Chapter 7: Hunting for What Isn’t There

THE NEXT STOP on our journey, after a long day of travel, was San Francisco. By this time, it must have come to the attention of Jordan’s watchdogs that I was emptying the cash cards. I’d been withdrawing a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars a day, but I collected receipts for my expenses and itemized everything I spent in a little log book. Paper. Before long, my digital trail would evaporate. I wanted a record of my journey should I ever be called upon to prove my location. I even snapped a photo of everyplace Maizie and I had stopped. Yes, there was even a photo of Monique holding her in her arms. Maizie was becoming quite the photo hound and happily posed for the pictures.

The Act III Motel had been pet-friendly but in California, it seemed the entire town was pet-friendly. Especially to small dogs. We walked several blocks from our hotel to a Chinese restaurant but Maizie wanted to be carried back like all the other small dogs she saw. She’s only eighteen pounds. I carried her.

Our day was filled with moving from WiFi hotspot to hotspot around the city. I was probing the defenses of some of the companies I suspected he might have worked for. And how did I decide that? I looked for a company I might want to work for.

It hadn’t escaped me that Hacker X and I were similar. His attack against Carlisle had been particularly vicious but the list of attacks he’d launched were not limited to religious institutions. I wondered, in fact, if I had merely beaten him to the punch when it came to Philanthropolis. His attacks on corporate entities seemed more surgical. A bank president, a chief financial officer, a doctor, and a lawyer had all been reduced to bankruptcy, but none had been completely erased. And they were scattered across the country, nothing that would help me pinpoint his physical location. Cyberspace doesn’t recognize state lines or national frontiers.

It was thinking about how similar we were and how I felt about executives in general that led me to a breakthrough.

It surprised me that Hacker X had never launched an attack on a business or a person in Silicon Valley. The area is rich with potential targets, but also with the highest concentration of top-notch programmers in the world. One characteristic of hackers is that they want to pit themselves against the best in order to show that they are supreme. The cliché is a theme in the James Bond movie GoldenEye when Boris Grishenko constantly repeats ‘I am invincible.’ That’s what every hacker wants to believe and the only way to prove it is to take down every other hacker.

I’d delved into the dark web on many occasions. Andi used to say I went to Nowhere Land. Here, hackers communicate, illegal merchandise is sold, and secrets are hidden. I was searching forum archives for signs of missing hackers. Who was here two years ago that isn’t here now?

Of course, it wasn’t just people who showed up on this kind of search, it was also companies. Thirty percent of new businesses fail within the first two years. Fifty percent in five years. Only one in four ever see their fifteenth anniversary. It’s a bit worse in the high-tech sector. And the ones that get the most attention are those that venture capitalists have sunk a lot of money into without adequate management.

And that was where I discovered Xebar Research. The total lifespan of the business was seven years. Two years ago, its assets had been acquired by a holding company and the doors were closed. All fifty employees were locked out. No final paychecks. No vacation accrual. No company stock value in 401ks. Evaporated.

I wondered first if this had been the first attack of Hacker X. The company and all its employees had been dismantled. But as I dug deeper, it became obvious that investors in the company had carefully planned its demise. The company had shown some great potential in combating malicious websites with its software, but there didn’t seem to be a market for taking apart phishing sites in China. The typical shortsightedness of corporate decision-makers wants a defense against attack, not an attack on potential enemies. The company was sinking into debt and the investors pulled the plug.

The investors. A venture capital firm that included a bank in New York, a capital consortium in Florida, and a legal firm in Washington. A banker, a chief financial officer, and a lawyer.

After two days in San Jose, Maizie and I moved south again, but this time my nightly searches had a different intent. I’d located the link between the bankrupt investors, but I couldn’t figure out how either the doctor or the preacher fit into the group. What I needed now was to get into the records of the former company and find out who was employed there.

It didn’t take long. By the time I was walking the beach at Malibu with Maizie, I’d found all the corporate records. If you acquire the assets of a technology company, you need to have the technology. The entire Xebar computer network had been re-established inside the holding company behind a so-called impervious firewall that took me half an hour to breach. I didn’t waste time looking into all the protected research. I grabbed all the company’s human resources files.

Ego plays a part in everyone’s life. Without it, we’d have no sense of self-worth. My bet was that Hacker X would gladly destroy all trace of himself, but he wouldn’t touch the tech he was proud of. I loaded the HR files onto my remote server and began running my analytics on the records. I woke up after my nap to find there was no employee number thirty-one.

Dates of employment for employees thirty and thirty-two were sequential, showing the same start dates. But the blank spot at slot thirty-one declared to me that there had once been another employee who started that day.

It should be easy to just call the other two guys and ask them who else started work that week, but there was no way I could do that without exposing myself to them. If these guys were as smart as I suspected they were, they’d get suspicious of that type of inquiry immediately. I needed the name.

Next stop, the U.S. Patent Office.

Both of the other employees were listed as research engineers, so I had to assume they worked with my missing engineer. I started looking up patents with their names on them, issued since their employment date. Patents are part of the intellectual property of the corporation and are owned by the corporation. But the patent office doesn’t recognize the corporation as an inventor. People invent. The patent application will always list the people who are credited with the invention.