Breaking and Entering Read online

“Are you sure?” asked Alien.

  Jim called Ted Roberts. “He says it’s the right place,” he reported.

  They circled it a second time. “There’s no indication of any activity,” said Alien. “Not any for a while.”

  “Maybe they want their DR site to be undercover,” said Jim. “Should we try the lock?”

  With frozen fingers, Alien took out the same lock-picking tools she’d had since freshman year. Jim had his own. One at a time, they halfheartedly tried to pick the rusty back door lock.

  Nothing budged.

  “I’m soaked.” Alien hugged herself, teeth chattering. She peeked in another window. Behind it, a little black wire ran to a box above the door. “At least it looks like it’s alarmed,” she said. “But I’m getting the willies. Can we just go?”

  “Yeah.” Jim nodded. “Okay.”

  The call came fifteen minutes later, as they were approaching their downtown hotel. “Uh-huh,” Alien heard Jim say. “Well, no harm, no foul.”

  He hung up. “Wrong address.”

  Alien showered and wrapped her hair in a towel in her hotel room. From her suitcase, she changed into flannel polka-dot pajama bottoms and a gray cotton Route 66 tank top emblazoned with the legendary highway sign.

  A seven-beat knock. Shave and a haircut—two bits.

  Alien opened the door.

  Jim was there, holding a bottle of wine.

  They sat on opposite sides of the bed, knees up and backs against the headboard, watching a movie. Two plastic wine cups, appropriated from Alien’s bathroom, sat in easy reach on the two night tables. About forty minutes into the movie, Jim inched closer to the middle. Without a word, Alien reciprocated. Soon they were side by side, eyes on the screen.

  The movie ended.

  Alien rested her head on her partner’s shoulder.

  Jim studied her. He took a strand of hair that had fallen across her cheek and tucked it back behind her ear.

  He put his hand gently under her chin and lifted her face to his.

  Early gray light filled the hotel room the next morning. “It feels so good to hold you,” Jim said.

  They snuggled, murmuring happily. But Alien felt guilty.

  “Are you going to tell your wife?” she asked.

  Quickly, gently, he said, “I wasn’t planning on it.”

  Alien turned over. Jim pulled her back. They kissed.

  Bad, thought Alien. So bad. For both of us.

  12 / /

  Europe on Five Hacks a Day

  Alien and Jim were like two cops assigned to work a beat together. They were partners. They had experiences together—intense experiences, like something out of a movie. They made each other laugh. They impressed each other. They respected each other. They saved each other’s butts. And one day, it seemed to Alien, they simply realized that they were in love.

  Whether that was true—or if it mattered—only time would tell.

  Over the next six weeks—late October, November, and early December 2007—Alien spent an average of six out of every seven days on the road for Elite Defense. Three times she and Jim were scheduled for the same conference or engagement. At first Alien thought it was a coincidence. Then, after they gave a talk together in Detroit almost identical to the one she had done alone at the Pentagon, she asked him, “Did they need two people here?”

  “I told my contacts I thought it was important to have you here as well as me,” Jim said.

  Alien kissed him. He wanted her, and was talking Alien up to others. But she still felt uneasy about two of them being sent when one would do. And, as she buckled up for the plane ride home, another, more intimidating thought occurred to her. Both she and Jim were Agents. But he obviously held more sway at Elite Defense. If he could get Alien assigned to anything, he could probably also get her unassigned.

  And she would never know.

  In mid-December, Melinda emailed Alien with a new assignment. The following Monday, she was to lead a security awareness seminar in Silicon Valley.

  “Jim is presenting with you,” the office manager wrote.

  Sunday morning, Alien took a five a.m. cab to make her flight out of Boston, but snowstorms held her plane on the tarmac for hours. By the time they took off and flew almost seven hours to San Francisco, the runway was jammed and the gates were full, so the plane circled the city until ten p.m. local time, more than twenty hours after she had gotten up.

