Stratagems Read online

  Sammy didn’t bother looking up this time, knowing it was too early to be fed.

  Kyle stepped out, as quietly as he could, and carefully opened the sliding glass door, tossing the flashlight on the bed. He eased the bike out, his eyes darting back to the front window now and again. He gently shut the door and pushed the motor bike down the hill toward the back of the yard. The moon was nowhere in sight, only stars filled the clear winter sky. He had on a light jacket, but didn’t need much else.

  He maneuvered the motorcycle into the back alley, closing the wooden gate. It was pitch black, no street light to aid in pointing out blue Blazers or dark sedans lurking in the shadows. He pushed the bike down the alley, heading north where it spilled out onto a side street far from his own. After Kyle was at least four houses from where he started, he hopped on and fired up the engine, taking it easy on the throttle. Sport bikes had a tendency to scream in the middle of the night, and he wanted to remain as quiet as he could for as long as he could.

  When it kicked over the headlight sliced through the dark. The alley was clear as he inched his way along. After a few seconds he reached the side street and took a right, away from his house. The first main street he came upon was Paseo Del Norte, which Lawrence had told him was Spanish for the north passage. Paseo was the only six-lane that ran from one end of the city to the other at the far north end of Albuquerque. He made a left and proceeded at the speed limit, watching the city spread out before him. He lived in the upper Heights and Paseo westbound offered a beautiful view of Albuquerque, especially at night with the city ablaze in light.

  He had been so immersed in the view he hadn’t noticed right away the headlights behind him. They had come up fast, and then slowed about ten car lengths behind, keeping pace with him. It was Tuesday night so the traffic at midnight was light. It could be a cop, having spotted a motorcycle, one of their favorite targets because speeding tickets were so readily earned. Typically, every weekend sport bike riders would race their crotch rockets up and down Montgomery Boulevard until the early hours of the morning. Cops could easily fill their quotas by sitting at a side street for a couple of hours. But this was not Montgomery, and it was not a weekend. The car behind him was the only one in sight.

  Kyle kept with the speed limit, making a right on Ventura and cutting through the neighborhoods until he was at the east end of Alameda. The car had backed off but was likely trailing him from a distance, even though he could no longer see it. Before long they would round the corner, the lights once again bobbing in his rearview mirror. Kyle thought of turning around and going the opposite direction, passing the car altogether. Or maybe turning into one of the neighborhoods, but knew that wouldn’t do any good. There were only so many entrances and exits and Alameda seemed to be the hub of them all. His only chance was to make a run for it.

  He twisted the throttle and the motorcycle lurched forward, the engine screaming loud into the night. He geared three more times in succession as the bike hit forty, sixty, and then eighty. The headlights had not shown up yet. The stop sign at Louisiana was coming fast, but he had no choice and prayed there wasn’t a police car sitting in the dirt field at the corner. Or worse, a car crossing over. He’d seen pictures of motorcycles that had slammed into the sides of cars, the biker thrown over the hood and onto the street. It was a picture that always popped in his mind when he pushed the bike past seventy.

  He flew past the stop sign, the bike leaving the ground for a moment and landing once again, now traveling eighty-five. He glanced in the mirror that was quivering like a leaf in a windstorm. The headlights were there, way off in the distance, but he could tell they were catching up fast.

  Alameda cut under Interstate 25, then down to Jefferson which led to Allied. He didn’t want to go there, but hoped whoever was tailing him would assume he had and ease off. There would be a momentary blind spot where Alameda intersected with the freeway, his new friends too far behind to see which way he chose.

  No other car seemed to be on the road, except far to the south where Paseo Del Norte ran parallel with Alameda. He sped past a row of mobile homes on his left and Coronado Auto Recyclers to the right, the headlights in his mirror growing. He brought it down to seventy and ignored the stop sign at San Pedro, the bike flying across the road, leaving the ground and landing 30 feet from where the stop sign had been posted. There were cars sitting at the light on the off ramp to the freeway, none of them cops. He had a green light that quickly switched to yellow. He throttled and caught it on the transition to red, slowing under the freeway and making a left at the arrow. The headlights had not appeared at San Pedro, so there was a chance they would not know he took the freeway, and hopefully would assume he had gone to Allied.

  Kyle made it onto the interstate where traffic was heavier, making sure he did not exceed sixty, his eyes continually glued to the mirror. The onramp he had taken remained dark, no headlights. He continued on at the speed limit and left the interstate at the San Mateo exit. Within a few minutes he coasted into the parking lot of Cliff’s Family Land. It was closed, dark and locked up. In the far southwest corner sat a white pickup truck. He knew it had to be Robert, which was soon confirmed when the headlights flashed twice.

  He parked the Super Hawk next to the passenger door and climbed in the truck. Robert seemed quiet, exhausted. A large manila envelope sat between them. Robert reached up and flipped an overhead light. Kyle thought of telling him about being followed, then decided against it. If no one had tailed Robert, which Kyle was pretty sure no one had since they were the only ones in the lot, then he didn’t want to concern him unduly.

