Infinite Exposure (4 page)

Once he arrived at home, he found that his new “friends” had actually bothered to pick up some food and drink. They ate a
meal, saying little, then told Nedim to check his email before he went to bed. “I usually go to morning prayer now,” replied
Nedim. “Do you want us to join you at the mosque?” came their response. In a way he did. He wanted someone who knew him to
speak with him after prayer, or the cleric himself. Word would spread quickly that Nedim had new friends. His al-Qaeda contacts
would disappear. Then he thought better of it. Yes, his contacts would disappear, but not before one final contact was made.
Had he been taken to prison, he would be honored as a near martyr, but with these men living here, he would be branded a traitor
and assassinated at the first opportunity.

He resigned himself to checking his email. This really was a no-win situation for him. Eventually his cleric would miss him
at the private Quran discussions. Someone would stop by, and the truth would come out. Logic told him he had about a week
to sort this out before he would die.

This email session went a little faster than the last. There were only a handful of emails to pull down, decode, and forward.
His “friends” asked the same questions they had asked that morning, but mostly just to confirm what they had already written
down. The one file he had to pull down for them contained fewer photos, but lots of plans and spreadsheets containing traffic
counts. The traffic counts were spread over several weeks and they listed special events going on in the far right columns.
Dates and descriptions of future events that could affect traffic flows were listed at the bottom.

Of course there were several files of blueprints, and one file containing Web links. Special events and traffic flows are
always important when you are targeting a bridge. Especially when the bridge had defied attack before. This bridge was the
Golden Gate Bridge. All of the files were copied onto a CD produced by his “friends.”

The final message was a new baseline file. Nedim showed them how to decode the text to know who was supposed to receive it.
Then came the question they weren't supposed to ask. “How do you chose the decoys?”

“Some will be email addresses from a spam list I acquired, others will be addresses he has communicated with before,” he responded.
There were only five recipients for this base image, so Nedim chose seven decoys to round it out at a dozen.

“Do the decoys know they are decoys?” asked his cousin.

“Not the ones from the spam list,” replied Nedim.

“But the others?”

“Every person receiving this is a good Muslim, they know the Holy Quran.”

Each base image came with a passage from the Quran that would seem to apply to it when read by the casual reader. The spam
list Nedim had obtained was a list of members from various Islamic and Muslim organizations around the world. Some had ties
to al-Qaeda, and some did not. They all had, at one time or another, subscribed to a “word of the day” or “prayer of the day”
sort of service like many of the infidels did. They would assume this was something sent out by the service and ponder it.

What the men hadn't noticed, because they were too busy writing notes, was that Nedim changed a word in the phrase when sending
to decoys. Any member receiving the image and finding a word out of place in the passage would simply ignore it. The rest
would save the image as a new base image. Any communication they needed to send to this leader would use this new image. Any
new instructions coming to them would use this new base image.

One thing the men did write down was the file name containing email addresses Nedim used for decoys. When they reported next
time they would be able to speed up progress immensely on this investigation.

Finally, after a very long day, Nedim went to bed.
One more sunrise, and another day closer to death,
he thought.

***

Back at headquarters Nedim's “cousin” was enthusiastically briefing the rest of the team on what they had learned. He turned
over the file CD containing the information on the Golden Gate Bridge and informed them of the file name Nedim used to pull
some of his decoy names from.

In all honesty, he thought this would speed up the investigation. Then he heard the man in the suit say, “This is exactly
what I was hoping to avoid. Not only do they hide among the population, now they implicate every Muslim devout enough to have
a daily prayer emailed to them.”

“They are determined to turn this into a war against all Muslims,” said Hans. They believe that once this gets spun into a
war against all Muslims, all Muslims will rally to their cause rather than die at the hands of the infidels.

“But we know he bought this list,” responded Nedim's “cousin.”

“We also don't know who on that list joined simply to hide in the forest,” replied the man in the suit. “The list itself is
of no use to us. We will have to look at each image to find out what it contains and build our tree from there.”

