The Devil's Code

CHAPTER 13

What the European hacks were doing to the IRS was simple enoughthe programming could be done by mean little childrenbut their organization showed some good old German general-staff planning. They must have worked for weeks, getting into the computer systems of not only a lot of small colleges, but, as it turned out, into the computers of several big retailers.

Without studying the problem, I would have thought that getting at the retail computers would be almost impossible, without a physical break-in to get at security codes. I was wrong. It appears that several of the big online retailers spent all their security money on protecting credit-card and cash transactions, and making sure that nobody could fool with their inventory and sales records.

But they had other computers that specialized in routine, automatic consumer contactscomputers, for example, that would do nothing but send out standardized e-mails informing the customer that his order had been shipped. For these computers, no great security seemed necessary.

They were perfect for the hacks. They were optimized for sending outgoing mail, and once the hacks were inside them, they could easily be set up to ship the phony IRS returns. At the peak of the attack, the bigger online companies were sending out thousands of phony returns per hour.

That would have been bad enough, but the hacks had taken it a step further: they didn't have the returns sent directly from the retailer to the IRS, but rather bounced them off the customers. When the retailer sent an acknowledgment of a purchase, the IRS file was automatically attached, but would not show up on the customer's computer screen. What would show up was a legitimate receipt or other message, plus a message from the hacks that said, "For auditing purposes, and your shopping protection, please acknowledge receipt of this message by clicking on the 'Acknowledge' button below. Thank you."

Every customer who clicked on the "Acknowledge" button was actually sending a message, but not to the retailer. The message was one of the phony returns, and went to the IRS. When the IRS tried to track the messages, they'd find they came from thousands of individuals all over the country, all of whom denied knowing anything about it.

The attack was continuing the following day when LuEllen and I loaded into the rental car and went for a noon-rush-hour drive on Interstate 10. We picked the Interstate because if we were moving fast, we'd be switching phone cells every few minutes.

"Hate to waste a perfectly good phone," LuEllen grumbled.

"That's why we got it," I said. Using one of the new cold phones, I direct-dialed Welsh at her NSA number. Nobody answered.

"Not there," I said, hanging up.

"What does that mean?"

I thought for a moment, and then said, "I told her I'd call her. But it's Sunday, and maybe she thinks we've only got her home phone. I'll bet she's home, sitting on the phone."

"With a bunch of FBI agents."

"Yeah, well."

I dialed her home phone and she picked up on the fifth ring. On the fourth ring, I said to LuEllen, "Maybe they don't fuckin' care." I was about to hang up, when I heard the phone shuffle, and then her voice.

"Hello?"

"This is Bill Clinton. I spoke to you last night. Did you go to Laurel?"

"Yes, we did. Is this a cell-phone call?"

"Yes."

"Then we will have to be circumspect. We looked at the account you were speaking about, but there wasn't any traffic of the kind you described, between the gentleman here and the gentleman from Dallas."

"There was last night."

"We think that the file in question may have been altered. Did you place an administrative account named B. D. Short on the Laurel installation? For your own uses?"

"No, we didn't."

"Then someone unknown has been burning files."

"I told you who it was."

"We are looking into that," she said. "We want you to stay in touch, though, and we also want to send you a file and have you look at two photographs. Can you take a quick transmission if I switch over?"

"Just a minute." I wasn't ready for that; it seemed uncommonly cooperative. I turned in the car seat, reached over the back, got out the laptop, and turned it up. "I'm just bringing it up," I said.

"I'll have to say, to be honest, that I didn't appreciate your approach last night. You scared me."

"I regret that," I said. I had the line that would go from the modem to the phone wrapped in a bundle, and fumbled it as I tried to pull off the rubber band while still talking on the phone. The bundle dropped between my legs and I had to lean forward to get it. As I did, with my head at a low angle, I noticed a helicopter a mile or so ahead, hovering above a line of buildings. I picked up the bundle of wire, undid the rubber band, and clipped it into the laptop and the phone, and called up my communications program. A moment later, I was ready.

"Switch over anytime," I said.

"It's about a hundred K, so it'll take a minute or two," she said. "If you're ready, here it comes."

I got a tone and hit the enter button on the laptop; a moment later, the download began.

"What's going on?" LuEllen asked.

"They're shipping a couple of pictures they want us to look at," I said.

"An unusual show of cooperation," she said wryly, echoing my own thoughts.

"Yeah, I." And as I started to say it, I looked right out the passenger window. There, a half mile away and running parallel to us, was another helicopter. "Shit!"

"What?" She'd picked up the tone in my voice as I plucked the wire out of the computer and shut down the phone.

"We were set up. They're tracking the call and they've maybe got us isolated. See that chopper straight ahead? We've got another off to the right."

"Aw, man, Kidd, what do we do?"

