Bad to Worse Page 10

  ‘Emphasize the fallacies; that would be my advice,’ said Worse.

  Spoiling looked at Worse, taking in the comment but staying with the matter in hand.

  ‘This morning, we searched a short-term rental unit in Fremantle. Thank you for the address.’

  He stopped talking, apparently deep in thought.

  ‘Well?’ said Worse.

  ‘Travel documents, probably forgeries. Forensics has them. We have no record of either entering the country. They were living out of suitcases. Many hats, peculiarly.’

  Again Spoiling fell silent.

  ‘Well?’ repeated Worse.

  ‘There were three suitcases and three beds, Worse. Warm coffee on the stove. Someone absconded, probably after hearing news of the motorcyclist deaths.’

  ‘Made a haberdash for the exit, you might say. Male?’

  ‘From the clothes, yes. We have prints, DNA, and a neighbour’s description. Until we find him, you need to be extremely cautious, my friend.’

  Spoiling gave Worse a look of genuine concern.

  ‘So, we have an imported MO, probably imported operators, and international monies funding the bike.’

  ‘American?’ asked Worse.

  ‘So far, everything’s American. Now tell me why you ask.’

  Worse gave an account of his communication with Thomas Worse in Arizona, and the American’s concern that an historical vendetta was recrudescing badly with the threat of global reach. Not until the end did he state the name of interest: Mortiss.

  ‘Ah. Then we have a connection, to the ultimate payment for the motorcycle,’ said Spoiling.

  ‘It was funded from a Mortiss entity, in Arizona?’

  ‘So it seems. A shipping line.’

  ‘In Arizona? In the desert?’

  ‘You do cause me headaches, Worse.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Worse was quiet for several seconds. When he spoke, he might have been in a different conversation.

  ‘Let me help with the validity lecture, Victor. I could critique the proposition that intuition has validity. Let’s name it “Premonition is Prediction”.’

  Spoiling stared at Worse.

  ‘You seem to be more interested in philosophy than survival, Worse.’

  ‘As is virtuous, Victor. It’s Socratic. And it is European. What’s the name of the shipping company?’

  ‘Camelline Shipping,’ said Spoiling, a little absently.

  ‘Victor! Camel Line. Ship of the desert. It’s a front!’

  ‘Yes, of course. I was about to think that. You distracted me with Socrates.’

  ‘This definitely warrants a covert expedition. I’ll phone you tonight.’

  ‘Mm. Actually, Worse, about my lecture. I would appreciate some discussions; perhaps your looking over a draft when I have written it.’

  ‘Then may I see everything you have on the Americans, Victor? Socrates. Socrates.’

  Spoiling’s posture straightened. ‘My dear Monsignor Papaduomo. This is a police investigation, conducted with scrupulous propriety, in which you are the principal witness. I cannot leave you sitting at my desk with all the files open and my office door shut while I go out on a time-consuming mission to find us coffees.’ Spoiling stood up. ‘Americano today, will it be?’

  16 CAMELLINE SHIPPING

  Thomas

  A development here. Two shooters riding a Seneca came for me on a city street last night. Professional MO. The bike has been linked to a Mortiss company. Why the sudden heavy attention on me, I wonder?

  Richard

  Jeez, Richard. Are you all right? How did you beat them off?

  Totengräber 9, Prussica sight. Every Worse should carry one.

  Damn it, cousin. That’s a very serious incident. Take care for God’s sake. It looks like a hunch came true. All the same, what you’re describing is major escalation. Nothing on that level has happened here for half a century. Maybe Regan’s decided to go global, she could be that crazy. We might have to get alerts to the whole Worse family if that scenario takes shape. What do you do, by the way? Maybe that explains why they came for you. I’ve heard about the Prussica, but we can’t get them here, at least not legally.

