Origin - Season One (3 page)

– – –

Mitch was standing by the counter in the main lobby when Mike arrived. He was dressed in his time-honored combination of faded jeans and a t-shirt. Mike didn’t think he’d shaved since they last met.

“Hey, Mike,” Mitch said when he saw him. “Long time, no see. You’re not going to tell me someone actually robbed the New York Fed, are you? Because that
would
be funny.”

Mike gave the guard behind the counter a nervous smile and ushered Mitch down the hall. “Jesus, Mitch. What part of discreet didn’t you understand?”

“Someone
did
rob the Fed. Holy shit.”

“Mitch, I’m not kidding.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it. I just can’t believe it.”

Dekker was waiting for them when they reached the security office.

Mitch walked straight to one of the terminals at the back of the room and pulled a laptop computer out of his bag. Every inch of it was covered in stickers depicting rock bands, cartoon characters and comic book superheroes. He took a USB memory stick from his pocket and put it in one of the slots in the terminal beneath the counter.

“You’ll want my login details, I take it?” Dekker said.

Mitch moved aside to show Dekker he was already logged on. “Lesson number one, either replace your keyboards regularly, or clean them at least once a week. Lesson number two, never use a common name as your password. That goes double for terminals you don’t use to type on very often.”

Dekker turned to Mike, blushing slightly.

“It’s okay,” Mike said. “He does that to everybody.”

Mitch turned back to the screen and started opening windows. Occasionally he would mutter something under his breath and open another, then close it again and murmur something else. This went on for about ten minutes. When he was done, Mitch pulled the USB stick out and put it back in his pocket.

“May I ask what it is you’re doing?” Dekker said.

Mitch turned and looked at him as if he’d just suggested they all get high. “Mike, you know I do my best work when I’m left alone, right?”

“I believe the chairman was quite clear about anything being removed from the system,” Dekker said. “You’ll have to clear whatever it is you’re taking with him first.”

“I can’t work like this,” Mitch said and began to stand.

Mike stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder. “Sit down, Mitch.”

“I think it’s best if I get Mr. Shaffer,” Dekker said and left the room.

“Christ, Mitch,” Mike said when he was gone. “Could you please keep that damn tongue of yours on a leash? Things are tense enough around here as it is.”

“Fine. But could you please do the same with that fuck stick? He wears Old Spice, for god’s sake!”

Dekker returned several minutes later with Shaffer and the assistant director in tow.

“Agent Banner,” Shaffer said. “I’ve been told you’re removing data from our system. Is that really necessary?”

Mike was about to answer him when Mitch said. “All I’m copying are system activity logs. I could write the information out into my notebook but I didn’t bring enough of them, nor do we have the six months it would take to do it.”

“How do we know that’s all you’re doing?” Shaffer asked.

Mitch sighed and turned to face the four of them. “That’s just it, you
don’t
know. Because you don’t really know what any of this stuff does or how it works. Unless someone who does – and in this case that would be me – is left alone long enough to figure out what happened here, you will never know. Make sense?”

Shaffer could find no response. He turned to the assistant director, who only shrugged.

“Yes. I see your point,” Shaffer said.

Mitch slapped both knees and stood up. “Good. I’m done here anyway.”

“That’s it?” Mike asked.

“Not quite.”

Mitch connected the USB stick to his laptop. They all watched as he typed something into a simple command line interface, his fingers a blur above the keyboard. When he was done he ripped a Post-it note from the pad on the counter and wrote something down.

“Can I see that note again?” Mitch said to Mike. “The one with all the numbers at the bottom.”

Shaffer nodded at Dekker, who handed it to Mitch.

“Bingo,” Mitch said.

“What is it?” Mike asked.

“I need to get in there,” Mitch said pointing at the door to the server room.

“What for?” Shaffer asked.

Mitch only looked at Mike and the assistant director, his eyes pleading.

“Let him in,” she said.

Shaffer hesitated for a moment then nodded at Dekker again. Dekker pulled a small ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door. Mitch disappeared inside.