Along one wall of the office was now a large marker board. They used a wet erase board rather than the more common dry erase
board so information couldn't accidentally be erased. In the center of it was Nedim. Above him was the beginning of an inverted
hierarchy chart and below him the more common image of a regular hierarchy chart. Only a couple of other names had been filled
in. These were the names of people arrested whose computer email traced back to Nedim. Each of their email accounts had the
forwarding option set and was now forwarding email to people on the team. Nobody wanted al-Qaeda to find out an operative
had been compromised by a full mailbox bounce.

When it came to the members of the team based locally, only Hans and the man in the suit knew where the other people listed
on that board were. They were the first occupants of the first camp built by Hans' party members. Nothing of interest had
been learned by their interrogation thus far, but it was early. Hans knew the interrogators held out hope of squeezing more
from them by the simple fact nobody in Hans' party had told him the second camp had been put into use.

***

Kent Braxton was sitting in his big leather desk chair gazing out his 14th floor office window. Kent was only 25, held a Harvard
MBA, and came from old money. To everyone who worked for him, this meant Kent was nothing more than a nice suit smiling and
schmoozing away money that could be better spent on real employees. Kent knew what they thought of him and didn't care. He
was getting a golden parachute from this firm even if they fired him on his first day. Of course he wasn't going to get fired
because his people get paid to leave.

Stored on a file in his BlackBerry was a cheat sheet he had been using since enrolling in business school. That cheat sheet
contained all of the knee-jerk things an MBA was supposed to say whenever the topic turned to cutting costs. All new MBA hires
were always asked to cut costs, so he needed all of the schmoozing phrases at his fingertips. In particular, he needed the
phrases relevant to IT. Like all MBAs, Kent had taken the one-day course on how to construct a contact manager using Microsoft
Access, and now held a certificate in IT project management. Every MBA had to do at least one IT project before being given
a vice president title, and Kent was planning on sailing through his. The less time he spent with these money-grubbing geeks
the better. They weren't MBAs, so why should they get paid so much.

First Global Bank, Inc. came into being as a result of the Asian financial crisis. A good many investment firms and banks
had gotten too greedy playing options and derivatives nobody could understand. Corporate carcasses quickly littered the landscape
once the bubble burst. A few firms hadn't dipped quite so heavily into the never-ending ocean of greed surrounding the financial
community. It's not that they did well, just that they had more cash on hand when a competitor's stock prices plunged below
$5.00/share, and then well below a dollar per share. They were able to snatch up assets at fire-sale prices when the companies
went under, and those close to avoiding going under were victims of hostile takeover tactics. Kent's brother had gotten him
this job, but he had to impress the gray hairs with his ability to cut IT costs.

The simple truth is that Kent could barely find the power switch on his company-issued notebook. He couldn't understand why
there were any other computer platforms or software packages because his only exposure to computers had been surfing the Web
and sending email. He had no idea how the VPN (Virtual Private Network) worked when he connected in from home, nor did he
understand why the company needed it. In short, most 3-year-olds knew more about IT than Kent. On the bright side, not having
a clue about what was and wasn't needed allowed him to cut everything without any emotion.

Nine different corporations had been consumed in one way or another during the creation of First Global Bank. Every one of
them had a completely different computer system handling all of their transactions. The only bright spot of the entire ordeal
was that the automatic teller machines all went through third-party service firms which had actually created communications
standards. No matter what ATM you were at in the world, you could check your balance and withdraw cash.

Kent's predecessor had actually known something about IT. Kent's predecessor wasn't an MBA, so the new board had to replace
him. This became especially apparent to them when IT costs tripled during the first year of all the mergers. Not one single
member of the board knew anything about IT, they just wanted it to work and be free. Such is the lot in life for those who
understand IT. Someone who doesn't understand a thing you do will be the first one to fire you to cover their ass.

There was a good reason IT costs had tripled during that first year. The board wanted to be able to see all information from
all units. Every unit had a different computer system with a different set of applications located at different places throughout
the world. In short, the lemmings walked off a cliff with their eyes firmly fixed on the other side of the gorge.

One thing the board of directors had failed to consider is that every data center is required to have one backup center. When
you handle the clearing for stock exchanges, and just about every other financial transaction, you aren't allowed to tell
the customer “please try again later” like you can some Internet user. You cannot get large amounts of FDIC coverage without
either a fully hardened data center or multiple data centers split across different power grids in different regions of the
country. The short description, in terms of the common man, is “you have to be able to completely lose one data center and
still handle all of your daily transactions, or you have to build a data center which can survive a nuclear strike.” Given
the last option is pretty expensive, most financial firms opted for multiple data centers.

