atop Mori's desk, but who knew what most of them said? Nothing looked
like my stolen list. Next she checked the drawers of the desk. One
contained a heavily marked printout; the others, nothing.
Time was ticking. If Yamada decided to make the rounds, no quantity of
creative fiction would save us.
She quickly grabbed the printout. At least we had one item that might
give us something. What, though, we still weren't sure. Nothing
resembled the page I'd lifted, but locating that document now appeared
increasingly like a long shot anyhow. Guess everything seems easy till
you actually try doing it.
Where else to look?
I glanced around the room, wondering about the file cabinet. Probably
locked, and besides . . .
That's when I saw it. On a side table next to some technical books was
an item we'd both failed entirely to notice. A large leather attache
case.
"Tam, I think we've hit pay dirt. Check that out. Do you suppose she
could have forgotten it last night when they shut the place down?"
"Maybe she didn't need it. Anything's possible. I remember seeing her
carrying it around yesterday afternoon."
"Well, could be this is our find." I lifted it . . . and realized it
was empty.
"Shit." I slammed it down, and just then detected a faint rattle
inside. Hold on a minute.
I carefully shook it again and listened. "Tam, there's something in
here."
"I vote we take a peek."
Which is what we did. No harm, right? I mean, the darned thing was just
lying there. No "break and entry."
Guess what was inside. Not paper. Not a MITI report. Not lunch. Nothing
in fact except for a shiny little compact disk, a CD.
"What the hell is this doing in here? Did she bring along some Beach
Boys?"
"Matt, that's an optical disk, a CD-ROM." She suddenly seemed very
pleased.
"Huh?"
"Compact disk, read-only memory. Except this one looks to be erasable
and writable. This is the latest thing in computer storage technology."
She held it up to the light, which reflected a rainbow of colors off
its iridescent surface. "Maybe we've found what we came for. Let's take
it and go."
"Is this like the CDs in record stores? The ones you play back using
some kind of laser gizmo?"
"Same technology, only this is for text and data, not music. These can
hold five-hundred megabytes, about one hundred and fifty thousand
pages."
"Then I have some disquieting information to impart. I saw somebody
come in here one day after shopping at Tower Records, and a CD he'd
bought tripped the metal detector out there in Yamada's anteroom like
he was wearing sleigh bells. Down inside this shiny plastic must be
aluminum or something. We can't take it out." I turned it in my hand.
"And besides, what would we do with it anyway? Stick it in a Walkman
and listen to all the little digits spin by? In hi-fi?"
"I've got a reader at home . . . but wait, there's a better way." She
lifted it from my grasp and headed out onto the floor. "Ever hear of
computer crime?"
"In passing."
"Good. Then what you're about to witness won't shock you."
I watched as she kicked on one of the NEC desk stations and loaded in a
program. Next she walked over, flipped a switch on a little box, and a
drawer glided out. In went Mori's shiny disk. Another button was
pushed, the drawer receded, and the disk was spinning silently.
Well, I thought. You want peaches, you shake the tree, right? Maybe
she's about to kick hell out of the orchard.
"I'm going to dump this into the memory of the mother ship downstairs."
She did some fiddling, then typed in her password to sign on the
mainframe on eleven. "Beam us down, Scottie." In moments she and all
those silicon cells below us were beeping away at each other. She
didn't look up, just kept typing away, the hollow click-clack that's
become the signature sound of our computer age. Finally she leaned back
and breathed. "Okay, it's reading the disk. After it's in memory down
there, we can pull up the contents here on the screen and see what
we've got."
I don't know how long it took to read the thing. Probably no more than
a minute or so, though it seemed forever. Finally something flashed on
the screen and told us the disk had been dumped. Tam took it out of its
little player and passed it to me.
"Here, put this back in her case. While I start pulling up the file."
I'd just finished snapping it shut when I heard an expletive from out
on the floor that would not be judged suitable for family audiences.
"Watch your language."
She was sitting there staring at the screen. Finally she turned and
looked at me. "So close, yet so far. It's encrypted'."
"It's what?"
"Come and look."
I did. On the screen was a mass of numeric garbage. What was this all
about?
"Matt, when this disk was written, whatever went on it was scrambled
using some key, probably the DES system, the 'data-encryption
standard.' It keeps unauthorized intruders like us from snooping."
"How does anybody read it?"
"A decrypting key must be in the hardware down on eleven. But we can't
get through to that level of the machine without an 'access code.'
Which we don't have."
"Very smart. The electronic keys to the kingdom." I watched, wondering
all the while what Yamada was doing out there. Should I blunder out and
chat him up with my Berlitz Japanese, just to keep him occupied? The
clock above the door was ticking away.
"Tam, why not just try activating the key using your own password as
the access code? Maybe it'll get you into that level on the mainframe."
She gave it a go, without much enthusiasm. Predictably the message came
back, 'ACCESS CODE NOT RECOGNIZED.'
"Well, try some others." I was grasping. "Hit it with 'NODA' or
'MORI.'"
She did, but after both were rejected the workstation suddenly signed
off. Click, out of the system.
"What's happened now?"
"More bad news. I forgot the mainframe is programmed so that you get
three tries at a protected code and then it breaks the connection.
That's to keep crackers like us from sitting here all day and running
passwords at random. Another security precaution."
