right out to have a look.”
During lunch, while she was in the cafeteria, he had reset Eileen Sing-Chu’s password. She was new and by far the cutest girl to work in the encryption section of Canadian Security Establishment, maybe the prettiest girl to ever work there. She wore glasses, but she was pretty and sporty, with an appealingly boyish body, and she didn’t seem to know she was pretty. Perfect.
The encryption section of CSE, Canada’s secretive electronic intelligence agency, employed math geeks, mostly pimply, awkward boy-men like him, the type who knew enough not to wear pocket protectors, but had to fight the impulse. Balfour, an overweight, prematurely balding, socially awkward computer whiz, was unlucky with women, a fact that was not far from his mind when he hired staff. It was at the front of his mind when he hired Sing-Chu, and he was now planning on giving her computer a series of problems that he would have to solve, giving him a chance to hang around her desk, look down her top, get to know her, see if there was any way he could get into her little Chinese panties.
He was standing up to go when his second desk phone rang.
“Balfour here,” he said.
“Hello,” said the deep male voice on the other end. “Do you know who this is?”
Balfour sat down.
“I do,” he said. “Are you calling from a secure line?”
“I’m calling from my desk phone.”
“Hold on,” said Balfour, and he flicked a switch on the side of the phone.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re encrypted. Go ahead.”
“All right,” said the voice. “I’ve got a job for you. I want you to try to locate a stolen BlackBerry for us. This is right from the top, and we need it in real time. Okay? We can’t afford to go through channels.”
“Have you got the PIN and the phone number?” said Balfour.
“I do. Ready?”
The voice read out the seven-digit code, a mix of numbers and letters, and then the telephone number.
“Got that?”
Balfour read it all back.
“Good,” said the voice. “When you get a read out, let me know the location. Got it?”
“Yup,” said Balfour. “On it.”
The line went dead.
Shit, he thought. No time for games. He quickly reset Eileen Sing-Chu’s password and called her to tell her to reboot.
Then he booted up a computer underneath his desk, and launched a program that disguised his computer’s ISPN on the internal network. After it was running, he plugged the computer into the network. It would now appear to any network administrators bored enough to be watching, that an extra computer had come online in the Digital Intelligence Interception branch of CSEC.
He typed in a password and username he had previously stolen using a keystroke capture program on a computer in his office used by a visiting DII agent.
He found the cell-phone tracking program used by DII agents, opened the interface and started wrestling with the problem.
Every time anyone uses a cell phone, the unit sends a radio signal, which, in a city, is picked up by a number of towers. Those towers send each other signals to decide which tower will handle the call. By measuring the signal strength at each tower and triangulating, the network can quickly estimate the location of any cell phone, but it took 10 minutes for Balfour to figure out how to make the program do that.
Once he had it figured out, he entered the PIN number and phone number and sat back to watch it work.
Jack’s BlackBerry vibrated on his hip while he was waiting for a light on O’Connor Street. It was a message from Sophie asking him to call.
She started crying when she heard his voice. “Oh, Jack. Did you hear about Ed?”
The light changed and Jack pulled into the intersection.
“I’m on the way to the police station now,” he said. “It’s terrible. I wish I had stayed with him. I’m so sorry. I don’t know how it happened. I should have been with him. We were both so drunk.”
Sophie choked back her tears and spoke just
During lunch, while she was in the cafeteria, he had reset Eileen Sing-Chu’s password. She was new and by far the cutest girl to work in the encryption section of Canadian Security Establishment, maybe the prettiest girl to ever work there. She wore glasses, but she was pretty and sporty, with an appealingly boyish body, and she didn’t seem to know she was pretty. Perfect.
The encryption section of CSE, Canada’s secretive electronic intelligence agency, employed math geeks, mostly pimply, awkward boy-men like him, the type who knew enough not to wear pocket protectors, but had to fight the impulse. Balfour, an overweight, prematurely balding, socially awkward computer whiz, was unlucky with women, a fact that was not far from his mind when he hired staff. It was at the front of his mind when he hired Sing-Chu, and he was now planning on giving her computer a series of problems that he would have to solve, giving him a chance to hang around her desk, look down her top, get to know her, see if there was any way he could get into her little Chinese panties.
He was standing up to go when his second desk phone rang.
“Balfour here,” he said.
“Hello,” said the deep male voice on the other end. “Do you know who this is?”
Balfour sat down.
“I do,” he said. “Are you calling from a secure line?”
“I’m calling from my desk phone.”
“Hold on,” said Balfour, and he flicked a switch on the side of the phone.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re encrypted. Go ahead.”
“All right,” said the voice. “I’ve got a job for you. I want you to try to locate a stolen BlackBerry for us. This is right from the top, and we need it in real time. Okay? We can’t afford to go through channels.”
“Have you got the PIN and the phone number?” said Balfour.
“I do. Ready?”
The voice read out the seven-digit code, a mix of numbers and letters, and then the telephone number.
“Got that?”
Balfour read it all back.
“Good,” said the voice. “When you get a read out, let me know the location. Got it?”
“Yup,” said Balfour. “On it.”
The line went dead.
Shit, he thought. No time for games. He quickly reset Eileen Sing-Chu’s password and called her to tell her to reboot.
Then he booted up a computer underneath his desk, and launched a program that disguised his computer’s ISPN on the internal network. After it was running, he plugged the computer into the network. It would now appear to any network administrators bored enough to be watching, that an extra computer had come online in the Digital Intelligence Interception branch of CSEC.
He typed in a password and username he had previously stolen using a keystroke capture program on a computer in his office used by a visiting DII agent.
He found the cell-phone tracking program used by DII agents, opened the interface and started wrestling with the problem.
Every time anyone uses a cell phone, the unit sends a radio signal, which, in a city, is picked up by a number of towers. Those towers send each other signals to decide which tower will handle the call. By measuring the signal strength at each tower and triangulating, the network can quickly estimate the location of any cell phone, but it took 10 minutes for Balfour to figure out how to make the program do that.
Once he had it figured out, he entered the PIN number and phone number and sat back to watch it work.
Jack’s BlackBerry vibrated on his hip while he was waiting for a light on O’Connor Street. It was a message from Sophie asking him to call.
She started crying when she heard his voice. “Oh, Jack. Did you hear about Ed?”
The light changed and Jack pulled into the intersection.
“I’m on the way to the police station now,” he said. “It’s terrible. I wish I had stayed with him. I’m so sorry. I don’t know how it happened. I should have been with him. We were both so drunk.”
Sophie choked back her tears and spoke just
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