<b>Roo'd</b>

# Roo'd

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# Chapter #39

Cass confirmed that the rest of the text was contact info for an anonymous-sounding Chinese government address along with instructions. They wanted a full explanation of what the combinate results were intended to do. The message was businesslike, succinct, and final.

Cessus thought that whoever had sent it was most likely in the Chinese governmental system and had seen the increased data load. Because all Chinese internet traffic ran through extensive proxies on the way out of the country he or she’d been able to sniff and replace all their recombinant sets on their way out. What was impressive was that whoever they were, they had distinguished Fede’s results from all the other random noise and postings going out in the same direction, and had coded up a response right after Fede’s had finished propagating. It was a neat hack.

Tonx spun into damage control as soon as the news hit, contacting those people he’d pulled favors from to warn them that there was a delay. Fede’s first inclination was not to tell anyone anything, but Tonx assured him that he hadn’t got this far by hiding facts from his investors.

After examining everything they had it was clear they couldn’t rework the remaining data themselves — there was too much information lost and no way of confirming if any of the rest of it had been scrambled. Cessus told Fede to prep a sampling app to run random confirmations on what they had and disappeared into the back of the truck. As soon as he’d shut the door Fede got a message on his comm; “don’t let anyone bother me” it said. Signed, Cessus.

Around dinnertime a small Toyota sedan with tinted windows picked up a group of Japanese men. An hour later a tourist bus dropped off three hard-looking Italians in expensive looking suits. They pitched a tent farther down the beach and reappeared in shorts and Hawaiian floral-print shirts. Nobody talked to them. Fede coded, exhausted. What the hell was he doing here, on some weird Mafioso beach in Mexico, big players waiting for him to pay out. Friends waiting for him to deliver. Screwed.

Somebody lit a bonfire between the chairs and the beach. Fede stopped to get a plateful of shirred pork chops and BBQ beans. He coded, eventually finishing his app. It would take days to run, but it would do the job. It was messy. Fede didn’t care.

After dinner Tonx reappeared, his shoulders peeling. Cass was with him, carrying their plates as Tonx wrote, fingers flying over his comm. His Hello Kitty glasses glowed and pulsed, his face hard behind them.

“Where’s Cessus?” Tonx asked.

“Working” said Fede.

“Doing?” asked Tonx.

“Don’t know. Probably trying to trace the guy who cracked us” he said.

Tonx looked down the beach at the fire, noticed Cass and took his plate. He sat and ate.

After a while a tall, beautiful boy with dark curly hair mixed classic operatic pieces with hip-hop tunes on his lapcomm; they’d patched him into the speakers mounted in the bar.

Eventually Cessus reappeared. He looked like a black woolly octopus was eating his head, three-day scruff turning his face dark. His eyes shone in their hollowed sockets.

“I got him” he said.

They stared.

“It’s one guy. Or a small number of guys. Got to be an important muckity-muck in China’s IT dept. Big into networking, but his security’s got some holes. Small ones.”

“But big enough?” asked Tonx, his voice hopeful.

“Big enough” agreed Cessus, reaching over and grabbing a pair of pork chops from Fede’s plate.

“So what do we got?” Tonx asked.

Cessus chewed, grimaced as his lenses rolled back to the sides of his head. His eyes were a bloody red.

“Like I said, likely one guy. Not enough stuff done concurrently to be otherwise. He followed the data uploads until he had a good sample rate and spoofed the rest. Fooled us, though. No idea what the actual processing rate was like, but the boxes I owned were all done by the time I got to them. Looks like your code did about as well as we thought, Feed.”

“We just didn’t get the results” Fede said.

“So who is he? How do we get our data?” Tonx asked.

“There’s the rub” said Cessus. “He took the real combinate results and put them on a private machine in Beijing. A roach motel.”

“What’s a roach motel?” asked Cass.

“They were originally used for credit card numbers,” said Fede. “E-vendors use them for making credit card transactions. When they want to make a transaction the vendor sends them a packet with an identifier, like ’ID #12345, $125.00, for Fuzzy Eggbeater’ and they match the ID number with an actual credit card. Then the roach motel runs the transaction.”

“So why are they called roach motels?”

“Credit card numbers check in, but they never check out” said Tonx.

“Is that bad?” Cass asked.

“It means we can’t get at the data from here” said Cessus. “Roach motels only do one thing — you send them packets, and they run a transaction completely separately. In this case they’re just passing it requests, and the roach motel is sending the recombinant information out some other way we don’t know about. Since we can’t see the packets going out, we can’t intercept anything useful.”

Cass snorted loudly through her nose.

“I thought you guys were uber-hackers. You’re telling me you’ve got a machine that only does a single thing — only takes packets in — and you can’t hack it?”

“Kind of breaks the illusion, but yeah” said Cessus.

“So how’d you find out he put our data up there?” asked Fede.

“One of the people who was trying to look at the information screwed up. He’d set up an anonymizing proxy before making the request to the roach motel. The guy who got our data put it on a web site somewhere — probably the roach motel itself, but we have no way of knowing — and when the person using the proxy tried to access it his browser kept asking the roach motel for the data instead of the web server. I just listened to what his browser was asking for and figured out that whoever had our data had put up a web page with a bunch of DNA data. A recombinant.”

“He put the whole thing up there?” asked Tonx.

“No, he didn’t. That’s the funny part. He put up half of it. The web page was extremely simple, but it took a really long time to load. The guy using the proxy kept pounding the reload button on his browser, which sends a new request each time. That gave me a nice sample set to figure out what he was trying to pull down. I compared the size the actual recombinant would be against the web page, and it comes to about half and change.”

“Who was asking for it?” asked Tonx.

“The request I saw was run through an anonymizing proxy, like I told you, but the packets it sent out to make the original request were all signed with a user ID” said Cessus.

They waited.

“And?” said Fede.

“The ID was C.Hintao” said Cessus. “The only person with that name that comes to mind is the president of China, and it was run through government proxies. The anonymizer is maintained by their equivalent to the secret service.”

“But then why didn’t he put the whole recombinant up?” asked Fede.

Tonx laughed. “The fucker’s playing them” he said.

“Probably” said Cessus. “Either he’s claiming the full data set isn’t done yet, or he’s ransoming it until he finds out what it’s for.”

“So does he have the correct data set somewhere?” asked Fede.

“If it exists, he has it” said Cessus.

They turned to Tonx. The ocean roared behind them, the gulf stream stirring its waves, winds from Brazil to Finland pushing its currents. Fede’s brother tucked a strand of hair behind his ear and looked around at them. He reached over and put a hand on Cass’s.

“So you want to go to China?” he asked.

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