Take the Fourth (28 page)
Authors: Jeffrey Walton
. . .
G
reg thought about his dilemma, he was one hundred percent sure that the holiday massacre was some scheme concocted by the Oval Office but he found nothing pertaining to that fact, even with all the technologies he had at his beck and call. He decided to look in the future for clues of the past. He knew Reynolds had dinner with Scott, he knew Reynolds was at the scene on that bloody day in December, and that’s all he knew. So he decided to put some tags or traces on emails to and from Reynolds. Scott’s emails went through the servers at the NSA which had protocols he could circumvent given the time and proper credentials but he would need Jorja’s assistance. Since Reynolds worked in the private sector his email was more or so public domain now that the Patriot Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and a slew of other acts littered with lawyer speak made it legal
Greg easily rerouted all of Reynolds’ email to a government router and he was then able to access each one he sent or received. This was very low tech by Greg’s standards and anyone could trace the path of the email but close to one hundred percent of the people had no idea how to view or even read the header information contained in each email. If Reynolds ever bothered to look he could simply open the email, navigate to the tools menu, click options, and then view the header information. He would then see the path that each email traveled. If he looked closely enough, he would spot a router’s/IP address that was common to all his emails besides his proper email server’s address at The Beta Group. And like almost one hundred percent of the people, he never viewed the header information. As a result, this email popped up on Greg’s screen on Thursday evening.
From:
J.
Reynolds
Sent:
Thursday,
May
07,
2008
8:58
PM
To:
Scott
Norwood
Subject:
Rules
for
software
purchasing
Proprietary
software
is
expensive.
Leasing
is
usually
an
inexpensive
solution.
And
tax
deductible.
Never
go
with
the
first
solution.
In
certain
circumstances
it
is
cheaper
to
build
your
own.
Search
for
the
best
solution
don’t
take
a
consultant’s
word.
Avoid
unnecessary
requirements.
Gather
only
what
is
needed
for
the
initial
phase
of
the
project.
Open
source
should
be
avoided
at
all
cost
within
the
government—it’s
free
for
a
reason.
Reynolds didn’t send many emails, if he did it was from another account Greg hadn’t found just yet. This one was odd. Why would he be sending Scott what seemed to be spam or very out-dated rules for engaging in a software request from vendors? It’s not like Scott was in charge of purchasing software for the Oval Office. Maybe he was in charge of enhancing the interface to God’s eyes, something along the lines of what Greg had already accomplished but why all the talk about cost? Cost would be the last thing this regime would worry about, especially if it pertained to the system. No, there was something very strange about this email and Greg couldn’t quite place his finger on it. He reread it again and again. The more he read the stranger it had become. The sentence structure just didn’t seem right. He was sure there was something else, he was sure there was more to the message. He tried to read between the lines, was software a metaphor, was cost a metaphor, was the consultant’s word actually Reynolds’ word, Scott’s word, or the President’s word, was it a word of warning? Why start a sentence with an “and,” why use the word “avoid” twice, why use the words “tax deductible” and “government,” why? He wasn’t sure why. He regrouped the words of the message, cataloging them as nouns, verbs, and adjectives and played around trying to make new sentences, like an anagram of sorts. Nothing made sense. Greg wasn’t a cryptologist by any stretch of the means and his sudoku skills weren’t going to help in this situation, nor his computer hacking skills for that matter, but he tried nonetheless. He spent hours on the email, then he took a break when he realized he was getting nowhere and decided to call it a night. Besides a fresh brain is a better brain. The next morning he printed the email out, folded it, stuck in his front pants pocket, and took it to work. When he had some downtime and by downtime it was meant when nobody was looking over his shoulder, he again played with the email and again got nowhere. He stayed well past office hours and continued working the email and again got nowhere. Closing in on ten o’clock and still getting nowhere, Greg decided to do what he did best, he used his math skills. He wrote each sentence on a separate line and placed an equal sign next to it.
