Hack to the Chief [synopsis]
Hack To The Chief (STEP FOUR)
Step Four:
A hacker who makes his living by doing so becomes the target of a terrorist organization and its’ murderous setup to assassinate The President of The United States. One day, Stephen Bolsom noticed his friends list being edited on his social networking accounts. The only ones left on the list were the names of those who were involved in his new network to hijack corporate social networking sites to promote new and emerging artists in the recording and other industries. By the time an old dope dealer of his from ten years prior shows up on the list, and attempting to chat with him, he is reciprocating with hostilities towards his tech junkie employees. The dealer tells him he is about to be exposed unless he gives up some of the money he took from corporate America and stored in Swiss banks.
He is not aware of the backing organization of this planned attack on his systems at first, and takes the shakedown lightly. He tells the dope dealer to go “fuck himself” and returns to what he thinks should be business as usual, but then it happens. The massive server he has set up at his house crashes, and then begins to spit information out to random assortments of people hooked into accounts he serviced. His bank records, privately filmed pornography, and all sorts of incriminating details about his advertising and business acquaintances. With accounts on the line numbering to hundreds of thousands of dollars, he is forced to unplug everything. His clients are now left naked and unshielded from exposure and having their, in some cases very well established accounts busted and irrevocably removed.
Stephen is soon let to know that he will either conform to a new set of rules, or be engaged in paying heavily for his own cyber - crimes. When phone rings, and it is his home security systems reporting that there was a call for an alarm, he is informed there will be a mandatory police inspection done due to suspicious activity on the videos. “We just want to make sure you are safe sir.” the security systems customer service representative tells him. It is just the worst of time, as he had just opened all of the secret safe positions around the house to store the backup and main hard disks until all of the controversy about to ensue blew over. He ends up enduring the police inspection, narrowly avoiding them inspecting the common area with the only safe still open.
He leaves his house the day after, and returns to find that all of the paperwork on his mortgage has been changed, and the house has been sold out from under him. The security code doesn’t work. The locks have been changed. There is paperwork and a sold sign in the yard. His phone rings, its’ the dealer again. He informs Stephen that he is homeless and due to his keeping such a low profile and living in the boondocks, he has made it easy on everyone. “The new security company will be there in five minutes, by the way, for you standing on the lawn. We reported you. Go to The Hilton downtown and request a letter for you at the front desk. You will find, we can also be very accommodating.”
Hotel accommodations are sent to his phone, but he is not so easily persuaded. Stephen does not want to give his new adversary any more leeway to feeling he is going to roll over and play dead. He takes out the emergency I.D. kit he has always kept in his car in the case of a fight or flight situation, and goes to the local pub for a brew to stew and think things over. Paying in cash at the bar, he withdraws money from his credit card, done on another name from another persons’ identity. He then reports his own car stolen, and calls a taxi. Removing all of his equipment to take with him from the car “downtown Hilton.” he tells the cabbie.
He takes to stealing hotel occupancies in cheap key- card establishments where he can infiltrate the book- keeping records and maintain a low profile. The message at The Hilton was a room key and a “terminal passcode” in an envelope. Not knowing if there would be a man in a chair in the dark in that hotel room waiting to meet him like in the movies kept him from going to the room. Once he is checked in to the hotel, he hacks their system records and erases even the data of the fake name he registered under. His enemy held that information on the disks from his home. He takes out his computer, and begins a back door look into all of his accounts, and finds that all of his money is gone. The only monies left are from the false identities, and they were pending transfer.
When his accounts go berserk on him, he doesn’t know what to do, but follow a trail of setups left behind for him to attain his only hope of survival. Maybe he should very well turn himself into a conspiracy theory nut who became a nobody, a bum and let them win. Even this idea of a recluse is soon squashed when his android rings with a fresh threat. They are going to expose his multi - national hacker based programming business to the authorities and have him doing hard time for all of his crimes if he doesn’t conform, they tell him. They direct him to The Hilton downtown once more to retrieve an envelope.
As the twists of his trail go further past the point of no return to his old life, he begins to live by a new set of rules. Not being a thug or a hardened criminal he has no means by which to support himself with a hustle. He was a white collar criminal, and a very successful one at that. He begins to live like a hoodlum, lifting ladies purses at bus stops to get food money to eat, once even asking to use a strangers’ cell phone and then walking away with it. If he isn’t picked up by the authorities for his various petty thefts at discount drugstores, he will be surprised he thinks to himself.