They watched through the small pane of safety glass as he pulled back one of the glass panels covering a stack of server modules and consulted the sheet of paper. When he pulled his arm back out he was holding a small circuit board. Mitch squinted, trying to read something on the label, consulted the sheet again, and nodded to himself.

“Here’s your bank robber,” Mitch said as he stepped through the door and handed the circuit board to Mike.

“What do you mean?” asked the assistant director. “What the hell is it?”

“Memory,” Mitch said. “Standard one gigabyte ECC DIMM module. Only that one isn’t exactly standard.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I’d like to meet the guy who made it so I can get his autograph. Whoever it is, he or she is a genius.”

“Mitch, this is serious,” Mike said. “Are you saying they used that thing to hack the system?”

Mitch looked around the room and saw nothing but blank, expectant faces. “All right. Systems like this can’t be hacked from the outside. That’s just something the idiots in Hollywood came up with along with those ridiculous graphic interfaces they always use to do it. It can’t be done. Not even from the control room in Boston. And it sure as hell can’t be done over the Internet. Whoever did this either had a copy of the software or he was familiar enough with it not to need one. Either way, he knew the only way to get inside was by accessing the mainframe directly. So that’s what he did. With that.” Mitch pointed to the memory module in Mike’s hand.

“I don’t understand,” Mike said. “You’re saying he was here?”

Mitch shook his head. “No. He got a maintenance engineer to do it for him. Once this was installed it was just a case of waiting for the designated time, and off you go. The program would have done the rest. Opened the doors, wiped the camera footage, whatever they wanted.”

“How the hell can it be that simple?” Shaffer asked, looking incredulous.

“It’s not,” Mitch replied. “For one, he would have had to do it twice. You’ll find another one of these inside the server up in Boston. It’s the only way it would have worked. And there’s nothing simple about the way it was done. That memory module is a serious piece of engineering. It’s not just a case of sticking a program on it and letting it run. To go unnoticed it would have been designed to mimic the real thing in every way. If it didn’t, it would have crashed the system as soon as it was installed. Without getting too technical, the way this managed to override the system was almost certainly by manipulating the data stored in memory by the program itself. As for how they got around the error correction code, I could only guess.”

Seeing he had lost them, Mitch said, “I don’t know who’s behind this, but I can tell you there aren’t that many people capable of making something like that. Personally, I would suggest you start with the people who wrote the code in the first place.”

Shaffer turned to Dekker. “But how the hell did it get in there?”

Before Dekker could reply, Mitch asked, “When was the last time the server was upgraded?”

“Last year,” Dekker said. “In April of last year.”

Mitch nodded thoughtfully. “If they knew who supplied your hardware, it wouldn’t have been that big a deal. There’s no way of checking the authenticity or integrity of a hardware component like this unless it fails. They would have made the switch somewhere in the delivery chain between the factory in China that produced it and the courier that dropped it off here. They simply switched it somewhere along the way. The guy who installed it would have had no idea it wasn’t authentic. Pure genius.”

“And this?” Dekker said pointing at the bottom of the sheet in Mitch’s hand.

“That’s the memory address location. Without it, it might have taken me all day to find the right module.”

“You’re saying they
wanted
us to know where it was?” Mike said.

Mitch nodded. “Yep.”

Skyline Defense
New York, New York
Saturday 15 July 2006

2300 EDT

Carl Bosch stood looking down at Central Park from his office on the 78th floor. Jack Fielding, the company’s corporate head of security, picked up a bottle of Glenfarclas 1955 from the small bar in the corner of the office and held it up to the light. “I didn’t know you drank whiskey.”

“I don’t. Rosenberg sent a case of it over last week.”

“How is the old Jew, anyway?” Jack asked.

“Considering he’s almost eighty and still drinks that piss, I’d say he was fine,” Carl said.

“He’ll outlive us both, you know.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Mind if I take a bottle?” Jack said.

“Take all of it. I can’t tell that shit from motor oil.”

