One night they sat on the sofa discussing vulnerabilities to the system, after a second bottle of claret lay empty on its side on the coffee table and a third was newly opened. Between sips from her glass, Eve explained that the weakest aspect of network security was at the default domain administrator level. The default domain administrator was the first account created on a network, and it had sweeping privileges. IT professionals often disable the DDA after setting up other users with lesser authority, but, Eve explained, in the case of Intelink-TS, the CIA’s top-secret network, the DDA was up and running, though the password for it was known only by a few highly placed administrators, all of whom were thoroughly vetted.
Eve claimed that anyone who logged on as the DDA had virtual Godlike access to the all aspects of the Intelink-TS, it was the virtual keys to the kingdom. An administrator with bad intent could dig around on secret corners of the system, and even exfiltrate data and erase the history of the transaction.
Ethan’s interest was piqued, but he needed more information. “Wow. Those people given that logon must be very reliable.”
Eve smiled and winked with an eye already half-mast from drink. “I have it.”
“You don’t.”
Her smile widened. “I do.”
“And with it you can go anywhere and no one would know?”
“If I wanted to. I never have. Why should I?”
Ethan still found this all hard to believe. “There is an audit trail for everything we do. Madeline Crossman, the security compliance officer in my department, is always checking on us via audits to make sure we don’t try to pull unauthorized access.”
Eve replied, “There is no audit for the DDA that I can’t get around, which means, when I’m logged on as the DDA, there is no audit for me.” She giggled. “Ethan, at my level, I am the audit.”
“So your password makes you untouchable?”
“Not exactly untouchable. I work with the virtual private networks that access Intelink-TS via the JWICS, and this requires two-factor authentication.”
She walked over to her purse and pulled out two small identical fobs the size of key chains with LCD screens on them. On the screens were a half-dozen numbers. One of the devices had a red tag on it that said Pang and the other said Pang-DDA.
“I use these. I can access the CIA’s network via my laptop by putting in my logon and then adding the number on the screen, which changes every thirty seconds. But if I wanted to logon at the DDA, I would do the same thing and use this fob. These fobs and the numbers on them track back to me.”
Before Ethan’s eyes, the six numbers on each device changed to six new numbers.
Ethan looked at the fobs closely. “But you are saying someone who isn’t logging in remotely, like someone inside CIA or somewhere with direct access to the network, wouldn’t need these things.”
“Exactly right. Someone on the network itself only needs the DDA logon, and then they can do whatever the hell they want. I’ve written papers about it, it’s a real vulnerability, but no one listens.” She laughed, dropped the fobs back in her purse, and reached for her wineglass. “The best IT people in the business aren’t working for the government, and we contractors are given a lot of access power, but not a lot of decisionmaking authority.”
Ethan mumbled to himself. “Incredible. You’re almost untouchable.”
She reached out, took Ethan’s hand, and slipped it under her button-down oxford shirt. She placed his hand on her small breast. “I am touchable. See? But with my password and my fob, you are the only one who can touch me.” She laughed at her joke, and in her laugh Ethan could tell just how inebriated she was.
He decided to push his luck. “Don’t you ever worry you’ll forget your password?”
She shook her head. “My password? No, because I use it every day. But I only use the DDA credentials every few months, so I have it written down.”
“What? That’s not smart, Eve. Even I know that.”
She kissed him. “Don’t worry. I’ll show you.”
She left the room for a moment, and Ethan sat there, gobsmacked. No one in IT handed over their password, even drunk lonely girls trying to impress their boyfriends.
He scrambled to refill her wineglass.
When she returned she opened a single sheet of paper. He tried not to snatch it out of her hands, because he knew its importance to his mission.
But when he saw it, he realized he didn’t have the keys to the kingdom he thought he did. It was a page full of handwritten characters that looked like Asian script of some sort.
“It’s in Korean?” Ethan said. “That’s not exactly secure, babe.”
“It’s not Korean. It’s Idu. A thousand-year-old script that was used in Korea. Not many people can write it. But the best part is, it looks like traditional Chinese. Like Kaishu, which was around at the same time. If someone tries to translate the words and numbers here, they will get it wrong, because they will think it is traditional Chinese. Idu is forgotten.”
Ethan was impressed, and he told his girlfriend so. She beamed, she swooned, and ten minutes later, she passed out.
Ethan photographed the page of chicken scratch with his phone.
While Eve slept, Ethan spent the rest of the night congratulating himself on his incredible intellect and social engineering skills, and wondering how the hell he was going to translate characters from Idu.
