ever will. For all intents and purposes, he is the warlord in that part of the island. That might explain why he has the girl there instead of out in the rainforest, where he keeps the businessmen he takes for ransom.”
Stan looked up at the sky and then back over his shoulder. Although the day still had enough brightness to hold the compound in its fading light, the jungle growth behind him was now completely dark. At this moment he was within a two-second dash of one of the entrance gates in the wall. The team had crossed the valley at early dusk, and everyone was in place. Getting close had worried Stan considerably, but, like everything else, the approach had been smooth as silk. What had concerned him most, naturally, was being seen, and for just a second his stomach had lurched when the sound of a horse’s hooves came from along the wall to his left as he reached his pre-planned spot. It was not a guard, though, but an old man on what looked like an even older pony, accompanied by a pair of scrawny dogs. The quartet plodded slowly across the road that led out the gate, and on down along the wall.
Stan keyed a button twice on his handheld radio and whispered, “Sully! The noise coming at you! Not security. Repeat, not security!” Then he keyed the button once and whispered, “We’re go! On my signal. Wait for it!”
He looked over his shoulder again, then rose slowly to his knees, one eye on the camera above the gate to see if it was picking him up but it was pointed across the valley. For a second he wondered if it could have ... no, not possible; they’d kept well hidden in the trees. He looked one more time at the ink sketch on the back of his hand, where the Dutch woman had drawn a layout of the villa. With his right index finger, he stroked the pair of stun grenades clipped to his vest, and with his thumb checked the Uzi. He took a deep breath, waiting for just a bit more adrenaline. It was time.
That brief pause, as it turned out, was what saved Stan and made him call off the operation, for in that pair of seconds he realized that for the first time in the operation – the first time he knew of – there was a hitch.
?
Stan Livy has become aware that something is not as it should be, and therefore calls off the operation. What is the “hitch” he discovers?
4
Closing In on the Hacker
The argument around the table was turning hot. The majority of the ICS team was confident they had identified the hacker, and wanted to arrest him, but Tara Kiniski was holding out. That mattered, because Tara headed up the team. Technically, hers was only a temporary appointment, for the simple reason that the team itself was temporary. The International Computer Security group had been put together by the RCMP two years before, when the World Trade Organization and the Canadian government announced that the next WTO conference would be held in Quebec.
As its title suggested, the team was in charge of computer security for the conference, and almost right away there was more work than they could handle.
Even before Tara had gathered all the code-slingers and chip-jocks and various geeks (from day one they’d been called the Geek Squad) she felt she needed – in fact, even before there was really any useful information to hack into – their own system had been penetrated. Nobody on the team, even the non-computer types, was surprised when it happened. Devoted hackers spend ten to twelve hours a day and more, seven days a week, trying to score in this way, so it made sense that someone might get in at the early stages. But at least the penetration convinced Tara’s superiors that the off-the-shelf software set up to communicate across thirty-seven different countries came with firewalls that were next to useless, and that better defensive resources were necessary. It also made the ICS team more cautious, so when a tip came from the U.S. Secret Service some time later, they treated it seriously.
Because the American president would be attending the conference for two days, the Secret Service had immediately begun investigating every possible political opponent of the WTO. Almost as a reflex, the first one it looked at was “Randy Andy,” Randalar Singh Anderjit, for he headed up an anti-free trade group that was regularly blamed, sometimes legitimately, for disrupting international conferences. Everyone involved with the WTO expected interference from Randy Andy, but what had caught the interest of both the Secret Service and the ICS team was an unknown face, a long-haired, twenty-something male who showed up in photographs alongside Anderjit right after the Quebec conference was announced. A search of police records revealed that he was on the FBI’s list of known hackers. A quick dig into some archived files identified him as an ex-student, first of McGill University in Montreal, where Randy Andy had studied, and then of Berkeley in California, expelled from both schools for allegedly hacking into their records and altering reams of data.
But for a bit of coincidence, this tip would not have merited more than the normal precautions from the ICS team, even though the subject, or at least, someone who was a dead ringer for him, was discovered to be renting a room in Quebec’s Old Town area. However, on the very same day the advice came, Tara discovered that their system had been cracked yet again – not the original, weakly defended commercial system, but their new, super-secure one. Someone had managed to insert what she and her fellow geeks described as a “demon,” a software program that operated on its own within their system. With this demon, and working through an anonymous server – probably in Bulgaria, Tara suspected, for that country was notorious in the cyberworld for such service – some hacker somewhere was now able to get into WTO files with an ordinary laptop.
Still, the news was not all bad, for Tara had a few shots of her own to take. Using a piece of hyper-trace software that she cobbled together herself, and with the help of the telephone company, she and the team discovered in less than twenty-four hours where that offending laptop was being used: the room in Old Town that the tip subject was renting! At that point, the “civilians” – the non-geeks – on the ICS team had swung into action. Within another twenty-four hours, they had a set of perfect fingerprints – “They’re so good you’d think we’d taken him into a station and printed him!” Sergeant Proulx had said – and a full-time stakeout had been established in a house across the street.
But now there was a conflict. After a week of careful watching, the team, especially the civilians, wanted to have done with it and make an arrest.
“Look, we got him cold!” Sergeant Proulx insisted. “He’s got to be the hacker ’cause your trace ... er ... er ... trace thing or whatever, placed him. And the stakeouts, they’re all saying he pounds away on the keyboard for hours and hours. This is the guy! Let’s take him out! Then all you have to do is clean out that demon or whatever it is and we’re in the clear! What are we waiting for? He’s got to be the one!”
That sentiment echoed around the table emphatically enough to make Tara get to her feet when she replied.
“No. We just keep watching. I don’t believe this guy is Randy Andy’s buddy. Or even a hacker at all for that matter. I think he’s a plant, set up to direct us away from the real one. If you re-examine the evidence and think about it for a minute, you’ll agree.”
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Why does Tara Kiniski believe this is not the hacker the ICS team must catch?