Jack shook his head in mock disgust and put the bottle back down. Carl walked around his desk to a large glass display case sitting against the wall beside the door. Inside was a scale model of a large research vessel with a dark green hull and white superstructure. The small print on the stern read
Pandora – Busan
. He stood looking at the model for a moment, taking in the extraordinary detail.

“How did things go with the admiral?” Jack said.

“Greer’s a son of a bitch. He asked for another twenty thousand. Can you believe that?”

“You want me to get it back?”

“And deny him his goat ranch in New Mexico, or whatever the hell it is? No, I quite like the idea of him shoveling shit for the rest of his life. Right now I’m more worried about finding someone to replace him. He may have been an asshole, but he was our asshole.”

“You have anyone in mind?”

Carl shook his head. “No. But Marius will find someone. He always does.”

Federal Reserve Bank
New York, New York
Sunday 16 July 2006

0400 EDT

Mike left with Mitch just after four in the morning. They drove to an all-night diner in Prospect Heights, not because it was the closest place to get a bite to eat, or even the best, but because aside from his small rented apartment in Manhattan, it was the only place Mike knew.

Aside from the pretty young waitress who had been using the downtime to give herself a manicure, and seemed anything but happy to see them, they had the place to themselves. They took a table in the corner. Mike ordered pancakes and Mitch asked for a cheeseburger, then changed his mind to the all-day breakfast, changed it back again, and was on the verge of another switch when the waitress put her pen back in her apron and left without another word.

“Remind me never to move here,” Mitch said when she was gone.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Mike said, “but your people skills need some fine-tuning.”

“Are you saying you don’t like me anymore, Mike?”

“Oh, forget it.”

When their food arrived Mike discovered he wasn’t that hungry after all. He watched Mitch make short work of his breakfast and managed to eat one of his own pancakes. When Mitch was done he let out a loud belch, drank the rest of his Coke, and did it again.

“Charming,” Mike said.

Mitch regarded him for a moment. “Mike, you do realize we’ll never find these guys, don’t you?”

“It’s a hard pill to swallow,” Mike said, “but I think you’re right.”

“And the Fed of all places. I mean the fucking Fed!”

“Jesus, Mitch. Keep your voice down.”

Mitch looked around and leaned closer. “The home of the US greenback, which, incidentally, just happens to be the cornerstone of the global economy. Do you have any idea what would happen if this got out? I don’t even want to think about it. Trust me, by this time next week they’ll be reading us the riot act and we’ll be signing confidentiality agreements thicker than the Bible.”

“You’re probably right,” Mike said. “What’s your point?”

“Nothing. I’m just thinking out loud. Aren’t you curious why someone would do this? I mean, the hard-core fern sniffers get up to some pretty crazy shit, but there’s no way this was some cabal of concerned citizens trying to stick it to ‘The Man.’ It’s just hard to believe they haven’t asked for anything.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Pull our troops out of Iraq, cancel Third World debt, who knows?”

“What makes you think they haven’t?” Mike said.

“Yeah, you’ve got a point there.”

“Don’t forget,” Mike said, “we don’t actually know they didn’t take anything.”

Mitch considered this. “Man, can you imagine the look on the face of the poor bastard that opens up his safety deposit box and finds it empty? I’d give anything to be there. Guy would probably drop a shit brick right there on the vault floor. He’d be like ‘Ahh, which one of you doughnut vacuums helped yourself to my fucking porn stash, man!’”

“Jesus, Mitch, grow up, will you? This is serious.”

“I know it is. I’m just saying. This whole thing is way out there in left field.” Mitch squinted and raised a pinky to the corner of his mouth in an imitation of Doctor Evil. “Give up Austin Powers or the next time, we’ll take one – billion – dollars.”

Mike was shaking his head, but smiling. “Mitch, I worry about you.”

When the waitress brought the bill Mike gave her a twenty and a ten and told her to keep the change.

“Come on,” Mike said. “I need to get some sleep. You can crash on my couch if you want to.”

“Gee whiz, Mike. I never thought you’d ask.”

They left the diner and walked back to the car.