The Minoan Cipher

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

Molly stood in the yard behind her house, eyes fixed on the cloudless blue sky. Her ears were cocked for the plaintive whistle of a Golden eagle, but the only sound she heard was the breeze soughing in the aspen trees.

On the ride back from Portland she had passed the accident site. A wrecker had towed the car away. She examined the raw scars on the tree and wondered what the medical examiner would make of the claw marks on the stranger’s head, but decided she didn’t really care.

When she got home, she garaged the motorcycle and went around behind the house to stand near the shed. Maybe Wheeling would drop by for a snack, but probably not. After its traumatic escape, the bird was probably so danged scared it would never come back.

Molly lowered her chin and rubbed the back of her neck. She took a final glance at the empty sky and headed into the house, stopping in the kitchen to rummage through the cupboards. She filled a bowl with tortilla chips and opened a jar of cheese dip. To take the edge off her guilt she liberated a can of diet soda from the refrigerator and carried her snack into her office.

She sat down in front of her computer, munched some chips and stared vacantly at the screen. Her mind methodically checked off a mental checklist. She ran a test of her computer. The firewalls and protections were in place. Some hackers throw every possible password at a wall to see what sticks. The technique was known as brute force. Amateur move. Time-consuming. Unlikely to reach higher levels of authentication. Guaranteed to alert the target.

Molly decided against a direct approach, such as running a scan to see how high the Auroch protective walls were. This was her first foray into Auroch. Poking around the edges of a target as big as Salazar’s company would likely trigger alarms and a counter attack.

Molly finished her chips and salsa. Then she flexed her fingers like a piano virtuoso preparing to dig into a Chopin etude, tapped the keyboard and called up the Auroch company logo with its stylized bull’s horns. She glanced with contempt at the photo of Salazar, thinking that he looked like a big old smiling lizard. Then she dissected the website.

She zeroed in on the Auroch subsidiaries. There were dozens, nearly all in the fossil fuel industry, mining or related businesses, such as, equipment manufacture or transport. With the patience of a Swiss watchmaker, she studied each company one-by-one, but made no attempt to get into their files.

After finishing the first pass, she gazed at the monitor, imagining herself on the other side of the screen. She put herself in the place of the computer experts who would have built defensive walls around Auroch. In their position, she would have made a few entry points accessible. Nothing too easy, just enough to pose a reasonable challenge to a competent hacker. She’d use sloppy programming, as if by mistake. The hacker who went down that pathway would eventually encounter a no-nonsense barrier. But by then the trap would have been sprung. The hacker would have no idea he’d been traced until he heard someone pounding on his door.

After a few minutes of contemplation, Molly came to a reluctant conclusion. There was no safe way she could get directly into Auroch or its subsidiaries. The barriers were too formidable. But every wall has a finite height and width. The Chinese had learned that with the Great Wall. So had the builders of the Maginot Line. If she couldn’t go through the cyber wall she could go over or around it.

The lavender eyes blinking behind the round lenses were the only outward sign of her inner excitement. She scrolled down the website. Her cursor came to rest on the section entitled ‘Corporate Responsibility.’ She reread the puff piece that had caught her eye on the first pass. Probably written by a committee of company public relations hacks, it was a surprising candid admission that Auroch could have been less than a good corporate citizen.

Without going into detail the piece described the damage some Auroch operations had caused. To demonstrate that the company had changed its ways, the article contained a list of two dozen environmental and green energy organizations that Auroch now sponsored. The benevolent attitude was at odds with the company’s history. The same corporation that destroyed the Oregon environmental non-profit in a few days’ time, was like a born-again sinner preaching Salvation.

She followed the links and read everything available about each non-profit. It was grinding, time-consuming work. She had to replenish her snacks a couple of times. Her computer-like memory stored every pertinent fact about each organization. One name blazed in her mind like a neon sign. She went back to the link for Fusion Technologies Research. FUTR for short.

Molly had noticed on the first run-through that FUTR had its headquarters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was about to pop a tortilla chip into her mouth but she stopped short. MIT was in Cambridge. The dude who’d attacked her and scared off Wheeling had been in Cambridge only a week before. Funny coincidence.

She dug into the FUTR website. The group had been created by some of the world’s leading scientists in the field of fusion power, in which atoms are joined together to produce heat that drives a turbine to produce energy. FUTR’s goal was to lay the groundwork for a clean energy source that would be cheap and plentiful. The organization coordinated a number of research labs experimenting with ways to harness the atomic reaction that powers the sun and the stars.

An MIT plasma physicist named Dr. Moncrieff Gardner was the chairman of FUTR. The photo of Dr. Gardner showed a middle-aged man with short pepper-and-salt hair, a friendly smile and intense blue eyes that looked as if they could see through solid objects. Molly got dizzy from reading his scientific accomplishments.

Under the photo was a message from Dr. Gardner reminding readers of FUTR’s annual conference at MIT. The conference was in a few days. The entire FUTR scientific board would attend. An announcement of global importance would be made at the conference, whose subject was: The FUTR of Energy. Dr. Gardner referred back to his first column, made at FUTR’s founding two years ago.

Molly clicked on the Archives. Summaries appeared of all Gardner’s past messages. His first outlined the non-profit’s goals, and said there hadn’t been such a concentration of intellectual power since the Manhattan Project scientific team developed the atomic bomb in a mere twenty-seven months. Gardner hoped this group accomplished its far more peaceful goal in twenty-four months.

She went back to a recent column under the title:

Her frown deepened as she read the message that described in glowing terms how Viktor Salazar was sponsoring FUTR even though fossil fuel alternatives would damage his company. Gardner had enclosed the copy of a ‘thank you’ letter he wrote after a telephone conversation with Salazar. The letter said in part that, “the selfless example of Auroch would encourage other companies to come forward for the good of mankind.”

Molly looked up Gardner’s email and phone number on the website. With that information, it was a simple matter for her to hack into Gardner’s business and personal files and follow them to Salazar. The cyber watchdogs who defended Auroch would not expect an indirect assault. Just in case, she built a firewall to prevent her probe from being traced back to her.

Within minutes she had Salazar’s list of calls made from a mobile phone. There were hundreds. It would take days to analyze all the numbers. Instead, she used his phone to connect to his computer. File after file popped onto her screen. She clapped her hands like an excited child.

She skipped over the files identified by numbers and concentrated on a few labeled with corporate names. None had appeared on the Auroch website. She guessed that Salazar didn’t want it known that Auroch had links to these off-the-books outfits. She hesitated, wondering if these files had the same level of protection guarding the corporate portals. Salazar was careful, but from what she knew of the man, he was arrogant as well. He’d never dream that anyone could get this close to him.

She hoped.

She decided to take the chance. She rubbed her palms together in anticipation only to pull back. First, she’d reward herself in advance with a snack.