The Merchant of Secrets Read online

  “I want the package that was sent here from British Ministry of Defense,” I insisted.

  Turning her head from side to side with her arms crossed “You can’t have it,” she said decisively. “It was sent to the Department of Defense and it’s our property.”

  “Don’t be a pain in the ass, Keisha. I travelled all the way to London to get it, and now you’re saying you won’t show it to me?” Her obstinacy was making me angry. “Okay Keisha, I want the a copy of the contract proposal PFG supplied to the Missile Defense Agency about six months ago, with ancillary documents like emails” I replied, trying to strike a conciliatory tone to pry it from her.

  “You’re not authorized,” Keisha retorted. She was drawing a line in the sand between her agency and mine and it was infuriating.

  “Then the Statement of Work, Okay?”

  The Statement of Work, or “SOW” for short, is the part of the contract or proposal that outlines what product or service is being proposed. It’s not as good as getting blue prints and flow charts, but for now it was a starting point to look for some clues as to the list of PFG’s suppliers and if it were possible to manufacture outside of the United States, perhaps Iran. If she wouldn’t share the file from the U.K. at least she could give me some of PFG’s paperwork to examine. Finally agreeing to share some data she turned to her laptop, pulled up the Statement of Work, encrypted it, downloaded it on a thumbnail drive and handed it to me.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “When’s the date?” she teased.

  “My wedding to Colin?” I replied, playing along.

  “You’ve got another man besides Colin?” She asked, leaning back in her ergonomics chair with her feet resting on her desk. I knew she was hinting at Mike Mulally.

  “Very funny. You wanna be a bridesmaid?” I asked, playing along with this imaginary engagement.

  “Oh Hell no! I just want to be invited to a party so I can get loaded on free drinks” she teased. Keisha was incredibly smart and could make me burst into laughter even when I was exhausted and angry.

  I turned around to leave, “I’ve got the perfect bridesmaid dress picked out for you in bright pink with big puffy bows on it.”

  “No.No. No. Hell no,” I heard her say, from halfway down the hallway.

  Keisha liked to wear fatigues to work and keep it casual on the weekend, pairing jeans with a T-shirt and boots. She was a woman who owned three motorcycles that she liked to race against her brothers on the weekends. No pink bows or other frilly accoutrements would ever hang from her body no matter who was getting married.

  I went back to the I.R.S. office to pick up my laptop then drove to the local coffee shop to review the Statement of Work drafted by PFG’s counsel and submitted to the Department of Defense in pursuit of a prime government contract. I laid my laptop on the table, booted up the computer inserted the drive just given to me a few minutes earlier by Keisha. I pulled up the document and started reading the Statement of Work from PFG. I knew it would show me what type of machinery Jones was trying to peddle to in the U.K..

  The Statement of Work was filled with typical legal jargon that attorneys put in contracts so that a simple sentence of valid information turns out to be 10 pages of unreadable nonsense that takes another lawyer to figure out. The document was a disappointment until I got to the footnotes of the hardware and software vendors on the proposal. Listed right there after the major software and hardware companies was Irongate. Irongate! It stuck out on the page like a red flag. Irongate designs password security software for a major defense contractor. I closed my laptop and called Mullally while running to the car with my laptop bag dangling from the shoulder.

  “Hello sir, I think I’ve got it. PFG was working with Irongate”.

  “What’s Irongate?” he asked. His ignorance was annoying.

  ‘Sir it’s the software company that provides access codes for secure networks.”

  Mulally went silent. He understood.

  “I’m headed back to Bailey’s office,” I said.

  ‘Hold on, I want you to meet me now,” he insisted.

  “Where?” I asked. Todd and his gang were still hunting for me and I couldn’t go back to our offices.

  “Meet me at my house” he said and hung up. I ran to my car and rolled it out of the parking lot, pushing the accelerator until I was doing sixty in a thirty five mile per hour zone. I was racing to Mulally’s house until lights flashed in the rear view mirror and I was pulled off the road by a police car. “Darn locals!”

  The police officer exited his vehicle, and approached.

  “You in a hurry?” he asked.

  ‘Yes officer I have an important meeting.”

  “Important enough to drive thirty miles over the speed limit? That must be one heck of a meeting! I should take you in and impound your vehicle right here, right now. Where’s your driver’s license?” the officer demanded. I shoved my driver’s license at him through the window and kept silent. He swaggered slowly back to his vehicle as if he ran the whole operation and was Chief of Police himself. I called Mulally and told him where I was and that I would get there as soon as I could.

  A few minutes later, the officer was walking briskly back to my vehicle, minus the swagger.

  ‘Thank-you mam,” as he said politely while offering my license back to me, “please just drive a little slower if you could,” he said as he tipped his hat nervously and smiled. My license must have been coded in their system to indicate who I worked for. Ha! I drove away and continued to Mulally’s house, this time only going fifty.

