Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

Chapter 58

Sunday, 13 March 2022 – 5:00 p.m. MST

The only aspect of working in the network operations center, the NOC, that Bryan enjoyed was the extreme cool of the air conditioning. He had been working for nearly three hours and hadn’t found anything. He knew that he was probably wasting his time, but he needed to find anything he could use to implicate someone else in the company. It was probably a technical witch hunt, but he needed a witch.

His frustration grew each hour he wasted. He had hoped to continue his personal work with the futurestream, but he didn’t dare risk doing so inside the NOC. Within his own office he had full control of security. In the NOC there were too many opportunities to really create problems. He couldn’t risk disrupting the whole network by running test software on production servers. He continued.

Every few moments he would locate a suspicious outgoing transmission in the server logs. Each time he would inspect the message and find some innocuous bit of personal data or amusing video clip. He found nothing interesting, but he continued.

After four long hours he detoured into something more interesting. He had grown bored with his search and decided to snoop through the company voice mail. He started with the most recent messages and worked backwards. Most were uninteresting meeting reminders and company business, but from time to time he heard some interesting personal information that he locked away for potential blackmail material later. From time to time he also stumbled across some interesting business information that he noted. He particularly enjoyed finding messages to or from Valerie. He listened to the sound of her voice and fantasized about her. He wished he had access to his surveillance video collection.

He glanced around the NOC, reconfirming that he was alone and decided to take a moment and look through Valerie’s recent messages. Most of the messages were encrypted, but from time to time there were some in plaintext. There was a response to a request to change a charter flight plan. Bryan read the message. There were other messages to contractors about her home and one to her stylist about a hair appointment that she needed to cancel. He didn’t completely understand the obsessive thrill of reading her mail, but he did enjoy it. He was disappointed to find that there was nothing interesting in the recent message list.

He spent about thirty minutes with his diversion then decided to return to his task. Hours passed before he finally found something he could use. Apparently someone else in the company knew that Ramesh had been visiting. There were several outgoing messages regarding him. None of them appeared to contain anything important but he decided to copy the messages to a secure area anyway. If he found nothing else, perhaps the ones he found could be altered to appear more controversial.

He reveled in his own cunning. He had sent more information about Ramesh than anyone would ever know, but he had not used the company network to do it. Even if he had, he would still have been the one on the inside searching for it. Nothing implicating him would ever be found in their networks. He controlled it all.