Free The Manuscript by Russell Blake Page A

mood, but if you needed his particular skill-set, you needed it, and would put up with whatever he was dishing out.
    Koshi leaned over and punched a button on the stereo. Deep house music filled the room. He’d always found it way easier to think if his ears were filled with sound, especially if he was doing something computer-related. He was odd that way – some of his buddies couldn’t stand any noise or disruption when they were coding, and yet he needed it loud and hard to get anything of significance done.
    Returning his attention to the problem at hand, he methodically went through all the standard protocols to hack Abe’s office. Part of the secret to being good was embracing flashes of intuitive brilliance, but more often it was just persistence and logic. He always loved the TV portrayals of hackers in front of elaborate screens with complex graphics and flashing strings of code. What bullshit. If only it were really like that…
    Koshi spent several hours trying to break into Abe’s network, with no success. There were no backdoors he could detect, no weaknesses to be exploited. He tried all the usual tricks, and then switched to some proprietary approaches he’d invented on his own, but there was no pressure point he could leverage. Koshi had a lot of his ego invested in being one of the best in the business, and if he couldn’t get into an office LAN then there probably wasn’t anyone who could. The network was as ironclad as they came. So that was a non-starter.
    He turned his focus to getting in from the other end, namely via the e-mail servers. Koshi had written several programs that would venture thousands of gambits per second – but no go on that, either. It didn’t surprise him, given the level of encryption the e-mail provider employed, but it never hurt to try, and sometimes you got lucky. After a half hour of no success, he discontinued his mini-assault and put his feet up on the desk. There was no way any hacker could have gotten in that he knew of.
    There had long been rumors of backdoors on encrypted e-mail servers left in place for government access, however, there was no way to verify whether the rumors were true – the e-mail companies insisted there were none, and the government wasn’t talking.
    Koshi viewed the insistence that everything was above-board with a highly skeptical eye, given that people routinely lied, early and often. But he’d never actually met anyone with that kind of backdoor access, and no coders had stepped forward to confirm that they’d written them in, so the stories remained rumors. Koshi just assumed they were probably true, because, if he could dictate terms, he would have forced the providers to put them in – legal and ethical or not.
    Now that he had run through his bag of tricks, he was at a standstill. He supposed he could contact his web-based network of hackers to see if anyone else could take on the project to penetrate the server, but it would be expensive, likely fruitless, and take a lot of time – if it was even possible to do. He suspected it would be a big fat waste.
    His cell rang.
    Koshi picked up. “Speak…”
    “Koshi. Listen up,” Michael said, “and don’t talk…please. We swept Abe’s office and it was a hot zone. Very high-end, as in non-commercial. And I think the place is under visual surveillance, so we can assume there’s serious weight behind it.”
    “Holy crap, Batman…” Koshi exclaimed.
    “It gets worse. Abe’s dead. Heart attack, or at least purported heart attack…”
    Koshi digested that. “You don’t buy it?”
    “I buy that a document so sensitive it was removed from encrypted servers within hours, and which brought in CIA-level hardware placement and a surv team, could be worth going after civilians to contain,” Michael declared. “You want to bet your life on it?”
    “That’s just so…I mean, shit like that doesn’t happen,” Koshi protested.
    “Again – Koshi, shut up long enough to hear