Executive

…45

Alex breathed in the refreshing fumes of steaming coffee coming from her mug, deeply enjoying the wonderful aroma of Brazilian dark roast.

She opened her laptop, the cloned one, to see if any interesting emails had accumulated overnight. The screen came alive immediately, going straight to the login screen, meaning the evening before she had just slammed the lid, instead of shutting it down properly. She put in her password. In front of her bewildered eyes, the screen displayed a message: printer installation complete. She verified in a hurry: yes, two printers had been installed on her laptop, one laser and one color inkjet.

Oh, my God, she thought, leaning back against her chair, thinking of possible implications. First, she concluded, Louie is one hell of a hacker. Her password was long, complex, unpredictable, not a dictionary word, and included numbers, letters, and special characters — an exclamation mark and a number sign. But had he seen anything? She checked for signs of anything out of the ordinary, checking folder access time logs, not really sure how else to gauge if he had noticed anything unusual. He could have checked the settings of the keystroke logger; he could have seen that the data was being saved, but not transmitted, unlike the rest of the company-issued computers. He could have noticed her archive of cloned emails from a number of key players in NanoLance's leadership.

She checked the email archive's last date and time of access and breathed with ease; it showed an access time stamp prior to her conversation with Louie, the conversation during which she had so naïvely invited him to hack into her machine. Let's assume everything is all right, but watch for signs of otherwise, she concluded, getting ready for her staff meeting.

All her direct reports were waiting in the conference room, ready for the weekly staff meeting. Bob Foster, the infrastructure manager, his kind eyes having a secretive smile hiding in them. Lisa Murphy, apparently a decorative doll, but with the sharp wits of a junior PhD in physics, was blatantly smiling ear to ear. Alan Walden, whose permanent worry had succumbed in favor of a more relaxed expression. And, of course, Louie, whose face was reflecting the playfully innocent look of a nine year old whose bicycle is in the middle of the driveway, while he's telling everyone he didn't leave it there.

"Good morning, everyone," Alex said, and then sat down. She looked again at everyone around the table and decided to grab this bull by its horns.

"By the looks of it," she continued, "you are all aware of Louie's exceptional hacking abilities."

A roar of laughter burst in the room. Louie blushed.

"What were you thinking?" Alex asked, with visible amusement, yet watching carefully for his reactions. "You're not supposed to hack into anything, that's illegal!"

"No, ma'am," Louie said, "not with your consent, it's not."

Another roar of laughter. They had all known about this for a while.

"I see. I guess you're right, I did specifically invite you to hack in, didn't I?"

"Precisely. The way I read your orders, ma'am, was that you did not have the time to input your password, and you delegated the task to me."

"Lovely," Alex said.

"By the way, you have one extremely complicated password," Louie continued, "took me a full fifteen minutes to crack it."

"Oh," she said, with an admiring tone that acknowledged his ability.

"He is the meanest hacker out there, this guy, but don't tell anyone," Lisa offered.

"All right," Alex said, changing direction, "let's talk a bit about what we can expect from the aftermath of the drone incident, and how infrastructure and support needs to prepare. Thoughts, anyone?"

"First of all," Lisa said, "I don't think we were to blame at all. We do one hell of a job here, you know."

"Who do you mean, we?" Alex wanted to know for sure.

"We, infrastructure and support, this team," Lisa replied.

"It's not about putting blame on the department. The company might have a rough patch ahead of it, though, even if the company wasn't to blame. I want us to focus today on our readiness to support the larger organization, as it deals with the aftermath of all this. Regardless of who was the Florida drone's manufacturer, we still need to be ready to assist."

"We can allow access to our data, in a structured manner, with zero or little warning," Bob said. "Our systems are designed to allow quick retrievals of data and activity or service logs, to do exactly that — support potential investigations or performance assessments. We're good on this end."

"On my end, though," Alan said, "we could run into potential problems."

"Why is that?" Alex asked.

