Annie Bellet

(Catch up on earlier chapters here)

Chapter Nine

            A small tick in his clean-cut jaw was the only sign Amos Levich, chief of security for the Special Projects division of BioCore Pharmaceuticals, felt anything at all about the news two of his network systems security analysts had just brought him.  He scrolled through the collected data on his PUDI, willing it to make sense but mostly just getting a headache.

            “Let me see if I have this correct,” he said in careful, measured tones, “That power hub break-in caused a leak in our server security?”

            “Yes, sir.” The older of the two analysts, Michael, swallowed audibly.  Though average in height and build with a gruff, sparse appearance, Amos had a reputation for being a man no one wanted to piss off.  His job was his life, and he took security for the company very seriously.

            “Humor me, kid.  I’m an old man and slow sometimes.  How does the power going out, in a district our building isn’t in, leave an opening in our wires?”  Amos leaned back against his stark grey plastiform desk.

            The break-in had been underneath the Kajipe central station, while the main center for BioCore’s Special Projects was located in West Morrow near the Central district edge.  BioCore’s main building was also located in West Morrow.  Their systems should be closed, accessible only from within the system itself.  That was how Amos understood things from his spec manuals.  Technology of it wasn’t exactly his strong point and he was smart enough to leave the details up to the network administrators.  The two administrators in front of him were the leads of that team and supposedly the best of the best in their field.  Amos grew more skeptical by the moment as they shuffled nervously in front of him.

            “Well, sir, our system is closed, but we still have servers that have to have a hard, I mean, physical, location.  We rent a server room in the Totsi Electronics building, due to its proximity to a. . . well. . .”  The grey-haired admin swallowed again and glanced at his companion.

            “We were piggy-backing onto a government black box.  A super server, if you will, for the use of its array and private Wires.  You can only access these directly at the site of the server, so we’d hardwired our way in.”  The freckled, paunchy middle aged admin, Seth, picked up the explanation.

            “So I take it that if we can hack into this ‘black box’, someone else could also?”  Amos waved a gloved hand impatiently.

            “It shouldn’t have been possible, but with the right mix of a hard hack onsite and then a power failure causing a system reboot, yes,” Michael confirmed.  “The servers are protected in electronically locked boxes that are nearly impossible to destroy, but you can get in at the actual physical location if for example, the power fails.  The locks would then fail.  The only way to kill that power though is from the central station or a main power hub.”

            “Wouldn’t the server also shutdown? I recall something on the newswires about interruption in certain Wires and feeds last night,” Amos said.

            “Yes, sir.” The freckled admin nodded. “But that doesn’t mean the information just goes away.  If you shut down your PUDI or one of those monitors,” he motioned to the bank of security cam screens that lined the wall behind Amos, “the information in the hard drives doesn’t cease to exist.”

            “Cut to the part where there was a breach.” Amos sighed.

            “Someone managed to hack into our partition on the server.  When we went in this morning to repair it once everything was back online, we noticed the lockpad broken and the security system had been tripped but nothing seemed to be missing.  Then we found tracers, data moved around a little.  Sometimes that happens when the servers are cleaning up after a reboot.  But it can also be a sign that data-mining programs have been rifling through.  Very sophisticated ones,” Seth said.

            “You are sure it was hacked? And that they got information off of it? Information about Special Projects?” Amos asked.  He tried to remember this satellite office in his records but he didn’t think he’d taken care of security for anything like that.  Might have been his unfortunate predecessor, if it was set up years ago.  It was still his problem now, however and that didn’t help the growing headache one iota.

            “Yes, sir.” Michael nodded. “We checked everything multiple times.  Someone was in there pulling encrypted information from our partition.”

            “These files are what they got?” Amos cued his PUDI to scroll through the files Michael and Seth had sent him earlier before he called the meeting.  The files were test results from the first stages of the project.  Obviously someone had stored the data onto the remote server as a standard backup procedure.

