From: Olumoya - Pamela Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: New: Cat and Mouse Date: Sun, 7 Apr 1996 19:26:17 -0400 Author's note: Pamela Olumoya again has graciously offered to post this story for me. But please direct e-mail to bguthrie@nmaa.org, okay? Thanks to Pamela for paragraph-by-paragraph editing on this story which is always useful. She also helped me get over a hurdle at the end when I didn't want to finish the story by suggesting a new place to stop. Helped a lot; thanks Pam! Standard boiler-plate disclaimers and stuff. All characters of this story are creations of Chris Carter and are owned by Ten-Thirteen Productions in association with 20th Century Fox Broadcasting and its affiliates. No permission was requested or granted, no copyright infringement intended, and I'll miss Ron Brown. "Cat and Mouse" by Bruce Guthrie (bguthrie@nmaa.org) Georgetown. The cab pulled up in the dark outside one of the rowhouses in the expensive neighborhood. The lone passenger paid his fare and included an extra tip for the pleasure of being able to smoke in the taxi. As Washington DC had become more politically correct over the years, it was harder and harder to smoke where you wanted to. The passenger had learned which places willingly allowed him to light up whenever he cared to. He had also learned which places he could force to allow him to smoke despite official policies to the contrary. And he had learned that the remaining places weren't all that important to him anyway. He was inseparable from his Morley's, an obscure brand of cigarette that made him stand slightly apart from the typical bureaucrat that he at first appeared to be. He had spent his life proving just how atypical he, in fact, was. As he placed his keys into the locks on his doors, he thought about this afternoon's meeting with the Consortium. He of course had flown up when they told him to come. At some point, he could afford to ignore them but now was not the time. He had made some missteps and he could feel the sharks circling. The Consortium continued to look for chinks in his armor, some way to point out his mistruths so they could eliminate him like he had eliminated others. Some people would have felt nervous in that situation but this man enjoyed these games of cat and mouse. He had learned through experience, some of it bitter, that he was a much better cat than mouse. They hadn't found anything of course but they seemed to think they would find something on him. He had covered his tracks too carefully to let them find him though. His loose ends were always tied or eliminated entirely. Just inside the door, he paused to deactivate some of the layers of security devices that protected his domicile. Some were the standard anti-theft detectors that any place in the nation's capital needed. But many of them were special devices that had required special installation, including some things were not legally available in an ordinary citizen's home and were unusual even for someone with his clearance rating. These included special sensors on the windows that prevented outside sonic detectors from reading the keystrokes he typed on his computer. These included encryption devices on his phone and modem line. These even included detectors that monitored his walls to detect it if someone was trying to drill into his apartment from the other side of the wall. Together, the security tools formed an almost complete shield around his townhouse. He had likened it to the silly "Cone Of Silence" that had been a staple of episodes from that television show "Get Smart". It wasn't completely secure of course. That was impossible to obtain. But he safe from anything short of a concerted, expensive effort to break his security and even then he felt reasonably certain that he could detect the breach quickly enough to respond appropriately. He always kept the curtains closed. They were reinforced with a bullet-proof and emission-proof layer of lead. He turned the living room lights on. The apartment itself was fairly drab. At one point, the carpet had been a solid tan-colored Karistan covering. Over the years, however, it had become glossy from the soot of the constant cigarette smoke and scarred by hundreds of cigarette burns. The sofa, the bed's mattress, the counter tops in the bathroom, and his tables all had similar markers. There wasn't a point in replacing it though. This wasn't exactly a heavy entertainment center. He visited the kitchen and prepared himself a drink. When it didn't matter, he loved to fix himself a Long Island Iced Tea. But when the game was afoot, as it frequently was, he preferred something lighter so he poured a small glass of expensive kahlua, treated himself to a sip of it, and settled down aimlessly on his sofa. He thought about his marriage, which had ended so many years ago. He wasn't sure why he had ever gotten married. Something you're just supposed to do maybe. Everyone else he knew from the OSS had gotten married toward the end of the war. And he thought he could learn to love Marilyn. But in the years that he'd been married to her, he couldn't say he had grown to care for her at all. Part of it had been due to the secrecy that everything in the intelligence community required. You couldn't tell your spouse about