Bunny murmured, “Not handicapped — handi-capable.”
“What’s the plan?” I asked.
Brick shrugged. “Big Man back home said to give you whatever on the ground support I can manage. Deep Iron’s a half hour from here. I pretended to be a potential customer and asked if I could come out sometime this week. Asked what their hours are. They’re open now. Head of sales is on the grounds. Name’s Daniel Sloane. Here’s his info.” Brick handed me a slip of paper with contact numbers. Then he handed me a slim file folder. “This is basic stuff I pulled off their Web site. Specs and such.”
“Good job.” I flipped open the folder, took a quick glance, and closed it. “I’ll read it on the way. How are we set for equipment? I have a handgun and two magazines. Can you load me up?”
The big man grinned as he led us to the back of the truck and opened the door. The whole thing was a rolling arsenal. I saw just about every kind of firearm known to modern combat, from five-shot wheelguns to RPGs.
“My-oh-my-oh-my,” Top said, breaking out into a big grin. “I’m so happy I could cry.”
“It’s like Christmas, isn’t it?” said Bunny.
A few minutes later we were cruising down an industrial side road that curved toward the snowcapped Rockies. Along the way we read and discussed the facility. Deep Iron was tucked away in the foothills of the Rockies southwest of Denver, built into a vast series of limestone caverns that honeycombed the region. Records were stored in various natural “floors” of the cavern system, and the highest security materials — meaning the stuff people were willing to pay the highest fees to squirrel away — were in the lowest levels, nearly a mile underground. I punched in the secure number for the DMS Warehouse back in Baltimore and asked to speak to the head of the computer division — Bug.
He was born as Jerome Taylor but he’d been a computer geek so long even his family called him Bug. His understanding of anything with circuits and microchips bordered on the empathic.
“Hey, Cap,” he said brightly, as if none of what was happening was any more real to him than the events in a video game. “What’s the haps?”
“Bug, listen — Top, Bunny, and I are in Denver at a place called Deep Iron and—”
“Oh, sure. Big storage facility. They filmed a couple of sci-fi movies there back in—”
“That’s great,” I said, cutting him off before he could tell me details of everything from the source material of the films down to the Best Boy’s shoe size. He really was a geek’s geek and could probably give Hu a run for his money. “See if you can hack their computer system.”
He snorted. “Don’t insult me.”
I laughed. “What I need are floor plans for the whole place. And I need an exact location for anything related to Haeckel. Dr. Hu has the basic info, but I want you to go deeper and download everything to my PDA.”
“How soon?”
“An hour ago.”
“Give me ten minutes.”
It took nine.
When he called back he said, “Okay, you have the floor plans and a searchable database of all clients. There’s only one Haeckel in their directory. First name Heinrich. It’s an oversized bin, thirty by forty feet, located on J-level.”
I pulled up the schematic on my PDA and cursed silently. J-level was all the way at the bottom, a mile straight down.
“What can you get me about what’s stored there?”
“Minute,” he said, and I could hear him tapping keys. “Okay, the main hard drive says ‘records,’ but there’s a separate database for inspections and that specifies the contents as file boxes times three hundred fifty-one. The bin has two doors — both locked by the estate attorneys. Contents are listed as mixed paper records. One box is listed as MF. My guess is that’s microfiche or microfilm.”
“Any idea what they’re records of?”
“Nope. It says the boxes were sealed by Haeckel prior to his death and there was a provision in his will that they not be opened except by a proven family member. No living family is listed, though. His estate provides for storage and oversight of the whole thing by a law firm. An inspection of the seals is required every year. Looks like it’s an attorney who checks the seals. Several attorneys over the years, all from the same firm. Birkhauser and Bernhardt of Denver. The seals are also witnessed by a representative of Deep Iron. Looks like it’s still there because they haven’t found an heir. I’ll hack the law firm and see if they have anything.”
I thanked him and brought Top and Bunny up to speed.
“No heir,” mused Top, “except for Gunnar Haeckel, who is apparently back from the dead and hunting unicorns in South America. Funny old world.”
Bunny grinned. “I wouldn’t give this job up for anything.”
“We’re here,” said Brick.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Hey, Jude,” said Tom Ito, “remember that virus you were asking about before? The one that was there and then up and vanished?”
“Sure, what about it?”
“It’s back. Log onto the e-mail screens.”
Judah swiveled in his chair and began hammering keys on his laptop. The set of screens used by the secretaries for handling e-mail, newsletters, and alerts popped us as cascading windows.
Ito leaned over his shoulder. “Look for auto-response e-mails. See, there’s eight of them. The virus is in there.”
Judah quarantined the e-mails and ran virus detection software. A pop-up screen flashed a warning. Judah loaded an isolation program and used it to open one of the infected e-mails. The software allowed them to view the content and its code with a heavy firewall to prevent data spillover into the main system.
The e-mail content said that the outgoing CDC Alert e-mail was undeliverable because the recipient e-mail box was full. That happened a lot. However, the software detected Trojan horse — a form of mal-ware that appeared to perform a desirable function in the target operating system but which actually served other agendas, ranging from collecting information such as credit card numbers and keystrokes to outright damage to the computer. A lot of “free” software and goodies on the Internet, including many screen savers, casino betting sites, porn, and offers for coupon printouts uploaded Trojan horses to users. On the business and government level they were common.
“Trojan?” asked Ito.
“Looks like. Can’t block the sender, though, because it’s really using replies to our own mailing list to send it.”
“Maybe someone hijacked some of our subscribers and is using their addresses.”
“Probably.” Judah frowned. “Okay, we’re going to have to identify the bounce-back e-mails and then block those subscribers. Send a message to everyone.”
Ito headed back to his cubicle to work on it while Judah uploaded info on the virus to US-CERT — the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, part of Homeland Security. The CDC was a government organization, and though this was very low-level stuff, it was technically a cyberattack. Someone over at CERT would take any warnings of a new virus and add it to the database. If a trend was found an alert would be sent, and very often CERT would provide updates to various operating systems that would protect against further incidents. It was routine and Judah had sent a hundred similar e-mails over the last few years.
That should have done it.
It didn’t.
There were no additional e-mail bounce-backs that day. None the next. Had Judah been able to match the current e-mail with the ones that had appeared — and then vanished — from the computers earlier he would have seen that the bounce-back e-mail addresses were not the same. Nor was the content, nor the Trojan horse. The senders of the e-mails were cautious.