Chapter 10: Lady Grey
The morning mission for the women was to get Kaitlyn’s wedding dress. They’d insisted that I couldn’t see it before the actual wedding began, so they sent me off to do other stuff after we’d enjoyed what there was of the hotel’s skimpy breakfast. I couldn’t have helped them much anyway; I’d been raised in India, so if they’d asked me, I’d have told them to get an ornate red sari! I didn’t think they’d accept that answer.
Cut free, I decided to call an old friend from my time living in this city who worked with me at the same place that had brought me over from India.
“Jess? It’s Davie.” Pause. “Yeah, been awhile. Look, I’m in town, and I’d like your help with a sub-rosa project. Are you still with S&G?” Pause. “I’m only about four blocks away, actually. Can you go grab some coffee with me down at Bigbucks?” Pause. “Great! See you then.”
Jess Jevgenijeva is what we call a grey-hat hacker.
The black hats are all the evil little kobolds out in the world trying to break into the rest of the world’s computer systems: scammers, thieves, spies, vandals… There’s a lot of them, they’re everywhere, and their motives vary wildly, as do their methods.
The white hats are those defending the organization from this variegated onslaught, working from the inside on a higher plane from the regular IT folk. They’re often ex-black hats themselves, and the rest have been trained in the art. Their job is to anticipate coming threats and design effective defenses to new attacks created to get past commodity security systems — anti-malware, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, etc. — which are mainly effective against old, well-known attacks. New attacks often slip right by these systems; thus the role of white hat hacker.
Grey hats are those somewhere in between. They may work as a white hat to earn their bread, but they keep a hand in the black-hat world, too. For Jess, it’s always been about curiosity and possibility. If someone tells her that a system is “secure,” she can’t help but go out and try her darnedest to find that system’s holes. Jess has made it her mission in life to prove that there’s no such thing as an unhackable system. She’s convinced me.
Jess doesn’t damage the systems she breaks into. It’s more about the challenge and score-keeping of it all. What she does is the computing version of mountain climbing: she sets herself each new challenge not as a means to an end but as the end itself.
I’d gotten a table down at the Bigbucks and had my order sitting in front of me when I saw a young woman walk through the door, about five-five, a bit pudgy and not especially attractive, her eyeglasses pointed down towards the ground. Her backpack had her listing 10 degrees off of vertical, stuffed as it was to the diameter of her torso by a third of her body weight in tech gear. This was her everyday carry, I knew, because it was my friend Jess.
I rose and caught her attention. “Jess, over here!” When she got to my table, we shook hands. We were very much handshake friends, not hug friends. “How’s it going?”
“Doing well up here still, Davie. You’re looking well, too. Much better than when I saw you last, in fact,” Jess returned.
I was wearing cargo shorts and a fairly tight tee shirt, so she saw a fair bit of my newly tightened musculature. I explained, “I’ve been living down in Moab for the past three years, and I bike most everywhere. About nine miles round trip each workday, minimum, just getting to work and back. More if I’ve got errands. It’s great exercise, and I get a lot more sun than when I lived up here.”
“It looks good on you. Let me go order and we’ll talk,” said Jess.
“I already ordered for you; I remember what you like,” I said. “It’ll be up shortly.” And just then the counter person called out a number. “That’s yours.”
She got up and brought back something that probably ran nearly 500 calories, not so much a drink as dessert. She took a sip and raised an eyebrow in appreciation.
“So, what’s this project, then?” she began.
I explained about the mining company sniffing around my fiancée’s family farm, then said, “I need to get into their network to snoop around, to find out what this project is and what their plan is.”
Jess looked thoughtful for a while, then said, “Let’s start with their WiFi. Where’s their building?”
I pointed, “Right over there, cater-corner from here.”
“Well, that’s easy, then.” Jess reached down into the backpack she’d slung under the table, rooted around a bit, and pulled out a laptop sleeve and a…Pringles can? Not just a Pringles can: it’d been modified. It had a thin coaxial cable coming out of its side, which she attached to a USB dongle, then plugged the whole assembly into her laptop. As the laptop booted, she dove back into the bag and emerged with a small tabletop tripod, screwed it into the side of the can, removed the lid from the can, and pointed the open end of the can roughly at the JRE building.
Jess pulled a smartphone out of one of the backpack’s several side pockets, poked around on its screen for about a minute, then set the phone on the table, screen up, showing a fancy-looking electronic compass. “With this, I can set the precise angle to the target from here,” she told me.
