The Protocols of Carstairs
Copyright© 2021 by Ron Dudderie
Chapter 18: Got the MacGuffin
Saturday, September 26th, 2015. Pullman Zamzam hotel, Mecca.
The next day I could barely walk. All in all I’d walked at least fifteen kilometres the day before, to which I’m not used. My ankles felt as if they were on fire and I actually fell over when I got out of bed. This caused me to scream. Shortly after there was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” I groaned, trying to get up. Amina came in and was alarmed to see me in some distress. She immediately put her hand under my armpit, so I wouldn’t fall over again.
“WHAT IS WRONG?”
“UNG ... nothing much ... I just ... I’m so sore. I fell over.”
The Khafama came in, saw her touching me and went apeshit. I didn’t understand a word, but Amina was getting both barrels. I was busy trying to get back on my feet, but the bedsheets didn’t exactly give much purchase.
“SHUT YOUR PIOUS PIEHOLE!” I bellowed. “Help me get up, you thundering arsehole!”
Two staff members came in, alarmed. One was an armed guard. Amina was in a right panic at this point and the Khafama didn’t take kindly to my admonitions, so we had ourselves a lovely screaming party during which I threatened to cut off the Khafama’s balls if he bothered Amina again. This did not go over terribly well with the hotel staff, but I was on full Carstairs now and anyone on this planet below the rank of Sovereign immediately wets their pants when I raise my voice in the accent I totally copied off the BBC when I was twelve. I was hoisted back in bed and shortly after visited by an African physician, who seemed marginally pissed-off at having been called in to see a man with minor muscle ache.
“Just have a hot bath and order a massage and you will be fine, Sir,” he grumbled. “For pain relief you can just take any pain killer.”
“Yes, thank you.”
I ordered breakfast and that was brought in by Amina.
“What, you again? Let’s not provoke the Khafama too much, eh?”
“The Khafama has just left with prince Asim. To the roof.”
“What, our roof?”
“Yes. Of the hotel.”
“What’s on the roof?”
By way of an answer we heard the thudding sound of a white and blue helicopter which suddenly appeared in a corner of my large window. It had clearly taken off a few floors above us and after a minute or so passed out of view, in the dusty haze of the desert beyond the mountains that cradle Mecca. Would someone traveling by helicopter be bringing that ostentatious laptop with him, I wondered.
Meanwhile, Amina was folding out a tray I could put over my legs to have breakfast off.
“Any idea where they are going?”
“A desert camp, I think. I packed for the Khafama.”
“What’s he going to a desert camp for?”
“I don’t know. So you went on the hajj yesterday?”
“Sort of. The highlights. Soarin’ over Mina. Pirates of Jamaraat. Carrousel of regress. Fantasyland, obviously. Art of adulation. Pilgrim mover.”
“What are you even talking about?!”
“Just kidding. Yeah, Asim took me to see Tent City. Got a private tour and everything. Then we picked up some stones at ... uhm...”
I snapped my fingers, trying to think of the place.
“Muzdalifah?”
“No, Arafat. The train station, not the mountain. Then we threw them at a wall. And I had a kebab.”
That made Amina laugh. ‘I had a kebab’ just sounds funny. Try it.
“So you also did animal sacrifice,” she joked.
“Yes! And I’m bald. See? Did the works. We can get married now, I’m basically in the club.”
“Marry you? But you’re far too old!” she teased.
“Yeah, like that’s a problem here. YOU are too old to get married, you mean. What are you, twenty-one?”
“Twenty-five. Okay, I have to go before the hotel manager comes to find me. Anything else, Mr. King?”
I ignored that, but I did have a question.
“Yeah, before you go, will you draw me a hot bath? Or I may never walk again.”
“I will do that. Enjoy your breakfast.”
Asim came to see me, entering my suite via the connecting door. He was surprised to find me in bed.
“Good morning, Carstairs. Unlike you to be in bed so late! I have a plan for today.”
“Well, I...”
“There is a high speed train between Makkah and Medina. You will LOVE it. The stations are very, very modern but beautiful, just beautiful. Almost like flowers. And the trains go more than two hundred kilometres per hour! I think the stations are outside the haram zone, so you can travel as yourself! But the Mosque of the Prophet is also very beautiful, I think you would...”
