Breaking Down Barriers

Thank you for all your encouragement to continue. And thank you Margaret for agreeing to be my beta once more. I also want to thank JE for creating the characters and allowing us to play with them :) And thank you Frostdance for pointing out my big faux pas. It's the CIAs offices that are located in Langley, VA, not the FBIs. I went back and fixed it in Chapter 2, but in case you noticed that I've changed the FBI to the CIA here and were about to question me this is the reason (and I like the sound of Langley, VA better than Washington, DC).

Chapter 3 —By means of elimination

Lester's POV

Ranger got us out here early by promising us food. Bobby and I had been up till two going over possible scenarios for the CIA to be gunning for Tank. We couldn't come up with anything.

I'd long respected Steph's uncanny ability to turn a small detail into a full-blown investigation and I hoped something would spark once we started relaying what we knew. Hector wanted to begin with the demo as Steph would be coming into this cold and Ranger needed to see how this linked back to Langley. Hector had pulled the IP address of the computer that was used to get into our system, but aside from an office-to-office search, we had no idea who was behind that computer.

So once we deposited our equipment in Ranger's office, Hec and I returned to the kitchen for breakfast. Of course it would be up to Rangeman standards but I'd long ago gotten over my early morning craving for sweets. I doubted Hector ever had one.

"Hey Beautiful, how's it going?" I asked, watching Steph pour the remaining coffee into a carafe before adding freshly ground beans and water to brew a new pot.

"You tell me. You guys find whoever got into our system?"

I nodded. "It's not exactly breakfast conversation so we'll talk after we eat.

Hector can give a demo. Boss, you need any help?" I asked turning towards Ranger at the stove to avoid any additional probing.

"I'm good but you can help Steph with plates and silverware."

We knew where everything was; we'd been out enough over the summer and Autumn loved to cook here. Yeah, Autumn and I were still together and I hoped today wouldn't turn into a long one as we had tickets at Lincoln Center tonight and we'd planned to spend Saturday at the MoMA.

Autumn was renting a tiny studio on Leonard Street in TriBeCa because the commute from Princeton to her job at the Four Seasons was killing her-not to mention the cost of that commute on the Acela everyday. We'd been talking about getting a house together somewhere in Jersey, halfway between her job and Rangeman, but we hadn't moved on it yet.

This was definitely the longest I'd ever been in a relationship with any woman.

"Les, how's Autumn?" Steph asked obviously picking up on my thoughts.

"Good, were going to the ballet tonight and the modern tomorrow. I like staying in the city with her, but that apartment is so small we are literally on top of each other all the time," I eyebrow-waggled.

"You are disgusting Santos," she said, smacking me with a potholder.

"Oh you should talk. Every time I walk into a room I catch the two of you in some sort of compromising position and I'm disgusting," I grinned at her and took the plates and silverware I'd picked up over to the breakfast bar to arrange.

"Children," Hector commented, doing a very good imitation of a Stephanie eye roll and looking over at Ranger. He needed to loosen up and enjoy himself a little more, but I wasn't going there with him today, I knew what he was carrying.

Ranger ignored everything that was being said and brought the first omelet over to the table. He plated it and passed it to Stephanie.

"Eat Babe or it will get cold. Santos can you take the cantaloupe out of the refrigerator?"

I did as I was told and Ranger went back to the range. Funny if you thought about it. A few minutes later he deposited an omelet on my plate and minutes later one on Hector's. Another few minutes and we were all settled at the bar with breakfast. It was an excellent omelet and I'd watched how he made it — twelve egg whites and two whole eggs. No wonder it had some color to it. Just seeing that little break from tradition made me laugh though; it had to be Stephanie's influence.

Hec and Steph cleaned up while Ranger and I went outside to talk. He already knew that the break into our system originated in Langley and had gone over all the scenarios on his own.

"It doesn't make sense," he said, shaking his head. "Our relationship with the CIA is a good one. Especially after we worked together to take down Briggs. What keeps coming to mind is that if this guy is good enough to hack into our system, maybe he's good enough to falsify his electronic footprint. Maybe he's nowhere near Langley."

"Hector thought that too. And if that's the case then we won't be able to find him by hacking-back the way we did. We might have to wait till he makes another move on Tank."

"Well let's go inside and have Hector take us through what he does have. Then we can talk about falsified footprints and see if that gets us anywhere. And maybe we can ask Alex DiSilva to get involved. I hear he's as good as Hector. Maybe if they put their heads together they can look at the footprints from a different angle. Hector's always said there's nowhere to hide electronically."

"True," I mumbled as I opened the door to let us back in.

Hector's POV

Estefania and I had cleaned up and were getting ready to go outside to see what was taking the boss and Santos so long, when the door to the deck opened and they walked in. My shit show would be up next.

