Chapter 3

Rebecca said, “Peter always had such an eclectic group of people around him.”

“What do you mean?” George asked.

Peter was his older brother, but they had never been all that close after leaving home. After Peter had gone off to the university, the only times he returned home were holidays. Once Peter had a full time job, even the holiday visits came to an end.

Of course, George had been busy as well. First it was a law school, then years spent as a clerk, time spent developing a reputation as a prosecutor before becoming a judge. There was talk of him being a candidate for the Supreme Court. He had far greater responsibilities than Peter and he was able to make time for family.

Although Peter ran a small Internet order business, it seemed to him that his brother always had an excuse for not being able to visit. It was the holiday seasons and he had to stay around the office to process orders. He had to travel off to some exotic location to check out a new product line. He had to stay around to negotiate something or another. There was an investment possibility that he had to pursue. There were a hundred excuses why he couldn’t come by for a visit.

“He knew politicians, business leaders, artists, authors, scientists, and religious leaders.”

Donald said, “I remember that author who used to stop by for a visit. I never understood how she came to know Dad. What did Dad have to do with writers?”

“You’re thinking of Ann Randal.”

Perking up on hearing the name of the authoress, George said, “Ann Randal? She always claimed that her series, Revolution in the Tranton System, was a result of having met Dr. Bowlings.”

Patricia said, “Her series really captured the mood in this country, right through the Time of Riots.”

Peter decided that the biggest problem with waiting to meet someone at a coffee shop was drinking too much coffee, and the subsequent trips to the restroom that it produced. He returned from the restroom and glanced around the room hoping to spot his quarry. Disappointed, he went over to the table he had staked out. He looked down at the half cup of coffee that remained, wondering if he could actually finish it.

He picked up the novel he was reading with a sigh. It was a printed book, one of those fading relics of literature printed on paper with a hardback cover, and produced by one of the largest publishers of Science Fiction. He much preferred eBooks, but this particular copy was a gift; one that was necessary in this situation. He settled in to read a page, upon finishing each page he took a quick glance around and then went on to read the next one. He’d been there long enough that the manager was getting nervous. Peter took another sip of his coffee, only now it was tepid and bitter. There was a slight film of oil floating on the coffee, perfectly natural for it to be there, but not quite so tasty.

About the time he was ready to give up, the woman he had been waiting for finally arrived. He watched her head over to the counter and order her coffee. She was a very attractive woman with a shapely figure, but her best feature was her long brown hair that came down to the middle of her back and the bangs that were cut straight just above her eyebrows. He could see why she had the troubles she had. Intelligent and attractive, that was a very compelling combination.

He watched her complete the transaction and head over to the condiments. She grabbed one of the cup sleeves and a napkin before heading over to a small table with two chairs. She took a sip of her coffee through the lid, and wrinkled her face when the hot liquid burned her mouth. She put the cup down and then unpacked her laptop. It took her a full minute to arrange things just so.

Peter went over to her table and sat in the second chair. Seeing him approach, her hand slipped down into her purse. He smiled. She didn’t.

“You won’t need that mace,” Peter said in a conversational tone of voice.

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“You’re right. It is better to be safe than sorry, particularly when you have a stalker who has been making strange calls to you in the middle of the night.”

The mace made its appearance.

“The gentleman ... I use that term loosely ... who has been stalking you received a tweet sent from your twitter account that you were visiting a small bar in Manhattan for a business meeting.”

“I don’t have a twitter account.”

“I know, but he doesn’t know that. He was greeted on his arrival there, by a rather large and mean individual. I have been assured that your stalking problem is ended.”

“It seems to me that I’ve traded one stalker for another.”

Peter laughed. “Appearances can be deceiving. I am somewhat of a fan of your work, but the large individual who rid you of a problem is a huge fan of yours.”

He held up the hardcover book and said, “I promised to get an autographed copy of this book for him. I’d appreciate it if you would sign it for him.”

“Look, all I want to do is enjoy my coffee while reading my email. I have a book signing two weeks from now at the Soho Book Market. Either you or your friend can get in line there and I’ll sign the book.”

“I know all about your meet the author session at the bookstore. It’s the Manhattan Book Market where the signing is taking place, not the Soho Book Market. You also have a book signing in Philadelphia in three days. There is a professor of political science who teaches in a university in the area that you need to meet.”

“He can get in line like everyone else if he wants to meet me.”

