The EMT Ch. 15

The connecting door between Ian's rooms and Suzanne's remained resolutely closed, even after Ian heard her guests leaving and after he had run to the window to watch the two brothers climb into their car and drive away from the resort complex. It was a little after 2:30 in the morning. He had heard Graham leave a couple of hours earlier, and was fully aware that Suzanne was now alone and able to see him. He was a little hurt by the fact that the door did not open immediately, and wondered why he was being excluded. He stood by the door, waiting for it to open, becoming increasingly forlorn when it didn't.

Suzanne was aware that he would be waiting to see her, but was frankly too exhausted to accommodate her husband immediately. At first, she thought she would just take the time to clean up first. Otis and Cordell had each used her repeatedly, and her body was both sore and dirty. She had lost the negligee some time earlier, and had been naked, except for the stockings as she had shown the two brothers out of her apartment, kissing each at the doorway, each of them taking one last chance to run their hands over her body, tweaking an already sore nipple, or in Otis' case, playfully turning her around in the doorway and slapping her ass before they left.

Suzanne was aware that she reeked of sweat and sex. Their sexual play had been full-on and uninhibited, and each of the brothers had taken full advantage of the gift that had so unexpectedly been given to them by Graham Leicester. They had taken turns with her mouth and pussy; any attempt to use her ass being firmly but politely rejected by Suzanne, who at least respected Graham's orders. To be honest, any such attempt by the brothers had been half-hearted at best, aware as they were of the restriction that had been imposed on them by Graham, and afraid to look a gift horse in the mouth, but testing the water just the same.

After they left and Suzanne had closed and locked the front door, she quickly ran a bath and stepped into it, letting the warm water embrace her, wincing where it touched a sensitive spot, but allowing it to flood over her; washing away the sweat and grime of her exertions, and the sticky residues of the brothers' indulgent satisfactions. As she lay back in the bath and closed her eyes, she thought of her husband a few feet away, and felt guilty about keeping him waiting, knowing that he would be keen to see her and hear about her evening. As the fragrant oils she had added to the bath soothed and calmed her, her mind turned to the events of the evening, and concerns about her husband slipped ever further into the recesses of her mind.

She ran her hands down her own body, testing her sensitivity, reminding herself of one particular event during the evening or another, and remembering her own satisfaction as her body had enjoyed the attentions of the two men. She had climaxed repeatedly as they used her, and her mind had been in a whirl for the couple of hours they had been alone with her. It seemed like there had always been an erect cock that needed her attention or sometimes one less hard that demanded her ministrations. The men had taken Graham at his word and demanded things of her that she blushed to think of. At one point, she remembered with acute embarrassment, they had demanded her to abuse herself to orgasm, and they had both eagerly watched as she frigged herself at their whim and for their own voyeuristic gratification. As she recalled that event, she sank her head under the water of the bath as if to hide from the memory.

Eventually, her fingers found her sex under the water of her bath, and she very tentatively explored herself, slipping the middle finger of her right hand across her clitoris, between her swollen lips, and into the inner folds. She was still tingling and moist from her excitement, and whilst supremely sensitive, surprised herself by being able to appreciate and respond to her own light and delicate touch. She closed her eyes and let the exquisite feelings of decadence wash over her.

As she started to play with herself in earnest, her thoughts once again returned to her poor, patient and waiting husband, who she knew would be wondering what was happening to her; who she knew would feel left out, and who she imagined being hurt by being so ignored. She felt she should stop doing what she was doing and open the connecting door to let him in; to share her experiences with him, and to give him the release that she knew he would need.

But her own gentle and sympathetic touch, the increasingly enthusiastic response from her body, and a feeling of total selfishness made her resist the temptation to share the next part of her evening with him. She thought of him standing waiting by the door as her excitement grew, and she found that the thought of denying him added to her excitement.

She barely recognised the feeling at first, but it was undeniable. Pleasing herself was more important to her just now than including poor Ian, who had worked alone and so hard all evening. As she thought of him feeling lonely and hurt on the other side of the door, her excitement surged again. With a gasp of surprise, she realised that she wanted him to feel lonely and hurt. Her eyes opened with the realisation that the thought, the idea, the reality of ignoring his needs was exciting her. This was an alien feeling.

As her fingers expertly continued their dance on her sex she explored this new feeling in her mind. She had certainly denied Ian on occasion in the past, but it had never felt like this. Here she was, deliberately ignoring his needs, whilst satisfying her own; and it was fuelling her decadence. She was getting increased pleasure because she was denying him. More than that! She could hardly bring herself to believe it, but she found that she wanted to cause him some hurt. She wanted him to be feeling lonely and unloved. She wanted him to be frustrated and sad because she was denying him.

Not unloved! Part of her brain rebelled against the thought. She did love him. But she suddenly felt a huge power in denying and potentially hurting him. She suddenly felt enabled to deny him; to act selfishly; to pander to her own thoughts and deeds and ignore his. The more she imagined him waiting by the door, the more she imagined him hurt and confused by her negligence, the higher her passion grew.