            Amos cursed under his breath.  Both administrators intelligently stayed silent.  After a few minutes that stretched on and filled the quiet room with breathing and tension, the chief of security refocused his eyes on the two men.

            “Can you trace who did this?  There were Hunter-killer drones on site, right?” He glanced at another screen where he’d quickly pulled up the security manifests for all the offices. “Why didn’t those get these people?”  A small relief there, since the purchase order confirmed it had been done years ago, before his tenure here.

            Another nervous swallow. “I don’t know, sir.  It was done right there at the site and the reboot from the power failure wiped the tracks.  Someone retrieved their programs and the data.  I don’t know if there was anything we could have done differently, sir.  They should have a hell of a time breaking the encryption though, if they even can.”  He looked as though he couldn’t decide whether or not to be proud of himself for that.

            “Who else knows about this?” Amos folded his arms.  He certainly wasn’t thrilled.  These two might be the best of the best, but clearly they were just good enough to cause trouble and not skilled enough to fix it.  His headache intensified and he resisted the urge to press his fingers to his temples.

            “Just the three of us. Seth discovered the program traces and came to me to confirm his suspicions.  We thought we should go straight to you, sir.”  Michael said.

            “Good.” Amos nodded, mostly to himself. “Thank you both.  You may go. If you discover anything else about this, you are to come straight to me.”  They both nodded and turned to leave.

            “And gentlemen, if anyone else finds out about this, you will be terminated.” Amos’s voice was calm and threaded with steel.  The two administrators looked back at him with pale faces and nodded again.  It was clear to them that ‘terminated’ didn’t mean fired.

            Amos waited until the door had sealed itself behind the two men before he walked slowly around his desk and sat heavily in the greenish-grey plastiform chair behind it.  He swiveled around to face the wall of monitors.  His brown eyes focused on the upper left hand screens whose cams observed the small labs.  A handful of men and women in light green lab coats moved carefully around the sterile manufactured steel tables with vials and handheld dictation devices.

            Head pounding like a drunk on a locked door, Amos cued up Dr. Tylour Blanc’s call sign in his PUDI but didn’t instruct it to place the call.  He reviewed the pitifully small amount of information his network security admins had been able to collect for him.

            “There’s been a breach.” Amos muttered to himself.  “Someone got the first testing data files, so they’ll have the basic gist that BioCore is up to more than just making pharmaceuticals, sir.  Oh, and by the way, we have no idea who got into the server, how much they might be able to extrapolate from these files, and absolutely no way to find out the answer to any relevant questions you might have, boss.”  He chuckled mirthlessly.  “Oh yes. That would go over so well.”

            Dr. Blanc was the head of the BioCore and more importantly for Amos, the brains behind the Special Project division.  Amos didn’t ask questions, but he knew that what was going on in those labs wasn’t legal or likely very nice.  Dr. Blanc had high ambitions and he was a ruthless man who’d made it clear to his head of security that getting in the way of those ambitions would be the last thing anyone ever did.  It was equally clear that what was good for Dr. Blanc would be good for Amos.

            “A rising tide floats all shit,” he murmured and shook his head.

            Amos leaned back in his chair.  If he was going to keep this quiet from his boss, he’d have to eliminate the two administrators and any data that could trace the breach or lead back to him.  It was a hard choice to make, either way.  Telling Dr. Blanc would almost certainly get him fired and likely killed.  Not telling him would cost two lives.

            Either way the two network administrators would die.  It wasn’t so hard a choice, after all.

            Amos sighed again.  He’d have to get his own hands dirty since he couldn’t trust anyone else to remove the two in a way that wouldn’t trace back to the Chief of Security. He’d take it slow though.  They weren’t likely to cause him much trouble yet.  It would be best to see how things played out in the next week or two.

            After a few more minutes of processing his options, Amos rose slowly.  He deleted the unmade call to BioCore’s President from his PUDI.  Running a gloved hand through his close-cut, graying hair, he walked out of his office.  There were two accidents to plan and a security breach to cover-up.  It was going to be a long month.

(Continued Soon with Part Two!)