Chapter 18: A Hurting Heart

I didn’t go in to EFC on Wednesday because it was my day to work in my own office. I did, however, intend to investigate what my search spiders had found overnight. Unfortunately, Andi was unable to get together for more than a pleasant good morning kiss before she left for class. She said she was scheduled to go back to the University for interviews in the afternoon and that she had a committee meeting this evening. She’d be bringing Cali home about ten if I wanted to stop by for a cup of tea before we said goodnight. I told her I wouldn’t miss it.

“Unless you are locked up someplace,” she sighed.

“Locked in.”

“Mmmhmm.”

That left me with a day to work in my office on 15th and to begin putting together the pieces that were left by the police. Yesterday, they’d finished gathering the evidence I’d left them and the tape was removed from my door. With my new toys, I had more computers lying around than would fit on my desk. I closed up my old laptop and plugged in the new one to recharge. It was powerful, but it ate batteries.

I immediately logged in to the computer in the EFC office by remote access on my tablet. The first search I wrote gave me limited results. It showed that I was online in the office but none of the other people I wanted to find. The second search result was more productive. I had a log of employee numbers of everyone who had entered the manufacturing facility in the past forty-eight hours. I matched names with employee numbers from the Human Resources database and waited for my list to be downloaded.

In the meantime, I started my gaming machine and called up the entire record of the game I’d run Monday night. I wanted to know who was playing and where they were physically located. While that was running, I flipped on my desktop unit to take a look at what the police had left me. Surprisingly, that was the first computer that gave me results to look at as all three struggled to access the cloud through my wired connection at the same time. The picture on the screen that greeted me was chilling.

The mutilated body of a child flooded my largest monitor. A message flashed across the screen that read “A worthy opponent? Two can play this game. Who do you love, baby?” The screen blanked and then images started flashing across the screen with a timer bar that told me there were two million files waiting to download.

I jerked the network cables out of the wall for all three computers as I noticed images starting to download on the laptop as well. This was not good. A quick scan of the files that were downloading told me my computer had been hit with a motherload of porn, much of which was still downloading. I pulled the power out of the desktop and the laptop, then pulled the battery from the laptop as well.

Damn!

I called Jordan and had to leave a message. Things were heating up. I knew Patterson was a predator, but I didn’t expect to be the prey. Then a thought struck me. I dialed into the office and asked for Don. The call was routed to Darlene.

“Darlene, I need to talk to Don immediately.”

“He’s in conference with Mr. Dennis.”

“Put me through to both of them, then. This is an emergency.” There was only a moment’s lag before I heard the phone connect.

“What’s going on, Dag?” Arnie asked.

“Is Don with you?”

“I’m here,” Don’s voice answered.

“Here’s the situation. I was logged in remotely a few minutes ago when I was hit with a massive attack on my office network. It blasted past my firewalls, virus detectors, and several other bells and whistles I’ve got running in my office. It’s nasty stuff. There is a chance the worm got through to my laptop in the office. If so, it could propagate through the network. You’ve got to isolate my computer from the rest of the company.” I could hear a door slam, but the only other sound for a few seconds was the clacking of keys. “Are you guys there?”

“I’m here,” Arnie said. “Don is in your office. How long ago did this attack take place?”

“Less than five minutes ago. I disconnected my computers, called the police, and then called you.”

“You called the police?”

“I’ve been doing some consulting for them on tracking down an online predator. This looks like it’s related.”

“That’s bad news for you, Dag. Very bad. If you’ve infected our network...”

“I haven’t infected anything,” I said hotly. “If the corporate firewalls are working the way they should be, nothing should be able to get through the connection.”

“Still, I can’t afford to have risky behavior in my department. We’re under scrutiny as it is.”

“Well, with luck that will all be taken care of soon, too.”

“You’ve got a solution to our little problem?”

“I’m closing in on one. I should be able to tell you more by the end of the week.”

“Good. That’s good, Dag. We’ll mop up here. You take care of your equipment. See you tomorrow.”

What was that all about? Arnie went from being threatening to exceedingly calm in a heartbeat. Just telling him I was onto a lead shouldn’t have changed him that much. Maybe he was just regretting having snapped at me in the first place. No matter. I needed to clean up the mess of my electronics. I started by pulling the hard drive in my tower. I sealed it in an anti-static bag and pulled a spare out of my locked file cabinet. Something told me I was going to need to expand my inventory of spare parts if I kept going in this business. I installed a clean system on the machine. I loaded it up with all the anti-virus software I had and connected an old modem to my landline. My T1 was obviously compromised as a route out. When it came time to get back online, I would have to use the old-fashioned way.

I grabbed my tablet and logged on to the cellular network. I wasn’t going to identify myself any further on the Internet than I had, but I needed to check my mail accounts. I knew exactly who had launched this attack, and he wouldn’t have done it without leaving me messages. Patterson was the kind of guy who loved to talk.

Sure enough, my email had been bombarded with messages, some ranting about Internet spies, some flaming me directly, and all of them containing an invitation to click on a message that I could see would lead to another virus. The last mail message, however, was one I hadn’t expected this time. It read simply “Unit purged with no harm. IGotUrBak.” What was this? Could it be that Don was the one working to back me up and watching to see what I would do? He certainly had the skills and access to everything in the company.

My phone buzzed.

“Hamar.”

“What happened?” Jordan was speaking.

“Booted the computer this morning and an attack message showed up on screen. Started downloading porn and unpacking it to everything on the network. And I’m not talking legal porn. This stuff is sick. I disconnected everything and bagged the hard drive. This was complete with a threat, Jordan.”

“I’m on my way there now. I’ve got a tech with me that will verify. See you in twenty minutes.”

Twenty minutes gave me just time enough to check the laptop. By disconnecting everything as quickly as I did, I’d aborted the download to the new laptop, which was a relief to say the least. I wanted to know more than ever now who was accessing that room. I looked at the results I’d received from my match. What I saw was not what I expected and not what I wanted to see.