  Mulally’s home was a large red brick house, located not very far from C.I.A. headquarters, encircled by a black wrought iron fence with an iron gate anchored on either side by red brick pillars.

  ‘Sir, I’m here,” I said, calling him from my car.

  “Right,” he said. “Pull up next to the white Ford pick-up.” Then the gate lock released and the two sides slowly opened, letting me drive in. My rear bumper was scarcely through the gate when it began to close again. The tags on the white F150 pick-up indicated that some guys from the office had already arrived. Inside the house, there would be cameras and alarms systems exceeding those at most prisons.

  Jose and Hugo from the office were already huddled over the dining room table with Mulally, in a room which now doubled as a conference room. Sitting with their laptops spread out on the table and staring at the screens with furrowed brows they were visibly startled when I walked into the room and said “hi guys”. Jose and Hugo had been told by Todd that I no longer worked for the company. Before they could ask “What are you doing here?” Mullaly broke in.

  “Caroline, we’ve already made contact with Irongate. We requested a conference call with the CEO, Richard Green. Sit down,” Mullay ordered. I took a seat alongside Hugo and pulled my laptop from its case, plugged it into the wall and started rebooting.

  The receptionist’s voice answered the phone: “Good morning this is Irongate”.

  “Hello this is Deputy Director Mulally calling for Richard Green.” Mulally had an intense presence about him at that moment.

  “Just a moment please…,”said the female voice on the other end.

  Then a hefty sounding voice answered, “Hi Mike, this is Dick.”

  “Hi Dick. We’ve got Caroline here who reviewed the Statement of Work on PFG’s proposal to the Missile Defense Agency, along with some of our software guys from the office who are familiar with your product,” Mullaly said. “What’d your Irongate people find?”

  “Well,” said the C.F.O., “I wish the news were good, but it doesn’t appear that way.”

  Mullally wiped his chin with his index finger back and forth, waiting for the bad news.

  “We had written some code for a password protection software, but it wasn’t released yet to the public except for a couple of aerospace companies who got a trial version.”

  “By ‘public’ you mean the defense companies?” Mullaly asked.


  “Yes, that’s our public,” Richard Green replied.

  ‘Okay got it, please go on,” Mullaly said, deepening his voice to a low baritone.

  “A copy of the application, written onto a disc, was given to Dave Jones so that he could submit it with the proposal for his advanced drone system to the Department of Defense. We were told it would be locked in a safe in a secure building,” Green said.

  “Well apparently it never made it to the Defense Department,” Mulally responded. “We think it may have gone to China as part of a deal.” In a crisis Mulally didn’t mince words.

  “Tell me you’re joking!” Green burst out, fuming.

  “I wish I were….,” Mulally replied steadily.

  Richard Green exploded. “Son of a bitch! That stupid son of bitch! What kinda fucking deal???”

  “Looks like he’s trying to sell his drones to foreign buyers, but the buyers were resistant so to sweeten the deal, Jones threw in your software,” Mike explained.

  “Where’s the bastard now? Right now! Where the Hell is he?” Richard Green demanded.

  It appeared that Mr. Green might send somebody to take of Jones personally which might have been disastrous so Mulally let a moment slip by to allow Green’s anger and shock to subside, but his own fear was starting to show through.

  “Listen Dick,” Mulally said, “there’s no time to waste here; can you tell me what kind of software you gave to Jones?” Mulally’s sense of urgency wasn’t at all masked in his voice; it was crystal clear.

  “Yea, simply put you enter your password in the system and it checks the password for its strength.”

  “What’s it?” Mulally was amazed at the simplicity.

  “No there’s another part,” Green added, “if your password isn’t strong enough the software will provide an algorithmically generated passcode that’s a stronger security code. Then there’s a companion software that takes a snapshot of a computer after someone first logs-in to determine if the person is a hacker or not.”

  “Let me make sure I understand this, so Dave Jones would have not a single password or two, he would have a whole series of passwords….. of security codes? And a blue print on how to log-in and avoid being identified as a hacker?”

  “That’s right,” Green said as his voice grew less angry and more worried “he would have thousands of security codes and the software which identifies hackers so that he can work around it.”

  Mulally stopped breathing for a moment, stunned into silence.

  “Sir?” I interrupted, “I don’t think he gave the disc to the Beijing.”

  “What?” asked Mulally.

  “You see, if he sold the disc he would have nothing left to trade. I think it’s Jones, not the Chinese, using the passwords to access the Defense networks to download top secret files and to sell the information to the highest bidder; if he’s got thousands of passcodes, of which maybe a hundred are in use, that’s a continuing revenue stream for him to keep the company afloat until he can find a buyer for his drones.”

  “But he can’t sell PFG’s military equipment to a foreign buyer because of the export restrictions on selling defense equipment outside of the U.S.” he replied as he shook his head from side to side then suddenly stopped. “Right. He doesn’t care about export restrictions does he?” He asked, catching his own error.

