Ridley Pearson - Choke Point

“Yes, of course. I made some calls initially, but I can expand upon that now that I have your needs more fully in mind.”

“I’m in something of a hurry,” Grace says. “Money is an issue, of course, but more than anything, I do not want someone beating me to the marketplace. First to the baker gets the freshest loaf.”

“And the warmest,” the agent counters, leaving Grace to wonder if she means anything threatening by it.

—

DULWICH FINDSa pooled office rental; one of six stand-alone offices, rented by the day, week or month, that share a conference room, printers, copiers and faxes, and a receptionist to run them. The Internet access is fiber-optic.

He, Grace and Knox meet there the following morning, with Knox in charge of runs to the kitchenette for coffee and tea orders. Dulwich has been awake since two when the Rutherford Risk offices opened in Hong Kong. Knox has been up most of the night on the canal boat.

There’s little conversation as Grace goes about her work. Knox dozes. Dulwich answers e-mails. The office is warm. Dulwich opens a window to the sounds of a city waking up. Grace has been supplied a VPN address, user name and password by the IT boys in Hong Kong. If she hadn’t studied and trained under Kamat and Yamaguchi, she might have doubted the data would allow her access into the bank’s network, but the two are like magicians and she the adoring apprentice. Yamaguchi’s head currently occupies a video window in the corner of her screen. A Bluetooth headset adheres to her right earlobe like a piece of ugly jewelry. Overhearing the one-sided conversation, Knox has to stifle his chuckles that bubble up from ignorance; she’s speaking the utterly indecipherable language of computers.

She puts Yamaguchi on hold to address Dulwich and Knox. “Only once I am in will we know if it will hold. If the system detects this as an attack, it will shut me out.”

“I thought I gave you everything you need,” Dulwich says.

“Yes. But Dr. Yamaguchi cautions me of the Ziegler Protocol—some institutional security maps a user’s most commonly accessed pages as well as the hierarchy route adopted to access those pages. Think of accessing The New York Times online. One person might go directly to Sports from the home page; another might first scroll the entire page reading headlines and then go to Sports. Those slight differences define us as users. Dr. Yamaguchi suggests I take my time getting to recent cash withdrawals. The deeper I am in the system, the more complex it is to compare this visit to others.”

“So? What’s the problem?” Dulwich complains.

“The longer I am online inside the server, the more time we give the Ziegler Protocol to work.”

“Catch-22,” Knox says.

“Exactly so. We must make a choice—collectively. It cannot be mine alone. If we are locked out, Dr. Yamaguchi believes it could be three to five business days before he can regain access for us.”

“Shit.” Dulwich pulls the window shut. It’s too noisy for him.

“Yamaguchi got us in,” Knox says. “I think we ought to listen to him.”

“If you go directly to cash withdrawals, how long to download that data?”

She shakes her head. “Not long, given that we are not looking back so very far. At these speeds, the download itself is a nonissue, which was the point of getting this kind of bandwidth in the first place.”

“Give me a time, Grace.”

“Under five minutes.”

“And this protocol? How fast—”

“Instantaneous.” Grace allows that to sink in. “Dr. Yamaguchi suggests looking at the company’s current stock price first—the information of the most interest to executives. It will be on the home page, so he suggests I stay there for at least twenty seconds. This user account we are borrowing belongs to an investment banker. Dr. Yamaguchi has assembled a list of eight landing pages that are the most commonly accessed on the network. Once we are past those eight, he believes we can make a run at the cash withdrawals. Even then, we will have to be fast. If this particular user has never accessed such data, it will generate a red flag that could result in session termination. On the other hand, the protocol may simply add the address to this user’s library.”

“Including the download?” Knox says.

“We will not know until we try. I have a screen capture program running. We will have a visual history of every page I saw.”

Dulwich looks over to Knox for advice.

“One shot?” Knox inquires of Grace, who nods. “I’m with Yamaguchi, but it’s your call, Sarge.”

“Very well,” Dulwich says, coming out of his chair. “We take our time.”

Knox comes around as well, shoulder to shoulder with Dulwich behind Grace.

“Dr. Yamaguchi says hello,” she informs them.

Knox feels stupid as he waves.

Grace’s fingers are fluid on the keyboard. She doesn’t stab or punch. It looks more like she’s casting a spell than typing. The home page appears.

“I am in,” Grace says.

Yamaguchi is watching a mirrored image of Grace’s laptop. He speaks to her, but Knox can’t hear. Grace opens a small window in the lower corner that shows a stopwatch timer. At :25 she waves over the keyboard and another page appears. She resets the stopwatch. At :15 she navigates to a fresh page. She checks the price of two traded stocks and moves on. Forty seconds are spent on that page.

Dulwich is sweating. He should have left the window open. Knox sips coffee. Office brew. He could never work in an office, a fact that won’t make any headlines. Watching Grace operate is fascinating—her accountant-minded precision, her adherence to a plan. Seeing this, he better understands Dulwich’s pairing of them. They are pinecone weights on a cuckoo clock, juxtaposed but working in concert. She is surreally even-tempered and made for such work. Yamaguchi’s mouth never stops moving as he speaks into her ear; Dulwich leans close enough that she can feel his breath on her neck. Grace robotically drills down into the site, page by page, resetting and restarting the timer to where Knox finds himself watching only the countdowns. He finishes the coffee, takes a three-point shot at the trash can by the door and sinks it. The noise stands Dulwich up like a gun was fired, but Grace—dear Grace—never so much as flinches.

“Okay, we’re in,” she announces. “Sorting by amount of deposit.”

The column is longer than she told them it would be. At the top are amounts in excess of twenty thousand euros. She scrolls down through the high teens to the low teens on her way to four digit withdrawals. She is too good at what she does. The column blurs on her way to amounts hovering at two thousand euros.

“Too fast,” Knox says. “I can’t read them.”

“Dr. Yamaguchi . . .” Grace says. “Security spiders . . .”

“We’re busted?” Dulwich injects.

Grace navigates to the bottom of the page, where a blue-highlighted radio button reads: Download Data . She double-taps the track pad and a second window opens; she clicks Save File .

Behind the pop-up window the server page posts a red-letter warning that this is Questionable Access . It’s followed by a yellow exclamation point and the triangular caution signs used for vehicles in the breakdown lane.

Grace yanks the PCMCIA card from the laptop, causing a second warning sign on the screen.

She turns to Dulwich. “I will need an external drive. Possibly a new laptop. Today. As quickly as possible. They will have back-doored my laptop. By now they know we’re in this building, this office. We must consider there is an outside chance the police may be dispatched. Perhaps no action will be taken. I suggest we—”