"Don't do anything, yet; keep the speed steady," I said. "In case they haven't spotted us."

"The front chopper is sliding this way."

"So's the side guy," I said. An exit was coming up, with signs for a shopping center. I could see it to the north, a big one, with what looked like an enclosed parking garage. "Take the exit, take the exit."

She cut right and took the ramp, "What next?"

"Take a left. There's a shopping center over there with a covered ramp. If they've isolated us, we won't be able to run from them as long as they can see us."

It was a cool day, and I was wearing a light sweatshirt over a golf shirt, and had a jacket in back. I peeled off the sweatshirt and began wiping down every surface I thought we might've touched, and at the same time tried to look for the choppers. The one that had been to the right was closing fast.

"I think they've spotted us," I said. "Get in the parking ramp."

LuEllen ran a stoplight, took a hard right into the shopping center, went the wrong way up a one-way drive and into the parking ramp, under cover. "We were in the backseat," she said. "We were in the back, we've got prints. We used the radio."

I'd spotted a parking space: the inside end of it, against the wall, was slightly lower than the outer end. "Right there. But don't go in head first. Back into it."

"Why?"

"Do it, goddamnit."

I crawled over the seat into the back, wiped down everything, stuffed the laptop back into my briefcase, and got out my old Leatherman tool as LuEllen maneuvered the car. When she killed the engine, I said, "Pop the trunk. Get out. Don't touch anything."

She did, pulling her hands inside her jacket sleeves, wiping frantically along the way. I hopped out, wiped the handles, then ran around behind the car, dropped to the ground between the barrier wall and the back of the car. I got the Leatherman out of my pocket and unfolded a long pointed blade with a serrated edge. After a couple of timid attempts to do it by hand, I pulled off a shoe, stuck my hand in it, and smashed the blade through the gas tank. Once I got a hole, the rest was easier, enlarging it to the size of a dime. A steady stream of gasoline flowed out and began pooling under the car and I slid out from under and stood up.

As I did, LuEllen said, "Kidd, I hear the chopperthe chopper's coming in."

"You still carry a lighter?"

"Jesus, you're gonna blow up the garage." But she got it out of her shoulder bag, a cheap blue-plastic Bic, and handed it to me. I stooped and fired it into a finger-wide trickle of gasoline. The flame caught and we ran.

Ran for fifty feet, until we were away from the car, then slowed to a walk. There were people further down the structure, but they were paying no attention to us. I could hear the chopper, somewhere, the beating sound seeming to come from all around. Then the fire jumped up from behind the retaining wall, and I heard somebody yelling; and then we were inside.

A mall is a mall is a mall. We either had to get out of this one in a hurry, or hide. I said so to LuEllen. Run or hide.

"This way," LuEllen said, grabbing my arm.

"Where?"

"Backside exit."

We walked across the width of the mall, to the far exit. "Look for somebody, a woman, getting out of her car. Spot the car. Spot the woman."

How many people have you seen getting out of cars in parking lots? A million? But try to see somebody getting out when you need to see them, and they don't. We could see that there was excitement on the other side of the mall. A couple of people running, but they were the best part of a block away. I was looking toward them when LuEllen said, "There."

I looked where she was looking. A woman was climbing out of a deep-red Dodge minivan. She was wearing a hip-length teal-colored jacket and carrying a purse. When she passed the back of the minivan, she casually turned and pointed her hand at it, and the tail-lights blinked. Then she dropped the keys in a side pocket of her jacket.

"That's her," LuEllen said. "That's her. Now do what I tell you. You gotta do it exactly right."

What I did was, I hurried halfway down the mall, until I was standing in front of a Victoria's Secret store. The woman in the teal jacket came through the inner door a second later. I started toward her, carrying my briefcase open and across my chest, digging in it with one hand. LuEllen was behind her, four or five feet back, pacing her. As we closed, I suddenly crossed in front of her and stopped abruptly, bowing over the briefcase, and she almost ran into me. She put her hands up to fend me off, and I said, "Oh, jeez, I'm sorry," but she was already past.

When she'd swerved to avoid me, then ricocheted off my arm, LuEllen had dipped her pocket for the keys. As the woman went on down the hall, LuEllen nodded at me, turned, and headed out. I was a step behind.

"We might not have long," LuEllen said, as we crossed the parking lot. She was tight. We could still hear a chopper, but it must've been on the other side of the building. Then there were sirens and for a moment I thought the cops would be blockading the place, but the sirens were fire trucks, coming in from off the mall.

We got in the van, LuEllen driving, and headed out; from the corner stoplight, we could see the parking ramp, and a fireball in the near end. Two big choppers were down in a vacant area of the lot, and a couple of hundred people were standing around, looking at the fire.

"If they get any prints out of that, they'll have earned them," I said.

"You think there were any left?"