ETHAN FOUND A TRANSLATOR after a few days of Internet searching, a professor of ancient East Asian languages at the University of Chicago. The professor did it for free; it took him just minutes to e-mail back a fourteen-character series of letters and numbers. Ethan then used the DDA access credentials to log in on a JWICS terminal in the NSC’s secure administration wing. He found the docs on the SCI code-word-access flotilla operation. He didn’t read every page of every document himself, that would have taken hours and he had only minutes. He pilfered the files using the techniques Eve outlined to him over dinner, and he’d sent the files to Harlan Banfield. Banfield looked them over, then told him they would sit on them until they knew the breach had gone undetected, perhaps as long as six months. Ethan was impatient, he was certain he’d executed the breach perfectly, but Banfield insisted the ITP would nevertheless use its own tried and true security protocols. And then nothing. For four months he’d seen nothing in the news on the flotilla raid. He’d held off pilfering more documents from JWICS because he wanted to see how The Guardian exploited this first batch, but the fact Banfield and his group hadn’t even sent the files on to the media infuriated him. And now this. The FBI running around the NSC, claiming a data breach, and alleging the breach got some ex–Israeli commando and his family killed.
Something went wrong with his exfiltration of the data.
He’d managed to obfuscate his involvement; he’d logged in as a DDA, so they couldn’t have known it was him, after all, but somehow they had still noticed the transfer into the file-sharing location.
TONIGHT ETHAN AND EVE sat at his house, not hers, but they drank claret and talked about network intrusions, much like that evening a half a year ago. Eve knew all about the NSC breach, even though it didn’t involve her or one of her virtual private networks, she would have been briefed on it first thing this morning.
Ethan talked about the meeting with the FBI man and the possibility there was some sort of a mole at NSC, but this was all just to set up his line of inquiry, because he desperately wanted to know what went wrong. He didn’t think for a second he had made a mistake himself. No, he was certain Eve Pang had screwed up in her explanation of the DDA logon’s omniscience over the network. This infuriated him, but he wouldn’t let it show.
Between sips of wine and while gently stroking Eve’s hair as they sat facing each other on his couch, he asked, “What do you think happened?”
“I know exactly what happened.”
This surprised Ross. “You do?”
“Yes. The government IT hacks are fools. They let the intrusion h
appen, but then they got lucky. It was nothing more than that.”
Ethan forced himself to take a sip of his wine. His fingers wanted to crush the glass in his hand, but he forced an air of calm. “How did they get lucky?”
Eve smiled. “A spot audit for anomalous behavior was done on the network. This happens less than five percent of the time. Even then, the audit records were never reviewed. They were just stored automatically on the server. It picked up the files being moved to the file sharing server in the National Security Council office.”
“I see,” said Ethan. “Can they tell if the files were downloaded or printed?”
“Most likely downloaded. The printers themselves would have recorded the job if they were used. I assume even the government IT security people are competent enough to check that out.”
She added, “Someone should have begun investigating this four months ago. Instead, it wasn’t till the thing happened in India when the system administrators at Langley were asked to review the files on Intelink-TS to make sure they were secure.” Now she laughed out loud. “They must have pulled up the logs and shouted ‘Oh, shit’ when they saw they were accessed and exfiltrated.” Then she added, almost as an aside, “They’ll never find out who did it.”
“Why not?”
“Do you remember that night when I told you about domain administrator access?”
Ethan looked off into space for a long moment. “Vaguely.”
“I’d bet anything someone logged on as a DDA to do it. I can’t prove it. That’s the problem with DDA credentials, but that’s what I think happened. They’ll never know who broke in that way, so they might as well give up looking.”
“How about that.” Ethan said. He wanted to put his hand through the wall.
Just as he’d expected, he’d done everything exactly right. It had only been a stroke of very bad luck.
His intrusion likely never would have been noticed if not for the completely coincidental death of the Israeli in India.
Eve tried to make another move on Ethan, but he wasn’t in the mood. She went to bed early, and he sat in his living room with a glass of wine in his hand, staring at a movie on TV that he didn’t give a damn about.
His entire focus now was on beating the polygraph. If he did that, he’d be fine. He told himself there wasn’t a single FBI agent in the world who could outsmart him. The investigation would fizzle out, or else that bitch Beth Morris at the Western Hemisphere desk would be suspected of the breach.
The only thing left for him to do was ace the box.
12
DOMINIC CARUSO STOOD at his stove, stirring diced tomatoes into a saucepan full of fat shrimp, olive oil, and herbs. The smell of garlic and oregano was prevalent, and the crushed red pepper made his eyes water. The heat from the stove created a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead, which he blotted away with the towel on his shoulder. When his forehead was dry again he left the towel on his shoulder, keeping it at the ready. This was shrimp Fra Diavolo, after all. He’d really start sweating only when he ate it.
Dom had always loved to cook; when he was young, it brought him closer to his mom and grandmother, and now it brought him back to his childhood, and with that came some happy thoughts. And that was the plan this evening. He wasn’t cooking because he was hungry. Tonight he thought it might be a good idea to do something productive to occupy his mind for a couple hours. So he’d climbed off the couch, ignored his bruised ribs and his slight headache while he struggled to get his coat on, and then he ventured out for groceries.
Fixing a real dinner wasn’t much, but it beat ordering a pizza, and it beat sitting in his dark condo and brooding.
Dom turned down the heat on the saucepan and stepped away for a moment to open a bottle of Trebbiano he’d found tucked in back of his refrigerator. He swigged right out of the bottle while he went back to the stove, splashed a little into the Fra Diavolo and ducked the steam that roared up out of the bubbling dish.
