[Steven Lyle Jordan]

8: Planning

“Okay, we’re ready,” Pete announced as he rejoined us in the dining room. His dining room, that is… we were now back at his place, where we set up a few very paranoid precautions against being tapped.

Web guys know about most of the tools spies use to tap into places. After all, IT guys built ‘em for them, and web guys have used most of ‘em. Most of them aren’t very effective, unless they are placed in advance, and no one’s had time to bug Pete’s place yet, so we had a good level of protection going. The second kinds of technology were pretty sophisticated, but could be defeated by relatively simple means. For instance, the basic telescope, used to eavesdrop on conversations… sitting inside and drawing the blinds took care of that.

The more sophisticated lasers are designed to detect the vibrations in windows created by conversations, and turn those into sounds that can be recorded. Tuning Pete’s stereo into a daytime talk show, and tilting the subwoofer against the nearest window to the conversation, would effectively mask any real conversations inside.

And finally, I made sure Pete’s PC was unplugged from the web. Really good programs can activate a PC remotely, and if it has a mike or camera, others can watch the room without the owner even knowing. Once Pete’s machine was disconnected, we were safe.

And finally, we’d brought Frosty along, and he was sitting by the front door. If anyone tried to sneak up and listen the old-fashioned way, Frosty would hear ‘em a mile away, and we’d know about that, too.

Satisfied we were safe, I took out my laptop. It was a Toughbook, hardened and secure, which I did my serious work on. I started it up and, making sure the wireless features were disabled, I set up a new secure folder in a folder in a folder, using a few normal-sounding file names that no one would notice as significant, but that related to keywords I knew well enough that I would always be able to find the files without trouble.

Then I held out my hand. “Fritz, I need your e-book.” Naturally, he gave me a skeptical look, so I explained. “I just need it to create a dummy file that will look legitimate. It’s part of the process. I’ll also use it to concoct our viral marketing campaign.”

“Really?” Fritz said, his eyes lighting up. Everybody reacted that way to “viral” campaigns, which could spread word about a person, product or service seemingly faster than light itself. When they worked. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But hopefully the story will suggest something. If not, I’ll just wing it.”

Fritz nodded and handed over the key. I plugged it into the laptop, then turned it towards Fritz and let him put in the password and his fingerprint. Then I turned it back to myself, and copied the e-book into the secured file. It was a Word doc, which I’d expected, and which would make my job easier.

“Okay,” I said once that was done. “Now, here’s the plan. We want to make it look like the mark will be able to stage a DOS attack on your e-book server, and take you out. But we’re going to pull a switch on him, and send him to a dummy site. While he DOS-es that to death, you’ll be selling on the other site. Very simple, very easy. Which formats did you plan to use for your e-books?”

“PDF, Mobipocket, ePub and eReader,” Fritz replied. “Those are already made, though.”

“That’s okay, these are for dummy files, too.” eReader may have been the only one I hadn’t heard of before, so I made a quick note of all of them in a notepad file. I knew where I could go online to find free conversion software for all of them besides the PDF, which I already had. They might not be pretty, but they were for the suckers, so it didn’t matter.

“Is your pay site set up already?”

“Not yet,” Fritz replied. “I was going to do that next.”

“Okay, I’ll take care of it, then,” I told him. “If you’ve already set up any accounts for them, like with Paypal or something, let me have them. I’ll need to use what you’ve already created, because the guys’ll know about them. Then we’ll create a new account for the real transactions.”

“How are people going to know the real site from the dummy site?” Pete asked. “For that matter, how are you going to steer them from one to the other?”

“We can ID their IP address by using cookies in the viral campaign and comparing it to any other correspondence you’ve gotten from them via e-mail, and arrange to redirect that IP to the dummy site,” I explained. “That’ll work for the mark, but not for every IP that a DOS attack will come from. So we use the viral campaign and embed something in it, something we know the mark will ignore, but any interested fan will find and check out. Then we put the link to the real site in there.

“The dummy site will look just like the real site,” I continued. “We don’t want the mark to get wise. He will go to the fake site, along with the rest of the DOC traffic, while the real site is sitting pretty on another server with another ISP.”

I shut off the Toughbook. “So, we need a viral campaign. Why don’t you tell us about the novel, and we’ll see what we can brainstorm up?”

Fritz agreed, and was eager to tell us his story. I don’t read much sci-fi, but I had to admit, it sounded interesting as he went on. Once he finished, we started throwing ideas back and forth, and trying to figure out inventive ways of approaching them. A few hours passed, and we prevailed upon Gail to order pizzas and wings to go with Pete’s beer.

By that evening, we had a plan.

Finally, it had gotten late. Fritz was yawning a lot, and Frosty hadn’t had dinner, so we decided to get them home. While I stood out on the balcony, ordering my strategy in my head, the others were saying goodnight in the living room. I finally heard the door shut behind me, and the place was quiet for awhile.

A minute later, I was aware of someone else on the balcony. Expecting Pete to be bringing me a beer nightcap, I held my hand out. I was surprised when a hand, not a beer, slipped into it, and turned my head around.

“Gail! Aren’t you taking Fritz home?”

“I talked Pete into doing that,” she said. “There’s more room in his car for a tall guy and a dog, anyway.” I reflected on how badly they had fit into her eclipse, at that, and nodded. “Besides, I wanted some alone time with you.”

“Alone time, with my brother’s ex?” I said. “Hello, awkward.”

“Not really,” she told me, and joined me on the balcony. “Pete and I were always swingers, even when we were together. And now we’re not together. Trust me, he wouldn’t mind if you and I spent some quality time together.”

“Oh, really? And what if I minded?”

“Oh, excuse me,” Gail said with a smile. “Nobody told me you were dead.” And she turned my head towards her, and kissed me. I immediately thought of Pete’s comments about sex videos, the thoughts punctuated by her talents with the liplock, and I started revising my immediate plans. IT guys do a lot of their work at night. But most of us are smart enough to know when to blow work off, if it means getting some. Namely, every time it comes up.

When Gail finally pulled back from me, I asked, “Are you sure Pete won’t have a problem with this?”

“Are you kidding?” Gail said. “We’ll have to lock the door to keep him from joining us. And oh, yeah: We’d better check the room for cameras first.”