  Not legally here, either. I live off income from the past. Nowadays, I assist the police in their enquiries, but in a good way. Generally related to financial crimes. Incidentally, would you mind if I look into your email security at the time we first corresponded? It’s possible that a Mortiss was on the line. The bike attack is being handled here by Inspector Victor Spoiling. I would like to put you in touch informally, via secure mail. If the Arizona connection proves real, you can move to formal channels. Also, unless you have an objection I would like to make your Mortiss material available to Victor.

  Worse was in his home IT workshop. He had been sitting before the screens for three hours without dinner and without a break. His first task was to examine Thomas’s police email protection. The security was two years outdated in key patches, and Worse had no difficulty in accessing the sheriff’s office accounts. Someone else had been there as well, and Worse sent an encrypted report to Thomas detailing the breach, advising on how to combat it, and providing the serial number and address of the machine that was implicated.

  Then he turned his attention to Mortiss Bros and Camelline Shipping. It was just before 10.00 pm when he phoned Spoiling.

  ‘Yes, Worse.’

  ‘Victor. They don’t own ships.’

  ‘You are talking about Camelline Shipping.’

  ‘Yes. No ships. No camels. They own casinos on ships, Victor. What does casino say to you?’

  ‘Money laundering. Illicit transfers. Kitsch. False ceilings. Cigarette smoke. Body odour. Great sadness. Mm. Casinos. My staff had not informed me. Worse, I’ve been thinking. How would you like to work for me as my probationary sergeant? Public service rates, uniform allowance, police issue revolver, flexible work hours, paternity leave …’

  As Spoiling spoke, Worse stood in his kitchen, pouring tea.

  ‘Victor. Nearly a thousand cruise ships in and out of hundreds of unsecured ports over seven seas. It’s a dark pool, Victor, hiding under bright lights. Mortiss owns the floor in all of them. The counting house is in Chicago. I’m close to their accounts. When I’m in I will tell you the numbers. Just for now, I estimate there are two to three billion in bankable chips on the table on any given day. Chips, Victor. Easy to move on and off ships along with victuals and luggage and people.’

  ‘What evidence do you have for illegality, Worse?’

  ‘I’m looking, Victor. They could transfer millions across borders and it would wash through to the aggregated accounts. Physical transfers, if they wanted, port to port. Plus electronic transfer ship-to-ship, ship to corporations. Banks. Crime syndicates. Chicago. Those sums would be lost in the noise as far as regulators at the top were concerned.’

  ‘Mm. I trust your methods of enquiry are legitimate, Worse.’

  ‘You know my view that everything accessible to this ordinary member of the public is, self-evidently, available on the public record. The defence of the ipso facto, Victor.’

  ‘Worse. The self-evident is moot. You need to consult more the hooligan on the Clapham omnibus to understand modern norms.’

  There was a sigh. Modern norms were no more palatable to Spoiling than to Worse.

  ‘Where does Camelline fit in structurally to the larger Mortiss empire?’

  ‘I’m still figuring that out, Victor. There’s information available, but I expect the reality is different. They’re incorporated in Arizona, with financial control in Chicago.’

  ‘I’m wondering why your Perth incident was linked to Camelline particularly, rather than any other Mortiss entity. Can you give me a complete list of specific ships that have Mortiss casinos?’

  ‘Tomorrow. You are thinking about the Fremantle connection, Victor.’

  ‘You may have to endure an ocean cruise, Worse, in a research capacity.’

&
nbsp; ‘Would that be covered by my sergeant’s expense allowance?’

  ‘Good night, Worse.’

  Worse was still in his kitchen when he finished the call to Spoiling, and the meaning of the space triggered awareness of hunger. He snacked unhealthily and carried his tea back to the workshop.

  It looked as if Camelline was the clearing-house for the various front-end casino operations, such as Sea Dice, that were familiar to the public. It also seemed to serve as the administrating entity for Area Pi, as Worse found personnel records, budget data and requisitions in email traffic between the two. The odd thing was that even Camelline appeared to have little control of financial accounts. Income and expenditures were handled further up a company chain, Camelline acting as a conduit and a filter. It would not have surprised Worse if many casino employees were unaware of their connection to Mortiss Bros, or even Camelline.

