Favors and Lies Read online

  “Striker didn’t send you?”

  “No. We, uh, had a falling out. I’m not sure I will ever work with that prick again.”

  “Hmm. Then how did you find me?”

  Dan delivered his packaged response. “You have a lot of bandwidth for a residence.”

  Tobias flipped a wad of wet hair over the top of his head and considered the statement. “I suppose, if you knew what you were looking for, you could eventually find me that way. Otherwise, I am pretty far off the grid. I have solar panels in the back of the house. They provide forty percent of the power I need. I have generators in the basement that run on ethanol. Not the cheapest option, but storm-proof and government proof. Geothermal heating as well. I have a generator running on natural gas and another on propane. Spreading things around to remain below the radar.”

  “Government proofing?”

  “The government can monitor everything based on power consumption. And believe me they do. This old place still has a working well, which I run through a filter system. By all appearances, I’m just an average middle-aged guy, living a quiet life doing computer work.”

  Dan was lucky. His visit dovetailed perfectly into two of Tobias’s greatest fears. Death and conspiracy. “I could use your help. I need your help. I lost my nephew and sister-in-law recently. I think there is more to it than what the authorities are telling me.”

  Tobias moved towards the window and peeked out the front blinds. “Solving crimes is not my area of expertise.”

  “I’m looking for a phone number.”

  Tobias began a slow slide into ego-mode, a chest-thumping personality who was as arrogant as his Dr. Death Count counterpart was crazy. “Phone numbers are easy. Frankly, I’m surprised you need help.”

  “I’m looking for a phone number that doesn’t exist.”

  Tobias twirled and looked Dan in the eyes. “You have my attention.”

  “The night my nephew and sister-in-law were killed, I received a phone call to my landline at home. That call, according to the police, never existed.”

  “And you believe the police? By law, the police are permitted to tell you any untruth they want to aid an investigation. By law. They can legally lie to you. Until they get to the courtroom. Then they lie, but it is illegal. Hell, lies are more prevalent in a courtroom than lawyers or criminals.”

  “Can you help me determine if the police are lying?”

  “Did you try your other connections?”

  “I did.”

  “I’m insulted you didn’t come to me first.”

  “I am here now. My contacts confirmed there is no record of a call to my home on the night in question.”

  Tobias paused and ran his finger in a circle on his temple. “You want my help, here are the rules. First, the meter is running. Going rate is a thousand dollars an hour. That is a one, followed by three zeros. Those are US dollars, not Guyanese dollars. Second, everything you see and hear remains confidential. Third, and most importantly to you, fuck with me, and I will make your life very uncomfortable until I have extracted what I determine to be an appropriate amount of revenge. Curse-proof or not. You fuck with me, you will never again have a working phone, get money from an ATM, use a credit card.”

  “I get the picture.”

  “OK. Good. Good. So, you need a trace on a call without a call record.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “You still living in Alexandria?”

  “Yep.”

  “Is the home landline Verizon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go upstairs and see what we can do.” Tobias tossed his head to the side and Dan followed him up a narrow staircase to an office on the second floor. The room had a slanted ceiling that sloped downward to the left, following the roof angle of the 1920’s bungalow. The walls were lined with racks of computers and servers. A desk stretched the length of the far wall, topped with a multitude of computer screens in various sizes. A small sofa sat along the other wall, under the narrowing roofline.

  Dan motioned towards the sofa. “Is this where you daydream the latest schemes to fleece the deserving and unknowing?”

  “Yes. Have a seat.”

  Tobias sat down in a wheeled office chair and pushed himself down the length of the desktop with one shove of his legs. The chair came to rest in front of a keyboard near the largest monitor in the room.

  “Nice space.”

  “A thousand processors in this room. Over a hundred teraflops in total computing capacity. A thousand terabytes of data storage across the hall.”

  “Serious numbers. What’s on the agenda?”

  Tobias mumbled to himself and then raised his voice. “Working on retirement. Got a few things cooking. Been spending some time on the gambling front. Working on perfecting spyware that allows me to see the hands of other players in most of the large online poker communities.”

  “Trying to get into the Tournament of Champions, or just making more enemies?”

  “Enemies of the righteous. Internet gambling is illegal in the US. Most of the online gambling sites are run from Central America. But the computers and servers, well, most of them are sitting on an Indian reservation in Canada.”

  “Canadian Indians?”

  “Completely autonomous Indians. Their own nation. Their own police. Their own government.”

  “And they have taken to online gambling?”

  “Like fish to water. Nothing new for the Indians. They were fucked out of everything else. Left them with alcohol and gambling, and if that wasn’t bad enough, they don’t have the enzyme to breakdown alcohol. Lots of Indian tribes running casinos, but these Canadian Indians are different. They don’t have casinos. They just host the computers for online gambling sites.”

