Cody McFadyen - Abandoned

“How’d you send the email?”

“Prison library. Not supposed to have access, but there are some smart people in here. They have ways.”

Alan digests this. I manage to hold my tongue. “That’s good, Douglas,” he says. “But the thing is, you told us you didn’t have a way to contact Dali, remember?”

Douglas remains silent.

“Is there something on the servers you worked on that we need to know about?”

There it is again. The cunning light. Alan sees it too. “Douglas?”

“I need protection. I’ll trade segregation for information.” He fumbles with his hands. He looks humble and frightened. “Please. I’ll tell you what you want. Just get me away from him.”

I want to jump up, tell him to fuck off. I want to laugh in his face and slap him. I hold myself back, waiting for Alan.

“Tell you what, Douglas,” Alan says, his voice mild. “I’m going to let my experts comb those servers first. If they don’t find anything, if I need your info, then I’ll be back and we’ll talk deals. If it turns out I don’t need you”—he shrugs—“then have fun getting passed around.” He leans forward. “Leo Carnes is a vegetable now because of you. Fuck off and die.”

He stands up and heads toward the door. I follow, dumb.

I stop before leaving, turn.

“Why?” I ask Hollister.

He glares at me, his eyes full of tears and hate.

“Because,” he says. “You ruined everything.” He stands, strains against his chains, and shouts at the ceiling. The cords on his neck stand out; veins throb at his temples. “You ruined everything!” he screams.

Guards rush in as we leave.

Back to hell. I shudder a little at my own satisfaction. But only a little.

Alan sits as we drive, silent, brooding.

“Sorry about that, back there,” I offer. “I’m still …” I sigh. “Maybe AD Jones is right and I’m not ready to come back. Anyway, I’m sorry.”

He waves me off. “I understand—and that’s the problem. Five years ago I might have reported you. Today? I was just as bad, and I still don’t care.” He sighs and falls silent.

The sky is blue again as we leave the prison behind, but invisible rain falls, trapping us, and only us, in a prison world of gray.

CHAPTER FORTY

“We found it,” James tells me.

It’s mid-afternoon. Alan and I barely spoke on the hour-plus drive back to the office. What was there to say? We’d condoned the rape of a man because of our rage. We felt vindicated and soiled, all at the same time.

“That was fast,” I say.

“It didn’t take long. It wasn’t that it was well hidden. It’s that no one would have found it unless they were looking for it. It seems innocuous enough, and under most circumstances, it would be, but it did the job it was meant to do.”

“Which was?”

“There were two programs. Both were installed with root access on the key servers at the ISP where Hollister worked. One was a search program. It would search email, chat rooms, instant-message logs when kept, and various other things, looking for combinations of keywords. Kill my wife, divorce , and hate , stuff like that. It was pretty sophisticated.”

“Sounds cumbersome,” I say. “Wouldn’t you come back with thousands of results?”

“Yes, but the sophistication of the program was that it grabbed a one-line snippet of each ‘conversation.’ It’s pretty easy to scan through and to then know what to discard and what to follow up on. Take a look.”

He hands me a printed page. Each line is preceded by a date, a time stamp, a number, and, at times, an email address. “What’s the number? An IP address?”

“That’s right.”

I read over the page and see that James is right. It’s simple to separate the wheat from the chaff. The keywords are highlighted in bold type.

One excerpt from an email sent by bob4121 says: That diamond ring as a gift, just killed my wife!

“Good job, Bob,” I murmur.

Another begins: I hate my wife.We are getting divorcedand I wish she was dead.

I hand the page back to him. “I get the idea. What was the other program for?”

“It was a kind of digital drop. Like a mass mailer. Send a message to it, and it forwards that message to two or three hundred different free email addresses.”

“Free makes it virtually impossible to trace,” Alan points out.

“The first program interacts with the second. It puts together a summary and then passes it over to the digital drop. The drop program sends the summary to every email address on its list.”

“What were the benefits to him of doing this?”

“Numerous. Since the programs are given root access, they have permission to access anything on any server they’re placed on. This lets them perform without raising any red flags. They can get into email, server logs—anything they have the password for.”

“Let me guess: Hollister provided the programs with the passwords they’d need.”

“Unconfirmed, but it’s the best guess. Initial installation of a program like that would have had to be done by an administrator or someone with the admin passwords to the server.”

“Dali probably offered him a discount,” Alan says. “When he found out that Hollister worked for an ISP, he probably said, Put these programs on your servers and I’ll cut fifty thousand off what you’re supposed to pay me.”

“Sounds risky,” I say. “Wasn’t he taking a chance by leaving a trail?”

“Yes and no,” James explains. “They were very well written. They execute in the background and put no strain on the servers at all. They keep no logs themselves, and Hollister would do regular purges of references to the programs from the server logs. That’s actually how we found them. Hollister hasn’t been around to delete from the logs. Even if they were discovered—if Hollister had been hit by a car or had a heart attack—so what? They’d be dismissed as an interesting but generally unimportant exploit from a hacker. Even if they were followed up on, good luck tracing him via those hundreds of email addresses. Most of them are probably dormant, and even the ones that aren’t could be set to forward to another address, which could then forward to another, ad infinitum.” He shakes his head in reluctant admiration. “It’s his brilliance. Keeping it simple. He had you for four weeks, for example. Can you tell us where the building was or what he looked like?”

“No.”

“Same principle here. The difference is, Douglas Hollister took out some life insurance.”

Excitement surges inside me. “What?”

“He modified the program, or got someone to modify it for him. It had a built-in IP logger. Here’s how it worked: Dali would occasionally access the server directly so that he could modify variables that the programs used, such as adding or deleting keyword combinations or email addresses. Hollister had the program log every access to it.”

“Why not just look at the server logs?” I ask. “Isn’t every incoming access logged?”

“Sure. Millions of them.”

“Ah.”

“This was easier. It was isolated to the programs themselves, which meant the IPs logged would belong to Dali.” My eyes widen. “That’s good.”

“There’s more. Douglas compiled a list of all the email addresses Dali was using and plugged them into a custom email program, which he then made Web-accessible. He could access the program in any Web browser and do two things with it: send an email out to those addresses, or email a list of them to himself. It’s obviously how he sent the warning email to Dali from prison.”