While he cooked, his mind drifted, thinking of the last meal he’d prepared here in his place. It had been the evening before his flight to India and, unlike tonight, he had not been alone, because Dom did not, as a rule, cook for one.
Her name was Abbie; she was a bartender at an upscale saloon in Georgetown. He’d been a regular at her bar, though he was quiet and preferred sitting in the dark to interacting with her other regulars. One night he stayed till closing and the two of them then went to a local late-night watering hole for a nightcap. They sat talking for an hour over beers.
He’d told her he was in corporate security, and other than “cool,” she’d made no comment about his job again.
They’d made love at her place first, but after a couple more nights of meeting for drinks before the inevitable late-night hookup, Dom asked her over to his condo for a home-cooked meal. He prepared an authentic veal-and-ricotta meatball dish and served it by candlelight with one of his favorite Chianti Classicos. She seemed pleasantly surprised he could actually cook, but she hadn’t come over for the veal, so soon after their plates were stacked in the sink and the bottle of Chianti was empty on the coffee table, Dom and Abbie disappeared into his dark bedroom and the meal was all but forgotten.
Dom enjoyed that last night before India, but he’d barely thought of Abbie at all during his trip, and she hadn’t e-mailed or called once while he was gone.
So that was that. Dom decided he’d have to avoid her bar for a while, so they could both move on.
Dom plated his dinner and headed into the living room, grabbing the Trebbiano along the way. In stark contrast to the candlelit dinner with Abbie, tonight he sat alone on his couch with his feet up on the coffee table; the TV was tuned to a poker tournament, but he wasn’t paying attention to it. He sipped his wine and ate his shrimp and sulked. He was proud of tonight’s dinner, it had the right balance of flavors: the buttery sweetness of the shrimp, the heat of the red peppers, and the zing of the citrus. But he was in a dark mood, partly because he didn’t have a woman here to eat it with him and fawn over it, before he could take her to his bed.
Dom was Italian, after all. He was well aware of the seductive power of food.
His mind drifted off the food, off the women, and he thought of the Yacobys and the meals they’d shared, and he thought of the kids, and he thought about the American son of a bitch who sold them out to the terrorists as if their lives meant nothing.
This train of thought brought him yet again of his own responsibility in their deaths. Try as he might to remain objective about his actions, he continued to second-guess himself for being unable to save them.
Dom wrestled with the images in his mind throughout dinner. When his plate and his bottle were both empty, he considered checking his refrigerator again to see if there was another cold bottle of Trebbiano tucked in their somewhere. He thought he might try to watch TV and drain another bottle before bed.
No. He couldn’t sit here all night drinking alone and thinking dangerous thoughts.
He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty p.m.
He came up with a new plan for the evening, and instantly his mind drifted away from the Yacobys. He knew it was temporary, just like cooking the Fra Diavolo for one had been. But it beat sitting here brooding.
“Don’t do it, Dom.”
He didn’t know why he talked to himself like that. He knew he was going to do it. His body ignored his inner voice, he stood, went into his bedroom and changed into a pair of jeans and a brown leather jacket. Slipping his left arm in the sleeve felt like someone was twisting one of his ribs with a pair of pliers, but he fought through the pain and got it done. Before walking out his front door he took five minutes to straighten his place, because even though he wasn’t sure where he was going, and he had no idea who he would meet there, he had no intentions of returning alone.
BY ELEVEN P.M. Caruso sat on a bar stool at a 14th Street gastropub called The Pig. He’d been here a dozen times in the past, each time looking for food, drink, and perhaps
something more. As he sipped his beer he scanned the dark and lively establishment, his eyes tracking over dozens of tables, each one with a cluster of patrons enjoying themselves.
And Dom identified several potential targets.
This always felt to Dom a little like the fixed-position surveillance ops he did with The Campus. Except he wasn’t tailing terrorists or Russian mobsters or keeping an eye out for enemy countersurveillance ops.
No, he was here to pick up a girl.
Dom’s phone contact list was crammed with other hookup opportunities, but they all would entail a certain amount of familiar conversation that would involve, inevitably, a high level of compassion and concern. Dom was rough and ragged, mentally and physically, and all of his female friends, even the most peripheral, would attempt to mother him, trying to find out what on earth was wrong.
Dom wasn’t looking to be mothered tonight.
HE DIDN’T NOTICE the woman just down the bar on his first examination of the room, but that wasn’t because she was unattractive. On the contrary, she was a striking brunette, his age to a few years older, with almond eyes and full lips. He hadn’t noticed her at first because she was surrounded by three young and very large men. One sat on either side of her at the bar, and the third stood close behind her. One of the men laughed loudly and put his arm around her, while the other two drank whiskey out of rocks glasses and glanced around the room with sly grins on their faces.
Dom’s eyes moved on. His radar scanned for targets of opportunity, after all, and this particular potential target was lost in the signal interference of testosterone.