  “Let me guess, Indians know more about getting fucked than they do about computer security.”

  “I always said you were smart, Dan.”

  “Just trying to pay attention.”

  “Anyhow, I’ve been working on some really slick code. But it’s a matter of finding the right asshole to fleece. I mean, with my software I can outplay any number of US citizens gambling online and there would be no recourse. What are they going to do, go to the cops? That’s like a drug dealer complaining someone stole their stash. Besides, believe it or not, I’m not into fucking over innocent people.”

  “A man of principle.”

  “Yes. As a result of my principles, I have to spend precious time vetting other players at the poker table. Background work. Make sure I’m not about to tilt the table in my favor at the expense of a recently laid off father of three who is just trying to make ends meet. The guy probably shouldn’t be gambling, but shit happens. I get it. Now, the son of a billionaire with a dozen martinis in his veins indicted for running over a young couple in his Ferrari . . . well, that is a different story. He could stand to lose a few dollars to finance my retirement.”

  “Not worried someone is going to track you down?”

  “They would have to go through Estonia, Poland, the Ukraine, and Belize. I am bounced off so many servers, I can’t keep them straight. Spoofed IP addresses thrown in for fun. On top of that, they would have to find the people I pay to make cash withdrawals at the end of a very long paper trail of fake names and companies. And they would have to get one of these non-US citizens, who are making a very good salary, to turn in their very generous yet equally unknown employer. It doesn’t really keep me up at night.”

  Dan imagined wads of cash stashed behind the drywall of the old bungalow. The attic awash in currency and precious metals.

  “What else do you have?”

  “The most accurate computer program for picking winning football games in the history of sport. Professional football only at this point, but I am looking to take the program and apply it to other sports.”

  �
�I can’t imagine the odds makers would be too happy about that.”

  “They will be if I sell it to them.”

  “Vegas cornered that market shortly after the first casino opened in 1906.”

  “No one has any software even close to this. I have the historical data for every professional game ever played. Home team, visitor, favorite, underdog. I know how far each team traveled to get to each game and by what means of transportation. For every hundred miles the visiting team has to travel, their expected score drops by two tenths of a point. I have injury reports by position. I have data on the referee teams and their tendencies, and I keep track of how far each referee has to travel for a game. I have the weather at kick-off for every game and another variable for the weather at halftime. I have the type of field and variables for how the field conditions change with weather and humidity. I know how much moisture is retained by various models of artificial turf, and how that equates to the footwear of various teams. I have the attendance records, the average decibel of the crowd per location per attendance, which by the way was not easy to get, particularly for the stadiums that have been decommissioned, so to speak. I have taken into account time-zone changes, arriving and departing airports. Local food. Prostitution and drinking ordinances.”

  “Prostitution and drinking laws?”

  “Absolutely. For example, if Las Vegas had its own football team, they would hold a distinct 0.4 additional point advantage due to the increased likelihood that the visiting team would partake, at least to some extent, in the all night boozing and strip shows.”

  “So you are assuming the home team is more immune to the local temptations.”

  “Maybe not immune, but perhaps they get their fill of sin during the week.”

  “How accurate are you?”

  “I have a statistically significant advantage. On average, my spread is one point closer than the best bean counters in Vegas can do.”

  “That’s worth millions.”

  “It is worth billions.”

  “A lot of data crunching.”

  “The computer power here is just a fraction of what I have at my disposal. I’ve installed thousands of Trojan horses on unsuspecting, unsecured computers around the country. Mainly people who leave their computers on and connected. I borrow their computers during the day, when most people aren’t home. Nothing malicious. Just using their CPUs when the owners aren’t.”

  Dan changed the subject. “How are you with unlisted phone numbers?”

  Tobias grunted.

  He pounded on some keys and the screen directly in front of him went blank. He entered code onto the black screen, looked over at Dan as he typed, and then hit the enter key.

  “Time of the call?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Two in the morning. Last Monday night.”

  “Tuesday, then.”

  “Correct, Tuesday.”

  “Address and phone number the call was made to?”

  Dan recited it slowly as Tobias typed. The screen filled with columns of numbers and every call made to Dan’s home phone in the last five years.

  “They started keeping all records after 9/11. Everything you do is monitored on some level.”

  “You mean everything can be monitored.”

  “I stand corrected. As you know, all phone records reside in databases at the phone company. By law, the phone company has to maintain these records. In legal proceedings and investigations, the phone company provides these records to law enforcement. They also use this data to create invoices, monitor usage, to develop marketing plans. And then, of course, at the far end of the spectrum, this information is being crunched by the NSA for terrorist threats.”

  Dan scanned the screen as Tobias zoomed through the list.

  “Good, it’s not there,” Tobias said.

  “Why is that good?”

  “Well, it narrows down the options, which can be helpful.”

  “What address was the call made from?”