Peter shook his head and said, “He doesn’t want or need to meet you. In fact, I’d be quite surprised if he even knew who you are. You need to meet him.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. The man is a genius. If you want your series, Revolution in the Tranton, to be successful, then you need to sit down and talk to him.”

“It’s not a series.”

“I know. I’ve seen the outline and read the first two chapters. You are definitely thinking too small. You can’t possibly build up that sense of social pressures that would trigger a revolution as you describe in your outline in two chapters. Get real.

“I know you’re trying to capture what is happening in this country today. Look around you. The current political crisis has been building for decades. You have the people storming the capital without any kind of plan in place for solving the problems of the world, yet in one chapter you have a whole new system put into place.

“I hate to tell you this, but the world doesn’t work that way.”

“Oh. You work for my publisher?”

“No. I have an acquaintance who works in the IT department there. Actually, he’s the head of it. He owed me a favor for getting his university tuition paid in full for two years, and for getting him the job at your publisher’s. He installed a little script on one of the servers there that periodically combs through submitted manuscripts looking for stories that meet certain criteria of interest to me. It identified your manuscript and put me on the list of external marketing reviewers for it.

“They sent me a copy of your manuscript, I read it, felt it had potential, and well ... here we are.”

“That sounds illegal.”

“If it makes you feel any better, just look at it like I recommended me for the job, but did so without talking to anyone.”

She stared at him wondering if she should send him packing or listen to what he had to say. One thing was sure, she was definitely going to talk to the publisher about what he had done.

“Miss Ann Randal, the American system is broken. It’s corrupt, and it’s broken. It’s tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. The people in this country are on the verge of losing their collective temper. The symptoms are all there. We’ve had the Tea Party, March on Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Anonymous. Violence is on the rise. None of those movements have changed anything except to increase the feeling of impotence amongst the American people.

“This isn’t a problem that can be solved by waving a magic wand. It is going to require a plan; a plan that can take us from this point, to a position of stability. It is going to take a great deal of care to maneuver the country through the upcoming years. One slip, one mistake, and it will turn into a third world country.

“You have a great talent as a writer. You excel at writing about the emotional and the social, but you know almost nothing about the political. Your well meaning attempt to provide a lasting social commentary will fail if you don’t get a handle on the political side of the story.

“You need to capture the anger that builds when people start realizing they live under a one party system that wears two masks; masks which hide the interlocking stranglehold of banking, the ‘so called’ political parties, the mega-wealthy, and big business. You need to capture the outrage that follows when people recognize the full extent of the lies that flow from the power brokers to the masses with the pretext of ‘helping us’ when they are, in fact, robbing us blind. You have to expose the contempt with which the average person is held by the elite.

“A great story can be written about the working innards of corruption if the appropriate care is taken. You have that talent. You can weave a story in which the elites get wealthier and bolder, the masses get poorer and angrier, and the situation becomes ever more fragile. You can capture it with the kind of clarity that will reach out and grab the reader by the heart, by the throat, and by the mind.

“That story will be the first in your series. It will end with the country on the verge of collapse.”

She said, “It seems to me that you have it all mapped out. Why don’t you write the story?”

Peter shrugged his shoulders negligently and answered, “I would if I had the ability, but story telling is not my forte. I am a tool user. I use tools to solve complex problems. Sometimes I wield a scalpel and sometimes I use a sledgehammer. The gentleman who took care of your stalker is a sledgehammer. He has all of the subtlety of a mad elephant.

“To be brutally honest, I’m here to use you to implement part of my solution to a dire problem. I’m praying that I’ve found an extremely fine pair of tweezers in you. I’m hoping that you can reach into a knotted mass and extract the one thread capable of creating order out of chaos.

“And what will you get in return? I can give you a lot. Would you like access to the most powerful research tool that you can possibly imagine? How about collaborating with one of the most brilliant political minds in the country? Maybe you’d enjoy having a conduit to an expert on any subject matter you need to learn about.”

“Prove that you can provide me with all of that.”

Knowing full well that she’d refuse, he said, “Open your email program. I’ll send you a link.”

Waving a finger at him, she replied, “I can’t receive email on this computer. It doesn’t have an internet card. Nothing goes out of my machine except what I want to go out. Nothing comes in that I don’t want in. This machine is Nike net only. The only files that get on this machine have passed through a one use only virtual machine that scrubs any binary that might be incorporated in a file. I deal with plain text only.”

Peter smiled knowing that she had no idea just how much she had told him. There were only a handful of guys in the world who were that paranoid. Only two lived in this country. Peter was one of the two. The other one of them, Samson, came from the same town in which she had spent her childhood.

