Rogue Code (13 page)

“Ademar Carvalho had steadily worked his way up through the ranks of Nosso Lugar, emerging as leader some ten years before. His was not the largest such organization in the city, but it was well established within its area, selling the usual, running numbers, and providing women to the back-alley brothels.”

Carvalho had been impressed with the young Bandeira. He knew the boy’s background and systematically set about recruiting him. The most recurring difficulty Carvalho had was not rival gangs or the authorities; it was finding hardworking, loyal young men. Eighteen months after that first visit, when Bandeira graduated, Carvalho suggested he work with him a bit before deciding on his future.

By this time, Bandeira was ready. He’d paid attention, even asked a few discreet questions at school, read newspapers, gone to the library for more research, and understood just who Luís’s father was. His own father, he’d decided, had been wrong. And because of that error, the street and gangs had taken his
pai
, his mother, and his sister away. There was no place for honest people in the world, definitely not in Brazil. Carvalho was showing him the way, and Bandeira intended to follow.

“And I’ve never changed my mind in that regard, Pedro. I have pursued the correct course for my life.”

He’d worked a year in São Paulo, never on the inside of the operation but never left on his own on the deadly streets. He ran errands, delivered messages, supervised lower-level operations when the usual manager wasn’t available. He was forbidden to possess drugs or a weapon himself. He was scrupulously kept away from all violence. The
chefe
had bigger plans for him.

As a reward for his good behavior, Bandeira was given access to the better brothels, enjoying them almost daily, and was provided with enough money to dress properly and to move in the more respectable circles when he wasn’t working. After the year was up, Carvalho had taken him to lunch at his exclusive club.

“‘I want you to attend the university,’ he said to me. ‘Luís refuses. I hope you will try to persuade him to join you.’ In fact, by this time I rarely saw Luís. After school, he’d joined Nosso Lugar with a vengeance. He ignored every effort made to keep him away from the areas I was also forbidden. Rumor had it, he’d already killed two men, and he was never without a gun. Fast women, fast cars, cocaine were his stock-in-trade. I told his father I would try but—” Bandeira shrugged. “—he understood. ‘There is much we do that is very addictive for the wrong kind. You can never be sure how men will react when given some power and exposed to what is out there. Luís breaks my heart. Do your best,’ he told me.”

It was agreed that Bandeira would take a degree in finance and business. Carvalho would pay for everything. When it was time, he would join the NL in junior management and begin his career. It went well for Bandeira, though Luís was dead within a year. Thereafter, Carvalho drew him even closer to him and his family, finally suggesting the marriage to his daughter, Esmeralda.

*   *   *

Lunch with Pedro had gone well, Bandeira thought as he set off for the city. Rather than be shocked by the story his father had told, by the harsh accent of his youth, his son had been intrigued, perhaps even impressed. No, it went better than he had feared. Relief swept over Bandeira, and only then did he realize how much he’d worried about telling him the story.

The young man seemed to have completely recovered from his anger at his parents’ divorce six years before. Bandeira scowled at the thought. His former wife, Esmeralda, had not been suitable for his new station in life, not that it was her fault. They’d married young, and it was a good match at the time. Unfortunately, her approach to the bedroom had been traditional. Despite the reputation of Brazilian women as lovers, wives of the old school viewed sex as a service. Their attitude drove men to other women, but that was the way it had always been.

For the first years, Bandeira’s only real disappointment was that they’d had just a single child, a son, at least. But in time, with his greater success as he’d moved in better and better circles, the uncultured and ever heftier Esmeralda became an embarrassment. Then she’d fixated on his many lovers and, to his surprise, began making demands. After that, he brought the charade to an end. These were modern times. There was no reason for him to be shackled to someone unsuitable, certainly not after the death of his father-in-law.

Still, the divorce had angered Pedro, and for a long year he’d refused to have anything to do with his father. That had hurt, hurt far more than Bandeira would ever admit. A Brazilian’s son was as much a part of the father as he was his own person. The wound had gone deep, and Bandeira feared the estrangement would be lasting.

