Lynn was anxious to get to work the next day to find out what the next assignment from Dave would be. She wasn’t disappointed – five minutes after she walked past the receptionist she had a call from Dave asking her to come to his office. She wasted no time getting there.
“Good morning, sir. How are you today?”
Dave looked annoyed. “You don’t need to be that formal with me.”
“Okay Dave, what have you got for me today?”
“That’s better. This new case will be a little more challenging for you.” Lynn opened the folder he put in front of her.
“A major company in town has someone near the top embezzling money from them. It shows up because the books don’t balance, but there’s no evidence who the culprit is or how he or she is moving the money out. They want us to find out who it is. Here’s a list of everyone in the company who is high enough in the company to pull this off. See what you can find out about them.”
“How much are we talking about, Dave?”
“Almost half a million dollars over the past three years.”
“Whoever it is, they will have a secret account somewhere to hide that much money. My first choice would be someone in accounting and finance. They would know how to doctor the books to hide it.”
“That was my first thought too, but I had my top computer guy, O’Malley, explore that possibility and he came up with nothing. Whoever the embezzler is, he or she seems to be good at covering their tracks.”
“How soon do you need an answer?”
“It may not be when you can find the answer, it may be if you can find the answer. O’Malley is good at cyber crime investigations, so you might find nothing but dead ends.”
“Let me get back to my office and get started. I’ll send you daily progress updates.”
“Thanks. I would appreciate that.”
Lynn sat down with the file and laid out her approach to solving the case. Her first move would be to get bank statements from all the top-level employees. If nothing showed up there, she would dig deeper into the accounting department staff.
She fired up her computer and started a search on the first name, Oleg Bohr. Bohr managed the overseas operations of the company, Great Eastern Financial Investments. His office managed over ten million in assets for several dozen major investment portfolios. Lynn knew if she chased the money leak from the portfolio investments end, she would still be at this three months from now. The key was to find the employee who had a secret bank account, or who was spending a lot more than Great Eastern was paying him.
Lynn began by hacking into Bohr’s bank account, but found nothing amiss there. Next she logged onto the Darknet to look for hidden information about him. She found a couple of credit cards that weren’t on his financial disclosure statement, but they held no surprises. Charges for some escort services, restaurants, and hotel accommodations – which probably meant he was cheating on his wife – but nothing that would indicate an unknown source of lots of money. Lynn drew a line through Bohr’s name and moved on to the next one.
Two days later she was finished with the initial searches for everyone on the list and couldn’t find anything suspicious. It was time to dig deeper into the list of the accounting people, and to do that she had to get the IP addresses of their computers. Lynn wanted to repeat the procedure she used for Dr. Hogue to find the email addresses and IP addresses. She needed to come up with an email subject that the six top-level employees in corporate accounting would open.
“Hmmm. What would that be? If I were them, what would get my attention . . . something from corporate headquarters maybe? . . . Or an email about their 401k retirement account! That will do it.”
Lynn went to the web site to see who managed the employee retirement plan for Great Eastern – Golden Parachute Wealth Management. She created an email that appeared to come from GPWM.com, with an alarming subject line that read “Important Information About Your 410k Retirement Plan – Immediate Action Required.” The text read “Please open the following link to approve the latest changes in your retirement account.” When they opened the link, a message appeared that told them to review their 401K account immediately to check for a possible computer error. Once they did that, Lynn’s bug would enter their computers and send her the IP addresses. It might take awhile before all of them checked their email, so Lynn spent some time thinking about her payback attack on Dr. Hogue and the good feeling it gave her. That brought her back in time to her first payback experience – her revenge on the man who had killed Jack and Selena and burned her Colorado mountain home to the ground with their bodies in it.
Alexei Brusilov was an agent who left Russia’s secret police to start a personal protection business in the U. S. The key feature of his business was a total disregard for the law, and a team of ruthless thugs who did whatever was necessary to achieve their objectives. He was hired by the ultra conservative presidential candidate, George Winston, to help him steal the election and win the White House. Jack Preston, his wife Lynn, and his team of patriots worked to expose Winston’s illegal activities and stop his plan for redefining freedom in America.
Alexei and his men tried to silence Preston and his team but, in the end, President Winston was assassinated during his inauguration parade by a Chinese Government agent. Afterward, Alexei killed Jack, Selena, and Lynn’s dog – then fled to his cabin in northern Wisconsin. Lynn tracked him down and sent Alexei and his HumVee to the bottom of the lake in front of his cabin. That moment of vengeance gave Lynn a special feeling – a feeling of deep satisfaction. That’s the feeling she got from her payback attack on Dr. Hogue.
“I wonder if I can find other opportunities to get my ‘payback high.’ Maybe I can find other women who have been taken advantage of and help them get revenge. I’ll have to think about that. . . . Oops. There’s my first hit on an opened email.”
This one was the Chief Financial Officer, Kelly Morgan. She fell for the fake email and opened up her computer to Lynn’s exploration. She started with a file directory labeled “Personal Finances” to look for evidence of a secret account somewhere. She had four investment accounts at major U. S. Banks, but the balances were well within her standard of living, so she wasn’t hiding anything there. Lynn explored several other directories and found nothing incriminating.
The second next email was opened by the comptroller, George Davidson. His job was to oversee the periodic audits of Great Eastern’s financial affairs. It occurred to Lynn that it was his job to uncover imbalances and missing funds, so it would be difficult for anyone to embezzle money without the comptroller knowing about it. And that makes Mr. Davidson a prime suspect for the missing cash. Lynn got access to his computer files and ran into a brick wall – a firewall unlike any she had seen before. He must be protecting something important.
Jack had left her with several firewall-cracking programs, so she started with his most recent. It got partway through Davidson’s protection when everything changed – his firewall had reconfigured itself to block her attack. She remembered Jack talking about adaptive firewalls like this, and that he had written some code that could adapt faster than the changing firewall. She checked her notes and found what she was looking for; Jack called it his Gossamer Ghost. Lynn activated it and three seconds later Davidson’s computer shut down.
“This isn’t good. Now he knows someone is trying to hack him and he’ll hide his activities even deeper. I won’t get another chance going in this way. I need to find another way to get to his records.”
Lynn pondered her problem but couldn’t come up with another approach. “It’s getting late. I’ll sleep on it and go after him again in the morning.”
Sometime during the night she started dreaming about the firewall on Davidson’s computer. It was a brick wall and in her dream, she kept literally banging her head against it trying to get through.
“That’s not the way, Lynn.”
She l
ooked around and there was Jack sitting in a chair across from the couch. Her eyes teared up as she spoke to him. “Oh, Jack. You haven’t come to visit for the past week and I’ve missed you so much. I need you to get me through these lonely nights.”
“Tonight I’m here to show you how to find Davidson’s hidden account.
“It’s hopeless, Jack. His computer sensed my presence and shut itself down. He will block me for good now.”
“You’re right about his computer, but there’s another way to find where he is hiding the money. You have to go around the brick wall, not through it. Break into Great Eastern’s accounting program and find out how he’s siphoning off the funds. I’ll provide some computer code that will get you into the company’s system and search for the leak.
“Where is the code? I’ve gone through all the hacking programs you left me and none of them work. And how can you write new code. You only live in my dreams.”
“I’m not just your imagination, Lynn. I have ways of doing things. The answer will be waiting for you at the office in the morning.”
Lynn was about to ask him to come and hold her when his image faded from view. But as she lay back down on the couch, she thought she felt a hand rubbing her back.