regular espionage. How could you tell them about Unidentified Flying Objects and the people that had disappeared? If any news of these sorts of things had gotten out, the government would have been paralyzed dealing with the worries and an already over-active imagination by the public. At that point, there had been no defense possible against the aliens who could actually steal time. But you couldn't tell the public that. They would demand solutions to problems without solutions. So the alliances with the other nations had been made in secret as had the accord with the aliens. The aliens would be more circumspect about their abductions, with potential candidates being approved by the consortium. The aliens would even contribute alien bodies--typically residents from their detention centers and other undesirables--for human testing. And, in return, the consortium would cover up all evidence of this activity by whatever means were necessary. Marilyn has lost one of their friend's children to the abductions. He couldn't tell her anything about it but she guessed he had known something. He wasn't going to tell her he had personally approved the name, that the abduction had actually been a policy decision to keep their friend, Bill Mulder, quiet. And the rift with Marilyn had grown. But it was, he realized, also his fault. Through the years, he had forgotten how to share with someone. His parents had never done so with him and he thought it was a skill that really wasn't necessary. He had no empathy for Marilyn and, every time they made love in the first years, she could feel it. It was clear that he didn't care what it meant to her, that his actions were just learned steps. Finally, like almost all of the marriages of his co-workers, his marriage finally collapsed. There were no tears on Marilyn's part and certainly none on his. Since then, he had made half-hearted efforts to be lovers with a few people, women mostly but sometimes with men. All of the relationships were empty. Most relationships were either about sharing, which he couldn't do, or power, which he didn't need a relationship to prove. All of the relationships had come and gone without impacting him at all. He had come to find out that he didn't care anymore. He had his passion in his work. He had his priorities in his mission. And that no other person, male or female, could really fit into this wasn't significant anymore. But, enough of that! His drink long gone, he lifted himself from the sofa and sat himself in front of his computer terminal. He turned the terminal on and waited as the familiar Windows logo came on the screen. The raw, unbridled power of Microsoft Corporation, the company that had suffered Windows on the world, appealed to him on so many different levels that the very act of using his computer made him feel more confident. Atop the logo was his normal password prompt. He typed it in, a series of random numbers that he memorized easily and frequently changed, and was faced with his screen of basic choices. The meeting with the Consortium had reminded him that he needed to record and then encrypt away some of his notes about a certain UFO he had buried in a silo off in Nevada. He turned his mouse cursor to the modem icon. He brought up a telecommunications program and entered the secret phone number of his system at the Pentagon. As the number started dialing, he lit another cigarette and waited for the various encryption keys to be exchanged. ------ Rosslyn. In the low background light, a computer screen came to life. "Rodin, lover," a male voice said through the computer's speakers. "It's show time!" The screen saver brought up the face of The Thinker. The lips moved in synchronized fashion as the voice repeated again. And again. Rodin had been sleeping soundly in the couch across from the terminal. The sound of his now dead lover brought a thin smile to his face until he realized where he was and he awoke with a jolt. He had been sleeping on and off between compiles and test batches of data which frequently went on throughout the day and night. He quickly got up from the couch and moved in front of his terminal. He fixed his glasses and read the screen. Modem signals were being intercepted. Next to him, a quad-processor Pentium machine started churning through the decryption algorhythms that had to be worked out before any of the modem traffic could actually be read. In the four months he'd been running this program, he'd managed to decrypt the streams of data exactly twice. The most recent occurrence of this had been just last week and the program had been tweaked considerably since then. He felt optimistic that this attempt would probably work again. While the machine did its seemingly endless series of calculations, Rodin thought about how he had gotten here. It had all begun when The Thinker had finally penetrated the Department of Defense computers and retrieved the files that were said to document the government's cover-up of alien experiments. Rodin hadn't cared about the search. That was The Thinker's obsession. Rodin was away on travel when luck allowed events to align for The Thinker. The Thinker hadn't been prepared to actually get something out of his trolling. He certainly wasn't prepared for the results of his find. The