He’d placed his son in charge of the Rio team, responsible for an operation ideally suited for Pedro’s attention to detail and technical background. Casas de Férias
,
“Vacation Homes,” it was called. All Pedro had to do was keep on top of things and lead. And so far, the boy had done just that. He’d taken to his work with zeal, and Bandeira decided that his son might yet become a true man, a man capable of taking over the cartel when Bandeira’s time was done. Not that that would happen anytime soon. He had years to go yet.

Curiously, it was Esmeralda who’d made this possible. Once she became his ex-wife, their relationship had suddenly improved, to his great surprise. She’d taken to dressing in the traditional black of a Brazilian widow, and he understood that within her circle of intimates, she spoke of him in the past tense, as if he were dead. At first he’d been shocked, and he’d confided in Carlos Lopes de Almeida one night over drinks.

“She is traditional, Victor, that is all,” Almeida said. “She cannot accept divorce. It is not in her makeup. She has been married, she has a son, and now she has no husband, so she must be a widow. It is no more complicated than that.”

Victor realized at once that he was right. As a consequence, he saw Esmeralda only alone, never around her friends, so she could maintain her façade—not that he had occasion to see her that often. Still, her name had been on many corporate documents, and it was necessary from time to time to obtain her signature. It was on such an occasion that she’d raised the subject of their son.

“I have spoken with Pedro,” she said as they sat in her garden some months after the divorce. As a youth, Esmeralda had closely resembled the Mexican actress Katy Jurado. That had been no small measure of her appeal, he’d come to realize. Now, forty pounds and twenty-six years later, the resemblance was impossible to find. She did carry herself with dignity, but that was an affectation of her putative widowhood.

“I have told him that the past is the past,” she said, “that you are his father, and he must not treat you as he has.” She paused.

“Obrigado,”
he said. Thank you.

Esmeralda inclined her head. “He has promised and I believe him. Call him. He will see you.”

That was the moment Bandeira wondered at the prudence of his divorce. Other times such as this flashed in his memory, times when she’d shown wisdom and a greater understanding of life than he often possessed. She’d never condemned his career and he rarely spoke of it in her presence, but there had been occasions when she’d known of his troubles and each time given considered advice, advice he followed. Maybe he’d been wrong to shut her out of his affairs so completely all those years; maybe he’d been wrong to divorce her when he should have embraced her fully as a trusted confidante.

But it was too late for that.
“Obrigado,”
he repeated.

“If I may suggest,” she continued tentatively, “you should find a place for him in your organization. A place of significance, though I understand you must craft him carefully; he is still young and untested. But he has ability, he is willing, and … he is your son.”

“I will do that.” And so he had. Vacation Homes had gone well, better than he expected, but his computer expert, Abílio Ramos, had much to do with that. Ramos had brought his wide-ranging Internet gambling enterprises under control, and Bandeira had enormous faith in his ability. Still, there was no question that Pedro had found his place. One of the reasons for their lunch had been to give Bandeira still another opportunity to consider the young man’s future. How long should he remain where he was? Where should he be moved next? Was it time?

When a longtime friend asked if Bandeira planned to change the name of the
Esmeralda,
he had shaken his head, saying it was bad luck to alter the name of a boat. The friend had accepted that, but Bandeira concealed the real reason.

Gratitude. Esmeralda had given him back his son.

16

TRADING PLATFORMS IT SECURITY

WALL STREET

NEW YORK CITY

1:33
P.M.

That morning, Jeff had employed one of his Linux tools to perform a thorough inventory of the UTP system. After lunch, Jeff and Frank returned to their temporary office and logged on to the command and control, or C2, server to check the status of the automated scans of the UTP servers they’d left running. Jeff sat up straight. “Look at this. Rotorooter says there’s a file hidden with a rootkit.”

