18

In his own bumbling way, George W. Bush’s secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld got it exactly right when he said, “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

If knowledge is power and ignorance is bliss, I was one dumb happy fella.

You have been riding right along with me every step of the way. I’ve kept you completely informed; what I knew and when I knew it. But to badly paraphrase Rumsfeld, I had no way of knowing what I didn’t know. The White House had done a good job scaring people into silence. However, as I was about to find out, there was one vital piece of information that I was not aware the White House knew that would change my plans.

The government had found out about the evidence I had in my possession. Months later I pieced together what had happened. But I think it is only fair to reveal it to you now. It will help you understand what happened next.

It turned out I had been right about Hack Wilson. As I suspected, he was a contract employee for government intelligence agencies. A high-level hacker. To confirm Brain McLane’s theory, Hack had reached out to several people he worked with regularly and trusted, asking if my interpretation made sense as well as requesting additional samples of code to use in his own analysis. Two of the coders he approached worked at the NSA. This possibility had never occurred to me. What are the odds, right?

To test McLane’s concept that individual coders left footprints that could be identified and used to trace back to the source, NSA senior engineer Paul Steingruby converted several segments of code he had written several years earlier into this “language.” He graphed the code. His initial reaction, when that sample turned out to be a close match for Hack’s submission, was that he had disproved the concept. The fact that old code he’d pulled out of his desk drawer was a close match to Hack’s sample indicated that the results produced by this method were not sufficiently unique to have any real probative value.

It was later that night, when he was home watching an old episode of NCIS that turned on an amazing coincidence, that he started getting very nervous. It seemed like too much of a coincidence that Hack would give him two pieces of code he had written without being aware of it.

While I was greeting the sunrise in McDonald’s parking lot, Steingruby was at his desk, running additional comparisons. His panic grew with each failure. This method made sense, it worked. Within hours his fear had become reality: Someone had matched a nonsense code he’d written as a favor for a high school hackers’ competition to the code he’d written for his old commanding officer, Artie Hunter. I can imagine the panic that ensued: Somebody had just connected him to the most recent Crime of the Century.