Infinite Exposure (6 page)

All Kent had to do to justify getting rid of everyone here, and thus cement his rise straight to a presidency desk, was to
eliminate all of the on-shore staff. To do that, he needed a project the board would leap at, thus the “world view” project
became the goose laying the golden eggs in Kent's eyes. He could enlist Big Four Consulting, which had just gotten the off-shoring
contract, to put together a spreadsheet with staff hour estimates that were amazingly high for an integration project. Then
he would have them put together what the project would cost using their off-shore development staff versus the cost of on-shore
labor at their standard contracting rates. His staff would of course have to train their own replacements before being shown
the door.

Kent wouldn't even have to finish the project. He would get the credit for it, and his replacement would have to deliver it.
His replacement would have to work at least a year before he could come up with some other cost cutting measure, and it would
all pale compared to the costs Kent had cut. His walk around the company had a very special “I'm the man!” strut today.

***

Kathryn, project manager for Big Four Consulting, was ecstatic when she heard the news they had won the contract. All of the
schmoozing had paid off big time. She quickly notified the services manager and got the contract drawn up to overnight to
Kent for him to sign. Each invoice presented to the bank had to be below a certain dollar amount so Kent could approve it,
but they could invoice as often as needed.

Unlike most projects, they were actually going to do this one instead of just generate paper. They had already contracted
with a communications company to provide all of the communications cut over effort for about a quarter of what was in the
contract. A huge data center had been built in Bangalore. While a large amount of networking and communications equipment
had been installed, not a lot of computers were there. The contract with First Global Bank would get the ball rolling. All
of the mainframe and midrange computers used by that company had excess capacity. A deal would be struck to purchase the largest
models available from those computer vendors and get them installed. Once installed, they could sign another deal with another
client that used the same equipment and bill them out twice. This was going to be a massively profitable venture!

With the overnight sent out and her phone calls made, Kathryn was dreamily calculating what her commission would be from this
project. Judging from the email sent out with commission rates for project managers, she would be pulling in an extra $50K
per quarter once this project got moving. Not bad at all.

First You Build the Wheel

John arrived in Bangalore and went to one of the addresses provided him to rent a place to live. He took an apartment in a
complex built by one of the American companies there. It was very expensive, but came with air conditioning and an Internet
connection. Getting a reliable Internet connection in India was more of an obstacle than one from a first-world country could
imagine. All you had to do was look at the mud trails that passed for streets to see hundreds of cables wrapped around a single
telephone pole which had two or three other poles propping it up from either side. Power, phone, high-speed Internet, all
wrapped in a big bundle at the top of the pole. It looked like one of those massive rubber band collections you see pictures
of on the Internet.

Once his computer was set up he immediately set out masking the IP address and then retrieving his email. There were lots
of pending messages. He had been gone almost long enough for his mailbox to overflow. He started the deleting and purging
jobs and began forwarding the messages to their intended recipients. It took him the better part of the afternoon to get through
the existing email.

With the email handled, he went out for a walk past the technology companies to see which had postings out front. He saw a
very large building that had been built recently and saw the name of the company. It looked like a massive data center. He
went in and found they were looking to hire operations staff, technical support, and just about every other kind of computer
job. He dutifully filled out an application giving them his new name and address. His new identity kit came with references
and some job history, so he filled that in and handed back the application. The man behind the desk asked him to take a seat
and said someone would speak with him in a moment.

John could hear some phone calls being made and some discussions being had. About five minutes later another man came out
to greet him and bring him back to an office. He asked a short series of technical questions and John was able to answer all
but the mainframe questions. When he was asked why he moved to Bangalore, John responded that he wanted to broaden his IT
skills and couldn't do that where he had been.

The man seemed to accept this response in light of the fact he wasn't going to have to pay a buyout fee to obtain John. Competition
for low-paid workers was fierce in India. Not fierce enough that any company was actually raising wages, but fierce with lawyers
and lawsuits. The standard practice now was that you had to pay a year's wages to a company when you stole one of their employees.
You see, the upper class in India keeps everything to themselves. They could care less if the lower classes lived or died
as long as they made money at it.

The man interviewing him would also be his boss. He told John he was joining the company at a very opportune time. His company
had just won a contract to off-shore four sets of data centers into this building and another building just like it in a different
location. The additional generators and UPS equipment were being installed even as they spoke. Another building was being
built on this campus to hold programmers.