  Alien dragged herself to the taxi stand, holding her rolling suitcase upright in front of her like a walker. She didn’t get to the hotel until close to midnight.

  The door to room 1219 opened before she could even knock. Jim, whom she had called from the cab, had been listening for her footsteps. He swept Alien up by the waist, sank his face into her neck, and began undoing her belts and buttons.

  Alien had barely enough strength to step back. “I’m exhausted,” she said.

  “Oh . . . ” Jim paused. “We don’t have to,” he said. But his eyes begged otherwise.

  “No . . . we can.” Smiling, Alien stroked his chest. “Just slowly. I’m so tired. And so happy to see you,” she said.

  Alien paused in the middle of brushing her hair in the bathroom the next morning. “I have an idea for a research project on recovering deleted evidence from hard drives,” she told Jim. “It would be a perfect conference presentation. Want to help?”

  “Sure,” he said. Jim entered, holding her coat. “Fill me in on the drive.”

  An hour later they stood side by side in front of thirty programmers and their bosses. The client was a fast-growing dot-com too busy building their platform to think about its vulnerabilities. Alien loaded the slides she’d prepared for them. Jim made the introductions. “Hi—I’m Jim Michaels. I’m a senior consultant with Elite Defense,” he said. “And this is my colleague, Elizabeth Tessman. She’s a junior consultant.”

  Junior? Alien looked up in surprise.

  Jim had arranged things so that he and Alien had almost a whole free day together following their presentation. Back at the rental car she said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d introduce me as a consultant or senior consultant too. It’s hard for me to have leverage with the client as a ‘junior’ consultant. Besides, I’m another Agent, the same as you.”

  “Sorry. You’re absolutely right.” Jim patted her knee.

  They drove to Half Moon Bay. Still unsure how he really thought of her, Alien followed up about the research project. “You know what would be cool?” she said. “I bet I can make it all boot from the SD card in my phone.”

  Jim said nothing for several seconds. Then: “You’d need three partitions,” he said.

  Alien nodded enthusiastically. “Say five hundred megabytes for the usual cell phone stuff, sixty megs for a RAM dumper, and the remainder for whatever else we can rip.”

  It was raining when they reached the beach. Nevertheless, Alien pulled Jim after her, over and into the dunes.

  During the rest of December 2007 and January and February 2008, Alien pursued her research project with Jim as best she could. They still saw each other in person every two or three weeks, but the collaboration—like every other aspect of their relationship—took place via email far more than through any live exchange. The hours she spent programming were on top of her already intense work schedule, whether on the road or back in Cambridge, for Elite and its clients. This meant she was up well into the night, her phone or a test laptop half-disassembled in front of her for easy access to the memory and storage units.

  The exhilaration she felt when she sent Jim her latest code, or reviewing what he sent her, more than compensated for the lost sleep. Alien imagined them presenting their findings at a packed session of an important security conference and then meeting back at the room later to celebrate.

  The killer effort was worth it. But it was still killer. And the requirements of her job could always push everything else aside.

  On the Thursday after Presidents’ Day, one of the Jedis called Alien. A mul
tibillion-dollar U.S. bank, code-named “Diamond,” had bought a French competitor—“Bastille.” In the wake of the acquisition, some Bastille executives and employees left to start their own new financial institution. Diamond believed that they had been poaching clients all the while, and planned to sue. To prove the charge, however, they needed evidence.

  In secret. From Paris. This weekend.

  Enter Agent Tessman.

  Alien’s flight was slated to leave Logan Airport for Charles de Gaulle at eleven p.m. At eight thirty p.m. she was just pulling into the parking lot of Micro Center, Cambridge’s computer supply superstore. She grabbed a shopping cart and hurried to the aisle for external hard drives. Alien swept the shelves clean. In ideal circumstances all the drives would be identical, but she had to take what was available.

