The Sand Trap (29 page)

“Fuck off,” he said so no one would hear he
was actually there. “The place is sold.”

The banging persisted and a voice. “Hey
Gord? Are you there? I know you’re here because the car is
here.”

Gord recognized Bruce’s voice and with a
suddenly stiff aging body pushed himself up from the floor and went
to the door and opened it.

Bruce noticed the drink in Gord’s hand. “Got
one of those for me?”

Gord didn’t say anything but just stepped
aside as Bruce entered the hallway and closed the door behind
him.

“Help yourself to a seat,” Gord motioned to
the floor as he poured a drink for Bruce.

They both sat down on the floor and Bruce
took a sip of the malt. “Shit, no wonder Ireland is in deep
economic trouble. Drink much of this and you’re sure to have a
brain deficit to go along with the other kind.”

“Sorry, I’m all out of pink Margaritas.
Shouldn’t you be at the club congratulating all the first round
winners?”

Bruce ignored him and took another sip.
“Hmmm … not bad once your mouth becomes totally numb," he offered
as he took a swig. “They don’t need me Gord or care where I am. The
club bar is full of half-drunk golfers replaying every shot of the
day. So what happened to you today?”

“I don’t know, just stunk I guess.”

“I told you that you might not be ready
Gord.”

“Look Bruce, I just divorced a wife who
'told me so’ whenever I fucked up. And that was way too often in
her eyes. I don’t need it from someone I thought was my friend as
well as coach.”

“Ok. That wasn’t fair. I have a different
view on this than you that’s all.”

Gord paused and looked at him and smiled.
“I’m sorry Bruce. Today was not your fault. So, Coach. What went
wrong?”

“Well these are just guesses, but first I
would bet there were some times today when you went back to your
old swing?”

“A few,” Gord lied.

“And second, you went out there today to
win. Enjoying yourself had nothing to do with what you did
today?”

“I hadn’t thought of it in those stark
terms,” he replied. “But yes, all I wanted to do today was to win.
There was nothing recreational there at all.” Gord poured both of
them another drink. “So, great sensei, how do I fix this?”

“Well grasshopper, “Bruce mimicked. “If I
remember correctly you told me once that you quit competitive golf
because you couldn’t deal with the pressure you put on yourself to
be perfect. You need to be in such control in your life you could
not accept the vagaries of the environment in which you played golf
were sometimes beyond your control.”

Gord nodded.

“You have always had trouble just accepting
that sometimes shit just happens and there is nothing you can do to
change it or avoid it?”

Gord nodded again, curious as to where Bruce
was going. But he was right. Gord had felt that any circumstance or
event could be traced back to some human action or error. He had
serious trouble accepting the role of chance in his life. He had
never left anything to chance in his work with the Agency and he
felt that was the biggest reason that he was still alive.

“Well it appears that I have done a great
job of teaching you how to swing. But like every other golf teacher
you have ever had, I have done a lousy job of teaching you how to
play the game.”

Gord didn’t know what to say. Bruce
continued. “No, I take that back. No one can really teach anyone to
play the game. You have to figure that out for yourself. I know you
are into some sort of eastern martial arts, so all I can suggest is
that until you find your karma, or your Zen, or whatever terms the
ponytail crowd uses, you will never be able to play your best
golf.”

“Bruce for a member of the brush cut gang
you’re pretty profound; even philosophical, God forbid.”

“It’s the Irish,” Bruce suggested. “Gimme
another. Not bad stuff actually.”

Gord retrieved the half empty bottle and put
in on the floor between them. “You’re right Bruce. I have no idea
how to let go, to not be in control, and to not become frustrated
when I lose it. For 30 years I have been enjoying my golf because I
didn’t give a shit. Who cares whether Richard beat me on Saturday.
And the senior championship was just a lark, especially when it was
only 6000 yards instead of 7000 like the club championship. From
the moment I retired from my day job and decided I was going to get
really good, I have approached the game differently. After today, I
think enjoyed it much less. I’m going to have to consider whether I
have made the right decision to change golf from distraction to
obsession.”