"Well, we deploy the hardware associated with the loading, testing, and deployment of the drone landmark acquisition and recognition and the target recognition software."

"And why would that put us in a hot seat?"

"Because, well, corners were cut," Alan said, looking down. "Not by us, of course, but we have knowledge of that being the case."

"What corners were cut?"

"The software testing did not occur on specs. Hardware deployment sees the activity logs and can figure out what testing had been done, and if it's up to par with the spec. You see, for all the software we deploy, we have specifications for the particular hardware that goes with it — this is what my team does. There are also clear specifications as to how software should be developed, tested, deployed, and retested. That's where the corners were cut, in the software deployment team."

"Did you report your findings?" Alex asked.

"Yes, more than once."

"What happened?"

"I was shot down, told to mind my own business."

"Did you report these findings by email?"

"Oh, sure, CYA, right?" Alan smiled sadly.

"CYA? What's that?" Alex looked confused.

"Aww… don't tell me you've worked in corporate for so long and you don't know what CYA means?" Louie laughed. "Stands for cover your ass, as in having paperwork to prove you've done your job."

"I see, well, thank you for educating me," Alex said, then turned her attention back to Alan. "Can you please forward me such emails? They would probably come in handy in the near future."

"Will do," Alan said, looking less at ease. "Other than that, we're in good shape. But if there's an official inquiry, and they ask me direct questions, I will have to tell them the truth."

"I would expect nothing else," Alex said, supportively.

"On my end," a now-serious Louie said, opening his portfolio to look at his notes, "there has been, in the past, business analysis done ad-hoc, by request of several executives, reflecting less-than-expected performance results for various areas touching infrastructure. I have also been asked, over time, to run reports for areas that were outside of the scope of infrastructure and support, such as software reliability and testing analysis reports, R&D-related reports, and so on.

"I have to confess I kept my head down on these reports. I ran the data, drew the conclusions, sent them over, and never followed up if the results were bad. Maybe I should have said something to somebody, I guess. My thinking was that if they were running the reports, then they were planning to do something to address the shortcomings, so I didn't feel compelled to do anything about the subpar performance that I found in my reports. Now, well, I don't know anymore."

"All right," Alex said, "I wouldn't worry about it now, what's done is done. Let's be ready to assist in every way possible going forward. Let's keep one another informed at all times. It's better to over-communicate issues going forward, than risk missing key information. Anything else?" Alex asked, preparing to adjourn.

Silence.

"Then, we're good. Have a great rest of the day!"

"Going out for a smoke, boss?" Louie asked, invitingly. She nodded her approval. Lisa tagged along.

Out on the lush lawn, Alex pulled her e-cig from its holder and inhaled the light vapor.

"Not doing the real deal anymore, huh?"

"Nah… stains my teeth and stinks up my house, but I can't quit either," she replied laughing.

"Listen," Lisa approached her with timidity, "there's something I wanted to tell you."

"Sure, go ahead."

"There were some people asking questions about you yesterday. Sheppard was with them."

"What people?" Alex felt her heart doubling its rhythm.

"Not sure. They wanted to know if you ever mention anything outside of work, if we ever met with you socially, if we heard you reference anything out of the ordinary, stuff like that."

"There were two men," Louie clarified, "pretending to ask casual questions, but they seemed really interested in you, specifically."

"I see," Alex said. "Does this happen often?"

"It does happen now and then," Louie said, "we are, after all, a defense contractor. We all have security clearances to be able to enter this building. Sometimes there are audits being run, just to prevent potential problems."

"Ah, then I'm sure that's OK, nothing to worry about, but thank you both for letting me know. I really appreciate it," Alex said, putting her e-cig back in her pocket.

"One more thing," Louie whispered, close to her ear, "don't ask people to forward you certain emails. You never know who's watching email traffic, do you? Then you'd both get in trouble… If you want to see Alan's CYA emails, ask him to print them. That's what printers are for."