"I don't think so. But why take a chance? And the fire got people looking that way."

"You think that woman saw your face?"

"Yeah, probably," I said. "A slice of it. Not all of it."

We took the van to the airport, trying not to touch anything. At the airport, we wiped it and left it in a reserved slot. I put a sheet of notebook paper on the dashboard with a note: "This car was stolen." A cab took us back to the motel.

At the motel, LuEllen took advantage of me. She tends to do that when there's trouble, when things have gotten tight. She went to her room, did a couple lines of cocaine, then, her eyes all blue and pinpointed, came down to mine.

"You need some exercise," she said, pulling her shirt off. LuEllen's a good-looking woman and an old friend. It would have hardly been polite to say no.

The first round of sex all done with, I was tracing some of her more interesting contours with my fingertips, and she said, "Tell me what they did."

"They must want us fairly badly," I said. "But then, we're right where they've got all their equipment. I think they probably put up several pairs of helicopters around Baltimore and probably Washington, with radio direction-finding equipmentcell phones are radios."

"I know that…

"Then, with the access the NSA has to phone call-tracing equipment, they probably picked up the cell our phone was using, spotted it, vectored in the nearest helicopters and fed them our signal at the same time. They'd get us pretty close just with the one cell, and our speed would probably tell them that we were on the Interstate. Then, if we switched to another cell, they'd have our direction, and from the time of change, a pretty good location. From that point, with their direction-finding equipment, it was only a matter of time. That's why they were downloading those pictures. They were keeping our signal going back and forth, and getting us to focus on what was happening."

"Smart," she said.

"Yeah. We fucked up. Sorry, Ifucked up I forgot who we were dealing with. If I'd been using my brain, we could've taken the tram to New York, which they would never in a million years have been covering, and we could have called from midtown at lunch. Instead." I spread my hands. "We have a major screwup. Hertz is gonna be pissed at Nancy M. Hoff."

She giggled. "Their car is a puddle of plastic."

"We hope."

Then she sighed and rolled over and said, "This was fun; both the running and the fucking. But we've got to be smarter."

"I don't see anything more for us here," I said. "Welsh told me that they'd gone into the computer in Laurel, so maybe they'll take care of everything."

"Back home?"

"You want to go back home?"

"Where're you going?"

I thought for a moment, then said, "Texas. Just to look around."

"I've been to Texas," she said. "I sort of like it there. I like the way they dress."

"You're welcome to come along."

Late in the afternoon, we checked out of the motel, took a cab to BWI, and flew to New York. We stayed overnight in Manhattan, sharing a room this time. Monday morning, before we left for La Guardia, I called Welsh at her office from a pay phone. Her secretary answered and when I asked for Welsh, said Mrs. Welsh was in a meeting.

"This is Bill Clinton. If she wants to talk to me again, right now, you have ten seconds to get her on the phone. After that, I'm gone."

Five seconds later, Welsh picked up. "This better not be a joke."

"This is no joke. This is a threat. If you come after us again, or threaten us, we'll tear major new assholes in all those bright and shiny computers you keep buying out there."

"Your threats don't worry us too much, Bill. We're only about one step behind you now."

"Oh, yeah? Get a lot of prints off that car? Listen, lady, I'm telling you. If we feel threatened, we'll take you down. If you want a demonstration of what we can do, we'll put your internal phone book on the Internet, with all the names and home addresses listed, so people who don't like your brand of bullshit can call you up at any time of day or night. Would that convince you?"

Her resolve seemed to waver: "I don't think you could."

"What phone do you think I'm talking to you on?" I asked. "Jesus Christ, woman, take a minute to think about it."

"So don't do that."

"Look at those computers, find out what happened with Lighter and Jack Morrison and AmMath and Clipper, and stay the fuck away from us."

I hung up. We were headed toward the airport, five minutes later, when one of LuEllen's cell phones rang. The taxi driver was chanting to himself in Arabic, and apparently paying no attention. LuEllen dug the phone out of her purse, punched the Talk button, said, "Hello?" listened for a moment, then handed the phone to me. "Green," she said.

Green was calling from a phone at a gas station in San Francisco. "I couldn't figure out how they were tracking us, when they were always so far away, always two or three blocks," he said. "So I drove over to my brother's placehe's got a garageput the car up on a lift and guess what?"

"You had a bug."

"Still got it," he said. "But I moved it inside the car, and duct-taped a big alnico magnet to it. When we get to the airport, I'll stick it on a car that's leaving. That ought to confuse them for a while. then we'll fly the Seattle-to-Houston route, and drive up to Dallas."

"Good. We're on our way now. We'll be in Dallas tonight."

"We'll probably stay over in Houston, see you tomorrow."

We talked for another minute, and then he was gone.

And we were gone. Seven hours later, we were in Dallas.