  Worse had decided that to understand the corporate architecture, and to find its financial control centre, he needed to enter at the top. As he sipped tea, he checked progress on another screen where he was running a classic password attack on the Chicago mainframe.

  Meanwhile, there were other matters needing attention. Worse had the account details of the card used to pay for the Seneca, and it was easy to search on auto-teller withdrawals where the same card had been presented. Unsurprisingly, the most common location was in Fremantle. Using date and time information built into the transaction records, Worse could access bank security footage showing their wanted man withdrawing cash. He chose the best quality frames and forwarded them to Spoiling for use in police persons-sought bulletins. His message was headed ‘Haberdash’, Worse’s code-name for their fugitive.

  Worse checked the password program again. A new window had opened showing initial solutions by user name and password, and the list was growing rapidly. As he ran a cursor down the page, the identity and company role of each user was shown in a separate box. One stood out as likely to be the most valuable, and Worse chose it: he signed in as Arnold Tweisser, Chief Financial Officer.

  It was immediately clear to Worse that he had struck the mother lode of Mortiss Bros financials. He was taken straight to a menu page for an entity called Unit Circle Fiduciary that had the hallmarks of being a private bank. It had several levels of secondary protection, all familiar to Worse. He found the financial trunk line to Camelline, and from Camelline the hundreds of connections radiating to shipping agents, casino suppliers, mainstream banks and, more interestingly, Area Pi. Worse followed it all, copying some files, and taking notes.

  As he took advantage of Tweisser’s access, and revisited some of his online history, something started to look unusual. At first, Worse was not greatly bothered by a few anomalies, but the further he explored, the more intrigued he became. He decided to run a specialist diagnostics package, and when it concluded, he could hardly believe what he was looking at. Someone before him had installed a mockingbird, a phantom account manager that could be concealed in the normally discarded decimal expansion registers of billions of real variable calculations. Worse was aware of very few individuals or security services that had the sophistication to design, install and operate such a tool. He had been planning to insert one into Mortiss Bros himself; to find a sleeper there already was extremely surprising.

  The mockingbird had the potential to completely control the Mortiss enterprise, but only a minute fraction of its power had ever been utilized. There was a facility that monitored Unit Circle transactions involving Chinese entities, and there was a low-level siphon that Worse traced to a private account of the chief financial officer himself. Tweisser was stealing from the company.

  The discovery altered Worse’s plan. It was a far better option to use the mockingbird already in place than to install his own, which always carried a risk of detection. Worse’s plan was to disrupt Mortiss Bros temporarily in order to study their security response and set off regulator alarms. He would cause exactly four hours of turmoil, and it would start the following morning, Chicago time.

  Before finishing for the night, Worse turned his attention to Spoiling’s question about cruise liners with Camelline casinos, and their schedule of visits to Fremantle. It did seem a reasonable possibility that Haberdash might be smuggled out of the country using company connections. He sent the information to Spoiling.

  Worse himself was more interested in how Camelline operated as a shelf company, and particularly why it should be the administrative controller for Area Pi. He was also curious how a vast network of borderless casinos might function within a much larger criminal organization.

  Dear Sigrid

  You are cordially invited on an all-expenses-paid cruise to La Ferste, calling at Singapore, aboard Princess Namok, in the role of the mysterious, convalescing Mrs Worse, whose sole connubial duty will be provision of companionship, conversation, and an inscrutably diverting casino presence in the course of routine enquiries. Embarkation Monday week. Fourteen nights at sea. Returning airfare included. Guaranteed reading, writing, and relaxing time in luxury conditions on calm seas.