"Three chances to guess the secret word and then you're
out. Sounds like a game show." I just stood there and scratched my
head. Seemed we were, to be blunt, shit out of luck. "What now,
Professor? I assume there are about a hundred million alphanumeric
combinations they could use."
"Close." She was clicking away at the keyboard. "So let's think a
minute." She glanced back at me. "Why don't we assume for a minute that
this is a MITI disk."
"Safe bet."
"So the decryptor key in the machine here would be from MITI, right,
since Mori obviously brought the disk to be read?"
"Sounds good."
"You know, I was in Ken's office once, and I recall watching some of
his staff playing around with the information on one of these disks.
Don't know why I still remember this, but the password they used was
... I think MX something, three letters, followed by six digits. The
digits were always changing, but the prefix was the same."
"So if your wild guess about this being a MITI disk is right, and the
first two letters of the three-letter alpha part are still MX, that
means there are exactly, what--twenty-six letters in the alphabet times
a million numbers--twenty-six million combinations. We're looking for
one number in twenty-six million? So if it takes, say, five seconds to
type one in and try it, we're talking roughly a hundred and thirty
million seconds to go the course." I glanced again at the door.
"Besides which, we get kicked off after every third try. Working around
the clock, we ought to have it sometime about, what, 2001?"
She glanced back at the screen, then suddenly whirled around, a funny
look on her face. "What do you have in your office?"
"What do you mean?"
"Don't you have a PC downtown?"
"Just a little IBM AT, 512K. And also a Mac, a toy I use to draw
cutsey-poo pictures now and then and do covers for reports."
"How about a telephone modem?"
"Built in. How else could I handle all that trading?"
"And it's up?"
"The IBM? Never turn it off. Little twitch left over from playing the
Hong Kong exchanges. Habits die hard."
"Okay, I'm going to try and use it to crack the code in DNI's
mainframe."
Honestly, for a second there I thought my hearing had gone. "My little
IBM against that monster? How, forchrissake? There're twenty-six
million--"
"We'll have to do something not very nice. Since the Japanese aren't
used to hackers, those bearded malcontents in firms who screw up
business computers for spite, these workstations aren't buffered off
sensitive parts of the system. We are now going to exploit that trust
in Japanese culture. We're going to organize these terminals, hook them
to your computer, and then direct that network against the mainframe
downstairs. Something no Japanese would ever dream of doing." She got
up and went down the row clicking on machines. "There's a list of names
in my office, there by the phone. Can you bring it?"
"Coming up." I fetched it. It was a temporary "phone book" of the staff
on the floor. She took the list and went back down the line of
stations, typing something on each keyboard.
"What are you doing, Tam? This is crazy."
"It'll just take a second. Everybody here has a password to sign on to
the mainframe, but it's just the name of the person." She came back to
the first workstation. "Now the mainframe thinks ten people just signed
on to the system. We'll use these terminals to try access codes on the
main computer. Your PC will control them so that each terminal hits it
with two codes and then the next one goes on line. That way we'll never
get kicked off. It should get around the 'three times and you're out'
filter downstairs." She began frantically typing again.
"What are you doing now?"
"We could try alphanumerics sequentially or randomly. I think randomly
is probably better. It'll be faster. So I'm writing a little program
for the mainframe, a random-number generator. It'll start making up
random access codes of MX followed by a letter and six digits and
sending them to your PC downtown, which will immediately feed them back
in pairs to these terminals. Out one door, in another. Maybe that will
fool it."
"Christ, woman, you've got a criminal mind. Is this the kind of stuff
you teach at NYU?"
"What's your number downtown?" She was typing away again.
I wrote it down and handed it to her. "I don't have the foggiest idea
how you're going to be able to swing this."
"That's all right. I do. Just let me get your IBM networked into these
terminals here. Fortunately it's compatible, and all it's going to be
doing for now is bouncing back numbers generated by the mainframe." She
flipped some switches, then typed my number onto the screen. I
momentarily wondered if the sleet had knocked out the phone system. It
hadn't.
Again the seconds crawled by, but as soon as she'd finished her chat
with my IBM downtown, the row of terminals suddenly started beeping
away. Two shots, beep, the next one came alive; two shots, beep, right
down the row.
"Okay, your computer is running the show now. Sooner or later maybe
something will click." She punched a couple more keys, then got up.
"It's done?"
"Ready to rock and roll." She was putting on her coat. "We'll be
running millions of numbers."
"Isn't anybody going to know you've pulled this?" I was, I confess,
totally dumbfounded.
"Not unless they discover my little program in the mainframe
downstairs. But it's just a random-number generator, something any
sophomore could write. The trick is, we're hitting it with so many
terminals it won't be programmed to keep track of all these little
elves trying to sneak in. And when we're through we'll turn them all
off using your modem downtown."
"Good God, whatever happened to pen and pencil?" I was still dazed.
She'd done it all so fast. "If you can find the decryptor key and get
into the files, then what? You going to dump all the info on Mori's
sexy little CD down at my place?"
"I hope you've got lots of paper. Who knows what's on it." She was
shutting off the lights. "Come on, let's get out of here."
"Aye, aye, Professor." I walked back, clicked off the light in Mori's
office, then paused to double-check the lock.
"We came for printouts, remember. We only have Mori's." I was joining
her. She glanced at the stack on her desk, then grabbed a pile and
handed them to me.
"You'd better carry these. And don't be put off by my 'ugly American'
routine at the door. It'll be for a purpose."