Black List (16 page)
“Excuse me?” Nicholas replied, surprised to find her standing there.
“Somebody once told me that if you wanted to sound like you knew about wine, all you had to do was say you found a
hint
of blackberries, apricots, or green apples when you breathe one in like that.”
Nicholas smiled and set his glass down. “I hadn’t heard that.”
“Oh, yeah. Then you roll out the gardening terms.”
“Gardening terms?”
Nina thought for a moment and then gave him her list. “Grassy, oaky, mossy, or peaty.”
“I think those last two are for scotch.”
“Really?”
“Really,” Nicholas affirmed.
“I’m obviously not an expert.”
“Do you like wine?”
“Yes.”
Picking up the bottle in his tiny hands, he poured a glass for her. “That’s all that matters,” he said as he placed the bottle back on the counter, slid the glass toward her and then picked his back up. “To Caroline.”
Nina stood where she was. “They killed her, didn’t they? She had the lingerie store mail me the package and then she ran out of the mall and got hit by a car. It wasn’t an accident, was it?”
Nicholas had no idea. They had talked about Caroline’s death multiple times since he had picked her up in McAllen, but he just didn’t have enough information.
“They aren’t going to stop until they kill me too,” Nina continued.
“No,” said Nicholas. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you. I promise. We’re going to get to the bottom of this. Okay? I know it’s hard, but you need to stay positive.”
She didn’t respond, so the little man repeated his toast.
Slowly, she reached for her glass and said, “To Caroline.”
They each took a sip.
Nicholas waited a beat and then asked, “So?”
“So what?”
“Blackberries, apricots, or green apples?”
A reluctant smile spread across her lips. “I don’t know, green apples?”
“Definitely green apples,” he agreed.
Whether it was the wine or the fact that he was in his element in the kitchen, Nicholas was much more successful at keeping their conversation upbeat this time. He talked about two of his favorite things, food and wine, and Nina seemed genuinely interested. Before she knew it, dinner was ready.
Nina helped serve and they sat down to a meal of roast chicken with thyme and garlic mashed potatoes. Comfort food, something she was sorely in need of.
After dinner, they returned to the flash drive and Nicholas opened another bottle of wine to “help him think.” He was throwing every tool in his toolbox at it, but the damn drive wouldn’t open.
Convinced the answer was staring him in the face and he just wasn’t seeing it, it was well after midnight when he staggered into the kitchen for a third bottle of wine and it hit him.
Rushing back into the master bedroom, he climbed up into the chair at his desk and began clicking away at the keys. Nina, who had lain down on his bed and fallen asleep, was awakened by the flurry of activity.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“How much do you know about what your sister did for a living?”
“She was a programmer for a company in Maryland called ATS. They do a lot of government work. Why?”
“And before that?” asked Nicholas as he continued working.
“She worked at some big Wall Street bank writing trading software or something.”
“How close were you?”
“Caroline’s fifteen years older than me. She was a sophomore in high school when I was born. Same mom, different dads.”
“So you weren’t that close,” stated Nicholas.
“By the time I was two, she’d already left for college. I saw her over the summers a little bit and most of the holidays, but that was it.”
“Did she ever tell you why she left the bank?”
Nina could tell this was headed somewhere, she just didn’t know where. Propping herself up on one elbow she replied, “She said she got sick of all the pressure. She also said she hated living in Manhattan.”
“She told me that too. Then I learned the real story.”
“What do you mean the
real
story?”
Nicholas turned so he could look at her and replied, “Your sister was fantastic with computers and wrote some amazing software. Like every other programmer in the world, she crafted an insurance policy, a way she could slip back inside the bank’s software if she ever had to. Call it a back door. The only problem was that her back door conflicted with someone else’s on the system. And that someone else used it to screw your sister.”
“How?”
“Another IT person was stealing the bank’s client data and selling it on the black market. He rigged it to make it look like your sister had done it.”
“She never mentioned any of this,” said Nina.
“It gets more interesting. As I said, this other IT person, some guy named Sanjay, framed your sister in a very clever way. That said, Caroline was able to point out several inconsistencies that argued for her innocence. Nevertheless the bank fired her anyway. Two days later, she launched an attack on their system and knocked all of their ATMs off-line for a week.”
Nina shook her head and smiled. “Ever since we were kids, she’s always had a serious temper.”
“Well, her
serious
temper got her into serious trouble. It didn’t take long for the authorities to show up on her doorstep. Within two days of the ATMs going down, they picked her up.”
“Wait a second. You said she had knocked the ATMs out for a week.”
Nicholas now smiled. “She did, but no one could figure out how to break the program she had written and get them back online. They threatened to lock her up and throw away the key, but she refused to give in. It was a Mexican standoff. Finally, the bank blinked. They apologized for firing her and offered her a severance package. The authorities, though, were another matter.
“A crime had been committed and they had no intention of letting your sister walk. They wanted to throw the book at her, or so they said.”
“What did they want?” Nina asked.
“They wanted her. And seeing as how no bank was ever going to hire her after what she had done, she took them up on their offer, in exchange for immunity from prosecution, of course. That’s how she wound up at ATS. They’re basically the IT people for the entire U.S. government.”
“She never told me any of this.”
“It took me a while to get it out of her, believe me,” said Nicholas.
“So what does this have to do with Caroline’s flash drive?”