others in the Lone Gunmen group had let The Thinker know that his actions had put himself in danger and The Thinker quickly gave the tape away. But they had killed him anyway. Rodin had left Rosslyn full of cheer and returned to find his lover dead, killed by "unknown assailants for reasons unknown." No one outside of the law enforcement kept up that pretense. Everyone else knew that The Thinker had been killed for his successful hacking. The clandestine newsgroups talked about the shadowy forces that had killed The Thinker, a beloved member of their league. The other hackers took this to be a challenge which couldn't be left unmet. Rodin, of course, was more incited than the others by this action. Rodin and The Thinker had been a team; as in the case of the sculptor and the creation that they had named themselves after, Rodin was nothing without The Thinker and The Thinker was empty without Rodin. After The Thinker's death, Rodin had worked in quiet desperation for several weeks, trying to track down the killers on his own. Then, one night, Mr Nakamoro had shown up at his door. Nakamoro said that certain parties he represented wanted to help Rodin prove who the killers had been. They also wanted to nail the person responsible for ordering the hit and Nakamoro had even provided Rodin with a name. Nakamoro never offered to tell Rodin which parties he represented but Rodin really didn't care so he never pursued it. What Nakamoro offered, beyond the name, were the computer resources necessary to accomplish the job. Those resources included Pentium computers, high-speed modems, ISDN lines, legitimate copies of compilers, some access codes, books, removable storage devices, and hard cash to buy whatever else he wanted. Nakamoro had even offered programming assistance from some unnamed programming phairies but, like most hackers, Rodin preferred to work solo and had used them sparingly. As a team, Rodin and The Thinker had cobbled together hardware equipment from wherever they could find it and by, well, borrowing software whenever they needed any. Nakamoro had supplied brand new equipment and software, something Rodin hadn't seen since his first (and only) year in college. It has been years since Rodin had seen a computer with its casing in place, instead of it taken apart in order to allow instant jiggling of any jury-rigged add-ons that happened to sizzle out in the moment. Rodin had heard of the perpetrator before. A friend of the Lone Gunmen had nicknamed his target "Cancer Man". Even with the equipment, Cancer Man had proved to be a tough nut to crack. He had built a fairly secure moat around his castle. Nothing was really impenetrable, of course, but the layers of security made Rodin's job considerably tougher. His first attempts at hacking into the system had involved a sophisticated con job. His program sat between Cancer Man and the host computer, intercepting keystrokes. Once he had the encryption key, the program could detect and intercept any logoff requests. Once intercepted, his program would simulate the response to the request on the target's machine so Cancer Man would think he had actually logged off. But then Rodin would keep the session going on his own. This approach had a certain "coolness" factor which appealed to him. He also knew that The Thinker would have liked this approach as he himself had used something similar on a number of systems. This in and of itself was important to him. And the approach had actually worked a half dozen times before. But it turned out to not be enough. Not only did Cancer Man use encrypted modem lines but he had actually encrypted each of his files. Double encryption wasn't very common but Cancer Man felt a need to use it for some reason. As a result, Rodin hadn't been able to do anything once he had control of the system. So he had recoded his program to record all of the byte traffic encountered during that session. Once the program had established the session encryption key, it would now automatically decrypt the entire session for him. This should return him the documents Cancer Man had been editing but it should also provide him with the individual document encryption codes as well. With this, if some of the same codes were used on other documents, he should be able to read them as well. All of this would be for naught, however, if Cancer Man logged off before Rodin's programs managed to grab his encryption key. The time dragged on. Rodin's eyes kept darting back to the digital timer on his computer screen. How long would this take? Forty-five minutes later, his eyes were drooping and his head dropping periodically. But, suddenly, The Thinker's voice came through the Pentium's, announcing "Damn! I'm good!" The program had succeeded in break Cancer Man's primarily encryption code. Rodin smiled broadly and shoved his hair back up his forehead. He glanced at the time--12:15. He reached over to the phone and speed-dialed Nakamoro. During the second ring, the line was picked up at the other end. "Yes?" was the one word response. Rodin knew that Nakamoro was an early riser, typically going to sleep promptly at 9pm. It was now a quarter past midnight so Nakamoro must have been sound asleep. Rodin's semi-consciousness registered some hatred for a man who could