The Fool's Run

for a minute. Was I a nice guy? The question had never occurred to me.
    “See?” LuEllen said in the lengthening silence.
     
    SOMETIMES I’M SURE I don’t relate well to women. There always seem to be a couple around, but they always leave. LuEllen, I thought, would be different. She was as self-contained as I was; we fit well together, we each thought the other was interesting. We didn’t talk too much, didn’t rub anything.
    I went back to my bedroom, accepting the change of condition, but when my undershirt came off I found myself wadding it up and pitching it at the wall like a fastball.
     
    THE NEXT MORNING Dace showed up at nine o’clock with a package under his arm and a look of mild embarrassment on his face. He walked casually through to the office bedroom and couldn’t quite contain a look of satisfaction when he saw the rumpled blankets in LuEllen’s bedroom.
    “Ah, I see. . . .” he said, when he noticed me noticing him.
    “Yeah, don’t worry about it. You must have hit it off last night.”
    “A fascinating woman,” he said. “We’re talking about Mexico. Afterward.”
    “So I hear.”
    LuEllen came out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee. “Are my ears burning?”
    “Just straightening out administrative details,” I said.
    “Details,” repeated Dace. “Say, we got a box.” He handed it to me.
    The box had no return address, but the post-mark indicated that it came from a California friend of mine who operates an electronics specialty business. He usually works from a rented garage, and his appliances are very, very expensive.
    “Tools,” I said. “Let’s start sorting things out.”

Chapter 8
    W hat?
     
    Need fix on MURs.
     
    Give me numbers.
     
    Can’t be simple patch.
     
    Will do cutout.
     
    OK. How much?
     
    1K
     
    OK
    The phone company keeps computer records of local phone calls. Hackers call them “muthers,” for Message Unit Records. If a hacker uses his home phone for illegal computer entries, and the law gets interested, the phone company can check his muthers to see when and to where he made calls.
    Once Whitemark realized that their computer was under attack, they would call in federal investigators. The feds, with their Crays, could sweep the Washington muthers looking for a pattern of calls to Whitemark.
    “If Bobby did a simple software patch, one that tells the muther computer to ignore calls from this number, the feds might find the patch and read the number right off it,” I told LuEllen.
    “So what’s he going to do?”
    “He’ll rig a cutout. Every time we dial out, the call will be assigned to a random number. That’s what muther will record.”
    “He can do that from wherever he is?”
    “I don’t know. He might hire a tech out here, but for the price, I doubt it. I think he does it from wherever he is.”
    MURs out w/ random bypass.
     
    Thanx.
     
    We ready for backup.
     
    I’ll get back.
    We would attack Whitemark in two ways. We would enter the company’s computer system and alter it. Some of the changes would be subtle, some crude. The damage would be extensive. As the computer breakdown got Whitemark into deeper and deeper trouble, we’d open the second front: Dace would leak word of the company’s problems through the Pentagon rumor mills and the defense press. If it was done right, Whitemark’s credibility would crumble, and with it, Hellwolf’s. But first we had to get into the Whitemark computers.
    Defense industries like Whitemark have physical security ranging from adequate to pretty tight. Fortunately for the craft of industrial espionage, they do have weak points. One of them is greed. They like the idea of their engineers and key managers working at home. Those people inevitably have home terminals with phone links to the main computer center.
    The existence of those outside terminals creates a paradoxical problem for the computer centers. On the one hand, if nonexperts, like engineers or accountants, are going to use the computers, the computers have to be friendly—easy to enter and easy to use. On the other hand, if they’re too friendly, a bunch of hackers—or spies, if paranoia’s your style—could get in and trash the system.
    The usual answer is a tough, but thin, security screen. There are a number of different techniques for building the screens, but most are based on coded access. The home users of the system would have entry codes. To get into the Whitemark computers, we had to have the codes.