The Dane Commission (The Dane Chronicles) (27 page)

A few minutes
later, Ryan got up and went to the cafeteria to get breakfast for everyone.

When he got
back to their suite, he had coffee, and a box of biscuits, kolaches and donuts.

He saw that
Jeff had arrived. Ryan set everything down on a small table in the front and
invited everyone over. Jim came out, looking tired but satisfied. He reached
for a kolache, and started explaining to Ryan and Jeff what he had done with
the ‘twins’.

“I’ve given
access to both of you, and I’ll send you the file path to find them. You see, I
need to test them, you know? Push them a little. But the point is, you have at
your disposal the fastest number-crunchers in the whole IntelliHealth System.
I’ve installed their software, and taught them how to compare data, respond to
queries and all that stuff. They now have access to your database Jeff. You can
give them a request, and they’ll carry it out for you. At light speed.”

Jeff was less
excited, but careful to respond appropriately.
“Thanks, Jim. That’s really impressive. I’m looking forward to using
them.”
 

Ryan laughed a
little, but caught himself.

Jim was
already walking back to his office, donuts in hand.

Ryan went to
his office and pulled up his list of facilities to canvass today.

He hoped they
went better than Tokyo.

The first one
on the list was New York City. He crossed his fingers and called the Director
of Patient Services, Maria Stevens.

A large face
filled his slick new, drop-down screen, “Good Morning, you have reached the
office of Mrs. Maria Stevens, how may I help you?”
“Good morning, my name is Ryan Dane. I am the lead investigator for an
IntelliHealth commission seeking data on patient treatments. May I speak with
Mrs. Stevens?”

“Please hold
one moment, Mr. Dane.”

The screen
went black, leaving him with his new friend, the floating IntelliHealth logo.

After a moment
the screen came to life with a new face on the screen.

“Good morning,
Mr. Dane. How can I help you?”

Ryan was
elated, he thought, ‘We’re on our way now!’

By early
afternoon, he had contacted four IntelliHealth facilities, New York, Paris,
Salvador and Mexico City. Ryan went to Jeff’s office, and found him with
several screens up, each with different graphs, numbers and charts displayed.

“Jeff, I just
sent you contacts for two more facilities to add to your database.”

Not looking
away from his work, Jeff responded, “Ah, very good, very good.”

“It’s odd
though, I contacted four, but only two reported the anomaly.”

Jeff looked
up, “Were they being stubborn like Tokyo?”

“I don’t think
so, no. Their reaction seemed honest, I believe them.”

“It seems that
the basic assumptions of our investigation have reversed,” said Jeff.

“What do you
mean?”

“Well, now we
find it odd when the anomaly doesn’t appear.”

Ryan
understood his point, they shouldn’t just assume everyone has this issue, but
it was nagging at him all the same.

“Have you spotted anything unusual?” Ryan asked.

“No. Sometimes
I feel like I get close to something, but when the analysis completes, the
numbers aren’t working out. So far, I haven’t been able to discern any kind of
pattern in the treatments you’ve given me.”

So, not all
the facilities were reporting having experienced this issue, and still no
pattern in the treatments they’d found.

‘Well, it’s
not going to be so easy after all,’ he thought.

He returned to
his office, and began to generate a new list of facilities to contact.

Jim had worked
through the night, and by lunch was able to sit back and watch his new machines
run.
They were spectacular.
He helped Jeff learn how to start running his analyses on them, and now he sat
back and watched them perform.

They were
officially named on the network as ‘Thor’ and ‘Loki’ now too.

‘Very cool,’
he thought.

He was a bit
tired, and he had that
‘I worked all night’
dullness rising in him.

He decided to
take a break.

After getting
some food, he ate his lunch at his desk and re-organized what information he
had up on his displays.

On one screen
he showed the twins running, keeping an eye on their diagnostics all the time.
This was technically still their installation period, and he didn’t want to
miss anything if they suddenly had problems.

On another
screen, he pulled up the security log from the Hospital network, and laid it
beside the results from his ‘Snoopy’ script.
 

On another
screen, he opened an empty text file.
 

He needed to
compile the list Ryan was asking for, regarding treatment changes at Ryan’s ‘critical
point.’

This would be
a list of users who have high enough network access, that they could change a
prescribed treatment after a research scientist has entered it, but before the
corresponding hospital technician receives it, invisibly and leaving no record.
This would be a tricky operation, even for him. He tried to imagine a way to
accomplish this same trick.

First, he
would introduce a script capturing prescribed treatments at their point of
submission into the research network. Then, he would need to hold the entry in
a queue, while he decided how to modify it. Since the scientists weren’t
noticing any changes to their entries, it would have to be altered in the
hospital Network, requiring a second script there. Finally, because entries
were submitted around the clock, and from every facility, someone would need to
be watching all the time. It would be a daunting task to say the least.

Still though,
the idea was not to prove who was doing it exactly, but only to prove that
individuals did indeed have access to the network, such that they could
hypothetically
do it.

