“I’m sure they’ll identify America’s spies in China, too.”
“Yeah, but why not identify every American spy, everywhere?”
“One, twenty-five million records. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent won’t be spies. Two, clearly the Seychelles Group are Chinese intelligence. Why do they care about a spy in Romania, or Iceland?”
Dalca shrugged. “Just seems like we’ve discovered a potential gold mine here. Working this data the right way could be very profitable for us.”
“Yes, well, working it the right way, in this case, means doing exactly what our client asks of us, and nothing more. Alexandru, we have a clear job with this. Let’s focus on Chinese contacts of these Americans, and let’s get to it. If we start exploiting this in other ways, then we just might open our client up to exposure. They’ve paid us a lot of money for our abilities and our discretion. And they’ll pay us a lot more money to crunch the data to get them what they want. If we do a good job for them, maybe they will want something else. They are China, after all. ARTD can help them in ways that go beyond fishing out some American spies.”
Dalca nodded, and said, “Sure. Of course.”
Alexandru Dalca left his boss’s office, already formulating a plan. What he could do with this information was much bigger than his assignment. Hell, it was bigger than ARTD. Bigger than the Chinese, even.
Dalca went to work, aggregating the data and cross-referencing it with medical records, insurance forms, property records, and the like. Much of this was done by isolating disparate data points, looking for clues through the analysis of the digital data.
Also included in the pulled sweep of the American server was something called clearance adjudication information. Potential negative information such as deviant sexual behavior, risk of foreign exploitation, and even information tied to interviews with the subject by background investigators.
And fingerprints.
Alex knew these files were a fucking gold mine.
True, a gold mine surrounded by a lot of thick rock, but Dalca was the best in the world at getting into this data and pulling out the important bits with OSINT.
There were hundreds of actors in the world who would love to find detailed targeting information on American soldiers, spies, politicians, and diplomats.
And Dalca would introduce this data to those seeking the information.
Dalca would process all this information himself, and he would sell intelligence off to the highest bidder.
Of course, this was something he had never done before. Sure, he could build the files on these individuals, out them as spies or other types of holders of classified intelligence. But then what? He had no way to reach out to the Russians, the Cubans… whoever the hell wanted this stuff, and sell it to them. Not without the wrong people finding out about him.
Well… Maybe there was a way.
The dark web. After doing some research, he realized he could set up a commercial enterprise on the dark web, and then reach out to those who might be interested in his product on offer.
It took him a few months to study this, and more time to build it, and all the while he was doing the work asked of him by the clients, the Seychelles Group.
But as he did this, he was also finding a way to test his plan to gain financially from the exploitation of the pilfered American files.
In all Dalca’s work on social engineering information from people, he found himself spending a lot of time on the news networking website Reddit. This was an aggregation of discussion forums where community members discussed virtually every major topic on earth. Dalca knew the members of the site did not shy away from controversy, so he began looking for a test case to use the OPM data he had stolen. This was just a few months after the American land and naval attack in the Baltic region, and there were hundreds of bulletin boards on Reddit about the fighting. While many were in Russian, there were some English-language anti-American boards, and Dalca found himself drawn to these.
He knew what he was looking for, a low-risk proof of concept. He found this, after weeks of false starts and waiting for the right moment, in the guise of a Reddit user who claimed to be the brother of a mechanic on the Kazan, a Russian submarine sunk in the battle. The man was beyond distraught about his brother’s murder; he railed against America and let it be known he was actually in the United States on an expiring student visa. Over days and days, in public forums, the man expressed his rage.
Alexandru Dalca watched a linked news piece that mentioned the name of the captain of the American destroyer given credit for sinking one of the subs and helping the Poles sink the other. Dalca heard the name of the ship, the USS James Greer, and that the captain was a man named Scott Hagen. He looked online at a Department of the Navy website that listed all the ships and their captains, and confirmed Hagen was a forty-four-year-old U.S. Navy commander. He accessed the Office of Personnel Management files and, sure enough, found a twenty-one-year-old application for classified intelligence from then twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant Junior Grade Scott Robert Hagen, straight out of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland.
He checked several real estate and property records, and found Hagen had a home in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and a rental property in North Carolina. Both homes were also in the name of Laura Hagen, who Dalca assumed was Hagen’s wife. Dalca made note of the addresses and then, knowing that a naval commander wasn’t any sort of a covert position in the United States government, he used Google to look for references to Hagen from before the action in the Baltic. He found articles, images, and videos of the naval officer, going back fifteen years, saw that he coached his son’s baseball team and scooped ice cream for his sailors and their families at an event in Italy a year or so earlier.
Dalca looked at a picture of Hagen with his wife at a ball, and studied the wife’s face for a moment before checking Facebook.
First, he looked to see if Scott Hagen had an active account. He did not. Hagen’s wife, Laura, did have an account, but it had been locked and unused since the battle in the Gulf seven months earlier.
Undeterred, Dalca went back to the OPM files.
While twenty-one-year-old information might not have seemed relevant to locating a man in the present, Dalca looked up the names of Hagen’s family, settling on a sister who lived in Indiana. She had been unmarried at the time, but the application contained her Social Security number. Dalca looked into a database he used regularly in his open-source research that showed all U.S. marriage licenses.
Susan Hagen had married a man named Allen Fitzpatrick in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the 1990s, and there was no record of any divorce on file.
Once he had Hagen’s sister’s information, Alexandru simply went back to Facebook. He had been ready to do a number of customized searches on all her page traffic to see if there were any mentions of her brother, Scott, but he needed only one. He typed the name “brother” into a search of all her posts, took just one simple glance at the second post brought up by the search, and he smiled.
Susan Fitzpatrick mentioned how excited she was for the opportunity to go to Princeton, New Jersey, to her son’s soccer tournament over the summer, and she was doubly excited that her niece and nephew would be meeting them there with their parents, because she hadn’t seen any of them in some time.
A little research showed Dalca that Susan Fitzpatrick had two brothers: Scott, who was his target, and Raymond, who lived in Winter Haven, Florida. A minute’s research into Raymond Hagen revealed two children, but they were both teenaged girls.
Case closed. Commander Scott Hagen, captain of the USS James Greer, the man who orchestrated the sinking of the Kazan off the coast of Poland, would be meeting his sister in Princeton, New Jersey, in six weeks’ time.