When you greedily consume nine other financial institutions, you end up with nine other sets of data centers, some of which
are on the same physical block with each other. Your first order of business, not only to eventually “cut costs,” but simply
to maintain sanity, is to start consolidating data centers. Sounds simple when you say it out loud, but it requires a lot
of outside contractors and a lot of rented/newly purchased equipment ... assuming you don't have to build a shiny new location
with enough room to hold everything from all of the other locations. It was this set of realities which caused a tripling
of the IT budget under Kent's predecessor.

In a year's time, Kent's predecessor went from 10 sets of data centers to 4 sets. He had cut the number of data center staff
needed by a third. He had even put together the plans for consolidating the last 3 sets into the primary set of data centers.
Given everything else his predecessor had successfully completed, Kent assumed the plan was a good one. There was no indication
if the plan was actually complete though, and given Kent's IT skill level, he had no way to know.

The cost savings which would be realized this year from his predecessor's work allowed Kent to bring in Big Four Consulting
to put together a beautiful looking PowerPoint presentation on how they recommended completing the consolidation and still
have a lower budget than his predecessor. Kent assumed they would just verify his predecessor's plan and he would have to
find price whores to do the work.

Assumptions can kill you. Someone should have told Kent that.

A Cold Calculation of Winter

Nedim's alarm went off around lunchtime. The rest of the week he was allowed to work a late afternoon shift that ran into
the evening. He had just enough time to clean up and head for afternoon prayer. He didn't even mind when his “friend from
university” tagged along. At least the man stayed behind him and didn't pray right beside him. After prayers he went with
the cleric and a group of others for his private discussions on the Quran. He could sense the obvious displeasure coming from
the back of the mosque and didn't care. When you have already decided you are dead, you no longer care who will be the one
to kill you.

Promptly at 3:00 he excused himself to go to work. Ramesh (the name given his “friend from university”) was waiting for him
outside of the mosque. When they were out of earshot of others, he began berating him.

“Do you want I should kill you now?”

“It does not matter. If you do it now it will save me the trouble of waiting for it to come.”

“Your only chance at life is to cooperate with us fully.”

“I have,” Nedim lied.

“And you call disappearing with a cleric for hours cooperating?”

“If you wish to join the discussion, say something to the cleric that impresses him and he may invite you. I cannot invite
you directly without giving up all of your background and I have no idea what that is. I participate in those discussions
at least three days per week.”

“If I start missing them I know two things for certain. The first is that the email I'm relaying will stop. The second is
that very soon after I will be dead. You might say I know three things. The third is that if I manage to survive doing this
until I'm no longer useful, you or one of your team will kill me. Do you really think threatening my life is any way to motivate
me?”

For a brief, but not too brief, moment, Ramesh thought about offing him right there on the street in front of everyone. The
only thing that stopped him was thinking about how he would explain it to the man in the suit. On short notice he could not
come up with a story that was convincing in his own mind. The cleric visit by itself wouldn't cover it. Ramesh also knew there
was no way he would be the one sitting in Holy Quran discussions with a cleric.

Nedim stopped at home, packed a lunch, then walked to work. This time Umar accompanied him, but they did not speak. When he
arrived at work there was a fax for him waiting at his desk.

I have escalated your issue to the highest authority.

God is Great.

John had understood his message and informed others above him. If there was any cross communications between cells, those
Nedim worked with would know in a matter of days. In a week or so, the bulk of his email would stop. Only those under deep
cover who do not communicate until necessary would send him anything. Perhaps before then he will have outlived his usefulness.
Nedim threw the fax in the shred bin. A Funny thing about working for an off-shore consulting company, everything you needed
to destroy evidence was right here in the office.

***

John knew he should not have sent the fax to Nedim, but they had been intertwined in this for some time. He needed to pass
along the information to the leaders he knew about so they could arrange for his relocation. Nedim was a good Muslim, but
not a great Muslim. If he was squeezed, he would give up John. As long as John had an Internet connection he could obscure
the IP address and continue to function without being located, he just had to move before he was located now since Nedim knew
where he worked and the infidels probably had a couple of his work emails. Those fax numbers went to physical addresses. He
had to be a long way from here by tomorrow.

