Storm Killer (9 page)

Lt. Randall James outranked her, but with the orders written by the Storm Killer Director, Kim assumed full command authority. Lt. James was not happy about this, but he did his duty.

Lt. James had experience and background with electronic surveillance. He’d been an operative from one of the numerous intelligence agencies that had sprung up in the years following the earliest terrorists attacks in the United States. His special area of expertise was electronic surveillance. He had perfected this skill spying upon the various radical organizations in the western United States.

He’d left the intelligence organization after what most people called the ‘Waco II incident of ’15 occurred. He’d never been able to shake the feeling of guilt in his role in the death of all of those people.

Even though his role had been minor and he had not raised a weapon against them, he was haunted by the cold, calculated way his field commander had ordered the death of over sixty save-the-Earth cult members whose only apparent crimes were failure to pay taxes and possession of a small cache of ancient automatic rifles that no longer worked.

He was already hard at work reviewing the sticks’ memory using computer technology that scanned each recording and only displayed images when movement was detected. Each recorded scene of movement was being copied to a chronological file by location.

The third member of the Storm Killer security team was Dan Hoch, a strapping six foot six inch shaven head former beat cop from New Orleans. He had resigned from the police department after the televised beating of an elderly man after Hurricane Katrina had devastated the city. He had participated in that incident much to his sorrow.

After Katrina, he had lost his home and young family to the floods. He worked over two weeks with only a few hours of sleep. The pain and hurt in his life had welled up in him until finally, just like New Orleans’ levees, his mental levee had broken. He snapped and, with the three other police officers at the scene, had beaten the man, causing extensive internal injuries and broken bones.

After lengthy therapy, he understood his loss and his fragile mental state. He went to the man he had beaten to apologize and seek his forgiveness. The man had looked at Hoch and saw his anguish. He raised a hand to stop Hoch in the middle of his apology and simple said, “Be well. Go, my brother, and do some good.” The man had dropped the charges pending against Hoch. The police department had allowed Hoch to resign with nothing being placed on his immaculate record. After a lengthy rehab period, Hoch felt he was ready to ‘do some good’ and sought employment with CORDEX security.

Hoch had investigated several warehouse pilfering cases and had been key in breaking up an international ring of thieves responsible for millions of dollars in lost warehouse assets belonging to a number of large corporations.

He had been astonished when CORDEX had approached him about taking one of the security positions aboard Storm Killer.

With his shaven head and weightlifter build, most of the contingent on Storm Killer referred to Hoch as “Mr. Clean” from the old TV cleaning detergent commercials. His size alone offered an intimidation factor that many thought important to the Security department.

Hoch was drawing up a working list of those personnel who were on duty during the twenty-four hour period. This list would be used to verify the recorded images of those authorized to be in the area. These would be the first people interrogated. If their stories proved true, the people listed who were in the area for no authorized reason would be detained and interrogated.

Hoch had already set up a containment area in one of the twenty-man dormitory areas that had been used to house some of the recently departed construction personnel. The dormitory was a separate module that had a cycling hatch that could be locked. The dormitory was to have been jettisoned after the construction crew departed, but it now would serve as a temporary jail facility. Only Hoch had the newly entered access codes that opened and closed the dorm’s hatch door.

Just as Kim began to feel she had the investigation moving along well, the second attack on Storm Killer occurred.

20

The department heads were in attendance at the emergency meeting called by Kim to review the latest effort by the saboteurs. She now believed there was more than one person involved. No one who had been identified as nearing the computer complex around the time of the airlock incident was anywhere near the three workstations identified as the only ones capable of allowing a worm to be introduced to the system.

This information she gave to the station executives at the emergency meeting. She was interrupted by Brad’s fit of coughing and sneezing.

“Damn. Sorry, Kim. I went to the doctor’s office and got a vile potion she guaranteed would cure me quickly. I took it last night, went out like a light, and actually feel much better today,” Brad apologized with a raspy voice.

The technician who had found and removed the worm was being used as the computer forensics expert in Kim’s investigation. Kim deduced that if this tech had introduced the worm, he would have done everything he could to hide its existence. Instead, he had detected it and removed it quickly enough to avoid it doing serious damage.

The technician reported that only the three identified workstations had the security access levels required to get to the system location the worm had inhabited and they were the only ones with external memory stick readers. These readers would have been required to allow the perpetrator to download the worm program into the system.

He’d initially reported that only a knowledgeable computer person could have gotten around the login and activity logs, as was apparently the case. No suspicious activity had been found in the logs. But then the tech also noted that the created date of login and activity log files did not match that of the other logs in this part of the system. The entire set of log files should have all been initially created at the same time. But these two logs carried a creation date and time stamp exactly matching the time of the worm introduction.

These logs had been intentionally altered at the time of the worm’s introduction! Very poor cover up attempt, opinioned the computer tech. He now changed his previous opinion and stated that the perpetrator was probably rather naïve about computers and was more than likely just following a simple set of instructions provided to them.

At the time of the guidance system incident, the technician had commanded the computer to freeze its memory and not reuse any memory that had recently been used and released back to the system. The tech had done a copy dump of the entire memory and he was now manually reviewing the contents of each piece of frozen storage from around the time of the log file alterations.

