Previous Chapters
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Hunger, thirst, safety, offspring
David Garfunkel, “Garf” to his friends, Barf to his enemies, went to the ATM in the corner. He typed his PIN and asked for his balance. He was getting ready to put a big smile on his face. The number showed on the screen, a couple of hundred dollars and change, and the smile disappeared before it even formed. That son of a bitch, he was thinking. That Art Lewis had promised him twenty thousands dollars for his work. He finished the work, but there was no phone call, no email. Nothing. And the money was never transferred either. He looked at the numbers again, and decided that he had enough for junk food and beer for the next few days. He made up his mind to start worrying about it in a few days when he runs out of money. In the meantime, he thought, there were things to do.
Garf was a computer whiz from the number one whiz maker – Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT. Like many of his friends, and he had quite a few, he didn’t particularly care for software engineering, testing, quality, and other overhead. He only cared about getting new problems to solve. Challenge and livelihood were synonyms for him. Without the challenge of cracking open problems, solving them not only in theory but in reality as well, he was lost.
It was most unfortunate that the Federal Government, as well as a few other governments around the globe thought that his activities were criminal. He really didn’t understand what the fuss was all about. He wasn’t like some of his pals who were doing time. He didn’t empty out bank accounts, didn’t fake cellular phones. He didn’t even give himself better grades, not that he needed any. All he did was helping the government a little. He started reminiscing about the time when he realized that some NASA probe was going to get in the wrong orbit of some planet. So he hacked into the server, corrected the really simple calculation, and the probe smoothly went into orbit. What did he get in return? A couple of Feds showed up with a white Ford LTD Crown Victoria and scared the living daylights out of his mother. What ungrateful SOBs. He was looking for viruses everywhere. In some places he was asked to do that, and was paid handsomely, and in others he just did it out of good will and patriotism.
Over the years he had developed a signature. Every server hacked, every website cracked open, was left with a souvenir. A small souvenir signed by Garfunkel.
He figured, the morons would never figure out that there was a signature in the first place. He was wrong. They might not be the best and brightest, but sure enough they were able to open a hidden file in the kernel. The Limbo dancing snake was a nice touch, he thought back then. He learned the lesson though. From that day on, he religiously used a triple anonymous site mechanism, which gave the Feds zero chance of retracing him. It’s been years since he had any interaction with the Federal Government. He was scanning his battery of computers every day, he wrote special kernel programs to see if anyone was pinging him, sending him Trojan Horses. He hasn’t seen any in a couple of years at least. He felt safe. Safe enough to meet with this clown Arthur Lewis, or whatever the hell his name was, and work for him.
He didn’t really know what he was doing for Mr. Lewis. All he knew was that every other day or so, Arthur would show up in his basement, with an envelope containing a few DVDs. Lewis would hand over the DVDs quietly, and in return take an envelope with a couple of printed documents Garf had prepared for him. It was an easy enough job. It didn’t take a whole lot of time, and it left Garf with plenty of time to do other hack jobs, but mainly, he had enough time and plenty of money for his real hobby – drinking.
Garf withdrew eighty dollars, and went back to his car. He still had some work to do, and payday or no payday, work needed to be completed.
He was contemplating the problems he was working on for this Mr. Lewis guy. Garf was a genius. He rarely needed more than a few minutes to understand the problem. He often took less than an hour to form a solution in his mind, and a couple of hours more to implement it. Most of the time, he actually improved the algorithm while writing the software to solve the problem. His algorithms were clean, short, self explanatory, and concise. Algorithms, a set of instructions given in pseudo code, have a notion of performance; depending on the number of times an instruction is performed to solve the problem. Finding the largest number in any list of numbers is order of magnitude of the number of elements on the list or O(N). Common sorting algorithms perform at O(N2), better ones perform at NLogN. Mr. Garfunkel was notorious for finding algorithms which performed an order of magnitude better than the common algorithms. He won quite a few prizes for improving test book algorithms. He thought it was a silly game.
