The Merchant of Secrets (15 page)

“Very funny.
You
wanna
be a bridesmaid?”  I asked, playing along with
this imaginary engagement.

“Oh Hell no!
  I just want
to be invited to a party so I can get loaded on free drinks” she teased. Keisha
was incredibly smart and could make me burst into laughter even when I was
exhausted and angry.

I turned around to leave, “I’ve got the perfect
bridesmaid dress picked out for you in bright pink with big puffy bows on it.”
 

“
No.No
. No.
Hell no,” I heard her say, from halfway down the hallway.

Keisha liked to wear fatigues to work and keep it casual
on the weekend, pairing jeans with a T-shirt and boots. She was a woman who
owned three motorcycles that she liked to race against her brothers on the
weekends.  No pink bows or other frilly accoutrements would ever hang from
her body no matter who was getting married.

I went back to the I.R.S. office to pick up my laptop
then drove to the local coffee shop to review the Statement of Work drafted by
PFG’s counsel and submitted to the Department of Defense in pursuit of a prime
government contract. I laid my laptop on the table, booted up the computer
inserted the drive just given to me a few minutes earlier by Keisha. I pulled
up the document and started reading the Statement of Work from PFG. I knew it
would show me what type of machinery Jones was trying to peddle to in the
U.K..

The Statement of Work was filled with typical legal
jargon that attorneys put in contracts so that a simple sentence of valid
information turns out to be 10 pages of unreadable nonsense that
  takes
another lawyer to figure out. The document was
a disappointment until I got to the footnotes of the hardware and software
vendors on the proposal. Listed right there after the major software and
hardware companies was
Irongate
.
Irongate
!
It stuck out on the page like a red flag.
Irongate
designs password security software for a major defense contractor. I closed my
laptop and called
Mullally
while running to the car with my laptop bag dangling from the shoulder.

“Hello sir, I think I’ve got it. PFG was working with
Irongate
”.

“What’s
Irongate
?” he asked. His
ignorance was annoying.

‘Sir it’s the software company that provides access codes
for secure networks.”

Mulally
went silent. He
understood.

“I’m headed back to Bailey’s office,” I said.

‘Hold on, I want you to meet me now,” he insisted.

“Where?”
I asked. Todd and his gang
were still hunting for me and I couldn’t go back to our offices.

“Meet me at my house” he said and hung up. I ran to my
car and rolled it out of the parking lot, pushing the accelerator until I was
doing sixty in a thirty five mile per hour zone. I was racing to
Mulally’s
house  until
lights
flashed in the rear view mirror  and I  was pulled off the road by a
police car. “Darn locals!”

The police officer exited his vehicle, and approached.

“You in a hurry?” he asked.

‘Yes officer I have an important meeting.”

“Important enough to drive thirty miles over the speed
limit? That must be one heck of a meeting!  I should take you in and
impound your vehicle right here, right now. Where’s your driver’s license?” the
officer demanded.  I shoved my driver’s license at him through the window
and kept silent. He swaggered slowly back to his vehicle as if he ran the whole
operation and was Chief of Police himself.  I called
Mulally
and told him where I was and that I would get
there as soon as I could.

A few minutes later, the officer was walking briskly back
to my vehicle, minus the swagger.

‘Thank-you mam,” as he said  politely  while
offering my license back to me, “please just drive a little slower if you
could,” he said as he tipped his hat nervously and smiled.  My license
must have been coded in their system to indicate who I worked for. Ha! I drove
away and continued to
Mulally’s
house, this time only going fifty.  

Mulally’s
home was a large red
brick house, located not very far from C.I.A. headquarters,  encircled by
a black wrought iron fence with an iron gate anchored on either side by red
brick pillars.

‘Sir, I’m here,” I said, calling him from my car.

“Right,” he said. “Pull up next to the white Ford
pick-up.” Then the gate lock released and the two sides slowly opened, letting
me drive in. My rear bumper was scarcely through the gate when it began to
close again. The tags on the white F150 pick-up indicated that some guys from
the office had already arrived. Inside the house, there would be cameras and
alarms systems exceeding those at most prisons.

Jose and Hugo from the office were already huddled over
the dining room table with
Mulally
,
in a room which now doubled as a conference room. Sitting with their laptops
spread out on the table and staring at the screens with furrowed brows they
were visibly startled when I walked into the room and said “hi guys”.
 Jose and Hugo had been told by Todd that I no longer worked for the
company.  
Before they could ask “What are you doing
here?”
Mullaly
broke in.  

“Caroline, we’ve already made contact with
Irongate
. We requested a conference call with the CEO,
Richard Green. Sit down,”
Mullay
ordered. I took a
seat alongside Hugo and pulled my laptop from its case, plugged it into the
wall and started rebooting.  

The receptionist’s voice answered the phone: “Good
morning this is
Irongate
”.

“Hello this is Deputy Director
Mulally
calling for Richard Green.”
Mulally
had an intense presence about him at that moment.

“Just a moment please…,”said the female voice on the other
end.

Then a hefty sounding voice answered, “Hi Mike, this is
Dick.”

“Hi Dick.
We’ve got Caroline
here who reviewed the Statement of Work on PFG’s proposal to the Missile Defense
Agency, along with some of our software guys from the office who are familiar
with your product,”
Mullaly
said. “What’d your
Irongate
people find?”

“Well,” said the C.F.O., “I wish the news were good, but
it doesn’t appear that way.”

 
Mullally
wiped his chin
with his index finger back and forth, waiting for the bad news.

