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xp_logsRemy and Doug break into a Romanian black market bank for more information.
It didn't look like much of a bank. The squat, two story building looked more like part of a strip mall or a humourless stand alone in an industrial park. It was an ugly forgettable building which only had one odd element about it, which was a very high consumption of power. LeBeau had explained that it was one of a hundred such 'nodes' spread across Eastern Europe in order to take advantage of often lax oversight on financial transactions.
Little more than server farms, the banks washed financial data as it came in, and forward transactions into a complex logarithm that traded investments, accounts and financial securities with other nodes, creating an impossibly tangled set of records for any regulator to trace or follow which accounts were real and which were merely shell accounts. As the bank would always comply to any orders for records, there were no grounds to charge them, and only by accessing the logarithm could they find the true path of the money through the system.
Which was what led them to break in during the middle of the night, evading the AK-47 toting guards and disabling the security alarm on a side door to quickly access the building.
It was a mark of how Doug had come along in his time with X-Force that he didn't feel the need to cover his usual mission nervousness and anxiety with inane chatter about the ubiquity of the AK-47 or other minor details. Well, that and how much a stern look from Remy could still make him flush with embarrassment and feel like a complete tyro. The pair relied on a complex set of pre-arranged hand signals, Remy taking the lead on the physical penetration, and Doug directing them through the hallway as he compared the actual layout to the plans they'd managed to dig up.
He indicated a room. Nothing about the room distinguished it from the others around it - a door, eight floor-to-ceiling server racks spread at equal intervals between the walls. The muted light from LED status indicators, the white noise of CPU fans. But Doug's gesture carried a quiet confidence that this was the particular room they were looking for.
The door security was deftly and quietly defeated, and Remy eased it closed after they got in. No sense alerting them about an intruder. While they were here with a specific purpose, having a secret datatap in their system long term could be a useful addition to their Eastern European resources. He motioned for Doug to get to work, but it was more force of habit. The room would be largely soundproof, due to the background white noise generated by the servers.
Even the most illegal and disreputable of financial organizations had to keep records. No matter how encoded and protected, those records still had to exist. In addition, there was always the dynamic tension inherent between the need to keep that data from being accessed by people who shouldn't, and the need to allow access to the people who should. Making unauthorized access impossible cannot be done, the best that can be done is to make it extremely difficult. If two people can access a system, then it is a near certainty that a determined third can find some way to access it as well. And Doug was very determined and very skilled.
A patch cable went from Doug's netbook to the first rack of servers, and he began parsing through data. "Talk to me, baby," he murmured to the computers.
Remy checked his watch. They didn't have a lot of time, and places like this only survived by being very smart and very ruthless in how they operated. It was unlikely that security didn't rotate through the rooms on a regular basis, and without someone inside, they didn't have that schedule to work around. Remy wanted very much to get through without having to leave a body behind and potentially alert their clients that someone had been in their system.
Doug knew that they were on a tight timetable just as well as Remy did. But the records kept in these sorts of places tended not to have names attached - an extra layer of security for the institutionally paranoid. Instead each had an alphanumeric code attached to it - a ciphered naming convention. Set a Cypher to crack a cipher... Doug thought whimsically to himself. All he had to do was find a key, a way to break into the naming system. Bulat does some stuff with the sex trade... And the connection was made in Doug's head. He knew the ins and outs of Telford Porter's financial records from having thoroughly ransacked them. It was much simpler to find Porter's records within the clearinghouse, and then use them, and the code that obviously represented Porter within the system, to extrapolate and find Bulat.
"Got it," he murmured, sending a command to download the entirety of the file that was tagged Bulat to a thumb drive attached to his netbook.
"Bein." Remy crouched down, looking at the screen. "What do we have in de overview?" It would be too much to try and parse the data here, but the overall architecture of Bulat's account should show them where the money was flowing in from.
Doug frowned, and tapped a few keys, bringing numbers up on his screen. "Okay, let's go with recent transactions. Let's say...hm...last two weeks." They could always dive into the logs more completely when they got out of the building, and his recent activities were what had developed their belief that he was a conduit, so... "Several payments from offshore accounts," he told the Cajun, pointing at the key pieces of information.
"Good ones too. Dey been washed by experts." Remy had been hoping Bulat wasn't this careful, but it was only an idle thought. In his line of work, only the most careful and ruthless men survived. "Wait, pull up de ones from six days ago. De transfer details."
Doug brought up the transactions in question. "Seychelles, Ghana, and Mauritius." He tapped his lips with a finger. "Africa."
"Remy know de names of dose originating accounts. Used to use dem as Gambit when operating down in Africa. De main location is just outside Pretoria." Remy made a contemplative noise. "Whomever paid him has, at de very least, a staff operating in Southern Africa somewhere."
"Makes sense." Doug shut the netbook and stowed it. "Time to get out of here, boss?"
"Looks like." Remy took a last look around. Being able to put a data tap in here would be a gold mine, but they simply didn't have the time or the need to assume the risk. "Go."
