Read Online Daniel Ganninger - Icarus Investigations 01 - Flapjack by Daniel Ganninger - Free Book Online Page A

Galveston turned, “Mike Fletcher?  He’s alright.  Damn fool broke his leg falling off a ladder.  He’s in a cast up to his neck.  You a friend of his?”
    “ Uh, no,” guard Jeff stammered.  “I meant another Mike.”
    “ Who?  Mike Jones?  That’s the only other Mike I know.  I haven’t been there very long though.”
    “ No, you must not know him.  Have a good night.”
    “ You guys have a good night too.  I hope you don’t get too bored.”  Galveston gave another friendly wave and closed the door behind him.  “Amateurs, but nice guys,” he thought.  He had played off of confusion and empathy to get the job done.  Lesson 112, he told me later.  Galveston walked to the van and got in the front seat.
    “ Professor, Mary Anne,” he announced to us, “we’re out of here. “

-Chapter 15-
     
    We quickly began the long drive back to our fortress of solitude in San Diego.  Unfortunately, we still had a lot of work to do.  Alex set up his computers in the office living room and began pecking on the keys, as the clock passed 5 o’clock in the morning.
    He managed to get into the Genesis system easily using the “Annie Oakley” virus.  Alex weaved his way through a series of backdoors and open ports allowing him to get into internal workings of the system.  It was an easy task with the intricate knowledge Alex had of security systems.
    “Annie Oakley” masked our every move and we were just another computer, out of thousands, bouncing off their servers.  Alex provided another source of security by masking our computer’s address to various cities around the world, from Prague to Amsterdam to Seattle.
    At this point we had been without sleep for over 24 hours, living off of coffee, highly caffeinated energy drinks , and items with large amounts of high fructose corn syrup.
    The mean little virus program we had installed on the Genesis computer system, the “Annie Oakley”, sprung to life and unraveled itself like a giant hydra monster.  Galveston and I didn’t understand how it all worked; we just knew it did work.  We again took technology for granted, like so many others.  We never asked Alex what his true snooping capabilities were and figured it was better to leave that alone.
    We could now use Dart’s internal username and password to access the more secure areas of the Genesis system, which contained the Adamanthea plans.
    Dart McLeod had two usernames and passwords.  One was for a general login to the system , a simple one that consisted of, DMcLeod and Ferrari442 .  Galveston joked this was obviously a little gift he planned to get for himself.
    The int ernal username and password to the secure area would have been impossible to break without the keylogger and had a complex password.  Alex typed it in slowly, careful not to make a mistake.  It read, Dart_McLeod_RD , and the password was, 877x4vst*779j-31st5 .
    “ Well that would have been easy to crack,” Alex said sarcastically as he finished typing the string of characters.  Alex informed us that, “figuring out the string would have been like trying to pass a watermelon through a garden hose.”  The encryption of the password was accomplished by a 64 bit Blowfish cryptographic block cipher.  This was the fancy way of saying, tough security.
    Alex quickly scrolled through the file folders he saw on his computer.  This was highly sensitive stuff and consisted of defense contracts and plans.  He finally located the Adamanthea file.  It was excessively large and would take time to move over.  Alex began uploading another nasty little virus that would lay dormant for a while, avoiding detection by anti-virus software, because technically it didn’t exist.
    It would tick down after a few hours a nd release its viral contents like a time release capsule, rendering all the files near it useless and trashed.  It was a nasty little bug.  We had nicknamed it “Grumpy”, because damn, it had a serious attitude