  “No sir, he apparently doesn’t,” I confirmed, watching Mulally pace the floor, back and forth in agitation. He followed my logic and considered agreeing with it as long as there was some proof to back it up. He went on to suggest that Qureshi might be working for the Pakistani Intelligence organization, trading U.S. military secrets to the Iranians in exchange for oil for Pakistan.

  He held discussions with the aerospace company executives trying to put out the word fast to contain the damage. Each company that had been given the trial version of Irongate’s passcode software was contacted.

  Everything was moving so quickly. It was time to update my friends. “Hi Bailey, we’ve got a crisis on our hands. It appears that Jones got a copy of a passcode application that was just successfully tested at Irongate Software Company and ready to deliver into production.”

  “Are you sure? How’d he get it?” she asked

  .

  “Irongate gave preliminary copy to PFG, so that PFG could include it with their proposal to the Department of Defense. Irongate was the intended software subcontractor for PFG’s drone manufacturing in Texas, when PFG got the government contract and began production .”

  “As a short term solution to the passcode crisis, we’ve got Irongate working on a patch that’ll be downloaded onto the networks of every company that tried their software. Irongate will cancel production of that new passcode software and destroy already existing versions, but that doesn’t help us solve the crisis now. We don’t know how much classified information Jones stole and who bought it from him, other than Beijing of course. Mulally suspected that he sold the entire disk to Beijing to be used by the People’s Liberation Army, or to one of their spy schools like Hunan University. But I think he wouldn’t sell the disk itself because once it’s sold, he doesn’t have anything else. He needs a revenue stream, so I think it’s Jones himself using the passwords to download information and then selling that information in installments whenever he needs more cash.” I said.

  Bailey asked “And this was triggered when the federal government wouldn’t give PFG a prime contract and buy it’s drones? The company must have been stuck with a lot of expenses for research and development of their prototype for the new drone, and no sales to the government to provide revenue.”

  “Exactly,” I replied. “After the DOD turned him down, he even tried to sell the drones to the State Department, but they weren’t in the market for killer drones, they want aerial imaging drones only. The State Department instead went with a major defense company that produced non-combat drone vehicles with more advanced sensors.”

  “You’re sure that he’s not selling PFG’s equipment to a foreign buyer?”

  “We think he tried to sell it to Iran, communicating through a website that looked like it was selling farming equipment, but he hasn’t found a buyer yet. The British Ministry of Defense tells us he tried to sell PFG’s drones in the U.K. but failed there as well. It appears that the downloading would have begun about 6 months ago, that’s when the U.K. and the U.S. both rejected his proposal to buy his drones.”

  Bailey started thinking out loud “So that’s the reason for the money to be wired from Shanghai to Abu Dhabi with Kabul bank being the intermediary bank to break-up the money trail and make the money difficult to trace?”

  “Right,” I replied.

  “Caroline, he’ll have to keep PFG afloat forever,” Bailey said.

  ‘Why?”

  “Because he needs to have a company where he can launder the money he’s receiving for trading classified information to a foreign buyer. He’s got to explain on his tax returns how he’s paying for a private jet and private clubs,” She explained.

  “So you’re thinking what I’m thinking. That the real product isn’t his drones anymore; it’s the sale of classified information…..,” I asked.

  “Yep,” She replied. “There’s no point wasting time guessing if he’s gonna have a buyer for his drones at some point in the future, right now the product is classified information. And he’s got to sell enough information to generate sufficient cash flow to keep his entire floundering company operational. He’s got to sell a Hell of a lot of information, there Caroline.”

  “Bailey, the price of intelligence isn’t always driven by the quantity of documents it’s also driven by the quality,” I said. Then a terrifying thought suddenly hit me, “He’s going to go after the crown jewels. Oh God, Bailey, we’ve got to shut him down. ”

  Before my panic could spread further Jose and Hugo were calling me back to the dining room to help review some of Irongate’s new code.

  “I gotta go, Queen B,” I said. “ I�
�ll keep you posted on your cell phone, okay? It’s going to be an all-nighter tonight.”

  “Caroline, as soon as you get something solid that a prosecutor move forward on, I can have all of their bank accounts frozen. PFG’s, Qureshi’s, ……..”

  “Okay. You’ll be the first to know. Bye.”

  Richard Green had gone back to his programmer team to create an updated version of the software to rush it out the clients and to pull together a patch that they could apply in the meantime to close the security lapses before Jones could log- in again and steal any more Top Secret files. We reviewed their work as they were writing it, and added our input to expedite its completion. The new software needed to be delivered to the defense community fast. There was an impressive amount of brainpower working in overdrive to achieve a singular purpose and the energy level was so inspiring we seemed invincible.

  We notified the DOD including Keisha about Irongate. Meanwhile Mulally notified the Chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, and the Chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee and told them that after Jones’ PFG contract was rejected by the DOD, his company was in limbo so he began to formulate another plan, which included downloading Top Secret files containing spacecraft designs from competitors and selling them on the black market to China, we believed.