A new passport and identity were being delivered to him within the hour. He would move to another tech center and hide among
the population. This time he would be living in Bangalore. Technical support centers were so desperate there he didn't have
to fill out an application. Simply speak clear enough English during the interview and answer two out of five technical questions
correctly. If you were willing to start off with a pathetic salary, you walked out of the interview and started your shift.
Most people hated working at the call centers, but not John. It provided him with income and didn't cloud his mind when he
left. His real occupation was communications relay center for al-Qaeda.

His computer at home had to be left on to retrieve all email to an encrypted folder. He received more than 500 emails per
day. He never bothered to decode them, he simply didn't have the time. There were now 14 cells for whom he handled communications.
Most ISPs in this country would bounce your email after you received 200 messages. John couldn't risk that. Many of the soldiers
in the field used libraries and colleges to send email to him. He couldn't risk a bounced email landing in an administrators
folder. It might actually be looked at and figured out.

John kept up on all of the latest technology trends. He read the industry trade magazines during every free moment. He didn't
read as much to satisfy a thirst for knowledge as to find out anything new that was mentioned about surveillance and viruses.
He ran every kind of virus scanner imaginable. The last thing he wanted was some Trojan horse piggy backing on an email message
that would give him up to the authorities.

This may be India, but he would not have a trial here. At best he would get a brief pass in front of news cameras with officials
denouncing him as a terrorist, then he would be executed. The “best” situation didn't happen much anymore. John knew several
of his co-workers were members of local cells. They had no idea he was the communication method. One day some of them simply
quit showing up to work; by late afternoon replacements sat at their desks. His bosses said nothing about it. Had they left
for other jobs there would have been much hollering by one of his bosses and shouts about suing a competitor. The silence
was more telling than a confession.

Infidels have a saying “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” He had heard some of them say this while helping them with computer
problems. For John, this wasn't a saying, but a mantra for survival. He had a scheduled job which deleted all of his sent
items twice per day. It also emptied his email wastebasket once that was done. Finally it kicked off some privacy software
which would perform a DOD-secure erase of all empty space on his hard drive. He had to thank the U.S. Department of Defense
for publishing a standard of erasing data so securely it could never be recovered. John knew all too well that just because
a file was deleted didn't mean it was gone. He had helped many customers recover deleted files.

While waiting for his new identity to arrive he was cleaning his home like it hadn't been cleaned before. Wearing gloves and
a hair net, he was scrubbing and wiping every surface. He even pulled the hair traps out of the drains to remove any and all
evidence of his presence. He took special care to scrub the underside of the toilet lid and seat. He had read about police
checking there for fingerprints.

Finally his new identity arrived. An old friend of his had brought it. They both knew they would probably never meet again.
John picked up his two suitcases, computer briefcase and bag of trash from cleaning, then left. His friend took the key to
the place as they said good bye. The bag of trash did not leave his possession until he was three streets over. He bought
a ticket, and waited for a bus. While he waited, he read through his new identity. It came complete with references from a
consulting company in the very city he had worked and some walking around money.
So, they did what we said and never told us,
he thought.

***

Nedim returned home from work exhausted. It was the wee hours of the morning and all he wanted to do was sleep. Of course,
his “friends” were waiting for him and wanted him to check his email before turning in. “Why don't you do it, I've shown you
how?” he asked them.

“We cannot risk a mistake at this point,” his cousin replied.

Sighing, he sat down in the chair and logged into his email. Seven messages were waiting with two coming from the same user.
His friends noted this and wrote the user down. As Nedim went through the forwarding process they noticed that one of the
forwarded messages went to this same address. They had him translate all three messages. One message referred to a plan to
blow up a tunnel under a river. Another message made reference to blowing up multiple trains at the same time. The response
going back was a request for more information about what was required. No hint about a location was in the messages.