“I’ll leave that to your conscience. I can
say that in these kinds of tournaments you need to quit trying to
beat the course and just beat the person you are playing with. Two
of the players with you today shot under par so you did not have to
go for the course record, just one stoke better than them. I can
also comment on the swing changes that we made. Quite simply Gord,
you need much more practice with these changes before you test them
in any more tournaments. My suggestion? You have the rest of the
summer here to keep practicing the way you have been and then go
south somewhere and practice over the winter. By the time you are
back here in the spring you might be ready to try tournament play
again.”

“Should I play tomorrow?” Gord asked. “I can
still make the cutoff for play on Sunday and with two great rounds
even win this thing.”

“That’s your call. But I think playing
anymore right now would lower your confidence. Until you manage
your expectations on the course continuing would just make you more
and more depressed. When you go south, find yourself a guru or
something,” and as he pointed at the Irish, “not a genie in a
bottle.” Bruce rolled himself up from the floor. “I gotta go Gord.
There is a banquet tonight you know.”

“Thanks for coming over. I know you have
other places to be and other friends to drink with tonight. I hope
I’ve given you a good start!”

They both laughed as Bruce feigned
drunkenness.

“But I want you to know that I appreciate
what you have done for me these past few months despite my paying
for that new Miata parked out front. I’m not going to give up. I
haven’t decided yet if I'll play tomorrow, but if I don’t see you,
thanks for what you have taught me. I won’t give up the dream.”

They gave each other a manly hug and Bruce
was gone and alone with the thoughts that Gord had left him with.
He couldn’t think of anything else to do but go back to the
Bushmills and hope that some Irish blarney might give him a flash
of insight into his golf’s and his life’s future. He thought he’d
have another drink and go get one of those precooked dinner. Bruce
had helped him out of his funk, but he certainly did not feel like
a banquet tonight. He had some decisions to make.

His next visitor was totally unexpected.

(Back to Table of Contents)

“What the hell do you mean we’ve been
hacked?” Richard yelled at Henry Thorpe, the Agency’s IT Director,
so loud that Thorpe actually backed up a few steps. “We’re the
spies goddamn it! We're the ones who hack into other peoples
computers, not the other way around!!”

“We’re not totally sure what happened,
Richard,” Henry tried to be as calm as he could. “We only noticed
that there was something odd going on when we were doing a routine
back up of today’s activity. As you know we back all our data up
and save it to an external offsite drive in the NORAD underground
bunker in North Bay. We wipe off our onsite drives so that we start
fresh each day. This means that anyone hacking into our system, and
this is in the very unlikely circumstance that someone could
actually hack into our system, would only have access to the day’s
activity and not our stored data.”

“How secure is the North Bay site?” Richard
knew the answer, but he had to ask it anyhow.

“The NORAD site is a kilometer underground
and only accessible by a single road, a tunnel actually. Someone
would first have to get into the server room and know the passwords
to access the data. That’s all conceivable but hardly likely.”

“Ok…Ok…” Richard was getting exasperated
with the techie. “What happened? How? Is there any damage? Can we
fix it?”

There was another question he wanted to ask,
but he was not quite ready to panic.

“I have reported on this before Richard. It
is all in my annual report you know. We have 30 seconds of weakness
in our system when we make the daily data transfer to the
underground servers. At that time both our systems here, and those
in North Bay, are open and someone with the passwords, the
equipment and the skill could do something in that thirty seconds.
I proposed a patch for this in last year’s budget but you cut it
out. When we were doing yesterday’s transfer we noticed a very
small electrical fluctuation during the thirty second transfer. It
would be the kind of fluctuation that would occur on your desktop
when you typed in your password and the computer recognized it and
connected you. It is miniscule and would only be noticed if you
happened to be staring right at it. Well yesterday one of our
technicians was, simply by chance, staring right at the screen
while the transfer was progressing and he noticed the fluctuation.
He was hesitant to tell me since it was so small but when he did we
reran the digitally recorded transfer and when you knew what to
look for it was obvious. Someone signed into our system during the
thirty second transfer.”