“Asim! I can barely walk! I’ve overdone it yesterday and today I fell over trying to get out of bed. I’m not going anywhere, I’m afraid.”
“Oh? I am sorry to hear that. I am sore too, but we will be on the train for four hours. They have a buffet car. The staff there are ladies!”
“Really? Actual women? That is incredible. Whatever next. But perhaps tomorrow. Today I really don’t feel up to it. And I have lessons with Alexandra.”
“Good luck finding her. She went out shopping as soon as Omar left for the helicopter platform.”
“Yes, I saw the helicopter leaving. Where is he going?”
Asim, who I can usually read like a book, shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.
“He ... is going to visit some Bedouin friends. They live in a desert camp near Tabuk.”
“Tabuk, where’s that?”
“Far away.”
“Really? I thought he was going to participate in the hajj.”
And I didn’t know he had any friends.
“I don’t know,” answered Asim, somewhat testily. “But if you are not in the mood to go out today, I will find something else to do. You would have loved the train, I’m sure.”
“I do appreciate it, Asim. Yesterday was remarkable and I’m glad I came along.”
That mollified him. And it wasn’t even a lie. You can enjoy experiences from different perspectives. For instance, I don’t give the tiniest shit about baseball, but I had a grand day when Phil and Wayne took me to see a game. Though they still mock me for getting upset at the price for a hot dog. Oh, and there I had to stand up for the American national anthem, which was almost as uncomfortable as pretending to worship towards Mecca.
“Tomorrow, then. Today I will find something else to do. Good luck with your legs, Reginald.”
“Thank you, Your Royal Highness.”
After breakfast I moved to the bathroom, inch by inch. The bath did its job, but I could have done without the scented oils and petals Amina had added to the water, no doubt as a joke. I reeked of rose oil, but I suppose it could be worse. After I emerged, a lot quicker than I had submerged, and rinsed off the petals I got dressed in a proper suit. Time to get to Omar’s laptop. If you’ll recall my room connected to Asim’s, whose room connect to Omar’s. Alexandra’s room was at the far end. It was worth seeing if I could get there via the connecting doors, rather than coming up with some excuse to bother housekeeping. And so I stepped into Asim’s room and was surprised to actually find him there, playing a game on his iPad.
“Carstairs! You’re up!”
Well, shit.
“Yes, I am somewhat restored.”
In my mind’s eye I already saw myself boarding the train to Medina. What a complete amateur I am!
“I’m sorry, I made plans for today. I am about to leave,” said Asim.
“I see. What time?”
I shouldn’t have asked that, but he didn’t mind.
“In one hour or so. My friend will call me when he is ready.”
“Very good, Sir. Enjoy your day.”
“Salaam,” he said, already staring at the screen again.
I went out into the hallway and tried my key card on Omar’s door, just to cover all the bases. Predictably the tiny red LED flashed. Then I strolled through the reception area and read a newspaper (in Arabic, which wouldn’t have fooled anyone who tracked my eye movements because I’d forgotten to read from right to left) while I observed the front desk. It was unmanned unless the receptionist downstairs called ahead, so I figured I’d get a chance to slip behind the desk and encode a card for Omar’s room. In fact, I probably missed three solid chances right then, but I wasn’t very quick on my feet.
The lobby had an even bigger window that looked out over the Grand Mosque, and a very expensive pair of Zeiss binoculars stood on a rosewood table, ready to be used by anyone. I had a go and looked at the buildings below, mainly for something to do.
I noticed quite a few antennae on the rooftops, one of them being a small dish aimed squarely at my building. That seemed odd. Satellite dishes for private use aren’t allowed in Saudi, because they’re an easy gateway to get access to porn. In practice this meant only those with the right connections and suitably large houses had them (and watched porn). And so I didn’t have any nearby buildings to compare the position of the dish against, but it made me think: wouldn’t this building, or rather the Clock Tower, be an ideal place to serve as a network hub? I remembered being at the top of the Berlin TV tower with a very early digital camera. The footage was almost unusable, because all the transmission equipment overhead gave off such a lot of radio interference. Or rather, radio and television signals. Seemed a waste of a good skyscraper not to use this one, right?
