‘F rom the boys in imagery – Dr Amon al-Falid alias Dr Alan Ferraro,’ Curtis said darkly after they’d returned from the DDO briefing. The computer-enhanced photographs of the senior Halliwell executive matched the satellite images of the man beside agent Bill Crawford’s car in Peshawar. ‘Amon is a variation on the Egyptian Amun , meaning hidden, which is pretty bloody apt.’
‘Doesn’t seem much doubt there’s a link between al-Falid and the Taliban madrassas, but I wonder if that link extends to al-Qaeda?’ Imran mused.
‘We’re about to find out. I’ve asked young Corey Barrino to come up.’
‘An expert on al-Qaeda?’ Kate asked, puzzled as to how the CIA would have a young expert on the complex and sinister workings of the Islamic fundamentalists.
Curtis shook his head. ‘In a previous life he was a computer geek. Used to get his rocks off hacking into the Pentagon and NASA’s classified networks and leaving messages for them. He hacked into here once and left a message for the Director and I think you can still see the spot where the paperweight hit the wall. He got caught when he went into a big merchant bank. They wouldn’t accept their systems had been breached until he left a message for their CEO with a list of all his top clients’ bank account numbers and then the shit really hit the fan. Fortunately for us, after he served out his good behaviour bond, we found a better use for those talents and I’m hoping he might be able to get into Ferraro’s computer at Halliwell. The al-Falids of this world keep dual identities for a reason but sometimes they think they’re infallible and they keep encrypted files as well.’ Curtis was interrupted by a knock on the door.
‘That’ll be him. Corey, come on in. Professor Imran Sayed, Dr Kate Braithwaite – Corey Barrino.’
‘Hi, good to meet you,’ Kate said, holding out her hand.
‘Hi,’ Corey said shyly. Kate thought he looked about sixteen, but to be working for the CIA he was probably quite a bit older.
‘Any particular area you want in Halliwell,’ Corey asked after he’d taken over Curtis’ computer and dialed up the website.
‘Several but we’ll start with a Dr Alan Ferraro,’ Curtis said.
‘The Chief Financial Officer?’ Corey asked, his fingers tapping the keys.
‘He’s the one.’
‘Access Denied’ flashed up on the computer screen and Kate watched, fascinated, as Corey’s hands flew across the keyboard, a look of concentration on his face.
‘They’ve added a salt to the DES,’ Corey muttered, totally absorbed by the lines of numbers, letters and symbols that to Kate, as mathematically savvy as she was, looked like a jumble. ‘Salt to the DES?’ she whispered to Curtis, her inquiring mind frustrated that she didn’t have the vaguest idea of what Corey was talking about.
Curtis grinned. He’d had the same problem until Corey had put him through ‘Hacking 101’. ‘A “salt” is just another layer of data that makes it harder to crack the Data Encryption Standard or DES algorithm. It is two characters that are added to either end of a password. They can be chosen from upper- and lower-case letters of the alphabet or the numbers 0 to 9 or a full stop or a forward slash. With a choice of sixty-four characters either end, you get a possible 4096 different salts to use on your password, making it a lot harder for your average hacker.’
As Curtis already knew, and Kate and Imran were about to find out, Corey Barrino was anything but an ‘average hacker’. In real life, hackers were often shy but still sought recognition from their fellow hackers. If they managed to hack into a particularly sensitive target like the Pentagon or the CIA, as Corey had done back in the days when his handle was ‘Byte Blaster’, those feats would be posted on cybernet bulletin boards. Proof was provided by posting a piece of information that could only have been obtained from within that organisation’s system. The more protected the system, the greater the recognition. In the murky world of cyberspace ‘Byte Blaster’ had been a hero.
Corey ran a program that would have crashed most medium-sized networks but it only required a fraction of the big Cray computers in the CIA’s basement. In a matter of minutes, Corey had cracked Halliwell’s password file. Ferraro’s name was in clear but his password was encrypted. After several more minutes and millions of computations the blur on the screen suddenly stopped.
‘Welcome Dr Ferraro’ was displayed on the screen. They were in.
‘Where do you want me to start?’ Corey asked as dozens of folders appeared on the file library.
‘I’m looking for a file that probably looks fairly innocuous but won’t be able to be opened, even if someone happened to obtain Ferraro’s password.
‘Two possibilities,’ he said finally. ‘Either “Silk Road Architecture” or “Duple”.’
‘“Duple” is Latin for double,’ Kate offered.
‘Where the single strand meets its double,’ Curtis said. ‘Something tells me that Ferraro would be more subtle than that, although it could also be a second set of accounts for Halliwell. Let’s go for the Silk Road Architecture.’
‘Whatever he’s got behind here, he doesn’t want anyone else to see it, or certainly not anyone in Halliwell,’ Corey said twenty minutes later, as the big Cray computer continued to make millions of high speed calculations in parallel with one another. Suddenly the screen calculations stopped.
‘Cold-blooded murderous bastard,’ was all Curtis said as he scanned down the subfolders headed with names like ‘Air Force One’ and ‘Caesium Chloride’.
‘Shall I check if he’s encrypted these as well?’
Curtis nodded and Corey clicked on ‘London’. The file contained a series of documents, including diagrams of the Thames Water reticulation systems and locations of water treatment plants and maps of Trafalgar Square.
‘All open source stuff but when you put it all together it will be enough to put him away for the rest of his life,’ Kate observed.
‘In this country we send them to the electric chair.’
‘Barbaric and too good for him,’ Kate responded. ‘He should rot in jail.’
Curtis leaned over and clicked open the folder marked ‘Travel’. It looks as if our friend is in Beijing,’ Curtis observed, opening a subfolder that showed confirmation of a departure the previous day.
‘Do you want me to bust in to “Duple”?’ Corey asked, a smile on his face.
A short while later the complete accounts for Halliwell Pharmaceuticals were on the screen, but this time they were the real accounts.
‘Corey, you’re a genius, you can leave the rest with us,’ Curtis said, noticing a folder headed ‘Bolton’ towards the end of the library and not wanting the young man to be exposed to what a folder on the President might contain.
‘I get paid for this now,’ Corey said, giving Kate a grin and writing down a series of code words that would get Curtis back into the systems. ‘As long as you’re careful not to change anything they probably won’t notice you’ve been in there, although if Ferraro is the only one that opens some of these files, the date/time group for the last usage could alert him.’ With that Corey headed back towards the basement.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Curtis muttered. The bribes to the then Vice President Bolton ran into the tens of millions, all directed to a bank in the Bahamas. Curtis clicked on a subfolder headed ‘Meetings’ and opened the most recent file. The audio took a few seconds to spool up but the voices of Bolton and Richard Halliwell were unmistakable.