The worm was very simplistic and had no programmed startup timers or event triggers. The worm had become active as soon as it was introduced to the system. This meant that the worm had been introduced within milliseconds of the first guidance system variances being noticed in Storm Killer’s guidance system.

Even with such a narrow timeline of the worm introduction and the limited number of input stations, the tech had to go through several thousand pieces of frozen memory storage.

Kim was frustrated. The evidence from the first incident was still incomplete and now the second sabotage attempt had stopped all progress by her team. They were now busy gathering evidence from the second attempt and had placed the evaluation of the evidence from the first attempt on hold.

Kim was awaiting a report from Hoch on fingerprint matches from the prints lifted from the three computer workstations. It would go much quicker if they knew which workstation the saboteurs had used. There were a hundred different prints on each workstation. Some of these prints were from people no longer on the station.

“From the number of prints we have found, I doubt the cleaning crew has ever cleaned any of the workstations,” Kim muttered to herself. Apparently, the cleaning crew did not adhere to the checklist item on wiping down the workstations each night. Kim made a mental note to herself to start carrying antibacterial wipes and use them every time she touched a computer pad in the public areas.

“Uh, Ms. Danby, uh, this looks like something,” the tech pointed excitedly at the screen. Kim walked over to tech’s desk and looked over his shoulder. “What have you got?”

“This appears to be the true log in file.” The tech browsed down the image until he came to the log in entries around the time the system variations started. His eyes widened as he pointed to the entry time stamped just fifteen seconds before the worm first appeared.

Kim couldn’t believe the name that appeared. The screen read:

LOGIN TERMASD1 08/21/29 TIME 08163108GMT   ACCESS CLASS EXEC USERID=BBOLINO

Brad Bolino? What the hell is going on here?
Kim thought to herself. She grabbed the tech’s shoulder and squeezed saying, “Keep this information to yourself until I tell you what to do, OK?”

“Yes, certainly,” the tech replied looking scared and confused.

“Which workstation is it from?” she asked.

“The workstation in hydroponics.”

Kim touched the intercom button on the cell phone attached to her waist and spoke, “Hoch? It’s the workstation in hydroponics. Back burner the other workstations’ prints and focus on those from that specific workstation. Report your findings to me and me alone. Danby out.”

Lt. James strode into the work area carrying a memory stick. “Well, Danby, are you still happy you went behind my back and stole command of this investigation from me? No need, to reply, I know you are.“

Kim started to reply and defend herself, but Lt. James raised his hand, waved her off and continued. “I finished the surveillance analysis. Nobody who should not have been there entered or exited the area around the mainframe during the airlock incident. Except for Dr. Cruz. She had been called to that location by a reported possible electrocution. Apparently, one of the techs had come in contact with a live wire while installing a new air handler for cooling the mainframe.“

“I don’t believe in coincidence, do you, Lieutenant?” Kim asked. “An electrocution in the area right around the time of the sabotage? Who was the tech?”

“A Rafael Denuza, a general maintenance engineer from Southern California,” Lt. James replied. “He has nothing in his background to suggest he had any motive for this. Dr. Cruz’s report states Denuza had suffered minor burns and was having some difficulty breathing when she arrived and it took her about twenty minutes to ensure he was stable and out of danger.”

“Who else was there with them during this time?” Kim asked.

“Well, another tech, Alfred Mooney, was there for a few minutes, but Dr. Cruz sent him to get a oxygen tank from the Doctor’s emergency sled. He was gone for about five minutes. The camera verified he did indeed come out and get a portable O2 bottle from the sled. He apparently had a tough time getting the bottle out of the sled. The bottle’s strap was wrapped around the handle of the emergency stretcher. He was on camera for about two minutes.”

“So, we have three suspects. We have Mooney, who we can verify only two minutes of his absent five minutes. We have Denuza and Dr. Cruz who appear to corroborate each other’s stories, but were alone with no witnesses for about five minutes. Did we get any prints from the reversed input feeds?”

“No prints. But I found a trace of a white powder on two of the wires. I packaged a sample and sent it down on the shuttle last night. Ground Control should be getting a report from the FBI lab later today,” Lt. James reported.

Kim filled him in on the latest information she had.

After the quick briefing, he stood up, heading toward the door. “The camera in hydroponics was reported out of order, so I don’t think we’ll get any video of our culprit. Convenient time to have camera problems, don’t you think? And a very interesting coincidence that the workstation used was in the only area with a known camera problem. I’m going to have Hoch look at the entire workstation area in hydroponics and see if he can find anything. While he does that, I’m going to be checking the broken camera. That is just too much of a coincidence for me.”

He stopped, turned around, and snarled, “I would assume you are going to pursue the Bolino evidence, so good luck. I would hate to be accusing the Station Director of sabotaging his own station. I think you’re in over your head, lady, and I hope I’m around when the axe falls.” He left the room.

Kim had developed a mild crush on the lieutenant. He had always treated her with utmost respect and kindness. He was a very attractive man in Kim’s eyes. They had become close friends and they shared many private thoughts with each other. Kim had always respected his senior rank and, in public, rarely called him anything other than lieutenant.

Kim watched him walk out and sighed thinking, He may be right. Maybe I was too aggressive taking command of this. He is really ticked at me. But he is a professional and is doing a good job. Maybe, when this is over, I can repair our relationship. He really is a fine man!

She thought back to her first meeting with Lt. James five years ago.