One of the things Peter had worried about was letting her loose with his program. There were a number of very powerful people who were on his do not search list only because they had people who scoured the Internet removing all references possible to them. They were connected to publishers who wouldn’t print a word about them unless it came from them directly.

Do you think you know who is the richest man in the world? You just read a list naming them, right? Sorry, but the richest men in the world don’t appear on that list; and if there is a list containing them, the entry detailing their wealth is empty. The ones on the widely published lists of the wealthy are the Nouveau riche (new money) and the vieux riche (old money), but there’s a third group, who fall outside of both those categories. One could call that group the dynastique riche (dynastic money). These are families like the Rothschilds, who (with branches of the family in France, Great Britain, Austria, and Naples) control more than a trillion dollars.

Having Samson take over an instance of his system would put a buffer between him and trouble. If anyone could keep Ann from getting in over her head, it would be Samson. After all, Samson had written some of the programs incorporated into his system.

Direct contact with Samson could be an issue, but he had known the day would come when he would have to meet with one of the hacker elite face to face. There were too many powerful people who were able to hide too many of their activities from the world at large. A lot of those activities had to be brought to light if there were to be any substantive changes in the world.

Coming to a decision that it was time to expand his operation, he said, “That explains why I couldn’t find anyone who had managed to hack into any of your systems. If anything about you impressed me, it was that. I knew that you had to have found a good guy to set up your systems, and that you maintain security discipline.”

“Most people don’t realize just how dangerous the Internet is. My father was a victim of identity theft and it nearly ruined him. He’s never really recovered from it.”

“You’re lucky to have Samson taking care of your machines. He’s very good at what he does. From what I’ve heard of him, he’s a big fan of yours.”

Her eyebrows climbed up high enough to be hidden by her bangs. No one knew about Samson except for a very elite few. He had been the boy next door and had come to her father’s help when his identity had been stolen. They were friends, not lovers, but she valued his friendship immensely.

“You know Samson?”

Peter answered, “I know of Alan Barton, known only as Samson among the hacker elite. We’ve never met, but what you described is a Samson trademark. He’s a big fan of single run virtual machines. He’s willing to accept the overhead of only storing encrypted files. He’s a fanatic about scrubbing files. He won’t load a binary on a machine unless he’s compiled it himself from source code. He won’t compile source code until it has undergone extensive automated analysis. He’s about as paranoid as they come.”

“Does he know you?”

“I seriously doubt it. My IT guys are even more paranoid.”

Peter knew that no matter how careful he was about his real world identity, there was an incredible amount of information existing in the Internet about him that could be accessed with great ease. You could control what you advertised about yourself, but there was nothing you could do about what others posted about you. It was even worse than that. Schools, banks, and businesses all stored information about everyone with whom they had a business relationship. None of them were safe from hackers. Every link a person followed on the internet was tracked, correlated, and subject to analysis. A handful of companies held that information. None of them, despite reputations to the contrary, were safe from hackers.

It wasn’t the real world identity that had to be protected. It was the secret identity that one used to traverse the back alleys of the Internet that had to be jealously protected. The secret persona never did business with a bank, attended schools, or bought and sold things. It lived in the shadows providing its real world owner information that others wanted to protect from people like him. It adopted and dropped identities with extreme frequency. It borrowed identities and created them when necessary.

“You never did introduce yourself.”

“I’m Peter Moore.”

“It’s nice to meet you Peter Moore. Do you have a middle name?”

“Kevin. Would you like a social security number to go with that?”

“Sure.”

“Sorry, but I have to say no. Samson will have to work for that one.”

“You can’t blame a girl for trying.”

Peter opened his backpack and pulled out a tablet. With just a few touches on the screen he had access to a program that connected to his secret server. Then he went through the actual process of connecting with the server. It wasn’t a direct connection, but one that went through a dozen encrypted hops. Each hop was selected at random from a list of servers. Even then, the connections would be periodically rerouted even as data was being exchanged. The purpose of all that wasn’t even to protect the data. That was impossible. Anything that went into computer memory could be monitored. The real purpose was to complicate the process of identifying the two terminal ends of the connection.

He asked, “Is there anyone you would like to know about?”

“You?”

“Try someone else,” Peter said.

“Baron David René de Rothschild.”

What a magnificent answer! She had taken him completely by surprise with that one. With her mind she was exactly the kind of woman with whom he could fall in love. Add in her good looks and it was a miracle he wasn’t drooling all over her.