Proprietary software is expensive =
Leasing is usually an inexpensive solution =
And tax deductible =
Never go with the first solution =
In certain circumstances it is cheaper to build your own =
Search for the best solution don’t take a consultant’s word =
Avoid unnecessary requirements =
Gather only what is needed for the initial phase of the project =
Open source should be avoided at all cost within the government—it’s free for a reason =
He counted the words in each sentence and wrote the number to the right of the equal sign, 4, 6, 3, 6, 10, 10, 3, 12, 16, then matched those numbers with their respective letters of the alphabet, D, F, C. F, J, J, C, L, P. What he found was no vowels. He then went back and counted the letters in each sentence and wrote that to the right of the equal sign. For the first sentence he counted 32 letters and since he couldn’t match that to a respective letter to the alphabet he subtracted 26 from the number and came up with 6 which matched to F. He did this for each sentence again and found the letters F, K P, A, U, V, B, Z, R. This time there were vowels but what word could that possibly be? He was grasping for straws. He felt like Homer Simpson in the episode entitled “My Mother the Carjacker.” Homer so badly wanted to win an “Oops Patrol” T-shirt like his wife Marge, by finding a blooper in the headlines (Marge’s headline was Mayor’s Erection instead of Election). He searched and searched, trying desperately to find something funny only to find nothing funny. Greg felt just like Homer, trying desperately to make some sense out of his mumbo jumbo but finding no sense whatsoever. It hurt his brain. Letters and numbers filled the page, so much so he barely saw the original email through all his gobbly-gook and scribble-scratch. He stopped thinking and just gazed, then Greg starting laughing, uncontrollable laughing, and loud, so loud that his office neighbors, those who worked the late shift, went to investigate. After he calmed down he simply told them it was an inside joke that just caught him off guard; an inside joke indeed. In that same episode, during Homer’s search for his funny headline he found an article entitled “World’s Biggest Pizza,” and since Homer and food go hand-in-hand he starting reading the article, only to find it was talking to him. Each line in the article spelled out “Homer” and continued with “meet me at the 4
th
street overpass”. It was a hidden message within the article. It was the same here, only it was the first letter in each sentence. It was just dumb random luck he found it, that and his bona fide expertise in Simpsons’ trivia. If he were to tell the story that the cartoon played a major role in thwarting the logic of cryptography he’d be placed in a nicely padded room with just his maddening thoughts.
His head was now clear of the cryptology cobwebs that filled his brain for almost two days, so was his goal—now the only thing to do was to find out what plan they were talking about and why it was a go, but first he needed to make a call.
“Hey Jorja, it’s Greg.”
“What’s up, it’s a little late don’t cha think?”
Looking at his watch he then realized it was slightly after eleven, “Sorry, but it’s only eleven on a Friday evening, I figured…”
“Relax Greg, I was only joking, I was just getting ready to go out.”
“Really, I’m sorry.”
“Again Greg, I was kidding, getting ready to go out, yeah I know those days are behind me, now I’m lucky to make it up to see midnight. So anyway why the call?”
“It’s about tomorrow, I know I said I would be in but I can’t make it tomorrow, something’s come up.”
“Anything serious?”
“No, no, nothing really, just some personal business to attend to and I don’t want to put it off for another day.”
“Oh, okay,” with slight hesitation, “I was so looking forward to it, I haven’t been in the system for awhile,” which they both knew was a lie.
“Listen, go ahead in without me, just be careful.”
“I’d rather not, how about Sunday?”
“Possibly, if you don’t hear from me tomorrow, I’ll see you on Monday morning.”
“Greg, are you sure you’re okay, nothing serious?”
“Jorja, I’m fine, really, I’ll tell you all about it on Monday, I swear.”
“Promise?”
“Yes, and really, I’m sorry for calling you so late, and sorry for ditching you last minute.”
“That’s okay, really, like I said to you before, call me anytime you need me, knowing what we know, well we’ll just leave it at that shall we? But you know, you are acting a bit strange and it’s got me wondering now.”
“Please don’t Jorja, listen, it’s nothing serious, I’ll try to call you tomorrow and hopefully we can do Sunday, okay?’
“Okay, just call if you need anything.”
“I will, thank you Jorja, good night.”
“Good night.”
Now he had two things to do… one was a bit more research, the other was to construct a lie. He realized constructing the lie was the easy part. He knew Jorja couldn’t keep her hands off the system and she’d be keeping a close eye on his tax ID, so he would just play the “I was sick card” and leave it at that. Then dawned on him, Jorja was actually worried about him
. . .
L
ynch didn’t go back to his office; instead he grabbed an empty seat in the now dubbed war room and was commissioned a top of the line laptop by one of the feds. He was now plugged into their secured network. Garfield gave him the same lesson as Josh had given him and Lynch was up and running in no time. After testing the tires for about thirty minutes he realized the potential of this system and just how unnerving this amount of data can be.
“Hey Josh, Garfield, can we take a few minutes to revisit and collaborate? I don’t want to waste any time stepping on the same toes now that I’m up to snuff on this system.”
“Yeah sure,” Garfield quipped. Josh turned around as well as the two feds who were in the room.
“So is it safe to say that the kid and the Camaro are not our priority, that our effort here is trying to find a man in his late thirties to mid forties with a limp, and that’s still the only thing we can go on?”
“That and a badly drawn pencil sketch and our assumption he is located within the LGC and a pedophile,” added Josh.