It didn't look like much of a bank. The squat, two story building looked more like part of a strip mall or a humourless stand alone in an industrial park. It was an ugly forgettable building which only had one odd element about it, which was a very high consumption of power. LeBeau had explained that it was one of a hundred such 'nodes' spread across Eastern Europe in order to take advantage of often lax oversight on financial transactions.
Little more than server farms, the banks washed financial data as it came in, and forward transactions into a complex logarithm that traded investments, accounts and financial securities with other nodes, creating an impossibly tangled set of records for any regulator to trace or follow which accounts were real and which were merely shell accounts. As the bank would always comply to any orders for records, there were no grounds to charge them, and only by accessing the logarithm could they find the true path of the money through the system.
Which was what led them to break in during the middle of the night, evading the AK-47 toting guards and disabling the security alarm on a side door to quickly access the building.
It was a mark of how Doug had come along in his time with X-Force that he didn't feel the need to cover his usual mission nervousness and anxiety with inane chatter about the ubiquity of the AK-47 or other minor details. Well, that and how much a stern look from Remy could still make him flush with embarrassment and feel like a complete tyro. The pair relied on a complex set of pre-arranged hand signals, Remy taking the lead on the physical penetration, and Doug directing them through the hallway as he compared the actual layout to the plans they'd managed to dig up.
He indicated a room. Nothing about the room distinguished it from the others around it - a door, eight floor-to-ceiling server racks spread at equal intervals between the walls. The muted light from LED status indicators, the white noise of CPU fans. But Doug's gesture carried a quiet confidence that this was the particular room they were looking for.
The door security was deftly and quietly defeated, and Remy eased it closed after they got in. No sense alerting them about an intruder. While they were here with a specific purpose, having a secret datatap in their system long term could be a useful addition to their Eastern European resources. He motioned for Doug to get to work, but it was more force of habit. The room would be largely soundproof, due to the background white noise generated by the servers.
Even the most illegal and disreputable of financial organizations had to keep records. No matter how encoded and protected, those records still had to exist. In addition, there was always the dynamic tension inherent between the need to keep that data from being accessed by people who shouldn't, and the need to allow access to the people who should. Making unauthorized access impossible cannot be done, the best that can be done is to make it extremely difficult. If two people can access a system, then it is a near certainty that a determined third can find some way to access it as well. And Doug was very determined and very skilled.
A patch cable went from Doug's netbook to the first rack of servers, and he began parsing through data. "Talk to me, baby," he murmured to the computers.
Remy checked his watch. They didn't have a lot of time, and places like this only survived by being very smart and very ruthless in how they operated. It was unlikely that security didn't rotate through the rooms on a regular basis, and without someone inside, they didn't have that schedule to work around. Remy wanted very much to get through without having to leave a body behind and potentially alert their clients that someone had been in their system.
Doug knew that they were on a tight timetable just as well as Remy did. But the records kept in these sorts of places tended not to have names attached - an extra layer of security for the institutionally paranoid. Instead each had an alphanumeric code attached to it - a ciphered naming convention. Set a Cypher to crack a cipher... Doug thought whimsically to himself. All he had to do was find a key, a way to break into the naming system. Bulat does some stuff with the sex trade... And the connection was made in Doug's head. He knew the ins and outs of Telford Porter's financial records from having thoroughly ransacked them. It was much simpler to find Porter's records within the clearinghouse, and then use them, and the code that obviously represented Porter within the system, to extrapolate and find Bulat.
"Got it," he murmured, sending a command to download the entirety of the file that was tagged Bulat to a thumb drive attached to his netbook.
"Bein." Remy crouched down, looking at the screen. "What do we have in de overview?" It would be too much to try and parse the data here, but the overall architecture of Bulat's account should show them where the money was flowing in from.
Doug frowned, and tapped a few keys, bringing numbers up on his screen. "Okay, let's go with recent transactions. Let's say...hm...last two weeks." They could always dive into the logs more completely when they got out of the building, and his recent activities were what had developed their belief that he was a conduit, so... "Several payments from offshore accounts," he told the Cajun, pointing at the key pieces of information.
"Good ones too. Dey been washed by experts." Remy had been hoping Bulat wasn't this careful, but it was only an idle thought. In his line of work, only the most careful and ruthless men survived. "Wait, pull up de ones from six days ago. De transfer details."
Doug brought up the transactions in question. "Seychelles, Ghana, and Mauritius." He tapped his lips with a finger. "Africa."
"Remy know de names of dose originating accounts. Used to use dem as Gambit when operating down in Africa. De main location is just outside Pretoria." Remy made a contemplative noise. "Whomever paid him has, at de very least, a staff operating in Southern Africa somewhere."
"Makes sense." Doug shut the netbook and stowed it. "Time to get out of here, boss?"
"Looks like." Remy took a last look around. Being able to put a data tap in here would be a gold mine, but they simply didn't have the time or the need to assume the risk. "Go."
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