Borderless Deceit by Adrian de Hoog Page A

somewhere, Irv. How good? Don’t know. Not yet. But I’m betting he was inside your network forweeks figuring out how it worked. Wanna see how it gets done?”
    Heywood hesitated. “Not sure, Jaime. I know you kids love doing it, but I understand sometimes someone gets caught. Don’t think that’s for me.”
    â€œRelax. It’s fun. We won’t do much, just go in somewhere, browse around, get back out. No one will know. Let’s do a police department? Always cute stuff to look at there. Pick a city.”
    â€œNot sure, Jaime. Really. Playing Peeping Tom? On the police?”
    â€œHey, come on. We’ll open a few files. See what’s in them. Close them. No one will be the wiser.”
    Peeking into files – the lure was strong. Jaime saw the Czar was wavering and so she picked a city. Dallas. A mouse clicked and a flurry of symbols appeared on a screen. Jaime made them come, then made them go away. The rapidity of it, a true visual assault, made the Czar feel giddy, and he decided to blink – as an antidote to hypnotism. His eyelids began going up and down, as regular as a sweeping lighthouse beacon, Jaime describing what she was doing. Heywood tried to grasp her flow, her account of how the records of the Dallas Police Department were being bared, but it sounded like a truckload of jargon which made no sense.
    She’d done most of the preliminary work on her laptop at home, so it went fast. With Irv looking on she reviewed the steps. “Footprinting’s done.”
Footprinting?
“Sort of like casing a joint, Irv. The scanning’s been done too.”
Scanning?
“Well…before you go into a bank you want to know the positions of the doors and windows. So I did a ping sweep of all the IP addresses.” Behind the blinking lids, Heywood’s eyes were rolling. “And here comes an enumeration.”
    Don’t tell me! screamed Heywood’s inner voice. I don’t want to know! But what he said was: “Sure. Gotcha. I know what an enumeration is.”
    Jaime’s hacking fingers continued their keyboard dance. She announced they were now no longer visiting the DPD web site with its upstanding messages on recruitment, training and career advancement, but had slipped behind it, and had come up against the DPD system’s firewall. Heywood saw columns of signs and words with backslashes in front and behind, screens coming, screens going, and finally a window listing names. Jaime paused. This screen was tranquil for a moment. Itdidn’t move. They studied it, Jaime conspiratorially whispering that these were the names of the folks with PINs for accessing DPD databases.
We’re gonna ride in with one
. Jaime struck another key. In a lower corner a separate, inset screen appeared. It was blank.
Patience, Irv, someone’s bound to come back from morning coffee soon
. They lay in wait. Then a quiet, low-pitched sound and the inset window showed a name.
DURHAMDL
.
    Lieutenant D.L. Durham back at his station was signing in.
    Seven asterisks appeared below Durham’s name. The PIN. Jaime struck more keys. She told Heywood to observe the inset window. He was transfixed. Eyelids ceased blinking. The computer purred and there were three quick gong-like sounds. Jaime counted to five, her finger describing a broad arc in the air. On cue to a snapping of her fingers a script appeared:
MYMUMMY
.
    She grinned.
Wanna bet Mr. Durham is one big, mean, ugly man?
    Password eavesdropping. Simple really. Heywood licked his lips when Jaime declared they had hitched a ride in on Lieutenant Durham’s strong back.
    More pronouncements from Jaime. They were now inside the DPD network. To keep the demo straightforward she wouldn’t escalate the privilege they’d gained. After an exotic display of more rapidly fingered keys, Jaime concluded D.L. Durham was doing parking infractions.
Maybe not a lieutenant. Maybe only a clerk
. Some parts of