Page 38 of No Stone Unturned

“Well, yes, but they might not be the only ones with intelligence on the assassination.” He shifted on the couch so he could look at me directly. “What about taking this down a notch, at least at first? We’d have a better chance of getting the information you need if we come at it from a different angle.”

“What angle?”

“The CIA angle. I guarantee you, they’ll have intelligence on what went down in the Congo. That would be much more familiar hacking for both of us, although a lot more dangerous this close to home. Still, we’d have a better chance to get at this in a timely fashion if we go that route.”

I pressed my hand against my forehead. “It’s a good idea, Elvis. I’m not thinking properly. I’m too close to this.”

He put an arm around my shoulder, pulled me in for a hug. “Look, I get it. You love him, which means you’ve got a lot invested in his safety. So do I. Slash saved my life on more than one occasion. If he’s in trouble, I’ve got his back. Besides, I may have a trick or two up my sleeve. Come on, let’s get hacking.”

“I don’t know what to say. Thanks, Elvis.”

“No thanks necessary. You can count on me anytime.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Lexi

Elvis had more than a trick; he had a freaking back door into the CIA, which saved us, at minimum, forty-eight hours of work. Possibly more. We drank coffee, ate snacks and hacked our hearts out rooting around in the system. We proceeded cautiously, so as not to draw the attention of their security monitoring software. It was extremely tedious work, unlike in the movies when after three dramatic clicks, the desired information popped up. Finding a specific file without using the search query function—which inevitably tipped off the security software—was like finding a special magic sword in multiplayer game world. There were lots of promising leads and even more dead ends.

Around dinnertime Basia and Xavier returned from purchasing furniture for their new house, on which they would close next Tuesday. Xavier joined the hack after Elvis quickly brought him up to speed. The backdoor was starting to get crowded. Basia and Gwen went out on the back porch to drink lemonade and enjoy the warm evening while dinner cooked.

“Bingo!” Elvis finally exclaimed. “I’ve found a folder that appears to correspond to the target years and countries. Give me a minute to poke around in the subfolders.” He spent a bit of time investigating. “This looks like the right stuff, but the security processes are pretty lame. There’s no use of code names, just regular text subfolder headings Africa, Congo, Vatican, and Apeloko. I would have expected something more innocuous like Project 19 or Continent X.”

Inner alarms were going off in my head, and I sensed Elvis’s growing unease, as well.

“Okay, we need to assume there might be a security tripwire associated with this information that we need to avoid,” I said. “Hopefully we haven’t already tripped it. We can’t back out now that we’re so close, but we don’t want create an uproar that will bring attention to this information if, in fact, it’s damaging to Slash.”

“So what’s the plan?” Elvis asked.

I considered the options. “Well, it looks like there’s an audio file, a large video file, a couple of photos, and some documents. All encrypted, naturally. It will be difficult to copy the video or audio files because of their size without alerting the monitoring software, but we might swing it. We could also attempt it in two stages, grabbing some documents and getting out, seeing if we can crack the encryption, and confirming that it contains the material we’re looking for, then going back for the rest if we need to do so.”

“You got a plan, geek princess?” Xavier asked.

I considered the options. It might be trap to find out who might be interested in this material and it might just be a honey pot that was established with false or fictional information to convince an interested party to stop looking while alerting the authorities to the presence of prowlers. But I didn’t believe anyone would go to the trouble of creating audio and video files in a honey pot. Too much time and wasted effort. So, my gut was telling me it had to be the stuff we wanted. We just had to be very careful and a lot smarter than the defenders.

“Yeah, follow my lead.” I tapped on some keys. “We’re going to go in real slow. If we detect a trap, we shift gears and try to buy enough time to grab what we can and get out.”

I handed Xavier and Elvis their assignments. “Xavier, I want you to monitor the back door to make sure that we get some warning of any activity that might try and close it before we can get out. Elvis, you have the security monitoring software. Do whatever you can to keep it asleep or distracted long enough so we can get out. I’ll also need you to make sure that we can’t be backtracked afterward in the activity logs if they do detect our presence. I’m going to grab as many of the documents as I dare, and perhaps a photo or two if things are going well. That shouldn’t take too long, and we’ll just have to hope that it’s enough. I want to do this in just one try, so let’s put our best game faces on.”

“Got it,” Elvis said. “Be advised it will take me about fifteen minutes to set up so I can monitor the security software and temporarily suspend the activity logging.” His fingers raced across the keys.

While he was doing that, Xavier reported he was in position, monitoring the back door. I spent the next fifteen minutes planning my exact steps so I’d be as quick as possible in case we did set off an alarm.

“Okay, I’m ready,” Elvis said. “Just give me a heads-up right before you start to actually copy the files. I’m going to create an error loop that will effectively block the security software and make any file transfer logs that do get saved look like a malfunction.”

“Understood.” I began with the penetration, taking my time and going as carefully as I could. After about five minutes, Xavier interrupted my train of thought.

“Lexi, we have something going on with the back door,” he said. “It’s subtle, but the traffic through the access point has increased in the last two minutes. Are either of you doing anything that would cause that?”

“Nope,” Elvis said. “Not me.

“Me neither,” I said. “Did we trip an alarm?”

“I don’t think so,” Xavier mused. “It appears most of the traffic right now is from the outside coming in.”

I watched the data scroll across my screen looking for answers or anomalies. Something was off “That’s strange. Elvis, who else would know about this back door?”

“No one except for Xavier and me. If someone else does, we’ll have to close it down after this.”

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