“LGC?”
“Yes. It’s a TLA.”
“TLA?”
“Three letter acronym… . The Lynch and Garfield circle, that’s what our federal friends here are calling it, there’s nothing that deviates us from this mind set.”
“So we are concentrating our efforts within the diameter of this circle, that’s a twenty-five mile radius, that’s a lot of ground, a lot of people… . let me see… . twenty-five squared, that’s six hundred twenty-five, times pi… . hmmm that’s close to two thousand square miles”
“Like you said, a lot of people as well, almost three hundred thousand if you take the average population of a hundred and forty-one people per square mile in our state,” calculated Garfield.
“I’m not even going to ask how you knew that. So, roughly three hundred thousand. How many registered sex offenders in that area?”
“Two hundred fourteen, with a hundred and thirty-seven of them within Macon alone, of those, fifty-one have been against children, we have their names on our hot list right here, but there is also a good possibility this person is not in that system.”
“Point taken, o.k. what do you think is the average number of people who walk with a limp is… . one in a hundred, a thousand, less, more?”
“Well we all know this guy probably has walked this way for some time now, the two slated witnesses are almost a year apart, so that means it probably wasn’t just a broken leg unless it didn’t heal right.”
“War injury, birth defect, accident of some sort?”
“Have we looked at the service records for discharges due to injury?”
“Yep, we all have those, only two people fit the bill within that circle but we doubt very much one of these guys is our man, it has been our indication that trained military personal, plain and simple, do not become pedophiles, they are trained to serve and protect,” supplied by a fed from the back of the room.
“I never heard of that.”
“You could probably count the number on one hand where this has happened in the tri-state area.”
“But still… .”
“Don’t worry, we’ve compiled as much info on these two as possible, just to be safe. We have also thought of the birth defect issue, this one is going to be tricky, especially if he hasn’t seen a doctor in years. The early medical records of someone in their forties are pretty much non-existent when it comes to the online world.”
“So we are pretty much back at square one.”
“Yes, back to square one… . did you ever wonder where that phrase came from?”
“Hopscotch,” answered Garfield to Josh’s question.
“Hopscotch?”
“The game with chalk and squares.”
“Yeah, I know it.”
“Well, you always go back to square one.”
“You’re a wealth of knowledge, that sleep did you well my friend.”
“It wasn’t knowledge, just a guess, but say it convincingly and people don’t question the facts.”
“Yeah, like a hundred and forty one.”
“I’m not questioning the facts in this case because there is very little to go on. Do we have any medical records with leg injuries for the past few years?” Lynch injected as to get back on track.
“Yes, it’s quite a list, there are three major hospitals in that area. We didn’t get any from the Atlanta or Columbus regions, since they are outside the LGC. We could if we need to expand the circle at some point but that list is going to be huge.”
“O.k., so we have a list of medical records, I’m afraid to ask just how many names are on that list, we have the hot list of sex offenders, the two military personal. Have we crossed checked the fifty-one sex offenders with medical records.”
“Yes, no matches.”
“What else do we have, how about driver’s license?”
“Already checked, we looked for both C and J restrictions.”
“Mechanical and prosthetic aids, good, any hits?”
“Just one, on the hot list but we’re unable to locate him, we have an unmarked at his current address and we pulled all the relevant data, he’s actually a transplant.”
“So this could be our bastard? Why wasn’t I told about this earlier?”
“He is out of the age range, he’s fifty-eight plus nothing really jumps out on his spending habits.”
“Right, has a prosthetic and is a registered child sex offender, and just so happens to be within the LGC, that’s just way too many coincidences. Where is he transplanted from?”
“Arkansas, and we have already checked police records there, no missing children within the same radius.”
“I want to take a look at his priors.”
“Here, just one, it was a he said she said type of deal.”
“Most always the case, is it not?” After a moment of reading the file, “listen, I want to find this, this James Wartner guy and I don’t give a shit how it’s done, we’ll start by knocking on doors, someone has to know where this guy is.”
“Day late and a dollar short,” snapped one of the G-men, “GBI is doing just that, the neighbors knew nothing, they checked his place of business and he scheduled the day off, they also started combing through his phone records and calling numbers, and nothing yet.”
“I have a strong feeling about this guy.”
“We all do.”
“Alright, I need to bring that kid in here again or closer to home, if we catch this guy I want a positive ID asap, and right now he’s the only one who can do it. What else is there besides the prosthetic sex offender, anything else on the plate?”
“All the so-called leads spurred on by the press conference, sixteen markers are located within the LGC, they’re represented by a blue pin.”