  Yours neptunically

  Worse

  Worse obtained passwords by making use of an input/output weakness common in mainframe services. When a large organization has many thousands of employees signing in over a short interval (such as the beginning of a regular workday schedule), user-password data will be queued in a secure ancillary cache in the event of overload. The password data enter the cache in random time order but, for service efficiency, they are accessed by the queue manager (the industry standard is Q-Man) in order of string length and alphanumeric homology. This strategy is designed to minimize switching frequency (and therefore queue service time). However, depending on the level of hacker penetration, this I/O regime can be exploited over multiple duty cycles using adaptive linear programming methods to solve for the simplest password, then the next simplest, and so on. The solution time can be dramatically reduced if the hacker submits indicial strings as (erroneous) passwords, but this increases the risk of detection. Paradoxically, one tactic deliberately promotes such detection in order to trigger a corporate-wide password reset. By utilizing the system’s non-similarity settings, extra information is obtained using a sorting algorithm based on difference analysis.

  17 MOCKINGBIRD

  Arnold Tweisser sat in a windowless vestibule outside the boardroom, awaiting his summons. Saviccia had been in there an hour, on his own with Regan, and it wasn’t sounding pleasant. Every few minutes Tweisser heard her raised voice, cursing and threatening. He didn’t know if he could withstand that kind of scene.

  But he didn’t know how to avoid it either. He couldn’t get away now. He could never tell Regan that he wanted out, that he was leaving Mortiss Bros. The company owned him, and she owned the company. From the time of its founding brothers, there were uniquely Mortiss traditions around managerial dissatisfaction, and Regan had relished their firm reinstatement. She would kill him.

  He tried to work, to keep abreast of the turmoil in the Unit Circle accounts, but his mind was wandering. He closed his laptop and thought again about what was happening. In the last three hours they had been the target of an unbelievable attack. Although there was no evidence of theft, funds were oscillating between accounts so fast that balances didn’t make sense and transactions were denied. Three hundred million dollars in creditor payments, including to the IRS, were blocked. Default notices were being issued. Auditor alerts and watchlisting had been triggered automatically. Secretive venture capital enterprises that banked with Unit Circle were pressuring for explanations. The more unsavoury client organizations and entrepreneurs were blatantly threatening.

  The problem was spreading as they tried to understand it, from Unit Circle to Camelline and every other business in the Mortiss Bros empire, as far away as the terencium operation that was supposed to be ultra secret. They were starting to lose their secure internal email channels as well. Area Pi was silent. Their own surveillance operati
ons that had caught the Misgivingston–Worse contact were shut down. Here in the centre of downtown Chicago, they were progressively being isolated from the world outside.

  Experts were on-site already. They weren’t the best available because no one liked working for Mortiss Bros, and that was because no one liked Regan. The expectation was that the chaos would stabilize and they would soon receive a ransom demand offering to withdraw the attack. The business model was this: if the problem could be fixed internally first, and defences restored, the attackers got nothing. If not, the ransom would be paid on trust that services would be restored to normal. Expenditure of this nature was a recognized operational outgoing in the modern corporate world. It saved businesses and it saved people. The technology damage and the monetary demand would both be carefully calibrated to wound but not kill the company.

  That was the strategic balance of the game. Enough poison to want to pay the witchdoctor, but not enough to render payment unfeasible. At this hour of the day, they were still awaiting contact. No one asked why, if an attacker could do this to them, he didn’t simply raid their accounts for the fee he wanted. No one considered that the assault might be primarily malicious rather than extortionate. No one thought that the poison might keep coming, that its purpose truly was to kill off Mortiss Bros.

  Tweisser heard more shouting. His pulse was racing and slowing crazily. He was sweating. He felt faint. Mortiss Bros may be in trouble, but so was he. A phantom account called a mockingbird, set up for him to supplement his wife’s lifestyle, was not only exposed, it was front and centre of the attack. Of all the possibilities, this had been chosen by the hacker as a central hub for the insanely fast traffic of funds in and out of subsidiaries. Not only had it been discovered and utilized, it was given special prominence by being labelled ‘Mockingbird’. Regan couldn’t fail to see it. She would ask why it was there. She was probably interrogating Saviccia about it. He would be saying he had never heard of it, and that would be the truth. When Tweisser was asked, he would say the same thing, but Regan would know he was lying.