“How do you know that angle?” I asked, mystified. “I mean, I see that you’ve got a compass app, but how does that help?”
“The compass alone doesn’t tell me that,” she explained. “The phone’s GPS told me where we are now within a few feet, and a satellite mapping app told me where the target is. The phone’s built-in gyrocompass tells the app where magnetic north is. The app takes all of those inputs, does some 3D geometry math on it, then puts this little pip on the compass telling me where to aim.” She then used her pinky to indicate a little triangle pointing outward along the radius of the compass display.
“Spiffy,” I acknowledged.
“Yeah, it is, but that gets us only one of the two angles we need for a precise aim point. Fortunately, this phone also has a built-in altimeter, so we can find out how high this coffee shop is are above sea level.” At this, she set her phone down on the floor beside her chair, screen up, waited for the reading to settle, typed the value into the laptop, picked up the phone, and continued her lecture. “…And then how high this table is above floor level.”
“Why do you need three measures? Wouldn’t two suffice, ground level here and and at the target?” I interrupted.
“I need ground level on the far side because I’m guessing that our target has a WiFi base station up in the dropped ceiling of their ground floor to serve the lobby, and my guess of the ceiling’s height is five meters above ground level, or roughly double the height of a normal office floor. That guess comes from looking at the ground-floor windows, which are clearly taller than those of the higher floors, so the lobby has high ceilings.”
I nodded my understanding, so she continued, “I then need to know the ground altitude on this side to set a proper baseline, but because I’m not going to do my work from ground level, I need the second altitude measurement on this side so I can subtract out the height of the table top, else I’ll be aiming at that height above the drop ceiling on the other side, having translated the whole system of measurements up by that amount.”
“Oh, I see,” I agreed. “Do go on.”
She nodded graciously. “The table’s about a meter high, so the effective height of the base station on the other end is roughly four meters above this table, plus another two for the difference in the ground level between the coffee shop and the target.”
“And you know that last from the same satellite mapping app you used to get the target building’s location,” I guessed.
“Preeecisely,” she agreed. Jess took some time to crunch the numbers, alternating her attention between the laptop and the smartphone. “So, subtract the table height from the estimated height of the base station, add the ground level delta, put that back into the gyrocompass app’s calculator…ah, 1.15°.”
With a nod of satisfaction, Jess held the phone’s long side to the Pringles can body, positioned like a shark’s dorsal fin, its screen tilted enough toward me that I could see a digital bubble level app on the screen. Jess used that to tweak the vertical angle of the can on the tripod. When the readout trembled around the angle Jess calculated, she carefully lifted the phone off and said, “Perfect.” Then she went back to the compass app and rechecked the first angle, tweaking the can position ever so slightly this time. “Right, that’s got it.”
“Wouldn’t it have been simpler to just sight down the body of the…?” I trailed off, not knowing what to call this lash-up, waving my hand vaguely at it.
“The rig is called a cantenna, and you’re right: with as much uncertainty as we have in these measurements, sighting down the can’s body is probably about as accurate as the other method, but I ask you, Davie, which is more fun?” This was apparently a rhetorical question, its answer obvious to her, because she returned to her work without waiting for an answer from me. “All righty, let’s see what we can see.” After about a minute of clicking and muttering, she said, “Got it.”
“You’re in? Already?” I asked excitedly.
“No, I mean that I can see their network from here now.” At my disappointed look, she said, “Hey, WiFi is normally good for, what, thirty meters or so in practice? We’re about ten times that distance from the building here, yet I see their network, a full five bars. Be impressed.”
I gave her a formal seated Indian bow.
“The can’s metal lining focuses the signal, boosting my effective transmission power and my reception sensitivity so that I can see their network from here. It’s going to let me get down to work without sitting in their lobby, which would attract unwanted attention to our project. There’s no free lunch: I sacrifice the ability to see anything beyond this narrow cone, but down that cone…”
“Ah, enlightenment dawns,” I acknowledged.
Jess went on, “Consequently, the rig is sensitive, so don’t touch! You’ll throw it off-axis, and we’ll have to start over.”
I held my hands up in a clear “Not touchin’ nothin’” gesture.
Jess went heads-down again and returned to typing and muttering. I sipped at my drink watching her work for maybe ten minutes. Then she closed the laptop, unplugged everything from it, slipped it into the sleeve, and slid the laptop back into her backpack.