He tapped on the screen for a bit making sure to hit the query filters that would avoid attracting attention from any of the hundreds of IT people who took care of the Rothschild empire.

He was about to submit the query when he realized that he was being stupid. Queries about Baron David René de Rothschild would hit locations that would sound alarms all around the world. That was inevitable.

He would run a lesser query and allow Samson to assist her in making a fuller search in the future. Samson would know that it had to be done slowly, a few probes here and there a day. A massive barrage of queries would set off alarms.

Looking up at her, he said, “It will take about thirty minutes to set up the search.”

“Why so long?”

“Gathering information about Baron David René de Rothschild is a billion times more difficult than gathering personal information about the President, and at least a hundred times more dangerous.”

A tool user has an interesting mindset that differs from most folks. Everyone realizes that you can’t gouge a nice square cut through a piece of wood with a fingernail. It requires a special kind of tool to achieve that. A craftsman, a kind of highly trained tool user, will collect a number of tools and select the proper one to use to accomplish a specific task. He knows which tool to use and how to use it to best effect. A master craftsman learns how to create tools as needed, such as a pantograph to trace, or a jig to repeatedly create identical products, and templates that allow one to create perfect copies with precision.

As Peter had said about himself, he was a tool user. In fact, he was a master craftsman who had a secret. There were simple tools, there were automated tools, and there were intelligent tools. He knew when to choose which kind of tool to use. In this case, he chose an automated tool. A simple tool would have been too direct and an intelligent tool would have been too slow. He couldn’t have created that tool to save his life, but he had long ago found the proper intelligent tool to create it for him. In an irony of ironies, the intelligent tool he had found, was none other than Samson.

He backed out and brought up the program developed by Samson. Samson had called it a trawler, a variant of a mobile aglet. As far as Peter knew, it was a one of a kind program. Did he understand how it worked? Not at all. Did he know how to use it? Yes, he did. He put it to work.

“I’ve started the search,” Peter said. Feeling the effects of all of the coffee that he had consumed while waiting for her to arrive, he said, “If you’ll excuse me for a minute ... nature calls.”

“Go ahead, I’ll just wait here.”

Peter headed off to the bathroom to empty his bladder. He carried his tablet with him. It made it rather awkward to hold it and use the urinal at the same time, but the tablet had become a security liability. He’d have to destroy it after it returned the result of this search.

He returned to the table to find Ann returning her cell phone to her purse. She looked at him and said, “Samson did a quick search about you. You’re a student at the University of Pennsylvania and currently working for Dr. Bowlings. He was rather concerned by what happened after that.”

“What happened?”

“IvanNoobie sent him a message to back off.”

“He shouldn’t have done that. Now Samson is going to be curious.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Peter Moore.”

She gave him one of those looks.

He held out the tablet and said, “The results of our search are coming in.”

“Let me look at it.”

Ann Randal watched the data slowly scroll by. To say that she fascinated by what she was seeing would be an understatement. At one time she had planned on having a main character in her book patterned after Baron David René de Rothschild. However, the amount of material about the man on the Internet was minuscule. Now she was watching details about all of the holding companies that he controlled along with the companies they controlled. In addition, the names of other people associated with the upper levels of those companies showed up, with details about their relationship to the Baron. There were links to every national leader in the world.

“My God! I had no idea how powerful he is.”

“If you follow all of the links from him, you’ll find that anyone who is anyone is connected by no more than two degrees of separation. He can reach out and touch anyone who controls more than ten million dollars with a single telephone call.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ve been tracing who other powerful people are linked to. It’s easier to find information about who deals with him than about him, yet they all have a little note that ties them to him. Pulling all of that together, you get a very interesting picture of who he is.”

“Amazing.”

“He’s one of a handful of billionaires who don’t appear on any list of billionaires. I find that ... disturbing,” Peter said.

“I can see why.”

“Will you visit Professor Bowlings?”

“Yes. I can incorporate so much information in book with a tool like that.”

“Excellent! Now, give me the tablet so that I can erase everything,” Peter said.

Reluctantly, she handed him the tablet. He exited from the programs. The downloaded information was still on it for the moment, but he’d take care of that soon enough. He had one more thing to do. He composed an email to one of Samson’s accounts. The subject line was, ‘SHA-256(x) = ‘TheWorldNeedsWhiteHatHackers’ Solve for x given any private key y.’ The body contained an invitation to meet in Alexandria, Virginia. He sent it from his IvanNoobie account. He turned off the tablet.

Chapter 4 »