“But they would have had to have access to
our line – to our system – to the passwords. This isn’t
possible!”

“Unlikely, but possible.” Henry was now very
much in control of the meeting. “And I am confident that it did
happen. In fact I warned you about this in the last budget
process.”

“Fuck the budget! What did this hacker
do?”

“We haven’t figured it all out yet, but in
thirty seconds a remote site with enough computing power and skill
could have downloaded the last year’s data stored on the remote
servers.”

Richard winced. All of the intelligence
gathered over the past year was on those drives. There were a
number of very sensitive reports that would be internationally
embarrassing should they become public. But as much as he hated to
admit it, despite the billons of dollars that CIDC spent on
national and international espionage there was not really much that
would do anything than cause a few brief scandals. An MP or two
might lose their jobs. It might even cost the Prime Minister his
job since there were some very explicit photos of him and a Chinese
reporter cum mistress who Richard knew also happened to be an agent
of the Chinese government. But there was not much that most
intelligence agencies throughout the world did not already have in
their own servers. It would be uncomfortable and he might be forced
into early retirement. With the payout that would come with it not
a bad prospect he thought. But in terms of national security not a
lot would be damaged. Canada was not that important a player on the
world security scene. That left the question as to why someone or
someplace with the kind of knowledge, equipment and skill required
would bother hacking into the Agencies data? “Ok, thanks Henry. Do
whatever you can to find out what happened and what they did. Maybe
it will tell us the why. We’ll keep this information in the
building until we have more answers.”

Henry nodded and silently headed down to the
basement and his team of IT specialists and analysts who were about
to have a sleepless night at their computer terminals.

Richard went over to the bar hidden behind a
fake bookcase full of vintage “World Book” encyclopedias and pulled
out a twenty-three year old Glen Fiddich Gran Reserva. He liked
most good scotches and this one was outstanding. He kept it in his
office because he had a lot fun serving it to his American visitors
and asking them why this particular scotch was not available in the
U.S. After twenty questions and more than one drink, he showed them
the label and pointed out that the U.S. won’t import scotches that
are aged in Cuban rum barrels. This time he just poured himself
three fingers, vertically, and asked Mary to come in to the office.
He poured her a drink as well.

“You know what’s going on in IT?”

“Yes, I heard it all.”

“Do you think that anyone could get into the
ghost drive?”

Henry didn’t know it, but his system had
been “hacked” long ago, only not by any outside force, but by Mary
Dover, one of the most brilliant information systems experts that
Canada had ever produced. Actually that the New York Institute of
Technology had produced. She was a postdoctoral student at NYIT
when she was caught hacking into the Federal Reserve Bank,
apparently just for fun to “show it could be done.” The FBI called
CIDC because she was a Canadian citizen and after reviewing her
file and learning that she had hacked into a dozen public and
private major high security operations in the world, CDIC offered
her a choice of life imprisonment in a U.S. facility or a job with
him where she would be paid to practice her hobby. That was ten
years ago. Richard had never been told her history and he didn't
ask since she had proven indispensible to him and the Agency ever
since. Her Executive Assistant title was just a cover for her real
job as one of the world’s most foremost hackers. She sat in the
outside office answering phone calls, arranging meetings and
bringing in sandwiches to important high level security meetings.
In between those duties she spent her day travelling through the
computer systems of every nation, every business, every government,
and every security operation in the world. She apparently could
change any record on any database anywhere in the world. It was a
testament to her talent that, since her first error over a decade
ago, she had never been outed in her wanderings. She also had the
highest security clearance that any civilian could get in Canada,
and she was the only one, other than the “watcher,” who knew of the
clandestine operations of Gord Salmy.