I'd brought the PC tower we used to track back the break-in with me. I was a Mac man at heart but the software programs we used for searches were not available for the Mac so I had to rely on the best of what else was out there. This Dell Precision T3610 seemed to fit the bill, so with Rangeman's blessing we bought 65 of them for the Trenton office. This one was maxed out. 16 gigs of RAM, a 3.7 gigahertz processor and 1000 gigs of storage space. Small by my standards, but usable. It was still set up from last night and all I needed to do was run the programs I'd put together to follow the break-in back to its source.

Everyone was seated in Ranger's home office. I purposely did not hook this computer up to his home network, although since he's Mac-based the virus wouldn't be able to invade anyway. I attached the computer directly to the 42" wall-mounted display and turned it on. I activated the Systernals security utility to once again locate the IP address that originated the threat to Tank, then a GeoIPTool to track it back to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Back to bullshit.

I knew this was a fraudulent IP address as soon as Santos and Brown reached the same starting point that I did. It took them exactly 7 minutes. Nothing like this should take 7 minutes unless it's programmed to replicate earlier efforts. Thankfully I'd already asked Alex to help and we stayed up well into the early morning hours just trying to find out what was going on.

What we found was frightening. The invasion was not only a means to threaten Tank it was also a worm designed to take over all our networked computers. A virus had been activated by our IP traceback and as Rangman's computers are networked, the virus had attacked all sixty-five machines. Whoever programmed this, now had access to Rangeman.

The only way around this was to either break the network and restore 65 computers or purchase new ones.

I was inclined to get a fleet of Macs, write my own cross-over program and/or install Parallels on all of them. If someone was able to hack in and drop a virus on us once, someone else would be able to do it again. That's why I like Macs, they are significantly less susceptible to viruses and I could remotely change all of our IP addresses weekly.

I still had yet to tell Ranger any of this and I was getting nervous as he and Steph stared at the screen. I had to speak up.

I was about to open my mouth, when Ranger beat me to it.

"This doesn't make sense, we are on good terms with the CIA. I think a sniffer program was installed by that attack to our system and we are..."

"...under siege," I completed the sentence for him.

I then told him, Les and Steph what Alex and I discovered last night.

"Break the network immediately," Ranger responded.

"We already did and Alex stayed up all night to physically take all our computers offline. But we can't trust that someone hasn't learned too much about us during the hours they had access to our system. My suggestion would be to have everyone work solely off their iPads and secure laptops until we 'clean' everyting. And we need to monitor for any suspicious activity on our servers and keep an eye out for another attack."

"Shit," Steph and Les said simultaneously, then laughed at themselves.

"I mean that isn't funny," Steph said back-peddling her giggles, "I was just laughing because Santos and I..."

She stopped when she realized no one found anything remotely funny.

"I know, 'bad timing'," she mumbled. Thankfully we all understood her.

"So," Ranger said, having had a few seconds to think. "Worst case scenario, someone spent a number of hours going through our system. We don't keep proprietary stuff on there, but they could have gotten names and home addresses for all the men, our client list and access to our weekly rotations."

"Sí. Pero...but, it was more like eleven hours. Tank got the threat around one and we didn't figure out what was really happening until close to midnight. I could download everyting off of everyone's computer in eleven hours. We need to assume likewise and send out a memo to all the Trenton men to take inventory of what they had on their computers. We need to know just what our hacker knows. I drew up a company-wide email this morning, but my English is still not perfect so I want someone to take a look at it before I send it out," I said pulling a couple of print outs from my bag.

Ranger's POV

Hector and Silvio had wanted the intranets of all four cities combined into a single place as a 'go to' for information. Thankfully this hadn't happened yet or our hacker would have had access to everything at Rangeman. Seeing inside Trenton was bad enough. It was our home office.

I knew given time Hector would be able to find the identity of the person who got through. He was that good and that's why we planned to offer him a place on the core team. Stephanie had been bucking for it since before we'd brought Briggs in but we just hadn't made it official yet. I guess you've figured out by now that Stephanie usually gets what she wants from me. I can't seem to deny her much. She's my weakness. Of course the core team needed to vote on it and they already had, so Hector was going to be asked to join us shortly - but it was Stephanie who instigated it.

Tank was still accessible and I wanted to let him know what we'd learned. Of course I could call him later, but right now things were fresh in my mind.

"How about a ten minute break?" I asked the group. "Les, Hector, I want to call Tank and Bobby. When I looked around the only one I was excluding was Stephanie. "Babe, join us on the call?"

She nodded and I went into the kitchen to grab a few waters. When I came back with four of them, Bobby was already on the line. We called Tank on the sat and Hector punched him into conference. I got everyone up to speed and with a few additional comments from Hector and Santos I sat back and waited.

"Does this make sense to anyone?"

I heard a throat clearing on the line.

"Bobby?"

"I think it means we're fucked."