It would be a few weeks before the new machines arrived and were installed. They had managed to obtain some books and training
documentation on the mainframe and midrange systems that were arriving shortly. Their U.S. partner was flying over a small
team to handle the installation and configuration. John's job would initially be computer operator and network monitor. His
first assignment would be to read through all of the documentation they had obtained and get fluent on the systems.

John asked the man if he had some links to sites with the documentation so he could continue reading on his own. The man took
his email address and emailed him the links to the on-line training. They then finished the paperwork to get John on the payroll.
John didn't negotiate salary with the man and the man was all too happy to avoid an argument about the low pay. They had been
seeing a lot of push back about the pathetic wages they were offering. The main reason they hadn't already staffed up for
this (or any) contract was that few would take their pathetic wages and the owners were too cheap to raise the salary. John
would be making $12.00 per day. Some days would be 8 hours and some would be 14, but he would always make $12.00 per day.

Several busy, yet uneventful, weeks passed for John. He established a bank account under his new identity so he could cash
his paycheck. Every day he went into work and spent most of it reading manuals. A flurry of people went in and out of the
data center installing computers and giving John some instructions on how to start and stop them. The team from Big Four Consulting
landed with the first set of backup media to install on the machines. John had even more documentation to read with respect
to the starting, stopping and troubleshooting of the bank applications. He spent quite a bit of time on the phone in training
conference calls.

John's boss managed to hire several other people who knew less than John about computers. He was supposed to train them as
best he could. John was promoted to lead operator simply because someone had to be lead operator and he had been there the
longest. It was odd to be at a place only a few weeks and receive a promotion. Of course the promotion came only with a title,
not any money or extra benefits. It did come with one intangible benefit for someone with John's sideline. He was allowed
to read up more on the banking systems and received administrator passwords on the systems. In his reading John learned that
once the data center migrations were complete, roughly one-third of the world's money supply would pass through the systems
he controlled every day.

***

Margret sat looking at the pile of paper on her desk, the triple booked meetings on her schedule and then back to the email
from Kent which had been copied to Kathryn.

Margret,

I will be traveling to our other locations over the course of the next four weeks having meetings with the IT teams in place
there. I'm assigning you the data center migration project. You will be the liaison between Big Four Consulting and the business.

Kent

“The son of a bitch should be castrated with a rusty spoon,” Margret said aloud. He had done nothing on the project or work
related for the past three months. His entire day consisted of hobnobbing with higher-ups to get a lunch appointment set up
each day, then spending the afternoon coordinating foursomes for Saturday golf. He wouldn't even attend a meeting unless someone
above him was going to be there.

Margret pulled up Kent's calendar and looked at the last three weeks.
What an MBA,
she thought. He had studiously filled his calendar with bullshit entries leaving only 15 minutes open here and there. Margret
was all too familiar with this tactic. To seem important you had to “look” busy and make it difficult for people to have meetings
with you. This made the higher-ups think you were slaving away for the company.

What Kent was really doing was spending the day surfing the Web. Margret knew this because she had run the IP usage report
for Kent's machine. Now that the little bastard had figured out how to get on to the Internet and run a mouse, he did absolutely
nothing. He even surfed the Web from home using the company's VPN! The higher-ups never saw the IP usage report. They would
only request reports about the amount of time people spent logged in and active, not reports about what they were actively
doing. This man had turned doing nothing into an art form. Now, he dropped the project which was going to get him his promotion
onto her back along with everything else of his she was doing.

Traveling around the world to visit each existing data center and programming staff was probably an easy sell for him. Most
likely he pitched it as “doing the legwork to ensure a smooth migration.” What he was really doing was taking a company-paid
four-week vacation. He would meet with each data center manager and each development manager to discuss their needs, then
they would all be compelled to take him out for entertainment. He would be traveling to four different countries and taking
in the sights while there.

Every one of those IT teams reported to Margret, not Kent. She could have easily prepared the report on who they could eliminate
after each migration. Every one of those banks had their own IT culture. It was incredibly difficult to impose the processes
and controls used by the original bank. You could try the pitch that if their IT processes had been better they wouldn't have
been eaten, but that argument was hollow. Had upper management not been so damned greedy and gone so far out on a limb with
options and their derivatives, the banks wouldn't have gone under; everybody knew it.