  Next came power strips, extension cords, USB adapters, and French electrical outlet adapters. Then gaffer tape, a label maker, rolls of label tape, and Sharpies.

  The cart teetered. A Micro Center staffer, a tall, thickset bald guy in a dark blue shirt and tie, approached. “Can I help you?” he asked.

  Alien counted her present haul: fifteen hard drives. “Do you have more in the back?” she said. “I’m ten hard drives short. I’m looking for external hard drives,” she said. “Or extra SATA drives would do in a pinch. And do you have anything better than fifty-four hundred rpm?”

  The Micro Center employee looked down at her. He was at least six two, a foot taller than Alien. “Well, little lady, let me tell you something about hard drives,” he said. “You don’t care about speed—you care about storage space.”

  Alien took a deep breath. “Thank you so much for your help,” she said as cheerfully as she could muster. “Do you have any seventy-two hundred rpm drives? Also, do you have any more of these SATA-to-USB adapters? There were only two.”

  As expected, polite persistence was more effective than a lecture.

  “I’ll check,” the man said, heading in the direction of the storeroom.

  Alien wheeled toward the register, preparing stoically for the hit to come to her credit cards. Between tonight’s hardware buy, the deposit on her Paris hotel room, and her plane ticket, the total was around ten thousand dollars. What was her alternative, though? Pass on an international corporate espionage case?

  Maybe I’ll get the reimbursement before the credit card bill, she lied to herself.

  Alien sighed.

  She unloaded her shopping cart and opened her purse.

  Bastille Bank headquarters was a four-story white stone neoclassical building with Doric columns in front and heavy mahogany doors with brass fittings. The client contact—Mitch, a tall Diamond American security executive in his mid-fifties, dressed in a trench coat—unlocked the ornate doors for Alien and her gear suitcase after the last employees had left Friday evening at six p.m. “The janitorial staff won’t come until Sunday night,” he said. “If anyone else enters unexpectedly and asks questions, you’re an auditor.”

  “I’m not great at French,” said Alien, suddenly getting flashbacks to seventh grade.

  “Even better.” Mitch handed her a keycard necessary to open other doors inside.

  The first three stories of the building each had dark glass-topped desks for fifteen to twenty employees in a modern open office layout, with a ten-person conference room on both the second and third floors. The top floor held three executive suites, another, larger conference room, and the Bastille data center. While they waited for others on the engagement to join them, Alien walked the entire building with Mitch, making detailed notes on the setup of every desk and workstation in a Moleskine notebook and taking photographs with her digital camera—better to reassemble later everything they were about to take apart.

  Over the next two hours, Mitch let in the entire team. First to arrive after Alien was a mustached man in suit and tie, contracted as legal counsel. “Al,” he introduced himself. Following him were six trusted French tech staffers, hired after the acquisition, who understood English and were ready to receive orders. Last came Bruce, the only Jedi on-site, toting a brick-sized black Tableau Forensic Imager, used to make precise disk copies at very high speeds, among other functions.

  By eight p.m., everyone had gathered in the third-floor conference room. But Bruce, standing back, holding the Tableau, made no move to take charge.

  “Let’s set up in the conference room,” Alien said. “Move the tables off to the side,” she directed the local staffers. “Make a ring. And then can you guys get us ten workstations that we can use to do the imaging?”

  While they worked, Alien ran power cables and adapters taken from her suitcase, and then unpacked four of the external hard drives. She carefully labeled each of them, using the label maker.

  “There are seventy desktops in the office—some with forty gigabytes, most with eighty gigabytes,” Alien told Bruce. “Each external hard drive is two hundred and fifty or five hundred gigabytes—I wasn’t able to get all the same size drives. So each drive can store images of at least three desktops.”

  They returned together to the first floor, carrying the label maker and a set of tiny screwdrivers. Alien and Bruce opened the physical frames of desktop computers. Inside each, where no one else would notice it, they affixed a small white label corresponding to the matching external hard drive they were taking back to the United States. That way, too, they could be sure they were reinstalling the correct drive on the correct computer on the floor plan when they finished.