He wrote his
own name at the top of the list, followed by about 36 network people from
around IntelliHealth. These names made up the entire group of network
administrators actually assigned to watch and maintain the research and
hospital networks. Next he pulled up the list of ‘super-user accounts’, which
included another 105 names. These were the highest-level scientists, Facility
and Department Directors, and Presidents. Sid Frances and Steven Ranks were in
this group too.

The total came
to 141 users with adequate network access.

Jim didn’t
think just anyone could really usurp the systems like that, but with Ranks on
the list, he supposed it was possible.

Jim saved the
list, and went back to his ‘Snoopy’ report to see if it had caught anything
last night. Technically, it was supposed to send an alert to him, when it
detected activity. Looking at the report, he found nothing. It showed no sign
of the intruder.

Next he looked
at the hospital network security log, but didn’t find anything there either.

The code
fragment was gone, its absence as odd and abrupt, as its presence had been.

‘Did ‘they’
see my script running, and choose not to jump in?’ he wondered.

His script was
invisible. How could anyone know it was there?

Right now,
only David, Ben and he even knew that he was monitoring the network.

Taking a deep
breath to clear his head, he followed the IntelliHealth security protocol, and
sent Dave and Mr. James a message indicated that no activity was noted last
night.

Leaving his
script running, he got up and went to visit with Ryan.

Ryan was on
the televid with the Los Angeles facility when Jim walked in.

“Well, thank
you so much, I will have our analyst contact yours to begin the data transfer.”

The face on
the screen said goodbye, and logged off.

The screen
faded to black.

Ryan saw Jim
in the doorway, “Come on in, I have three more hits for Jeff to add to his
collection.” He sent Jeff the contact information for the three new facilities.

“That makes
eleven facilities contacted with nine hits and two misses,” said Ryan.

Jim said, “I
have news to report when you’re ready for it.”

“Sure, hold
on; let's get Jeff in here too.”
Ryan stepped outside.

“Lara, please
keep helping me with the list of facilities and contact names. We’re going to
need more.”

“Sure, Mr.
Dane,” she said putting down the papers she was reading.

Raising his
voice a little, Ryan called out, “Jeff, can you take a break and join us?”

Through the
open door of his office, Jeff said, “Yes, I could use a break.”

They all sat
down at the small conference room in Ryan’s office.

Ryan started,
“Jim, you said you have some news.”

“Well, I have
the list of names you wanted,” said Jim, “The users who have network access
high enough to capture and change prescribed treatments.”

“How many
people are on it?” said Ryan.

“141,” said
Jim, “that includes network admins, facility and department directors a few top
scientists, the presidents and Frances and Ranks of course.”

Jim continued,
“I have to say Ryan, the idea you’re suggesting would be very hard to pull off.
I mean trying to change treatments on the fly, day and night from all the
IntelliHealth facilities? There are probably only three or four names that
could come anywhere near to doing it.”

“I agree that
sounds almost impossible,” said Jeff.

“I agree too,
but to solve this we need to continue eliminating all possible theories. I
would like to start taking names off that list.”
Standing up, he said, “Lara can you come in here too, please?”

A moment later
she was at the table with the rest of them.

“Jeff, please
generate a list of the last ten to twenty treatment changes, by date, and give
them to Lara. And Jim can you send your list of users to Lara.”

Turning to Lara, he said, “Lara, please compare the two lists. I want to remove
users who were not present at work when the treatments were changed. See how
many names you can get off the list.”

Jim said,
“Yes, I see what you’re saying. The network can’t be broken from outside
without alarms going off everywhere. The suspect would need to be at work to do
it; ah, very good Ryan.”

“Okay, so
moving on to the network incursions,” said Ryan.

Jim said sourly, “Snoopy detected no activity last night, and the security logs
agree.”

“You don’t
sound convinced,” said Jeff.

“Well, I saw
activity every night since I started paying attention, and now for the first
time, there’s nothing. It’s a little weird. I feel like
‘they’
new I was
monitoring. Either they knew, and chose not to access the network, or they
sidestepped Snoopy. Either way it should be impossible.”

Ryan said,
“Who knew that you were running Snoopy?”

“David and
Ben, but I trust them implicitly.”
 

“I know them
too, and I feel the same way. So rule them out as suspects. Look at the date
stamps on the last few incursions, and compare to their user accounts.
Hopefully, you’ll find that they were not logged in,’ Ryan said.

“Yeah,” said
Jim, “that’s a good idea. I can do that pretty quick.”

 
Ryan noticed that everyone looked a little
tired.

“So, to re-cap
where we are, Jeff is studying the treatments that were changed, looking for
any clues. Jim has given us Loki and Thor to help with the analyses. Lara is
going to work on the list of users who have a high enough access to change
treatments. And Jim is still working on the hospital network activity.
Meanwhile, I will continue contacting new facilities to add them to our list.”