  “You look wiped out,” Kyle said.

  Robert produced a grin. “Yeah. I’m not sure if it’s from the long hours or what’s in that envelope.”

  Kyle glanced down. “What do you mean?”

  “I discovered it just before I called you. It was embedded inside the zip file on the floppy. I uncompressed it using the DIETCOKE password you gave me. There were 12 files embedded inside.”

  “What was in the archive?”

  “A couple of computer programs Charlie had written along with a couple of text documents. One of the text files was a daily log Charlie was keeping. He thought he had stumbled on a virus in our system, which would explain the file differences found between the Jammer production program and Viola development executable. There was an extra five kilobytes on the Jammer app. Charlie must have figured that five K was an attached virus. Pretty big virus, don’t you think? The one’s I’ve run across are only a few bytes long, so as no one would hardly notice.”

  “Did Charlie find out which virus?”

  “That’s just it,” Robert said, taking a swig of a Coors that had been hiding in the dark near the floorboard. “It’s not a virus. I mean it’s not a known virus that randomly infects a system. Based on Charlie’s notes, it appears it was designed and written specifically for our programs.”

  Kyle’s pulse jumped when Robert uttered these last few words. The implications flooded his mind. Norm’s theory of someone in the company being involved now appeared plausible, and left only a handful with the ability to plant something that lethal. Worse, if the code was specific to their systems, the motive had to be even more devastating than the action.

  “It gets worse, Kyle.”

  “Worse?”

  “The alien code manipulates the bank account numbers of our clients.”

  “What?” Kyle’s heart was now racing. Why hadn’t Charlie come forward and let him know? Or maybe he was going to and someone found out first. Either way, things were rapidly proceeding downhill.

  “Get this, Kyle – I took one of our customer’s programs that Charlie had in his encrypted file and put in on our development server. I compiled it and it comes out with the extra five-thousand bytes of code. I compiled it on Viola and there it doesn’t. Exact same source code, but they compile differently. I first thought, well, Viola has an older version of HP-UX, right. So maybe the compiler in
the new version adds new system calls or libraries or something. So, I wrote my own little ‘C’ program and compiled it on both, using an almost identical make file. It was the same size on each. I figure the virus is running on Jammer and some of our other systems, but not Viola because Viola is so old and we hardly ever use it. Someone, somehow, gained access to our systems. They added their own little homegrown virus. The way I see it, the virus knows exactly what programs to infect and which to leave alone. It’s targeting specific applications, and if you look at the filenames of the ones that are infected, they all deal directly with bank accounts and fund transfers.”

  Kyle inhaled deeply. “Do we know all the programs that are infected?”

  Robert downed more Coors. “One of the 12 programs which was double encrypted was a scanner Charlie was working on to identify all infected programs. There’s a problem, though. Depending on the program, the virus and the number of bytes it adds is different every time.”

  “How are the accounts manipulated?”

  “Not sure,” Robert said. “From what I can tell, Charlie might have recently discovered it. Maybe that’s when they, whoever they are, took care of him.”

  “How’d you know customer accounts were involved?”

  “Charlie found an account number encoded in one of the programs. But it was a specific account number, nothing random. He was keeping a log of everything he did. Last Thursday he wrote an entry stating he deciphered one of many account numbers, then made a call to Morgan Weir at the bank in Kentucky, one of our clients. Actually, it was one of the last entries in his log.”

  “How many bank accounts?”

  Robert shrugged. “Charlie alluded to a dozen, maybe. Each account number seems to have its own cipher, so one algorithm doesn’t necessarily work on another. That’s why he only came up with one number. Eventually, he would have found them all.”

  “So, where’s the virus hiding?”

  Robert sighed. “Beats the hell out of me. Charlie didn’t know, but somewhere inside the operating system itself. I read an entry from last Wednesday where he suspected it was attached to the actual compiler, but it could even be a system daemon running in the background. You know what this means, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I do. Someone in our organization put it there.”

  “I think it goes beyond that. There’s some pretty sophisticated logic and encryption in that virus. Even dedicated hackers would need time to come up with something so intricate. Either someone inside our company wrote the code, or someone gained access to our systems months earlier, gathered information, then worked on their little bug before they planted it.”

  “Do you think they could have penetrated the firewall?”

  Robert shook his head. “No way. That’s why they call it a firewall, you know?”

  Kyle laughed a little. “So, how many people have access to that level of our systems?”

  “I figure everyone on the network team, all system and database administrators, and most on our team.”

  “Except our team doesn’t have system admin privileges.”

  “True, but someone clever enough to write a virus could get around our security once they have access to the operating system. Not to mention the cron utility can run applications as root, even if the person who scheduled it doesn't have root privileges.”

  There was a long, drawn-out pause between them. Kyle pictured the faces of everyone on the teams as Robert rattled them off. There were about forty individuals in all. He couldn’t imagine anyone on his team was involved, and for sure not Charlie since he was trying to figure out what, and maybe who, was behind the infection. He did wonder why Charlie hadn’t come to him so they could work on it together.

