True Faith and Allegiance

Together Jack and Gavin began entering the different names into search engines and databases to try to find something that would stick out. Their target inhabited dozens of different online personas, and he was all over different sites, many having to do with obtaining open-source intelligence. But they needed more. They needed to link him to a real identity. Moreover, they were looking to find some way this character had some relationship with the jihadists, a relationship with the intelligence community of any nation in the world, or something that would show them that this person who contacted Rechkov with intel from the Office of Personnel Management and a plan to kill a Navy commander had some motive for doing so.

As they came up with new information, they put it in their shared link-analysis database. This led to more names, all associated with the initial username Polygeist999 and its permutations.

It was slow, arduous, and complicated work, but less than an hour and a half into it, Gavin called across the table. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“That no matter what you do, you can’t trace back any of these usernames before March of last year?”

“Yeah. It’s like he was born that month. I wonder why he just started in March and exploded like he had been doing this sort of thing his whole life.”

Jack looked up slowly from the computer. “It began with him joining an apartment-hunting website in Romania, right?”

“Yes. Maybe he was trying to hack into it, or he was researching someone who lived in Romania and did business on the website. Maybe he could have been looking up a floor plan of one of his intended identity theft victims. We don’t know.”

Jack said, “I interpret that information more literally. I think he needed a place to stay, so he joined the site.”

Gavin hadn’t even considered the fact there might be a straightforward and benign reason for the person’s actions. He said, “Why do you think he needed a place to stay? You think he’s actually Romanian?”

Jack said, “Yes, and he needed an apartment, because he just got out of prison.”

“Prison? Where the hell are you getting this?”

“There is no online activity for any accounts, usernames, e-mails, et cetera, et cetera, that take place before March nineteenth of last year. What if he’d been locked up, without computer access? You know a guy like this doesn’t just appear out of nowhere online. His skills take years and years to develop, but the link analysis with websites and usernames just begins, as if the man is a fully formed computer and OSINT expert on day one. We have enough data here to cast a wide net, and we aren’t finding anything from more than sixteen months ago.”

“It is a possibility,” Gavin allowed.

“Do we have a way to look into Romanian prison records?”

“With some work I can do that, but we don’t know when he got out exactly, and it would still be a needle in a haystack.”

Jack said, “Yeah, but it’s a smaller haystack than we had yesterday.”

Gavin chuckled. “You’re right about that. I’ll get to work on the Romanian government networks and swim downstream into the prison records. It’s going to take me a couple of hours.”

In the end, it took less than four minutes before Gavin shouted in the conference room, startling Jack. “I’ve got him!”

“You found Polygeist? How the hell did you do that so fast?”

“Because I didn’t have to hack into the Romanian network. Instead, I just ran a search of U.S. government DoJ records of Interpol convictions. I got a list of cases the DoJ was involved with in Romania. There are a hundred thirty-eight of them, but only seventy-one led to conviction. Of those, only twenty-eight have been released. Of those released, only twenty-one were released on or before March nineteenth of last year.”

Jack was impressed, but he was about to be a lot more impressed. “Message me those names and I’ll start to—”

Gavin kept talking. “Of those twenty-one released on or before March nineteenth, exactly one of them was released on March nineteenth.”

Jack stood from his chair. “You’ve got a Romanian cybercrime personality released on the day the Polygeist entities started cropping up around the Web?”

“I do indeed. The prisoner’s name is Alexandru Dalca. He was held in Jilava Prison for a term of five years, ten months, and sixteen days. Before he went in he had his own online cyberfraud network, bilked customers out of millions.”

Gavin read a portion of the complaint from the U.S. Department of Justice. “He was an expert in social engineering passwords. A confidence man.”

Jack slowly sat back down behind his laptop. “That doesn’t explain how he got so good at compromising these targets with open-source intel.”

Gavin shrugged. “Prison, Jack. You can learn all sorts of bad stuff in prison, because that is where all the bad people are.”

“Not all the bad people, Gav. We run into a shitload of them out here on the outside.”

“Okay. You got me there.”

“What’s he doing now?” Jack asked.

“Beats me.”