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Mac Messiah • Most Of Your Mac • RealBasic • Grack • Moore's Views • Abacus • Absurd Notion • Quantum Threads • Mac Basics •
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November 19th, 2000
My Corvette is my thinking machine. On Sunday mornings, around dawn, I like to get out on the highway and cruise along at a moderate pace, say, 130, and just let the wind and trees refresh my spirit. (Let's see: is that miles per hour or kilometers per hour? I forget.) There's something about the machinery of a fine automobile, tracking along in its own element that soothes and relaxes me.
When I came back to the house, I double checked the surveillance system. I put the surveillance system in after Jesus was killed by a car bomb in my previous Corvette. That bomb was intended for me. Now I have small, hidden low-light cameras on each edge of the house and a radar system that detects movement. We had to work on that one quite a bit to make sure every cat in the neighborhood didn't keep us up all night.
I headed for the kitchen. Time for some ham and eggs. The toast had just popped up and I was swooning over the smell when Diane came into the kitchen, yawning. She was in her red terry cloth bathrobe, and her blonde hair was more or less all over the place. No sooner than I had the strawberry jam on the toast, she sat down next to me at the table and slid the plate over towards herself.
"Mmmm. Yummy. You make good toast," she said as she pushed her hair behind her ears.
I got up and put some more bread in the toaster. "So, tell me about this brilliant plan of yours."
She swallowed and reached over for a sip of my orange juice. "Here's what we have to do. I need a down load of one of pp's HTML pages. The Mason's never did that, so we have to find someone who did. I need the meta language header."
I pondered this and struggled to make sense of it. "I checked with the S.E.C. They wouldn't give me the names of any other victims except the Masons."
"That's okay. I actually bought one of those SPAM CDs. You know. The kind that has millions of e-mail addresses. But this one is special. It's only people who have been known to make an on-line purchases. Seven hundred thousand quality addresses for a mere twenty-nine bucks."
"You're going to send out seven hundred thousand e-mails?"
"Don't worry," she said, finishing off my orange juice. I headed to the fridge for some more. " I talked to our ISP yesterday. They'll let me send out 500 every two minutes. It'll take a couple of days. I wrote a Perl script to manage it all."
"A what?"
"I'll have to teach you that some day. Anyway, I figure we'll find a few people who've been victimized by pp dot com."
I looked at Diane as she nibbled my toast. Her hair had fallen back into her face and almost covered it. "By the way," I said as I sat down again. "What do you have on under that bathrobe?"
"Umm. Nothing." She looked at me and smiled.
"Ahem. I believe breakfast is over."
Three days later, Diane had received 187 responses to her request from "Hadron and Associates." Of those, four people had saved one of the Paperless Portfolio HTML pages to disk. They were all too happy to send it along to us.
I sat down next to Diane at her computer desk as she was peering at the HTML files. "What do you see there?" I asked.
"For starters, the page was created with Netscape Communicator under Linux. Look here. Where it says Mozilla 4.7. And see here, all these key words? After the word content? These financial key words are designed to come up when someone searches for an on-line investment firm."
"So? What will you do with that?"
"My guess is that this guy isn't going to give up on a great scam. He might change his name and register another domain name, but when he posts this scam again, my bet is that he'll use the same tools and same set of HTML pages."
"Like some kind of signature?"
"Exactly."
"But there are millions of Websites. How can you look at them all?"
Diane turned to look at me. Her light blue eyes were crinkled and blazing, like a teacher ready to pounce on a student who has gone astray. I figured I had said something stupid. After a pregnant pause, we said it simultaneously.
"Perl."
It took two weeks before we struck gold. During that time, Manuel and I worked on several other easy cases, and things were just kind of humming along. Routine stuff. Then, on a Wednesday evening while Manuel and I were shooting some pool and watching West Wing, Diane came running into the den.
"Guys! Come quick! You gotta see this!"
We gathered around her computer, and there it was. Fidelity Investments. Dot biz. It sure looked like the real thing. "Is that him?" I asked.
"Here. Look at the page source. I did a differences. It's identical. This is our guy."
"How can we find him?"
"We can't," Diane said in her usual professorial tone. "I guarantee you that his domain registrations and addresses are fake. But we can make him come to us."
"Oh, really? What have you cooked up now?"
"Here's what I want to do. When I lived in Bermuda, back in my youth, I worked at the Hamilton Princess hotel. At the front desk. I got to know a whole bunch of interesting people."
"I'm sure you did!" Manuel piped in.
"Shut up." Diane gave him a dirty look. "Anyway, I have a friend in Bermuda who runs a bank there. He can help me set up some private, numbered accounts. You know. The kind they use in the Cayman Islands. Anyway, while we've been waiting for this guy to surface, I've been designing a Website that looks like a front to one of these banks. Here, take a look."
It was incredible. Diane had created a Website to beat all Websites in its creepy look and feel for a supposedly legit foreign bank, but it had the earmarks of those sites that cater to, shall we say, less than honest businessmen. I was getting more and more intrigued. "So how are you gonna get this guy's interest?" I cringed, knowing that Diane would already have the answer.
"Simple... Targeted SPAM."
And it worked. It took a week and two SPAM messages, but finally our guy set up an account with the bank in Bermuda and started transferring funds. Diane had created an elaborate system with her old friend there so that the secure Web site, actually located in Hamilton, reported his deposits and allowed transfers out of the account... until the day would come when we would make the money disappear. Just like he had done to his victims.
