CHAPTER 2 A RIDDLE WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY INSIDE AN ENIGMA
Rezko Lenard's Apartment, San Francisco, 9:15 am
Rezko Lenard drank his tea very slowly as he looked at his computer screen. He'd been looking forward to a relatively quiet day of report reading and maybe a trip to the Apple Store to get one of those new Ipad Airs, so he had gone online to check his balance at the Usata Bank, and there had been something that just didn't jibe. His account was significantly lower than it should have been, and he'd just been paid by his employer. Now he would have to go to the bank and find out which incompetent dolt of a data processor had inputted the wrong information into his account. He printed off the account information and found his last paycheck stub. Lenard worked in the Cultural Affairs Office of the Romanian Consulate, but actually, his employer was the Serviciul Român de Informitații or SRI. In English, it translated as the Romanian Secret Service.
Lenard was born during the repressive regime of Nicolae Ceausescu in the town of Timişoara, near the Serbian border. At the age of 10, he saw his father gunned down a week before Christmas by Ceausescu's internal security forces when he and others protested actions that caused the country's economic ruin. On Christmas Day, he and his mother and sister rode in a friend's truck for seven hours to Bucharest, fighting for space in a crowded courtroom to see the trial of the dictator and his wife Elena on charges of genocide and economic sabotage. Two hours later, the couple was dead, executed for their crimes. Life had been quiet for the boy until he was a student at the University of Bucharest. Lenard, an outstanding computer science student, had been approached by the SRI to join the struggle to keep the Motherland secure. Rezko saw it as his chance to leave a life of poverty and no advancement, took it, and never looked back.
He had earned his promotion to the Los Angeles Consulate based on the skillful completion of his previous assignments. He had persuaded the Consul-General to allow him to live in San Francisco in order to keep an eye on the growing technology industry of nearby Silicon Valley and three large universities, all with outstanding technology and research programs, Stanford, the University of California at San Francisco, and Berkeley. After making a phone call to his masters in Bucharest, the Consul General, a timid man caught up in the glamor of Hollywood, thought this an excellent way to get this agent, more interested in Steve Jobs than in Brad Pitt, out of his hair, and eagerly sent Lenard north to San Francisco.
At thirty-five, Lenard spoke nine languages accent-free, and a box secreted in the wall of his small bedroom closet held twelve different passports and supporting documents: birth certificates, bank books, identity cards, credit cards, driving licenses, family pictures, wedding rings, marriage licenses and divorce decrees, one for each identity. Ironically enough, his code name was Apostle. He'd been other people for so long he'd almost forgotten who he really was sometimes. Looking one last time at his account, he decided it would be best to have all the information he needed. Carefully he signed into a chat room popular with hackers. A sort of online coffee shop, as it were, with a large community bulletin board. He'd find out soon enough if someone had hacked the Usata Bank recently. He scrolled through topics. There it was. Someone had posted about a hacker named Mad Max. Max specialized in financial institutions and small technology companies and was a prolific developer of Trojans, viruses, and spyware. The poster didn't say Max had attacked the Usata Bank, but he had been suspected of the successful attack on the Landingham Trust, a high-profile boutique bank, two months ago. It had been kept quiet because what bank would want to lose the trust of their elite clientele by looking bad in the papers and, more importantly, the social media that fueled the San Francisco gossip scene.
There were two ways Lenard could address this. One would be to launch a counterattack and restore his account, but his would be the only one repaired and would create suspicion. Better to go into the bank and complain like any American citizen about the error. He would tell the manager he needed the funds for tomorrow night's Art and Wine auction. That was true; he was expected to be there as a patron of the event. He knew the funds would be replaced quickly because the bank was obviously keeping this cyber-attack under wraps. Then he would spend the afternoon and evening rebuilding his computer system and security so he could keep an eye on this Mad Max. Chances were good; they were looking at the same things, and he wanted to be ready when he finally met this Mad Max. Perhaps he might be able to recruit him if the price was right. He found himself intrigued by the possibility.