Rotorooter, as he had named it, was one of the programs Jeff routinely ran whenever he gained access to a system. It was designed to look for signs of rootkits, which were programs that hid files or other programs from the standard administrative and diagnostic applications a systems administrator would run.

“There shouldn’t be anything hidden in this system, not where we are,” Frank said. “Are you sure Rotorooter isn’t giving you an FP?” Wonderful as Jeff’s tools were, they did provide false positives from time to time.

“No, not entirely, but I don’t think there’s any reason it would.” Jeff showed Frank the Rotorooter’s output, and for the next hour, the men worked in conjunction, finally establishing that there was no problem with the tool, that a concealed file existed within the UTP, a place where none should. One odd turn occurred when Frank determined that embedded in it was the NYSE Euronext digital authenticating signature. With that knowledge they made several attempts to access the file employing standard system commands, all without success.

“Maybe it’s something left from the original coding,” Frank suggested, “something inadvertently squirreled away.”

“That’s possible, I suppose, but why a rootkit? Could Stenton have planted it as a test to see if we’d find it?”

“You mean as part of the pentest?”

“Maybe.” Jeff paused, racking his brain for explanations. “Or what if it’s some final security cloak to protect the trading software from an attacker who gets this far? Of course, the scans haven’t found anything else hidden, and if this is a security measure, there should be others, wouldn’t you think?”

“It could be the most security-sensitive file in the entire system, that’s why it’s been singled out for special treatment.”

There was another long pause; then Jeff said with a low voice, “Or maybe it’s malware.” This was the most logical explanation, as rootkits were a tool of hackers.

“But it’s got the Exchange’s code signing signature.”

“So why’s it hiding itself?” Jeff countered. “Besides, the stuff we planted has the same signature. Whoever put it here could have used the same trick we did.”

“Or it’s someone in-house. That’s more likely. It would make affixing the signature really easy.”

Just then, the door to their office opened. “Ready for a break?”

Jeff looked up. Richard Iyers was standing there with a warm smile. His office was not far away. From the first, he’d taken Jeff and Frank under his wing, showing them about the building, answering questions but never intruding on their work. He had said he understood what they were doing was confidential. He’d even made his gym available, but neither had had the time to take him up on his offer.

“Not now. We’re just back from lunch, and we’ve got a lot more to do yet today.”

“All work, no play. Maybe tomorrow,” Iyers said as he stepped away, careful to close the door behind him.

17

TOPTICAL

JACKSON STREET

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

2:07
P.M.

The long meeting broke, and the mid-level managers who’d attended filed out while top management lingered, as was often the case these days. Scattered before them were the electric-blue covers of the revised IPO prospectus just released by their principal underwriter, Morgan Stanley.

Brian Cameron, CEO and cofounder of Toptical, looked down at his iPhone as if he had no interest in continuing the meeting. Samantha Mason, known as Sam, sat opposite him across the expanse of the conference table. In the hallway, staff went about their business paying no attention to them behind the clear glass wall. The topic was the same as always these last months.

Money.

Molly Riskin had launched into her favorite topic with her usual animation, hands slashing the air, her brow moving up and down as she argued against the pending IPO. Chubby, with bitten nails, she was one of the company’s first employees and had worked with Brian at his previous start-up, Enerva. She was senior VP of Toptical Sales and Marketing.

Gordon Chan, CFO, was to her left, while Adam Stallings sat opposite her. Dark, hard to work with on occasion, and a software engineer, Brian had moved Adam into management, a decision Sam thought was a mistake. He lacked the temperament, though she understood Brian’s recurring dilemma. He needed people he knew in positions of responsibility, and he required people who understood the system. What it meant was that Toptical was being managed essentially by self-taught executives while the crucial software was being largely written by newcomers. That didn’t bother Sam all that much, considering what the so-called professionals were doing to companies that had been household names during her childhood. As for the code, that was another story altogether.