reach a reasonable level of coherence so soon after being woken up. "First level of contact," was Rodin's reply. "Coming," said Nakamoro as the other end of the line went dead. Rodin knew Nakamoro lived in an expensive apartment near the Iwo Jima War Memorial, maybe a half mile away. Rodin was curious how expeditiously his visitor would arrive that night. Surprisingly enough, just three minutes later, Nakamoro let himself into Rodin's apartment and watched with much interest while data scrolled across the screen as Rodin saved it to his hard disk. There was a mumbled greeting between the two, but both were too engrossed by the information on the screen to bother with pleasantries. The on-screen information was formatted for the host computer's editor so it had a lot of embedded control codes and such. Still, you could get the general gist of the files. Cancer Man had apparently met with some group called the "IC" the previous afternoon. His comments about the group weren't all that favorable but it looked like their comments about him had actually been worst. Rodin watched as the commands were issued by his unseen foe to save the document. "Is this log off?" asked Nakamoro, his first actual sentence this evening. "Looks like it," whispered Rodin and he hoped his program would catch the signals and reprocess them appropriately. With a degree of relief that betrayed his normal bravado, he found that everything worked correctly. "Sole control established" the speakers stated. "We've got it!" stated Rodin. "Now, let's see what else we can find..." "You've recorded everything, correct?" asked Nakamoro. "Of course," Rodin replied with a degree of irritation. "Cancer Man's been on-line for almost an hour. My program's translating everything that it intercepted before. We can review everything he's done this evening." "Good," Nakamoro said with pleasure. Rodin did some directory displays and tested out some Unix navigation commands. As expected, he found a fairly standard system underneath all of the layers of protection. The file names were obscure of course but at least the file dates and times were clear. He found three files date-stamped roughly when The Thinker had been killed. He tried to access the first one and was prompted for the file's encryption key. His own program popped up on top of the display, while the speakers said "Password request intercepted. Scanning..." He knew he had perhaps three chances to enter the key correctly before the host's system security functions would start negate his efforts and start raising alarms. He waited for his decryption program to come up with the various decryption codes used for the other documents from this evening. After a minute, the speakers stated "Attempting first password." He watched as the program entered "E.B.E." on the screen. The host system responded with "Invalid password. Retry." Immediately, the speakers echoed "First password rejected. Scanning..." After another thirty seconds, the speakers stated "Attempting second password." He watched as the program entered "Merchandise". The host system again responded with "Invalid password. Retry." And the speakers came back with "Second password rejected. Scanning..." This would be the last attempt for this document. More than three failures would create too much suspicion. Another fifteen second passed and the speakers stated "Attempting third password." Rodin and Nakamoro watched as the program entered "TrustNo1" on the screen. After a split second which seemed like an eternity, the host computer accepted the password and brought up the document. ------ Georgetown. The smoker had taken off his suit and was about to brush his teeth when he heard a "ding" coming from the living room. With concern, he went back into the room and confirmed what he had thought had been the case. An invalid password had been issued twice for one of his files. The system would have automatically cut off anyone who failed three times but he had jury-rigged his own remote alarm system to detect intrusions at a lower level. His hand reached for his phone just before the phone rang. The smoker smiled confidently, picked up the handset, and asked "You're on it?" "Yes, sir!" came the voice on the other end of the line. Despite the time, the voice was very much alert. "Good," the smoker replied. "Contact number 4 when you know." "Yes, sir!" the voice again replied. "It'll be handled." "Of course," the smoker said. And then he hung up the phone, glad to have another game of cat and mouse. ------ Rosslyn. The police and firetrucks responded to several calls received just after 1 am. The body of an unemployed computer enthusiast was found in his burned out apartment. The computer equipment had been deliberately torched. The man himself was determined to have had his throat slit from behind by an intruder wielding a thin metal strand. This strand was found in the pocket of a coat worn by a Japanese national whose employment status could not be determined. The Japanese man had been shot at close range as he approached a waiting limousine. The driver of that limousine, also a Japanese national, had also been shot once in the head. The police report ended by saying that the two Japanese had been killed by "unknown assailants for reasons unknown." (End)