He abandons his smart phone, and begins to try and ditch all of the comforts of his old tech junkie lifestyle. He pawns his laptop, feeling he can’t outright sell it as it would be another in a long string of losses here. He can’t help but feel that going to the Hilton will inevitably put him in deeper danger. At least for now, he is free and safe from any further damage being done. These people obviously wanted him to do something more than money, as they had all of his money already. At several bus stops in the city throughout his days travel, he notices a man tailing him. As if it weren’t bad enough that he couldn’t get through to his old girlfriend for some shelter, he is now being tailed.
At every turn, the equipment is left in his path to return to work, but with very specific design documents coming forward from the glowing terminals he faces. As he walks by a stranger in the subway terminal, a phone is dropped in his trench-coat pocket. It begins to ring, and he picks it up. They inform him that the subway police have been informed of a man wanted for bank robbery matching his description, and that he needs to exit the train “NOW!” He just so happens to be at a stop, and as he sees a subway cop running after him, loses him in the crowd by ditching his trench- coat and stealing a little kids baseball cap. Earlier in the night, a laptop had magically appeared with a video of his on it playing at the bus stop on the corner. He is being egged on to use his old programming to open a key- locked security highly classified documents page at The Pentagon. They tell him his old programming is still in place on a new network designed by them. All he has to do is use it, and they will let him go free.
Once living off of forged documents and credit cards, he is now reduced to stealing from snack machines to eat. While rocking a snack machine back and forth to retrieve a bag of potato chips, he has an idea. What if he can write some fast programming to reroute the signal from whatever terminal they would have him on? That would leave him risk free, if he could make sure the terminals’ cameras were disabled to have any proof of it being him who infiltrated. The question remains what were those classified documents they were attempting to obtain and why?
He is being chased, starved and cheated of his own cheatings, to which he can raise no complaint. He is worn, tired from being up all night and having nowhere to rest, he decides to turn to just showing up at his old girlfriend, Marcia’s apartment. When he gets there, it is a very awkward situation as her new boyfriend is there. He basically forces his way in the door to explain his circumstances, but she is not having any of it. They have an argument, the end of which is her giving him twenty dollars to “just go away!” He uses the money to buy some over the counter caffeine pills, what he used to use when he was crash programming, and some hair dye and scissors. Using the men’s room at a fast food restaurant for about twenty minutes, he changes his hair style and color, and changes into some clothing he scavenged from a trash can downtown.
His own crooked affiliations are of no use, and his business shattered, leaving him to desperate measures that will lead him closer to The Pentagon and The White House with his hacks than he had ever before attempted, or hoped to be in attempt. He goes to the downtown library, to use a free computer terminal. Using simple text and cut and pasting from various sites, he writes a signal rerouting program and drops it onto disk. He is starting to see that if these documents were in fact stolen for the reason of need, they would have done it already themselves. No, they were playing another sort of manipulation once again. But he had no idea what it was. Perhaps the key was contained in those documents.
When a PC arrives at his high jacked motel room via a courier, he is told to accept the terminal or take two from his twenty – two to the head. He had crawled in through the window of the establishment, having checked to see what rooms were free and what the expected occupancy was for the night. He accepts the terminal and, nervously turns it on. Once again it is teed up to the network automatically connecting it to the Pentagon’s Classified Documents section. This time he accepts the challenge, using his signal rerouting or diffusion program and opens the classified documents and, as per the instructions popping up on the screen sends them to his contact via an anonymous free email account.
Whoever is behind his demise is through playing. The documents are the details of the military detail for movement of all of the U.S. nuclear warheads in times of high alert. It specifies the amount and procedures of guards around the facilities and their movements in protecting the warhead. The specialized report is used to pinpoint strategically the weakest points in the movements in order to fend off possible terrorist organizations in those areas gaining access. These reports were almost designed as a sort of blueprint for terrorists to strike, in order to train the personnel for high alert drastic weapons maneuvers.
