Pleased he’d managed to set Tommy charging off on a tangent, Andy checked his watch. Knowing Susan G. would be waiting to take him to the airport out on the street, double parked as usual, he zipped up his carry-on, took a quick look about to make sure he hadn’t left anything, and headed for the door. “Just you take care,” he warned Tommy as he was leaving. “Casino owners in Vegas don’t take kindly to people who set out to cheat them of their ill-gotten gains.”
Before Tommy was able to reply, Andy was gone, leaving him wondering who had more to worry about: himself and any possible run-ins he might have with casino security or Edward Telford once Andy had the bastard in his sights. Telford, Tommy finally concluded with a happy smile. A man didn’t survive back-to-back tours in Northern Ireland doing what Andy had done there without becoming something of a heartless bastard himself when he needed to be.
With nothing else to do for the balance of the evening other than make reservations on the first available flight to Vegas and book a room there, Tommy decided this was as good a time as any to find out what was so special about Susan G. O’Conner. Firing up his laptop, he browsed the Web, using all the usual search tools he relied on in order to find out about a person’s past. When he came up with nothing he already didn’t know, he tried a search that included only the terms O’Conner and NYPD. The only thing that came close was a series of old newspaper articles that spoke of an NYPD detective named O’Conner who had been wounded in the line of duty.
What convinced him he had found what he was looking for were the photos of the two detectives. Easing back away from the screen as he gazed at the photo of detective first grade O’Banyon and detective second grade O’Conner, Tommy snickered. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
When he spotted Andy from behind, sitting on a bench in Battersea Park right where he said he would be, Edward Telford hesitated. The idea of turning around and slinking away, while inviting, would have only made the tirade he had no hope of avoiding worse. With this thought in mind, the former Guards officer drew himself up and headed over to the bench where he took a seat.
“Listen, Andy, I’m terribly sorry things were as badly mismanaged as they were,” Telford began when his friend didn’t open the conversation as he had expected. “Had I known someone was going to go after your girl as they did, I never would have involved you in this whole sordid affair.”
For the longest time, Andy said nothing. When he did finally break his silence, his voice was very calm, as if he were discussing the weather. “I expect you heard all the rumors that went about at the time regarding how that Provo who set off a bomb next to the Londonderry school playground that claimed the lives of all those children met his end?”
Glancing over at Andy out of the corner of his eye, Telford nodded. “I did.”
Ever so slowly, Andy twisted about until he was facing Telford. “Well, let me tell you, mate,” he muttered in a tone that sent a chill down Telford’s spine, “if I find out who did that to one of mine, what happened to him will pale by comparison.”
Telford knew better than to shrug off such a threat, not when it was made by a man with Andy Webb’s reputation. The urge to ask him if he had found anything else concerning the Mullins incident was forgotten as he watched Andy come to his feet and walk away without another word. In this case, Telford decided self-preservation firmly trumped his obligation to queen and country.
Besides, Telford concluded as he also came to his feet and retreated in the opposite direction Andy had taken, he’d got all he imagined he could reasonably expect Andy to be able to find, and then some. If the people he’d been tasked to look into the matter needed more information, they had other, more capable resources they could draw on.
Well, Telford reminded himself as he left the park. Maybe not as capable, but from my standpoint, a damned sight safer to employ.
BUM STEER: THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
While watching Fox News one morning as I ate breakfast, I saw a story about a study conducted by a pair of University of Pittsburgh professors on how easy it was to hack into a car’s computer system and take control of all the key functions away from the driver. An article in the August 2011 edition of Car and Driver entitled “Can Your Car Be Hacked” as well as a 3 September 2013 AP story by Tom Krisher entitled “Hackers Find a Weakness in Car Computer Systems” served to confirm that this was not only possible but actually quite easy.
It was a chance observation that set the creative storytelling wheels turning. One night, while waiting for my sister to come out of a Broadway show, I saw a pair of black Lincoln Town Cars parked between a pair of NYPD patrol cars. It was the gaggle of plainclothes security types who were not doing such a great job of being inconspicuous, as well as the presence of so many world leaders attending a general session at the UN that led me to conclude there were some high-speed VIPs watching the same show my sister was.
The final element that brought this together is the way conspiracy theorists continue to find new and inventive ways of blaming the death of Princess Diana on the British government. Whether or not this is an efficient way of doing someone in can be debated. That it is possible is all that matters.
HAROLD COYLE
BUM STEER: THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND THE STORY
In 2013, Dr. Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek presented a paper at the DEF CON event on hacking cars. It had taken them nine months of hard work to achieve it, but their results were staggering. “We could control steering, braking, acceleration to a certain extent, seat belts, lights, horn, speedometer, gas gauge,” said Valasek. And whilst some observers may consider the chance of assassination by remote control car extremely unlikely, others think it has already been done and point to the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of journalist Michael Hastings the same year.
One of the hardest problems any would-be cyberassassin would face is finding suitable hardware to plug in to the target vehicle’s data bus, the network that links all the computers inside a car together. It must be small enough to conceal, easily programmable, readily and cheaply available, and, of course, almost impossible to trace. Enter the Raspberry Pi. Initially designed as a cheap and easily configurable computer to reintroduce young people to the joys of programming in the UK, it has quickly gained an almost cult status among hobbyists globally. On sale for about fifty dollars, by the end of 2013, over two million units have been shipped worldwide to accommodate a vast range of programming projects that have come to rely on it, some of which are educational and fun, others not quite so innocent.
I imagine there are readers who might consider Andy’s methods to protect his transatlantic communications somewhat paranoid, but that probably depends on whether you read the UK’s Guardian newspaper. The use of a disposable pay-as-you-go data SIM card — purchased with cash, of course — is a good start. But it also helps to ensure your GSM device’s built-in International Mobile Station Equipment Identity, or IMEI, is also “clean” and has not been linked to you previously. An old laptop that you can later trash is also a good thought, but Andy goes one step further and has a bootable USB flash drive that Spence had prebuilt for him with an operating system, e-mail, and encryption software, all of which are readily available as open-source utilities, such as Thunderbird and GnuPG. Even then, a final bit of paranoia kicks in. Why did he insist on his letter being printed out on an ancient dot matrix printer? Simple. Almost all modern printers have both memory and computers inside. If you look, you’d be amazed at what you can find in a printer’s memory. Like elephants and creditors, they never forget.