I went back to my room and fired up my laptop. In my bag I had an external antenna for the wifi, just a few inches long but a lot better than built-in wifi. Without the antenna my laptop easily picked up the hotel wifi network, and the local printer at the reception desk. With my antenna and some special software that’s only supposed to be available to network engineers, I found I could see at least thirteen other networks on the 2.4 Gigahertz band. There was a lot going on here. The names were set in Romanised Arabic, because even though Word processors support many different languages, network equipment by and large only uses the ASCII character set and that’s it. I found a channel called ‘Bawwaba_master’, which means something like entrance, gateway or portal. It was secured with WPA-2 encryption.
Cracking WPA-2 is not exactly easy. It depends on how much traffic is passing through the channel. More data means more information. There are a number of attacks, all available through ready made software interfaces that are fairly easy to operate. I had a few ready to run. One simple utility simply tried again and again to connect to the network using a long list of known and frequently used passwords. Cycling through all combinations between 00000000 and ZZZZZZZ might take years, but the list contained a lot of common passwords, factory defaults, etcetera. At the same time I started a sniffer, which took samples of the network traffic and tried a PMKID hashcat attack. That’s one way to melt your processor, but laziness and convenience are your friends: a short password is fairly easy to crack and because these passwords must often be entered into a variety of devices, all with different interfaces, they tend to be human friendly. I left my laptop to run and ordered tea and a scone from room service. You will not be surprised to learn that scones are not available in the Pullman Zamzam in the heart (or perhaps I should say the bowels) of Saudi Arabia. And yet they have the temerity to call themselves a civilised nation.
While I was listening at Asim’s door to ascertain if he was still in his room, my laptop dinged. The password for Bawwaba_master turned out to be 000111222333. And I could hear Asim in his room, talking on the phone.
I changed my MAC address, just in case, and connected to the network to see what was going on. My browser opened automatically and showed a green portal page with white Arabic text under the Siemens word logo (just turquoise letters on white). A Google Translate plugin in my browser did its best, but it turned out to be a lot of legalese regarding use of the service, unauthorised access, etc. Boilerplate stuff. At the bottom of the page were two fields under the word ‘Login’ in English. On a whim I tried ‘admin’ and ‘admin’. To my surprise, a green checkbox appeared next to the top one and a red cross next to the bottom field. That is very shoddy programming: you’re not supposed to tell hackers when they get part of something right. And so I tried a few passwords, including the classics:
adminadmin
admin01
admin1
hello
marhaba
password
mypassword
2015
123456
football
qwerty
1qa2ws
starwars
salaam
salat
sala
azan
azaan
adhan
asalaamaleikum
salaamaleikum
mohammed
muhammed
muhammad
allah
allahuakbar
allahuakhbar
inshalla
Bingo: admin/inshalla. Seriously?! The next page loaded at once and I had to look at it for a while before I could make sense of it. It looked horrible, because engineering software doesn’t bother with such niceties as style sheets and rounded corners. What was Siemens controlling here? Air conditioning? Power plants? Water pressure? I had no idea and neither had the Google translate plugin, because all the text labels were image files, obviously without an ALT description because blind people tend not to be systems engineers. It looked like a maze if anything, with switches on certain intersections. Maybe a water filtration system? A sedimentation tank? Could this be something to do with the Zamzam well? I had no idea, so I idly pressed a few switches and all that happened was that the website replaced them with a new image, of a switch in the opposite state. After five minutes of that I was none the wiser about the purpose of this site.
“Well, sod that. I have shit to do,” I grumbled, and just then I heard Asim in the hallway, loudly speaking into his phone on his way to the lobby. He has that annoying habit of putting someone on speakerphone and then holding up his phone as if he is about to take a bite out of a submarine sandwich. Am I the only one who gets absolutely furious about that? What the fuck, just hold it to your ear! It’s a phone, you’re not on Star Trek, you twat.
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