But Mr. Lewis asked him to look at a different kind of problem. He was asked to crack a code. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed that he was looking at an Enigma. The mechanism the Nazis had used in WWII to encode and decode messages from Central Command to their operatives in the field. He was looking at combinations of letters, four letters, trying to find patterns, trying to make sense of them.
He was making progress, but not knowing what he was looking at, he was at a disadvantage. He mentioned it to Mr. Lewis a few times, but Mr. Lewis always found a way to dodge the questions. Lewis promised him that he was better off not knowing the source of the data. He didn’t buy that, but he didn’t know of a way to get the missing information.
He opened the car door, but just before going in, he turned around and into the convenience store at the corner. He bought a six pack of Heineken and the Daily News and went into the car. An unmarked police car was parked across the street, with two cops in plain clothes. Amazing, he thought, they really think they are undercover. Garf never thought much of the police, but this was outstanding, even for them. He started the car and drove home.
The unmarked police car was two cars behind. His mind was already elsewhere, he was crunching numbers, or rather patterns of letters. His mind was barely noticing the traffic lights and signals. He was thinking about algorithms and beer.
He stopped at a traffic light and took a quick look at the paper’s headline. He swallowed hard when he realized that the photo on the front page was Arthur Lewis’. He almost lost it when he realized that the guy was dead. His mind started to race. What the hell? Who was Arthur Lewis? The light turned green, and the driver behind him blew the horn impatiently. Instinctively he looked in the rear view mirror, and knew he was in trouble. That undercover Crown Victoria was in pursuit. The subject seemed to have been no other than him.
Well, he thought, here’s a puzzle to solve. His sharp mind, now assisted by a full blown adrenaline rush started to think. First, he though, he had to shake the tail. He started driving, and at the same time turned off his cellular phone and took the SIM card out. A minute later, a new SIM came out of his wallet and found its way into the old Nokia. This SIM, he well knew, would never surrender his location. Eavesdropping would be anywhere between extremely difficult to impossible. The technology was relatively simple, yet few owned it. Garf was an expert in cellular technology. Not the cumbersome devices, but rather the technology of taking communication packets, as shipped by the device to the nearest cell, and then most likely to the underground cable, heading in the direction of the target device – whether a land line or another cellular phone. Garf planted a Trojan horse virus in all of the national carriers that were serving his area. The Trojan was dormant, waiting for a single event to wake it up. That event was about to occur.
Garfunkel dialed a sequence of numbers, sixteen digits long, and waited. “Welcome” said the voice, a synthesized voice of Start Trek Seven – the dissimilated Borg, and Homer Simpson, the famous cartoon character, “please enter a number and then the pound sign”. He thought it would be a nice touch. He dialed a number and a groggy voice said “what the hell?”. Garfunkel said to the person on the other end of the line that he needed help, and the person said: “one hour, usual place”. Garf was thinking how easy this was. All that needed to be done is for the Trojan to identify his call, to strip his identity off the packets coming in, and directing them forward. If someone was to trace the call, they would be very surprised to learn that the call came from within the White House. A further investigation would lead to a Federal Government communication switch somewhere in Avenue K, and after that a very large variety of airphones, traveling back and forth in 30,000 feet altitude. There was really no way to trace the calls and he knew it very well. Plus, he thought, it was a really neat puzzle to all those nine-to-five people working for the Government, most likely in Virginia…
He had an hour to shake the tail. He made a right, and an immediate left. Then he made a quick U turn and another left. He was speeding away, when he realized that the tail was gone, but another one showed up. Now he knew, he was in deep shit. If the new one was Fed, then it must mean that they really want to talk to him. If it wasn’t, then that would spell a completely different order of magnitude of trouble…
Looked like plan B was up next. Garf made a few quick turns, ran a couple of red lights, went up the wrong way in a one way street, and then, next to Cleveland Circle, he parked the car nicely in a parking lot, paid for a week in advance and went down the stairs to the subway. He took the Green Line to Park Street. Before he switched to the Red Line, he walked around, went to the bathroom, bought a piece of candy. He kept his eyes open for unfamiliar people trying to blend in, who was miraculously everywhere he went. When he realized that there were none, he boarded the Red Line and went all the way Braintree.
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