Chapter 74

"Looks like you're enjoying retirement," Alex said.

They were on the back deck of Doug's house, overlooking a lake surrounded by woods. Squirrels played among large oak trees, birds flitted around. A large Irish setter was playing with a couple of cats.

"It's pretty good," Doug replied. "How's yours going?"

"Kinda busy. Looks like no retirement for me until this hospital thing is put to bed. Did you look at the website?"

Alex had emailed the address to him.

"Yeah, it looks bad."

"It is. And you might want to let Hannah know, anything happens to you, you end up in a hospital, don't let them send you there. And let us know immediately."

"That bad?"

"Worse," Alex said. "The website is just something we're using to make contact with people. That place is part of a racket, and they don't mind killing people if there's enough money in it."

"Don't they know killing the patient isn't profitable?"

"There's only so much money in a human being. They milk them as long as they can, but they look at the statistics. Sometimes there are other ways to exploit them. Like putting them into a vegetative state. Shipping them off somewhere where they're a steady source of revenue. And with the right setup, parting them out."

Doug took a long swig of his Stella Artois.

"You don't look any crazier than you used to," he said. "Killing people for body parts? I remember seeing a movie like that."

"Yeah. Me too. That was a long time ago. It probably was going on then, occasionally. Today there's no telling how much of it there is."

"I know they do it other places," said Doug. "China. I've heard of people selling kidneys in India. Here, it should be harder but you never know."

"Hard to say. That's a small part of what these guys are up to though. It's mostly just fraud, kickbacks, stuff like that. But organized."

"You think the other hospitals are into it?" asked Doug.

"I've heard rumors about St. Bernards. NEA, dunno. They're part of the Memphis system, I'd like to think there are still some that haven't gone bad. But the Plandemic exposed a lot. Mostly that fact that about seventy percent of the population is cowardly. And the medical industry is no exception. But greed as been a part of it for a long time."

"Plandemic? Yeah, Covid. There sure was a lot of money made there."

"Yeah. Of course that wasn't the main objective, but the industry cashed in big time."

"They did that. What are you planning? That involves getting into their systems?"

"We want to shut this one down," Alex replied. "I know we can't save everyone, but when you see something like this going on, and you don't try to stop it... you want to find yourself in a hospital?"

"Never did. Sure don't now. How can I help?"

"I don't remember much about breaking into things," Alex said. "Or if I ever did"

"You handled security. That was a matter of keeping people out. Of course, for testing you would try to penetrate our networks. Or I did, I'd see if I could break in, from a proxy in Russia or India or somewhere. I never could of course. You were pretty good."

"Ever break into anything else?"

"Just for fun. To see if I could."

"I need to get into the ACCH network," Alex said. "I did some soft probes, but didn't want to alert them. Can you take a look?"

"Sure. I'm still doing some consulting work, just to keep my tools sharp and my connections up to date. Where do I start?"

"Let me show you."

"You guys want some lunch?"

Jessica and Hannah had been chatting and watching the wildlife from the steps.

"Sure," Doug replied. "Want to go into town, or fix something here?"

"Here is fine, it won't interrupt your work as much. We'll fix something," Hannah said. "Go ahead, we'll call you when it's ready."

She and Jessica went inside, Doug and Alex followed and went to his office.

"The health care business is like pretty much everything else," Doug said as they sat down at a desk. It looked like Alex's setup, with more computers. He rolled a mouse to wake up the screen on one of them.

"Back when we were in the banking software business," he said, "it was mostly IBM for the big guys, the smaller ones - our customers - were more open-minded. Later everything went Microsoft. Now it's the cloud. I imagine a lot of the hospitals have it outsourced."

Doug opened the email Alex had sent, copied the URL.

"Let's see what we have," he said, pasting it into box on a program in another window. He clicked a button and waited.

"That'll give us a quick scan, probably what you've already done."

They waited as the script worked, emitting bits of data at irregular intervals.

"Looks like just workstations on the inside, running web browsers and that's about it," he said. "I'll scan them individually if I can, see if I can get outgoing traffic."

"We'll have to crack one," he said after it finished. "If I can't, it may not be easy."

"What if I can get one of them to load a trojan, deliberately?" Alex asked.

"Can you do that?"

"Possibly. Do you have a custom one? So it only talks to you?"

"Sure, got those. How do I get it loaded?"

"I should be able to have an insider plug in a USB stick. I doubt they have their workstations locked down that tight."

"It's worth a try. If they let their employees bring computers from home, it'll be real easy."

"If we have to," Alex said. "I may have to try."

Hannah appeared at the door.

"Lunch is served."

"Be right there," Doug said. He opened a window and made a few clicks and keystrokes.

"OK," he said. "We'll let that run while we do lunch."

"You guys look busy," Hannah said. "so we did a quickie with pizza. Have some chips and dip and we'll slice up the pizzas."

Doug and Alex sat down at the table in the small dining room and ate chips and dip, while Hannah and Jessica chatted as they finished.

Sounds happy. Girls seem to get comfortable with new acquaintances pretty quick. She seems nice.

"How's it going," asked Jessica later.

"We're running some tools to get a picture of their setup," Doug replied. "It looks like their accounting is outsourced to a cloud company, like a lot of them are. I've contacted a few of my connections that can do a security assessment. Try to figure out some attack vectors."

"Do you think you'be able to get in," Jessica asked. "Without being detected."

"I say it's likely. Perfect security is hard to do if you don't have completed control, and it's a lot of work even then. Outsourcing is done by people who don't want to do the work. Or any work. They just want the money, and the career advancement that comes with it."

"I hope it can be done without Liz taking any risks. She says it's a rather sloppy operation."

"That does make it easier."

After lunch Doug and Alex went back to work while Hannah went for a walk around the place.

"I've got a pretty good picture," Doug said after a while. "I have some tools that can get in and get pretty much whatever you want. What do you need?"

"Personnel, pharmacy," Alex replied. "There HR department could be real useful, especially if they have the resumes of staff. And pharmacy is essential. Accounting, money coming in and going out, who and where."

"If I can get in I can probably get it all. How about I just dump it all, you can look through it?"

"Sounds good."