Free Last Track, The by Sam Hilliard Page B

would fail.
    And today Crotty needed information and his sympathetic cohorts were on assignment. Approaching the division head was out of the question, because claiming that the target was a source of information meant opening a file. Right back to that paper trail.
    This was the chore he pondered over a cup of decaffeinated tea. He stirred the beverage, steeped precisely for four minutes. Steam floated off the surface of the dark brown liquid. He sipped and thought, neglecting the pending case report next to the keyboard. An agent passed by his desk. The reflection of the passing man displaced the text and blinking cursor on his screen.
    Crotty smiled at the sheer elegance of a solution that had presented itself. Reaching into the drawer for a USB flash drive and a pad of paper, he knew exactly what to do.
    First he pulled up the contents of the file from the disk drive on the screen. He kept the file on the drive, because once it was on the local machine, a compliance program logged details about the file.
    Deleting the logs created another entry far beyond his reach. Traffic to the network printer from any terminal was monitored. Details about every print job—including the author and the raw data—were archived indefinitely. Only at the shell prompt at the machine was the action untraceable. Writing text to the pad, he respected both case and spelling.
    The program was simple, only a few lines of code. Now he needed to push the program where it served him best. That meant the Internet. Street agents had Web access for research; however, the Network Operations Center tracked all browsing activity. State-of-the-art equipment recorded and logged phone calls on hard drives in a remote data center. While his cell phone had Web access, the building was a dead zone and no signal could penetrate the walls.
    Not a problem for Crotty. One machine—available to all staff—lay outside the firewall and the reach of the NOC. Instead of a commercial trunk line connection, the phone company listed the line as a residential DSL customer, registered under a false name and billed to a private mailbox. The kiosk had no physical connection to the network and existed for one purpose: a mechanism for browsing in complete anonymity. A slow connection; the lack of a USB port, floppy drive, or printer; and no local file storage, ensured data remained on the screen. Since the kiosk was in the center of the office, visible to nearly everyone, illicit uses were impossible. Any deed, evil or otherwise, required time and risked being observed.
    The dilemma: find a mechanism to unleash the code. He drafted a message. A brief note, it requested someone’s presence immediately at the usual place, at the usual time, without mentioning details. For the recipient, he chose a Suit.
    Saving the code as an attachment inside the e-mail, he submitted the form. An e-mail anonymizer service did the rest, bouncing the message across the globe between participating remailers. Each hop altered another message header until the forged message resembled a legitimate e-mail from the sender.
    Merely viewing the message executed the code inside the attachment, which retrieved a program from another server and installed it on the local machine. All this happened automatically, and without the recipient’s knowledge. Although Network Operations warned management about the risk of Internet mail, Suits ignored techs. Janitors rated higher in the eyes of management. If a virus was loose on the network, it meant a Suit had installed forbidden software or opened an electronic message from an untrusted source. Mayhew, the Suit in question, would trust the forged source. Crotty made the note look like it was from his girlfriend. Mayhew would certainly read the message; not many men passed up sex in the middle of the day.
    As Crotty was walking back from the lavatory, Mayhew barreled down the narrow hallway toward him, nearly an hour before the Suit’s usual lunch break. Mayhew