The other G-man from the back of the room spoke, “We are doing cross checking on those sixteen markers as I speak, it is already generating a list of hits that will have to be cross referenced again. It’s a daunting task. Basically we are taking the information called in, such as always shops at this store or always seen in this laundry mat, then we run all the credit card information from those locations through our filters or cross reference files so to speak. Then any hits we may have we’ll dive deeper into their files, see what they have purchased, where they have been, who they called.”
“You know that’s not proper search and seizure etiquette.”
“Listen we have heard this before and to a certain degree it has been upheld in court under the Patriot Act, besides if we find the little girl who really is going to mind how we found her?”
“The scum sucking lawyers, that’s who.”
“True, but we can’t worry about that, our number one goal right now is to find a little girl, find the guy who took her using the best tools at our disposal. If we don’t then we are not doing our job. I for one, am not going to do this job with both my hands tied behind my back while our digital freedom is being squelched in the courts.”
“Our digital freedom? What do you mean by our? This data is not ours, it’s mine, it’s Garfield’s, it’s Joe Shmoe’s, it’s private, private information, just because this information is contained in a file somewhere, it’s not yours, it doesn’t give you or me the right to see it. Remember, I’ve played with that system of yours and the information on me alone is… . is overwhelming, we and I mean we, as officers should have no right to pry into anyone’s file just because we can without proper jurisdiction.”
“I beg to differ, it’s just information like this that will help us in these types of cases and in our fight against terrorism.”
“Oh fuck that shit, every time you guys are backed into a corner you throw the fucking T word around. Just because some wackos flew a plane into a building does not give the government a right to peek into everybody’s file… . into everybody’s life.”
“I understand where you are coming from, I do, but shouldn’t we use the gift horse, especially in this case or should we bring the parents back in here and tell them we couldn’t find their little girl because the government is unwilling to question the facts and that’s just what these are facts, nothing more.”
“Very private facts in most cases”
“True, but with those facts we are trying to tell a story, a true story, it’s not like we go in with no just cause. We are just looking for suspects, given the potential data fits our story line. If it doesn’t we move on.”
Lynch looked at the picture of the little Braves fan once again; he put his conjectures aside and agreed with the man, “You’re right, I’m just playing devil’s advocate, besides I guess there are plenty of ways to skirt the issues when the time comes for justification.”
“You betcha, just a well documented phone call by a quote unquote witness, a few facts, a clue, and we have a solid case.”
“That and we’ll have all of America on our side screaming for justice, so yeah I can live with taking it away also,” quipped Josh.
“Exactly what did you mean by taking away?”
“His right to the fourth amendment, pedophiles such as this goddamn sick twisted bastard should have no rights.”
“No fucking rights,” Garfield quickly added, “and when he’s convicted he’ll get what he deserves,” knowing all too well what usually happens to child molesters in prison.
“In the meantime I guess now we divide and conquer until we find our newest key suspect,” continued Lynch.
“With the help of our system. So let’s each of us take a few data markers and do some cross checking. If you right click on a blue pin you can see the option to lock that marker. Once it’s locked no one else can claim it, so we won’t step on each others’ toes. From there you can each do your needed data mining and cross checking. Any names you find that stick out, you can drag and drop them into the box on the lower left-hand side of the screen. These will be global names that will automatically be checked against all of the blue pins by the system. Once a name has been selected, again right click on the name and chose filters. Here you can run any numbers of filters already identified by the FBI, such as bought items or you can construct your own. In order to do that, just pick custom and follow the prompts. So easy a first grader can do it. If you have any other questions feel free to ask, and remember the answers are probably hidden in plain sight.”
“If you can hear me whispering, you are dying,” Josh added.
“Huh?”
“Pink Floyd, you know the album Dark Side of the Moon, well the song Great Gig in the Sky, the one where they use the human voice as an instrument?”
“Yeah, I know it, you don’t need to explain, I’ve been to college.”
“Well, four minutes thirty-three seconds into the song.”
“Four Thirty Three, John Cage, I love that song.”
“I meant three,” not knowing who the hell John Cage was, “so three thirty three, give or take you will hear a woman’s voice in the right speaker say, if you can hear me whispering you’re dying.”
“Right?”
“No seriously.”
“Listen, I’ve heard the song hundreds of times and never heard that.”
“Same with me, but way back when I was listening to the album with headphones at like four in the morning, I was dozing off when I heard it for the first time, it freaked me out but now I hear it plain as day each and every time, hidden in plain sight so to say.”
“We’re all dying, shorter of breath and one day closer to death.”
“Touché,” realizing this was a reference to another song on one of the most quintessential rock albums of all time.
“So where were we?”
“Hoping Ripley still has breath,” Lynch stated in a sort of grumpy manner since he was already tired of the tangents.
. . .
