It was one of those rare moments when Ripley had a break. Leaned back in his chair, he stared out the window at the light traffic visible in gaps between the other buildings around the warehouse.
Krumm walked in carrying his laptop and a pair of headsets. “I really need for you to listen in on a phone conversation.”
Ripley sat up. “Um, okay.”
Krumm pulled up a chair against the front of Ripley’s desk. He placed the laptop, and plugged both headsets in, then opened the cover. “I’m going to use VOIP because our broadband is more secure than the land-line,” he explained. He handed a set of headphones to Ripley, then donned the other set, which had a boom microphone built into it.
Ripley was just one notch above bored. He listened as the software finally got a dial tone. The number was speed-dialed, and it rang enough times to make Ripley wonder if anyone was going to pick it up. Krumm seemed unconcerned. Eventually the connection was made, but there as a lot of noise in the background on the other end. The voice was hard to pick out, and Ripley didn’t recognize it.
Krumm smiled, “Caught you working, eh?”
The voice responded, “Not quite yet. What’s up?”
“My neighbors seem utterly certain we are facing a major attack in the valley, probably in the next few days. Why do I feel like the bunker isn’t going to save us?”
There was an unrecognizable sound on the other end — laughter? “It’s compromised. Tell your co-workers to pack a bug-out bag, something they can hold in their laps. The best ride is tomorrow just before dawn. An equipment convoy will pass by on the main drag where they have been hanging out. You can lock up their stuff in your bunker, but they won’t be coming back.” There was a pause. “Check your mail. Bye.”
The connection went dead. Ripley’s eyes were wide open. With a faint smile, but without a word, Krumm gently removed his headset from the stunned Ripley’s head, closed the lid on his laptop, and left. Halfway down the stairs, he heard Ripley moving, finally.
The noise of sudden activity and chatter from his co-workers didn’t follow him into the server room in the basement. He went to a workstation, logged in with a long password, then punched a few more keys after the screen came to life. It was simply black with colored letters. There on the screen was the following message:
I hope to continue hearing from you.
It was followed by a large block of gibberish characters, commonly referred to as a PGP Key, an encryption code for sending email to a specific recipient. Without the password, the recipient could never read it. While a few agencies with massive computing power could crack this, they would have to know which among the large number of such messages were worth pursuing. Krumm knew if he sent such a message from his laptop locally someone would notice, and it wouldn’t be anyone friendly. But there was a way around that.
He opened the link to his server back home and added the key to the keyring there. Using an encrypted link to a server was much more common than sending encrypted emails, and would not be noticed. This way, he could simply connect to his server and let it send the noisy traffic. The same electronic address for his server was used for plenty of other, standard traffic, so it would be hard for anyone to guess he had used it for secret messages.
Once that was done, he activated a script. All the official HTS data files would be gathered, indexed, and burned to a DVD. He made sure the system which handled this had a blank in the burner. He knew from recent checking it would fit on one disk. Once the data DVD had been checked for read-back, the script would command all the computers in the entire building to wipe their drives repeatedly. Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, all the computers in the place would be staring back at the world with blank screens, blank drives.
Krumm proceeded to pack his own bug-out baggage, but to fit on his bike, not his lap.