  “I assume it was made from my sister’s house via a cell phone. Her phone records are also clean, according to the police. She lives in Northwest DC.”

  “Address?”

  Dan provided the address and Tobias’s fingers danced.

  “Yes, there is no record of a call from her home either. Once again, that is helpful.”

  “Your definition of helpful differs from mine.”

  “A couple of things can explain a phone call that doesn’t exist. The first and most obvious is that it has been erased from the database. This, I imagine could be done by a handful of people at the phone company. In your case, you are talking about a call to your house landline, so deleting that record would very likely have to be an intentional act. There are probably some controls on the people who could write to or delete from the database.”

  “So someone on the inside or someone like you, on the outside, with the skills to infiltrate the system and delete evidence.”

  “Yes. And that too is useful information.”

  “What are the other possibilities?”

  Tobias sighed. “After 9/11 the NSA and CIA saw the vulnerability of the current phone system. Anyone who made a call in the DC or New York area on that September morning remembers the phone networks were overloaded. Landlines worked in some cases, but cell phones were inundated with a volume of calls the system could never handle, nor was ever designed to handle.”

  “And?”

  “Even the CIA was impacted. People working for the most powerful spy agency on earth couldn’t make calls from their cell phones. The CIA had two choices. One was to provide the phone carriers with all CIA phone numbers and those phone numbers would take precedence on the network should there be another incident of national security. This plan would have been the easiest route, except that the CIA and NSA refused to give a list of phone numbers to the phone company. Many of the local law enforcement agencies readily agreed. So the next time there is an emergency situation, the calls made by police officers and response teams will take priority and their calls will go through the system. The average Joe will be screwed. Well, you, not me.”

  “So the CIA and NSA and others did not agree to give their phone list to the phone company.”

  “No, they did not. The CIA and NSA built their own wireless network. In high-strike-probability locations. Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston. The NSA acquired, or appropriated, a narrow sliver of the wireless spectrum for these proprietary network endeavors. Sometimes they attached their equipment to existing cell towers and in other cases they put up their own cell towers on government-owned buildings.”

  “A private network . . .”

  “With no public records of calls.”

  “And if this number came through this network?”

  “Beyond my domain. Wouldn’t even try to poke around if I thought I could. Don’t need that type of attention.”

  “Any other good news?”

  “Let’s stick with the likely scenario. Let’s assume the call was deleted from the database. Let’s also assume that the call came from a cell phone.”

  “Why do we assume that?”

  “I could be wrong, but I’m guessing we’re dealing with professionals. What professional is going to use a landline? Landlines require interaction with the phone company. Real phone company employees come to real addresses to hook up landlines. If you have nefarious intentions, who is going to go through that?”

  “No one.”

  “Correct. Secondly, from a pragmatic standpoint, if the call originated on a cell phone, and the record no longer exists in the central database, we can still get the data via another route.”

  “How?”

  “Even if a cell phone number is deleted in the central database, the record of a mobile call will still exist at the physical cell tower. Phone compan
ies install hard drives on every cell tower and that hard drive stores the records of all calls that come through that tower. It is a failsafe. Required by law.”

  “Let’s take a look.”

  “It’s not that easy. First, there are a couple of dozen cell towers in the DC area. Run by different companies. AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint. All of these companies have different cell tower hard drives. Some of these companies may lease space on the same physical tower, but their local hard drives would not be shared. So right off the bat, I have to get access to the hard drives of five or six different companies in several dozen cell tower locations. That requires time, which for you means money. I currently do not have access to every cell tower. Never needed it before.”

  “Just an issue of time and money.”

  “Exactly. And once I locate the cell towers and the hard drives, and break the security of the hard drive, I still have to decipher the data.”

  “How is that?”

  “The data stored on the hard-drive at the tower is raw data. Nothing but zeros and ones. I have to figure out the algorithm for translating the ones and zeros into meaningful information. Human readable information. That will also take time as every company probably has their own protocol and formats for translating this data.”

  “How soon do you think you can get an answer?”

  “Depends on the level of encryption of the hard drives. Given enough time and processing power, any encryption can be broken.”

  “So, if you take all those dummy computers you have out there and combine it with all the computing power in this house, and you focus it on this task, you can do it.”

  “Yes, but as I mentioned, the meter would be running and the going rate is a thousand dollars an hour.”

  “Ouch.”

  “And that is my discounted rate for people I like.”

  “Work fast.”

  Chapter 16

  —

  Detective Wallace looked for the entrance to the underbelly of the L’Enfant Promenade for ten minutes. He found the staircase that led downward to the adjacent street and examined the wall from where Dan Lord and Detective Nguyen had ambled into the abyss, one using a stack of pallets, the other employing nothing but gravity. Neither of those routes would end favorably for a detective in his early-fifties with two bad knees and thirty extra pounds.