Free Take the Fourth by Jeffrey Walton

away to the ends of the internet and running reports out his ass and that’s exactly what he was doing on this Sunday,
     
    This Sunday was a slow yellow day. “Elevated” was the term provided by Department of Homeland Security on their five color-coded scale. Funny, no one can ever recall if their scale was ever set to their lowest color green or “Low” . . . don’t want the terrorists hitting us with our guards down do we? “Hey Amad, look, it’s green on the website—no one’s watching, let’s go, bring the nuke.” Yes it was a slow yellow day with CNN churning out their liberal slander, forest fires in California, and something about the latest femme fatale who drug overdosed right after her concert the night before. Yes, a slow yellow day for Greg as well; sitting in his cubical running daily reports, looking for suspicious activity among library book checkouts (kidding on that part… . but possible), and theoretically making the world a better, safer place. He was working on his fourth can of crab juice, aka. Mountain Dew, so aptly named by one of his colleagues while watching a Simpsons’ episode involving the World Trade Center and some low-bit toilet humor, when an automatic email appeared on his Blackberry. It read ‘Fingerprints’. This was a message generated from a program in which he wrote years ago. It was to inform him that a file was on its way. The file contained all fingerprint records to be uploaded to IAFIS (Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System owned by the FBI) through various Police departments around the country. The normal channel of delivery for such a file was through the FBI network; after all it was the database owned by the FBI. Being the smart guy Greg was, he intercepted this file prior to arriving on the FBI’s network. He had listeners installed to retrieve any packages of information with specific headers verifying it was indeed a Federal Bureau of Investigating IAFIS file and he simply routed this to his/CIA network first. From there he would download the file into the CIA’s database and cross-reference this with any known undercover agents, CIA’s wanted lists, or VIP’s in the system. The program was requested by the former Deputy Director of DS&T after the FBI exposed one of their ops in the field. It was an accident but try explaining that to his widower and only child. Since this program was installed there have been several incidents that have gone under the radar of the feds at the bureau and for good reason. Once the file was scanned it was placed back into the queue for IAFIS, uploaded with a new timestamp and maybe, just maybe a few key pieces of information deleted or changed and everybody was none the wiser. The whole process of cross-referencing was an automatic process but there was a manual process in which Greg alone was responsible—it needed a pair of human eyes and the touch of human logic that a computer could not provide in order to evaluate the hits within the CIA’s database. It was rare that a hit occurred but when it did he would have to investigate the matter and sometimes call his supervisor in order to continue. As luck would have it on this slow yellow day one such hit flashed on his screen after he opened his trusty old program.
     
    It was from a police report from Saint Michael’s, Maryland dated 1978. The IAFIS system came on line in 1999 but since then there has been a tremendous amount of backlog with getting old files uploaded. The typical scenario would be when an officer responsible for caseload had any downtime; they would gather any unsolvable crime or missing person reports and batch them together to be sent to the feds. Some departments worked better than others, some took their time; after all, a thirty-year old unsolved case rarely took precedent over a case that was in the here and now. The scenario in Saint Michael’s was they just forgot until some newbie wanting to make a good impression, entered