotten in. Whoever it was, they
had everything locked. They had even plugged the tens of thousands of security holes known to exist in Microsoft operating
systems and products they were running. Nickolaus had to give whomever it was credit, they had managed to do what even the
Evil Red Empire couldn't do.

Another thing which had piqued Vladimir's interest in the trainer was the analysis Hans had just sent him. Apparently the
Brit thought the trainer might be on his way up in the organization. If that was true, then they couldn't allow anything to
happen to the trainer or let him get suspicious. The odds were very high any new inductee into the inner circle of al-Qaeda
would be granted a face-to-face pow-wow with bin Laden himself. All they needed to do was plant some tracking devices on the
guy: His computer, a bag he normally carries, possibly even the heel of a shoe he wears. People had been chasing rumors in
the mist trying to find that piece of shit called bin Laden, and this email operator could serve as a homing beacon for the
missiles.

Vladimir then had a horrible thought. He had to write it down and email Hans.

Hans,

We need to plant some passive reflective tracking devices on the trainer. His computer, a bag he carries, etc. Your team should
be able to gain entry easy enough.

It is most important that if he is elevated in the organization we do not inform the higher ups. Be sure the Brit knows. Don't
even tell the man in the suit. He will be obligated to tell Pakistani intelligence and they will either warn bin Laden or
run to the Americans who will want to capture him alive to stand trial. Either way the puddle of shit will get away once again.

If he is elevated, let this guy be a homing beacon. I will take care of getting missiles sent to dispose of him.

Vladimir

With that little bit of venting taken care of, Vladimir returned to skimming through the outbound messages from the trainer.
Handling his email was easy. He had somehow transferred nearly all of the cells he was handling to his two trainees. Vladimir
wished he had been trapping this person's outbound emails before they had managed to complete the transfer. Nobody on this
team knew how the cells in the field were informed of a new email hub transfer. They were too busy trying to find cells to
round up and a new email hub.

They weren't looking for the tool that would give them all of the hubs. Vladimir was looking for the Rosetta Stone. He suspected
that some message was sent with a special phrase embedded in it telling the receiver to send to a new email address. Vladimir
needed that phrase. He knew of one team in America that was storing every suspected terrorist email in a huge disk farm. The
incoming system which filtered spam had a 500TB disk farm. The back-end system had four disk farms of 1,000TB each. The cooling
and power consumption must be astronomical. Vladimir didn't currently have a contact with that covert team, but he could get
one. He knew the team existed and he knew both Hans and the Brit had contacts in American covert Ops. The trick was in finding
the phrase.

Finally Vladimir could take this line of thought no more. He picked up a disposable cell phone and made an international call
to Hans.

“Yes,” answered Hans, not wanting to give anything away.

“It's Vlad, Hans.”

“Just reading your email. Are you serious about this?”

“Deadly, but that isn't what I called about.”

“What has you in a tither?”

“Do we know if this trainer was handling cell sites in America before he transferred things to the others?”

“We are certain of it.”

“What are the possibilities of you bagging Nedim for a session of questioning again?”

“Me, personally, damned low. The suit is looking for reasons to stay in Pakistan, so he might be up for it. Why?”

“You guys are letting the Rosetta Stone slip through your fingers. There is some message sent out to cells in the field which
tells them to use a certain hub email account. All we have to do is identify what that phrase is and we can shut these two
trainees down.”