  “Well, let me fill you in on a few things,” Kyle said. “I think my house might be bugged, and I also think I'm being watched. Actually, I'm sure, since I was almost followed here tonight.”

  “By who?”

  “I think the FBI, but I’m not sure.”

  “Shit,” Robert said, then repeated it a second time, finishing off his can of Coors in one, swift gulp.

  “Then who’s bugging your house?”

  “My guess is the guys that visited us this morning, or rather yesterday morning. Probably the same ones who killed Charlie. Things didn’t feel right when I got home, like they were out of place somehow.”

  “We should go to the FBI.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Whadda ya mean, not yet?”

  Kyle wasn’t certain if Robert was scared or simply influenced by the alcohol, or maybe a combination of the two. “I don’t trust them,” he said flatly. “Things are happening too fast.”

  “Yeah, but if you hand everything over then they might catch those involved, you know?”

  “They were ready to accuse Charlie of either drug trafficking or abuse. Let’s dig a little deeper before we go to the FBI...if we go to the FBI.”

  “You’re taking a big risk, Kyle, for both of us. Maybe that’s what Charlie did but he didn’t make it. I don’t want to end up like him.”

  “Me either, but if we act too soon it may backfire. Those responsible may vanish and we’ll never know.”

  “So what. Let the feds deal with it.”

  “I can’t, not yet. Beth’s in a vulnerable state right now, and we really don’t know Charlie’s involvement in this. We may believe he’s not guilty, but the FBI will likely hound Beth and that’s not what she needs.”

  Robert was silent for a moment, then asked, “so what should I do now?”

  “Go home, get some rest. You can be late tomorrow, okay?”

  “Don’t worry, I will.”

  Kyle considered his next statement, then spoke slow and clear. “Do you want to bail out of this right now?”

  Robert shook his head slowly. “No. Charlie was my friend, too, and if I can help nail the killer’s ass to the wall, I’ll do it.”

  “Thanks,” Kyle mumbled.

  “I got something else, Kyle.”

  Robert reached in the envelope and pulled out a sheet of paper, glanced over it once then handed it to Kyle. It was a printout, or photocopy, of a smart card, enlarged enough where the front of the card covered the top half of the paper and the back covered the lower half. It looked like a standard credit card with a small micro computer chip implanted in the corner. The front had three letters in the upper left-hand corner, taking up a full quarter of the card itself. The letters were NIC. The upper right of the card had a small blank square with microprint in the middle – PLACE PHOTO HERE. At the left edge, below the NIC logo, was the name Agnes Pounds printed in bold ink. Below that was a nine-digit number, followed by a dash, two digits, then another dash and two more digits.

  The lower part of the page was the back of the card, also enlarged. Along the top was a long black area running the length of the card. In the middle were three small squares, each with a patchwork design, and Kyle recognized they were three computer chips sitting side by side. Beneath the squares was a blank rectangle area, probably where the signature would eventually be written in by the owner. At the bottom a legal notice, in small print, stated the rights and privileges of the bearer. What grabbed Kyle’s attention were the three words that preceded the legalese, also in small print – National Identification Card. NIC.

  “Where’d you get this?” Kyle asked, gazing up.

  “It was a scanned image among the rest of the files Charlie had zipped together. I went on the Internet and looked up the name on front of the card. Agnes Pounds.”

  “And?”

  “The Internet turned up nothing. Of course, the listing could be under her husband’s name, if she’s married. There’s more, Kyle.”

  “More?”

  Robert reached in the envelope and took out another sheet of paper. It was a copy of an article from World Net Daily. The title indicated the Transportation Department would eventually be using the national ID cards. Kyle looked up to Robert.

  “I read it,” Rob
ert said, “twice in fact.”

  Kyle tried to read the page, but the low light and the size of print made it difficult.

  “Maybe there’s no relation between this, the scanned ID card and the rest of the files,” Kyle said. He didn’t sound as convincing as he had hoped, and could tell Robert picked up on it.

  “I remember seeing that article before,” Robert explained. “I was with Charlie when he found it. He’d been searching the Internet for Homeland Security and NAFTA information, and that popped up. I guess he saved it. It basically states that in ‘96 Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. A section in that act requires states to make their driver’s license comply with certain guidelines specified in Section 656b.”

  “Sounds like you read it more than twice?” Kyle said.

  Robert smiled. “Okay, maybe three times. Remember, this was an older article. It said that by October first of 2000 all licenses must list the person’s social security number. So, I took a second look at the copy of the national ID card. That number on the front begins with four-three-eight. Do you know what that is? I do. I was born here so my social security number starts with five. My older sister was born in Louisiana and her soc number begins with four-three-eight. The number of digits on the card is nine, same as a soc number. They must have added some digits for other reasons, but that has to be a social security number.”

  “But how does this fit in with us and Charlie’s death?”

  “No idea. Anyway, the article also goes on to say that each driver’s license must also include biometric data on the holder, a.k.a. a smart card. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Department of Transportation were given the task of designing the cards, and I think that’s one of them right there, or at least a photocopy of one. Here’s the kicker – the bill was defeated.”