That's exactly how it played out. We let him play with the account for awhile to verify that he had control. At first, there was about $250,000 in the account, then there were some transfers. $75K went to a bank in Manhattan. Another $45K went to a bank in West Palm Beach. But then the account started climbing. When it reached $1.4M, we (Diane) threw the switch. The money was yanked into one of my public accounts in San Jose, and his account was terminated.
Manuel moved in to the guest room, we left the Corvette at a friend's house, and then we waited.
It didn't take long. It was two days later, a Monday morning at about 4:00 am, when the radar system lit up like the Krell power station. I reached over for my Handspring which has a TV receiver. A Jeep Cherokee had parked at the curb and four darkly clad men with automatic weapons scrambled out. I got on the intercom.
"Diane! Manuel! Show time." At that instant, the power went out. Not unexpected.
The plan was for Diane to remain hidden and armed. Manuel and I went out exterior windows and climbed an intentionally sturdy trellis to the roof. The house is Spanish style, essentially a rectangle with an inner courtyard that has the pool in the center. Anyone who barges into the courtyard is a sitting duck when we're on the roof. There is just enough light from a nearby street light to illuminate the scene.
And, being amateurs, that's exactly what they did. Two of them blew out the gate with a small explosive and came running into the courtyard single file. Manuel dropped the lead guy with two rounds. A staccato of Mac-10 gunfire sprayed into the air as he went down. I took the trailer. But when he heard the gunfire from above, and saw his buddy drop, he stopped cold, swiveled, and reversed his path. My two rounds went into the concrete patio.
I signaled to Manuel to go back to the exterior. The idea was to block them from entering an exterior window. Too late. Sounds of windows crashing. The grounds were deserted. I climbed down the trellis, quickly went around front and fired two rounds into the Jeep's front tire. Then I backtracked and very slowly and carefully looked into the broken window of the living room. I fired into the ceiling to create a muzzle flash of light and ducked back down. The lingering image in my eyes showed no one in the room. I climbed through and headed towards Diane's bedroom.
That's when I heard a short burst of automatic weapon fire followed by the low, dull sound of a forty five firing from across the courtyard. Three crisp rounds. I went to an interior window and snuck a look. Manuel was running around the far side of the pool, saw me, and pointed one finger up then a thumb down.
Two down.
Both of us got to Diane's bedroom at the same time. Manuel threw his shoulder into the door and hit the floor rolling. There was just enough light from the street light to see Diane standing there with her gun trained on Manuel. I kneeled in the doorway as Manuel shouted "It's me!" I looked around as she lowered her gun. Next to Manuel was a dark figure on the floor, clutching his throat and gurgling pathetically.
"One down here," Diane said nonchalantly.
"We didn't hear any gunfire," Manuel said, somewhat puzzled.
Diane shrugged and blinked her eyes slowly. "I didn't need the gun."
While Manuel and I looked at each other and let that sink in, we formed a circle and kneeled down. Manuel kicked the dark figure's gun away and sat on him. After a few seconds, he stopped moving. There was one more slime ball running loose. We waited perhaps thirty seconds, and nothing happened. Then we heard the squeal of tires.
The Jeep!
We ran into the courtyard, along the side of the pool, and peeked through the front gate. The Jeep was burning rubber and making an awful noise as it limped away on a seriously flat tire. Manuel started running after it with a Mac-10 he'd picked up from one of the attackers and sprayed thirty rounds into the Jeep and its gas tank.
Later, people living two miles away said they heard the explosion.
None of the attackers survived. After a menagerie of blues, detectives, and medical people, the last one left about 30 minutes after dawn. As big ball of California sun rose over the trees, we walked around and surveyed the damage. Things were a mess in Manuel's guest room especially. Broken furniture, bullet holes everywhere and blood on the carpet. A purple place for dying. We walked outside again. The front gate was shattered, and bits of flying metal had destroyed the entryway and the stucco for yards in every direction.
It took the electric company until noon to patch the severed power line coming into the house. Come to think of it, I better get that into some steel conduit soon. After the power came back on, we sat around the patio and cooked some burgers.
About 2:00 pm, the police called back. The only identification they could make out of the four was the one Diane had taken down. Robert Frabrini, aka Galen O'Brien, aka Norman Wirth. In hindsight, it looked like Frabrini's plan was to kidnap Diane in exchange for the money. Bad form. Diane is way out of his league.
The next morning, we paid a visit to the Securities and Exchange Commission office in San Francisco and gave them a check for $1.4 million minus $81,000 owed to my clients, the Masons. Our take was $27,000 of which we each got a third.
Nine thousand bucks for me. Before taxes. The rest might just pay for the damage to the house. Oh, well. It's a life.
I gotta learn some Perl.
Copyright 2000 by John
Martellaro, All rights reserved. Quantum Threads banner
artwork by Tracy Haynes.
About the Author
John Martellaro lives in Colorado at 2,800 meters above sea level with a Ph.D. wife and two cats, Nikki and Data. He holds a B.S. in Astrophysics and an M.S. in Physics. His hobbies, include amateur astronomy, downhill skiing, bicycling, and listening to piano solos. His personal Macs are a B&W G3/400 with a flat screen Studio Display and a blueberry iBook.
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