“We had written some code for
a
password
protection software, but it wasn’t released yet to the public
except for a couple of aerospace companies who got a trial version.”

“By ‘public’ you mean the defense companies?”
Mullaly
asked.

“Yes, that’s our public,” Richard Green replied.

‘Okay got it, please go on,”
Mullaly
said, deepening his voice to a low baritone.

 “A copy of the application, written onto a disc,
was given to Dave Jones so that he could submit it with the proposal for his
advanced drone system to the Department of Defense. We were told it would be
locked in a safe in a secure building,
”  Green
said.

“Well apparently it never made it to the Defense
Department,”
Mulally
responded. “We think it may have
gone to China as part of a deal.” In a crisis
Mulally
didn’t mince words.

“Tell me you’re joking!” Green burst out, fuming.

“I wish I were….,”
Mulally
replied steadily.

Richard Green exploded.
“Son of a
bitch!
That stupid son of bitch! What
kinda
fucking deal???”

“Looks like he’s trying to sell his drones to foreign
buyers, but the buyers were resistant so to sweeten the deal, Jones threw in
your software,” Mike explained.

“Where’s the bastard now? Right now! Where the Hell is
he?” Richard Green demanded.

It appeared that Mr. Green might send somebody to take of
Jones personally which might have been disastrous so
Mulally
let a moment slip by to allow Green’s anger and shock to subside, but his own
fear was starting to show through.

“Listen Dick,”
Mulally
said,
“there’s no time to waste here; can you tell me what kind of software you gave
to Jones?”  
Mulally’s
sense of urgency wasn’t at
all masked in his voice; it was crystal clear.

“Yea, simply put you enter your password in the system
and it checks the password for its strength.”

“What’s it?”
Mulally
was amazed
at the simplicity.

“No there’s another part,” Green added, “if your password
isn’t strong enough the software will provide an algorithmically generated
passcode that’s a stronger security code. Then there’s a companion software
that takes a snapshot of a computer after someone first logs-in to determine if
the person is a hacker or not.”

“Let me make sure I understand this, so Dave Jones would have
not a single password or two, he would have a whole series of passwords…..
of
security codes?
And a blue print on how
to log-in and avoid being identified as a hacker?”

“That’s right,” Green said as his voice grew less angry
and more worried “he would have thousands of security codes and the software
which identifies hackers so that he can work around it.”

Mulally
stopped breathing for a
moment, stunned into silence.

“Sir?”
I interrupted, “I don’t
think he gave the disc to the Beijing.”

“What?” asked
Mulally
.

“You see
,
if he sold the disc he
would have nothing left to trade. I think it’s Jones, not the Chinese, using
the passwords to access the Defense networks to download top secret files and
to sell the information to the highest bidder; if he’s got thousands of
passcodes, of which maybe a hundred are in use, that’s a continuing revenue
stream for him to keep the company afloat until he can find a buyer for his
drones.”

“But he can’t sell PFG’s military equipment to a foreign
buyer because of the export restrictions on selling defense equipment outside
of the U.S.” he replied as he shook his head from side to side then suddenly
stopped.
“Right.
He doesn’t care about export
restrictions does he?”  He asked, catching his own error.

“No sir, he apparently doesn’t,” I confirmed, watching
Mulally
pace the floor, back and
forth in agitation. He followed my logic and considered agreeing with it as
long as there was some proof to back it up. He went on to suggest that
Qureshi
might be working for the Pakistani Intelligence
organization, trading U.S. military secrets to the Iranians in exchange for oil
for Pakistan.

He held discussions with the aerospace company executives
trying to put out the word fast to contain the damage. Each company that had been
given the trial version of
Irongate’s
passcode
software was contacted.

Everything was moving so quickly. It was time to update
my friends. “Hi Bailey, we’ve got a crisis on our hands. It appears that Jones
got a copy of a passcode application that was just successfully tested at
Irongate
Software Company and ready to deliver into
production.”

“Are you sure? How’d he get it?” she asked

.

“
Irongate
gave preliminary copy
to PFG, so that PFG could include it with their proposal to the Department of Defense.
Irongate
was the intended software subcontractor
for  PFG’s
drone manufacturing in Texas,  when PFG
got the government contract and began production .”

“As a short term solution to the passcode crisis, we’ve
got
Irongate
working on a patch that’ll be downloaded
onto the networks of every company that tried their software.  
Irongate
will cancel production of that new passcode
software and destroy already existing versions, but that doesn’t help us solve
the crisis now. We don’t know how much classified information Jones stole and
who bought it from him, other than Beijing of course.  
Mulally
suspected that he sold the
entire disk to Beijing to be used by the People’s Liberation Army, or to one of
their spy schools like Hunan University.
 But I think he wouldn’t
sell the disk itself because once it’s sold, he doesn’t have anything else. He
needs a revenue stream, so I think
it’s
Jones himself
using the passwords to download information and then selling that information
in installments whenever he needs more cash.” I said.

Bailey asked “And this was triggered when the federal
government wouldn’t give PFG a prime contract and buy
it’s
drones?  The company must have been stuck with a lot of expenses for
research and development of their prototype for the new drone, and no sales to
the government to provide revenue.”

“Exactly,” I replied.  “After the DOD turned him
down, he even tried to sell the drones to the State Department, but they
weren’t in the market for killer drones, they want aerial imaging drones only.
The State Department instead went with a major defense company that produced
non-combat drone vehicles with more advanced sensors.”