“It didn’t work?” I said, disappointed again.
“It worked perfectly.” She picked a USB stick off the table that she’d just removed from the laptop and handed it to me. “Here’s the WiFi network key, and I’m leaving you the cantenna, the WiFi dongle, and the tripod. What you do with them is your lookout.”
“Wow, thanks! That was easy.”
She laughed at that. “Expertise usually does look easy.”
She wasn’t being arrogant, just bluntly honest.
“What do I owe you for your time and the equipment?” I asked. I knew her time alone was worth plenty.
“Don’t worry about it. You’re a good friend, and I’m mindful of how few of those I have. Consider this past-due maintenance,” she said, transparently slipping into IT argot. “The equipment’s all inexpensive, and most of it’s off-the-shelf, easily replaced. The most difficult bit to replace will be the cantenna, and that only because of the hour or so it’ll take me to make another at home tonight. I already have the parts for it.”
“This means a lot to me and Kaitlyn,” I said. “Maybe you’ll get away down to the southland and we can get you some sun?”
“Hmmm… I’m afraid of the big day-ball. It burrnnns us, it does!” she said, holding her hands up in a warding gesture toward the sky, mimicking Peter Jackson’s Gollum. “You’re lucky you caught me up this early in the first place.”
It was 11am.
“We’ll start you off light, lather you up with some SPF 50, then renew it every hour or so. We won’t let you get too crispy, I promise.”
“We’ll see,” she said, clearly trying to be polite without actually refusing.
I’d met Jess when she was 17, already working at the company that had brought me over from India, having graduated from high school two years early the previous year. She ate, breathed, and lived computers, so she hadn’t had to go to university to get the skills needed to land that job. I heard she aced the interview and commanded an impressive salary besides. She had to be about 20 by now, I thought, which led me to another thought. I’d have to proceed carefully.
“Hey, are you still single?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she answered guardedly. “I thought you just said you were recently affianced?”
I reminded myself never to play Scrabble with her, then said aloud, “While I am most impressed at this demonstration of your mad skillz, it is true that it is not enough to break up my marriage plans.”
“Darn it,” she said, pretending to be bummed.
“I had another guy in mind for you: Kaitlyn’s little brother Vicente. How about you come down next month and see if you two get along? He’s a forlorn lonely geek-ling, and I know you’d just love to raise him up right.”
“Hmmm… I dunno.”
“I’m pretty sure I could get him to give you a naked massage. You, him, or both, your choice. With sunscreen. He’s a farm boy; nice muscles.”
That set her to thinking. “I…might just have to look into that.” She sat there for a few seconds staring out into the uncertain distance.
I interrupted her thoughts, saying, “I have a particular date in mind, actually. Kaitlyn and I are getting married on the 9th. I’d like you to attend. You going with Vin is only part of the attraction.”
“Wow… I had no idea. Congratulations, I suppose.” The way she said it, someone who didn’t know her wouldn’t be able to tell whether she was truly happy for me or if she was distracted thinking about getting a cookie to go with her drink. I knew the truth, which is that she was even more socially awkward than me, so I wasn’t offended by her answer.
“We’re keeping it quiet. It’ll be a small wedding, and a bit unusual: we’re doing it in the Betazoid tradition.” I knew I didn’t have to say anything more. She was a bigger Star Trek fan than I was; probably bigger than Vin, too.
She got a crooked grin on her face and said, “Wow! Really?” I nodded. Then after a second, she said, “Um… I’m going to have to join in if I attend?”
She was asking if she’d have to get naked, too, as is traditional for the whole wedding party according to Star Trek canon, so I explained about our modifications to the tradition, finishing my pitch, “Thus the offer of a naked sunscreen massage: you’ll need it!”
She bit her lip and returned to staring off into the distance. “I’m definitely going to need to give this some thought.”
Then I saw her reach down beneath the table and rub her crotch a bit. I had her, hook line and sinker!
She just stood and said, “Well, gotta get back to the grind. Thanks for the coffee and the game, Davie,” referring to the challenge I’d set her. Then she turned, slinging her overstuffed computer backpack onto her back in a smooth well-practiced maneuver, and walked back out of the coffee shop without another word.
My people.
With what Jess had left behind, I knew I could continue on the project, but I’d left my laptop back at the hotel. Besides, it was probably best if I didn’t camp out here too long or too often. I’d want to set up somewhere else next time. So, back to the hotel it was.