On the right side of Margret's desk was a pile of paper with programming requests from all of the different branches. On the
left side was a pile of paper, mostly from the board, screaming about getting a single view of the company for ease of planning
and financial reporting. Margret knew this entire data center migration thing was a lark. It had been a lark when Kent's predecessor
started it, but the only experience the guy had was in data center consolidation and the board was looking for a quick win
at cutting costs.

Had Kent's predecessor even bothered to read her integration plan, they would have been down to one set of data centers now.
All they had to do was train each of the branch locations on how to use the existing system, then migrate the data into the
existing systems. There was only a handful of additional fields in use by the banks that had been conquered. Had they started
and used quality consultants, they would be done. All of the extra data centers would have been permanently eliminated, along
with the programming staff from the conquered banks. Cost savings would be in the millions and the board would have been able
to get a single picture of how the bank was doing. Now the programmers at each location were busily making changes that weren't
supported by the central bank systems just to try and hang onto their jobs. Almost no documentation existed for these changes.
Migration was going to be a real PITA (Pain In The Ass).

***

Three weeks had gone by since they first found out about the cell in Lutton. The Brit had been grinding his teeth for three
weeks as well. He was beginning to wonder if the Pakistani government hadn't allowed them in just to rub their noses in it.
As long as Pakistan was “cooperating” with this operation, the world powers wouldn't invade, at least on the grounds they
were aiding and abetting terrorists. The nuclear program they had going on was going to be a different story all together.
The Brit had been quietly gathering what information he could on that and feeding it back to his contacts in the UK.

What had him in an irate mood today was the sheer fruitlessness of it all. More and more information had come in. The man
in the suit kept saying that the people on the ground could only identify the message senders. Three weeks of tailing them
had turned up no meetings or other members. There was now beginning to be open speculation that this entire message series
was a ruse to see if anyone had caught onto how al-Qaeda was communicating now.

The Brit had spent far too much time in covert operations to believe al-Qaeda that smart. They had intercepted messages about
the quantity and type of explosives being assembled. There had even been a long list of prospective targets. It seemed that
they were planning to blow up multiple trains in the tunnels under London in such a way that when the last bomb went off,
one of the trains would be directly under the river. The plan appeared to be to blow up the trains where the tunnels connected
so there would be little to no chance of damming the ensuing flood.

A good many messages had gone back and forth about the size and type of explosive needed under the river. Some files had been
transferred with specifications for the tunnel itself, but there had not been one single meeting of a cell. In fact, the two
people being followed didn't seem to go anywhere but to the Internet locations and to the store. Some were willing to drop
the tail, but the Brit kept bringing up the one piece of information which made it all credible. They had been seen buying
multiple disposable cell phones. Given the quantity of explosives they needed, it could only be a matter of time before the
explosives purchase and/or storage would surface.

The Brit was taking this one personally. Everybody knew it. He never spoke of home, family or lovers, but even if you had
none of those back home, seeing an attack coming on your own soil was bound to bring forward some feelings of patriotism.
The man in the suit kept an eye on him and monitored his communications while this was going on. Even MI6 didn't know about
this operation and it was his job to keep it that way.

All it would take would be for the Brit to leak the information they currently had. Even if he told them nothing of the operation,
everyone would know there was some clandestine OP going on. Then they would want to take credit for it, which meant they would
have to get more information on it to claim being part of it. Not a good situation, but the risk was to be expected. He had
to control it. Politicians would eventually say the operation was occurring with the full support of the Pakistani government
and that would lead to large terrorist attacks here, in the man in the suit's own country. Not to be allowed. Only a handful
in Pakistani intelligence knew anything about this operation. Too many in the government were backing al-Qaeda to let any
officials know about it. They would all be executed the same afternoon officials found out.

***

Kathryn had spent her morning cracking the whip and denying overtime wages for the subcontractor actually migrating the communications
equipment. She planned to spend the afternoon talking with the first group of 20-somethings who had just gotten back from
Bangalore. They flew the first set of backup tapes over to the new data center and restored them onto the machines. Once there,
the systems managers from the data center being phased out was to spend time tweaking startup and shutdown procedures.