Nedim was now allowed to eat, pray, and go to bed. Ramesh gathered up his notes to file a report with headquarters in a few
hours. Umar settled down on a sleeping bag. In a few hours, Nedim would need to be awake again and Umar would need to be his
shadow. Ramesh informed Umar about the lectures with the cleric Nedim was attending and told him he would be required to infiltrate
the circle to hear what they were discussing. Umar was not pleased.

***

Kent was sitting in a conference room with his Big Four Consulting firm team. It was the largest conference room the bank
had in this building, and was almost too small. His assistant Margret, was the only other bank employee in the room, all of
the rest came with the consulting firm. Because Kent knew nothing about IT, he had little ability to defend himself from the
team surge that happened three days into the project. Other than the team leader, they were all fresh college graduates, which
the team leader claimed were all required. All Kent knew was that he was paying $120/hour for each of them, there were only
seven slides in the PowerPoint presentation, but they all billed him for 40 hours per week. A quick math calculation informed
Kent that about half of the consulting budget he had available went out the door last week.

All of the girls working on the project wore short skirts with stockings and heels. They all wore some kind of top that looked
very business and professional when you looked at them standing, but when sitting down they could turn/twist/bend to show
all they had to offer. There was a lot of turning and twisting keeping the conversation going during the entire seven slides
of the presentation. They managed to consume exactly 40 minutes before opening it up for questions.

Kent had asked them to review his predecessor's plan and see if the final round of data center consolidation was well mapped
out. He expected a yes or no answer. If no, he expected to get a few extra pages added to the plan to round it out. What he
got was neither of those.

Big Four's entire presentation had been a bunch of quotes from the Langston Group about the cost savings of off-shoring all
IT operations. There had been spreadsheets computed with some of Kent's own numbers showing the dramatic year-over-year cost
savings once all of the data centers had been moved to India. The grand finale of this presentation included a spreadsheet
showing how the entire cost of the move would be recovered by the sale of the existing data center locations and all of the
equipment inside of them.

Kent sat shell shocked for a while. He didn't know anything about IT, but he knew how to read spreadsheets and the spreadsheet
they presented showed him an IT operating budget which was less than one third of his current budget. It wasn't until the
team leader offered to give this same presentation to the board with Kent and let him take credit for it that the gleam appeared
in his eye. He had just bought the white elephant, and everyone in the room could see it.

Even the tiniest bit of research would have told Kent this wasn't a consultant's analysis, but a sales pitch. Kent's assistant
sat there shell shocked after they all walked out of the room. She thought they should all have been summarily fired half
way through the presentation. The fact they were allowed to complete the entire presentation, and bill for it, left her feeling
numb.

Margret actually had a degree in IT. The only reason she was allowed to keep her job when Kent came in was that she had also
minored in business. Since he started at the bank, Kent had been after her to go back to school and complete her MBA so she
could move up in the company. He had no clue that she didn't want to climb any higher. Had the market been a little better
for consultants, she would already be an independent consultant. A lot of companies were consolidating data centers now, and
the experience she had from the prior consolidation was a license to print money when the next big project came up.

What Kent didn't know, the board was too lazy to investigate. Big Four Consulting had an off-shore division and Kent was being
told to have it as the bank's new data centers. A great big data center had been built and a lot of communication hardware
had been installed and was just waiting for a client to install computers. Another company the Big Four owned half of was
the Indian version of the Iron Mountain backup storage company. It was all a neat little package.

Anyone with a degree in IT and having more than a handful of years in the field knew that Langston Group was more a marketing
company than an independent analyst. They were paid to promote a new trend every year or so. Each new trend had some big marketing
war chest behind it and just happened to be the very thing the Big Four Consulting companies were experts in now.

Off-shoring was currently promoted as a Utopia for slashing labor costs. Management viewed all workers as Grade 8 bolts. If
you didn't have an MBA, you were a Grade 8 bolt. You could be replaced by a Grade 8 bolt from a cheaper supplier with absolutely
no negative effect on business. Thousands of workers with actual skill had been replaced by recent grads working off-shore
for less than welfare payments amount to in this country. Hundreds of companies were now engaged in creative accounting, hiding
failed projects on their books so they could still tell investors just how much money off-shoring was saving them. Hell, the
bank had refused to extend lines of credit to three just last week. Yet, here they were, about to do the same thing themselves.