Anselm was interrupted in his studies when Gwen stepped back into the room, the look on her face telling him what he needed to know.
“No luck, huh” he smiled wryly.
“I’m afraid not,” she admitted. “Director Jacob won’t violate the privacy of his employees.”
Anselm nodded, having at least half expected something like that. Few companies were willing to just open up their database to the police, it was perceived as a bad precedent to set. In some ways Anselm agreed, but when he was looking for a mass murderer who had tried to use weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations, well he was willing to bend the rules to the breaking point.
And then twist just one iota more.
So he flipped open his portable and called up a program before looking at Gwen, “Do you know the Tower Project’s network node”
She stared at him, blinking furiously, “What good will that do you I already told you that they weren’t giving us access.”
“Just trust me.”
She eyed him for a moment, but finally turned on her office system and accessed the I2 backbone, and linked to the node he wanted.
“There,” she said after a moment.
Anselm loaded it into his portable, then paused and looked at Gwen.
“What” She looked suddenly nervous, glancing around for what he was looking at.
“Local PD Inspectors who want to maintain plausible deniability might want to leave the room for fifteen minutes or so,” he said after a moment.
She looked at him, then at her computer, and swallowed. Finally Gwendolyn nodded and flipped her own system off and got up, “you know what I feel like coffee. Want some”
“Black,” he smiled, “two sugars.”
She nodded, “alright, I’ll be back in.fifteen minutes of so.”
“I’ll be here,” Anselm said as she left, then waited for the door to close before he looked back to his portable.
He was just as glad that she didn’t decide to be `noble’ in one way or another, either by trying to stop him or by trying to support him. That stuff worked out well in movies, but when he was breaking the law in the real world, he really didn’t want to deal with the responsibility of bringing someone else down with him.
He accessed the node with his browser, then called up a terminate and stay resident program to monitor and operate as a gateway between his browser and the node. In a few moments, he was deep into the Tower’s public files, but that was only the start.
The first thing he had to do was identify the security system in place. If it was a custom job, then his work would be a lot more difficult, perhaps impossible for him personally, but the odds were against it.
It wasn’t. It was a SecureGate IV server with a hardware firewall.
Not a bad system, five years earlier.
Anselm accessed the server, then sent a backdoor command to the firewall, causing it to open a port into the tower network well off from the commonly monitored routes. In a few seconds he was in and downloading the employee files.
Sometimes it was just that easy, he supposed.
He’d `acquired’ the backdoor command from a programmer he’d worked with some time earlier. Many of the top security packages included them, quietly of course, so that the company could recover files for the client, or let the client back into their own system, in the rather common event of a lost password.
That had changed a bit when biometric security became vogue, but not as much as most people assumed. While it was true that it was a great deal harder to lose ones fingerprints or, more disturbingly, retina, it was also true that people who were the sole persons cleared for access to some systems disappeared, or died.
So the tradition of putting backdoor systems into many private security programs continued unabated.
Sometimes, Anselm thought that it was just done as a power trip for the programmers, but he wasn’t going to complain about something that worked in his favor.
His own home system wasn’t connected to the I2 network in any fashion, largely for that very reason, however.
So when Gwen returned with the coffee, she found Anselm leaning back in the visitors chair and watching as faces flashed past his screen.
“I guess I really don’t want to know, do I” She asked with a hint of distaste in her voice. “You do know that any information acquired this way won’t be admissible in court”
Anselm chuckled lightly, “I already have all the evidence I need on Mr. Amir, Gwen. When we catch him, he’s not getting much more than his day in court.if that. More likely his hour in Court will be enough. You don’t kill entire villages to test your deployment strategy for an attack on the UN and get away with it.”
Anselm looked up at her then, “I’m not an Inspector, my job isn’t to prepare a criminal case, Gwen. My job is to deliver the suspect to custody.”
She sighed, shaking her head, but handed him the coffee he’d asked for and reluctantly nodded her head toward the portable. “Did you find anything”
Anselm shook his head, “not yet, but I’ve only processed about a tenth of the employee files and.”
His portable sung out suddenly.
“Hello,” He said, looking down. “What’s this”
Gwen leaned in, frowning as she caught sight of a face she knew. “That’s Director Jacob.”
“Is it” Anselm smiled thinly as the program began confirming its initial estimate, examining the length of the nose, the height and prominence of the cheekbones, and the accent of the brow with a series of vector based calculations.
After a moment, it beeped again and spat out new file.
“Jacob Kalinden,” Anselm whistled, shaking his head. “Holy hell.I should have recognized the bastard.”
“Who”
“Jacob Harrow Kalindan. Former member of pretty much every eco-fringe group in existence.for all the time that lasted at any rate,” Anselm said.
“You’re kidding.”
Anselm laughed at the utter disbelief in Gwen’s voice, “he got kicked out of almost all of them. Started suggesting that killing people was the way to change the world. Not even the hardest Green Peacers were willing to let someone say that.at least not while using their public image.”
Gwen grimaced, remembering a few cases in the past where otherwise respectable individuals suggested what amounted to murder in the name of the Earth. It was rare, almost as rare as the proverbial hen’s tooth, but it had happened. There had been one professor in the States, almost two decades earlier, who had advocated killing seal hunters on the Canadian east coast.
Every community had its lunatics, she supposed, but they really were the oddity among ecologists.
“How did he get a job as Director here” She asked, genuinely curious.
Anselm shrugged, “It looks like he was part of the original project advocates.under the assumed name of Samuel Jacob. He applied for the position when it came open, and was accepted largely based on prior performance. Nothing outwardly questionable.”
The portable suddenly beeped again.
Anselm raised an eyebrow, frowning as he flipped from Jacob’s file to look at another one.
“Holy shit.” He said after a moment.
“What”
“This can’t be right.” Anselm shook his head, “I know this man is dead.”
Gwen looked over his shoulder again, frowning. “That’s Doctor Kreig.”
“You know this man”
“Of course, he’s in charge of the Tower Medical Center,” Gwen replied. “It services the entire city.”