By this point, he has been flushed via a series of close calls with Homeland Securities to Washington, D.C. and he is nervous in the face of a city he does not know, or wish to tamper with. As he follows his instructions on the terminal while traveling on his pre- arranged train tickets, he is plagued by these people not only rushing him to work while traveling on other documents, but giving him unscheduled stops and reroutes enforced by similar episodes as what happened in the subway. So he finds himself in D.C., just three days after the initial takeover of his accounts. The fact that he has been physically demanded to appear in D.C. where the machines storing these records are kept has him feeling emotionally exhausted. The question was, who were these people, and what was their new agenda for him now that he had arrived in the capital?
When he boots up the computer, his old network fires up, but with a time sensitive key element that if not deprogrammed by following instructions will send all of his files to the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. in a series of very stimulating letters and attachments. He is to hack into the secret service current events database for details on protection of the President while traveling in the next week. A picture pops up on the screen, and he is asked to print from his new printer supplied at his Hilton hotel room a badge enabling him access to the press room at The White House. He is shown manifests that list him fresh on the list, and given an itinerary to attend press conferences prior to the Presidents travel later on in the week.
When the trail turns deadly, with his old girlfriend turning up dead at the scene of a Senators’ shooting in the brownstones of South Philadelphia, his hometown, he is led ever further on this action packed trail of terror which will leave you at whits end. The news story of his girlfriends’ death arrives in an email attachment on the terrorists terminal, along with a note: this could be you if you try and tell anyone else. The Senator was a visit point for The President later on in the week, and thus there would be itinerary changes. They seemed to be arranging a sort of rendezvous with the chief himself. Stephen just hoped he wasn’t expected to be there.
To the press release room at The White House he is called as a legitimate courier of the terrorist organizations news media group which has somehow secured him a badge and the rights to stand in very close proximity to the world’s elite. He asks no questions, and takes notes quietly in the corner of the room, his exact instructions being to ask one simple question. The question was “In light of the Senators’ shooting do you feel that you will have an increase Secret Service protection for the coming weeks travel?” He was being asked to obviously set himself up to have been the one who asked the fateful question to the President before what could only be an assassination attempt.
His presence is being established for a very special setup attempt on the Presidents’ life, and he knows it. As his travel plans are made to include the Presidents infamous last minute stop on exit from the White House, his favorite deli in Georgetown, he sees his worst nightmare coming true. They were going to plug the President and have him pinned for it, left holding the gun. That was the only feasible explanation for the fact that his presence was being demanded at this point in time. If only he had listened to his mother, and become a doctor or a professor.
Sweating over a night picking through brownstones trash receptacles, he pieces together a terminal of his own as he desperately tries to fly under the radar of what he now knows is an Islamic terrorist organization getting it’s funding by a chain of old dope dealers with which he once had association. He has backtracked through hacking through their firewalls to see where their group is initiated from. Though the few transmissions he got to see from one group member to another cell were vague, they were done in Arabic. The most visible chain of transactions was from the dope dealers to these men, for opium that could be turned into heroine at one of their labs. They were a drug supported terrorist organization, making money hand over fist with no intentions of stopping until they had destroyed America at the very core of what they felt we were: greed incarnate.
As he faces death head on holding the hands of his own exposure and the greater imperative of saving the leaders which once vexed him, he is faced with the opportunity to go down in history as one of the worlds’ most important hackers ever. He pieces together a small server with the computers he has scavenged, and with his one day off arranges with an elderly man in the park to set them up and leave them at his house for him in exchange for use of them for one day. The man agrees, and his tail absent from sight, he builds a small website to relay messages to the Secret Service men as they protect the President in real time. Any other way would cause red flags to go up with the terrorists, and he would lose his chance to get the main cell, who he now knows is a sniper put in prison. Gathering all of the classified documents stolen, he slowly pieces together the adverse chain of reactions surrounding a key point where we are storing a warhead in the Middle East, taken back from them. The Presidents killing would most likely call for a high alert, and those procedures would be implemented. It was a two part plan!
Either way, he is in for a down to the wire hair raising ride through downtown Georgetown to visit the possibility of becoming the infamous hacker who shot the President on the eve of a terrorist attack. He could just see it now, all of the proof that he had had dealings with Islamic Nationals to give them all of the necessary documents for their attack. The exposure of his long standing criminal network which had slid loose as he lost his marbles. In the end, it all depends on what he could piece together of what had been thrown away the night before in a brownstones alley.
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