  When she and Bruce were done with the first floor, Alien booted the workstations the other men had brought into the conference room with a CD running Helix, a computer forensics toolkit. To each workstation she connected one of the first batch of ten desktop drives she and Bruce had removed, and one of the external drives. She ran a checksum program, MD5sum, a kind of digital fingerprinting tool to make sure nothing was inadvertently altered in the disk duplication. Finally, after she started the imaging process, Alien typed “while true; do ls -l; sleep 10; done” at the command line.

  “Now it will give a file size update every ten seconds,” she told the local guys. “Wait a few minutes and then extrapolate to how long forty or eighty gigs should take.”

  Bruce turned on the Tableau and said, “Different drives will end copying at different times. We’ll have to babysit them.”

  Alien nodded. She flipped her notebook to a new page and drew up a schedule of shifts and breaks.

  At dawn Saturday, walking to her hotel to crash briefly, Alien calculated when the last hard drive copy would complete. Using the workstations, each forty-gig drive took approximately four and a half hours to image. An eighty-gig drive took approximately nine hours. Working all weekend, even with the Tableau, they’d barely be half-done. That left Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights, seven p.m. to four a.m. And her return flight was at seven a.m. Friday, after which Diamond expected analysis to start in the States.

  Alien winced. It was going to be tight.

  She looked up to cross the street. Five women in their mid-twenties tumbled out of a cab in front of their hostel off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, dressed in heels and miniskirts, laughing after a night on the town.

  C’est la vie.

  Thursday night at seven p.m., Alien and Bruce made a final pass through the Bastille offices, comparing every detail with her earlier notes and photos. “Good?” Bruce asked, screwing shut the last desktop computer frame.

  Alien checked. “Perfect,” she said.

  They walked to a metal door at one end of the fourth floor. Alien typed a six-digit keypad code and pressed her keycard to a reader. The door beeped and opened, revealing the bank’s data center.

  Machines whirred—servers in racks. In the middle of the data center’s white-tiled floor were four laptops, each connected to a labeled black external hard drive. “Copying complete, checksum correct,” Alien verified. Bruce returned the laptops to their original place in the room while she added the gathered hard
drives to neatly stacked piles.

  Another beep. Mitch, the Diamond security executive, joined them, trailed by Al, the attorney.

  “Knock, knock,” Al said.

  Bruce and Mitch exited the data center to talk in a darkened hallway.

  “All set?” Al asked Alien when it was just the two of them alone.

  “Just one thing,” Alien said. The lawyer’s presence made her think. Every time they signed in, Bastille employees viewed a short notice, in both French and English and in twenty-four-point capitals, advising that all activities on the corporate network were subject to certain terms of use and might be monitored. Few realized, however, that a digital forensics specialist could reconstruct the products of their clicks and keystrokes, going back years.

  “Are you sure this is okay?” she asked hesitantly. “Doesn’t Europe have strict laws about exporting private information?”

  “It’s fine,” Al said. “I’ll sign off on it.”

  “But these drives don’t just have work documents on them,” Alien said. “They have people’s Web browsing, photos, and personal email and voice mail.”

  Al smoothed his tie between the thumb and fingers of his right hand. “It’s fine. I’ll sign off on it,” he repeated.

  Alien opened her mouth once more, but the lawyer interrupted her.

  “Here’s the rule: if it’s the company’s computer, it’s the company’s data,” he said.

  By now, Bruce had returned to the room. “Al’s the attorney,” he said. “It’s fine.”

  Hard drives covered the bed in Bruce’s hotel room. Alien encased each one in bubble wrap, as she had done for the trip over, loaded them in her gear suitcase, and strapped down the pile. The elastic side pockets, designed for toiletries, held the remaining office supplies. She threw out a power strip to fit in the Tableau.