Turning back around, he made several more keystrokes. “I think your sister built one of her back doors into this flash drive.”
“You do?” replied Nina as she got off the bed and walked over to the desk.
“I do. And if I can find it, I think I can get us in.”
Nina watched over the next ten minutes as Nicholas continued to type in strings of code into his computer.
Suddenly he hung his head and then shook it slowly from side to side.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Nicholas smiled.
“You found it?”
“I did. There’s a back door, but you’ll never believe what the password is.”
Nina put her hand on his shoulder and gave it an excited squeeze. “Tell me.”
Nicholas pointed at a small box on the screen and then typed the six-letter code that opened up the drive: S_A_N_J_A_Y.
I
t was unlike any drive he had ever seen before. The amount of data it contained was staggering. There were literally thousands of files stored on it and room for multiple terabytes more. Nicholas had heard about theoretical jumps in microstorage capability using discs coated in protein from salt marsh microbes, but he had never interacted with one until now.
“What’s all this?” Nina asked.
Nicholas scrolled through the directory. “I’m not sure.”
“Caroline said you’d know what to do. Whatever’s on that drive, she said they were going to kill her over it. You have to figure it out.”
“I’m trying, but it’s like being given a puzzle without the top of the box.”
“So start lining up the edges,” replied Nina. “Do what you have to do to work your way in. I need to know what happened to my sister.”
“I want to understand all of this as well, but deciphering what we’re looking at is not that easy.”
“Neither was figuring out how to unlock the drive, but you did it,” she said, placing her hand again on his shoulder. “You can do this too.”
Nicholas liked the confidence she had in him.
“What can I do to help you?” she asked. “I’m not a computer person, but there must be something. Just name it.”
“How about some coffee? I think our long night is about to get much longer.”
When Nina returned with a pot and two mugs, she asked, “What have you found?”
He had been chewing on the top of a pen, an exercise that sometimes helped him focus. “Are you familiar with filter bubbles?”
“No.”
“It’s a term used to describe how search engines, Google in particular, are studying every online move you make and then tailoring what results get returned in response to your search queries. You and I could both conduct the exact same search and Google would kick back completely different results. If we each typed in ‘Egypt,’ you might get sightseeing and travel information, while I get information about politics and the Arab Spring. Everyone is being placed in their own bubble online.”
“But they’re not getting the same information,” Nina stated.
“Exactly. By controlling what you see, they can reinforce, or even shape, how you think. It’s like going to the library only to have the librarian hide half the card catalog when she sees you coming. Information is being filtered based on what computer algorithms think you want to read. The problem is you have no idea what’s being left out. However you see the world, whatever your politics or belief system is, you have to work to uncover any contradictory information.”
“So much for the Internet existing to bring people together,” she replied.
“Actually,” said Nicholas, “the Internet was created to be a military communications network that could withstand a nuclear first strike. It was developed in the 1950s, but didn’t transmit its first message until October 29, 1969. It was supposed to be the word
login,
but only the
l
and the
o
were transmitted and the system abruptly crashed.”
“How ironic.”
“Indeed,” he replied as he exited out of an article and scrolled
through the other files. “Filter bubbles are only one kind of issue Caroline saved articles on. There’s a bunch of material on Internet legislation as well, Net neutrality, the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act—”
“Why would she have saved all of those?” Nina wondered aloud.
“I can’t tell.”
“It must mean something. What’s Net neutrality?”
“Basically, it’s a move by elements within the government who want to have authority to censor the Internet,” replied Nicholas.
“That’s not good.”
“No, it’s not, and the PCNA Act is even worse.”
“I haven’t heard of that one either.”
“The PCNAA is also called the Internet ‘kill switch.’”
“That, I have heard of,” replied Nina. “That’s the law that would place a giant off button in the President’s office, right?”
Nicholas nodded. “And if there’s ever some sort of mega cyber attack, the President would have the ability and sole discretion to shut the Internet down.”
“Until the attack was gone?”
“For as long as the President saw fit. All he or she would have to do is keep renewing the state of cyber emergency.”
“You act like it’s that simple,” Nina said as she raised her hand and snapped her fingers. “Once the threat’s gone, the President would have to turn the Net back on. You can’t just continue to say there’s a state of emergency when there isn’t one.”
Nicholas raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think so?”
“Lobbying for the ability to censor the Web isn’t good in my opinion. I don’t like censorship of any kind, anywhere. I want the Net to be free and open. But I find it hard to believe that a U.S. President would claim there was an ongoing emergency and use it to keep people off the Internet when there really was no emergency at all.”
“Three days after the 9/11 attacks,” said Nicholas, “the President of the United States declared a national state of emergency. Over a decade later, it’s still in effect.”
“What?”
“The United States has been under a continuous state of emergency since 9/11.”
“And Congress just allows that?” asked Nina.
“It’s not something Congress votes on. Under the National Emergencies Act, the President is required only to inform them of his decision. The act was created so the President couldn’t establish a never-ending situation. A state of national emergency is only supposed to last for two years. The 9/11 state of emergency has been renewed repeatedly since it was established.”
“On what justification?”
Nicholas looked at her. “Terrorism.”
“But terrorism was around before 9/11,” said Nina, “and it’s going to continue to be around.”
“And so will America’s continuing state of national emergency.”