Her last thought as she came was of Ian sitting by the still locked connecting door, head down, hurt, confused and lonely. Then her climax washed over her, the last of the night, and her back arched and her legs stretched out and she almost thrashed in the bath water, biting her lower lip and closing her eyes in grateful release.

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All was quiet through the connecting door and Ian, eventually, reluctantly, turned away from it, knowing in his heart that if it hadn't opened by now, it wasn't going to, at least until morning. He couldn't understand why his normally loving and accommodating wife had seemed to desert him. He had spent the evening working and thinking of her; anticipating the pleasure he would derive from hearing about her adventures; imagining what was happening between her and the three men she had gone out to have dinner with. Now, he was lonely and confused, although strangely, unaccountably he remained excited. He was also aware that he had already forgiven Suzanne her abandonment of him. He knew in his heart that he loved her. He knew that he was capable of forgiving her anything.

He walked through from the small hall to his bedroom, his mind a complex mixture of emotions and thoughts. Mechanically, he undressed, musing on what had transpired. As he stripped himself of his boxers, he became remotely aware of his erection; his cock stood still proud from the anticipation that had been building all evening; an anticipation of eroticism and vicarious pleasure as Suzanne would recount her adventures. Now that anticipated pleasure was, at the very least, deferred for reasons he knew not, although he suspected that his wife was exhausted and in need of time to herself to recover. The thought that her denying him had added in some way to her own excitement never even crossed his mind.

As he slipped, naked, between the crisp cotton sheets and laid his head on the welcoming pillow, he stroked himself and briefly considered yielding to the temptation of self-satisfaction, but curiously withheld from the act. As he closed his eyes and deliberately rolled on to his side and curled into a foetal position, his cock strained against his belly, there was a feeling of sacrifice, a vague submission, a self-imposed and almost sanctimonious self-denial. In the back of his mind, he was unconsciously doing the exact opposite of what his wife had done a little while ago. Where she had deliberately denied him and satisfied herself, he was deliberately denying himself for her.

In the next-door apartment, Suzanne was also climbing into bed and enjoying the crisp white sheets, having dried and pampered her skin with moisturising creams and lotions, and feeling clean and fresh from her bath. Parts of her were still tender and sore, but she knew that her body's power of recovery would ensure that the healing process continued as she slept. Had she known of Ian's self-denial in the adjacent room, it might have sparked her interest in another bout of indulgent self-abuse, but she was not aware.

Ian and Suzanne fell asleep at about the same time. He to a restless and interrupted few hours of frustration and tortured dreams, her to the perfect oblivion that belongs to the wickedly indulgent, but totally satisfied and spent debauchee.

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In the morning, Ian found the connecting door still locked against him, although he could hear the tell-tale sounds of Suzanne being awake and on the move. He considered knocking, but decided against it. Time was pressing; he had arisen late following his fitful night. He quickly showered and dressed and had started to collect his things together when he heard a knock on his own front door, and the sounds of Suzanne and Graham meeting outside and heading towards the elevator. Graham shouted back through the door for Ian to hurry up and meet them at The Good Egg. Running to his bedroom window, Ian was in time to see them climb into Graham's car and head away. He quickly followed them to The Good Egg, where he joined them.

As Ian slipped into the booth across from Suzanne and Graham, he looked questioningly at Suzanne, wondering if his exclusion had been due to any failing on his part. Suzanne's radiant smile back reassured him, but the question still remained. He couldn't resist asking her.

"Good morning Suzanne, Graham," he started, and then turning to Suzanne, "I was hoping to see you last night!"

Suzanne smiled even more disarmingly. "Oh I'm sorry Ian, it was sooo late, and I was sooo very tired that I just fell into bed and straight to sleep. I'll tell you all about it later, I promise."

She reached across the table and caressed Ian's cheek and blew a kiss at him. Ian could only smile back, and then Graham got straight down to business.

"So Ian, how did your evening go? Have we made any progress?"

Ian took a gulp of the fresh coffee that had appeared in front of him as if by magic, and started to explain.

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Forty minutes later they were all gathered in the same small meeting room where they had first met the previous day. As they shook hands all around in traditional morning greeting (Cordell could not avoid giving Suzanne a quick peck on the cheek – he was naturally unaccustomed to having business meetings with attractive women with whom he had enjoyed such an intimate relationship), the thought crossed both Ian and Suzanne's mind that it seemed an awful lot longer than 24 hours ago when they had met for the first time.

Coffees were served, and Graham, who naturally took charge of the meeting without challenge from Otis, the natural other candidate to do so, briefly summarised the situation and then handed over to Ian.

Ian cleared his throat and swigged from his coffee cup before launching in to his explanation of his tests carried out the previous evening, and the results he had derived from them. Everyone listened attentively, even Graham and Suzanne who had heard a little of this over breakfast.

"So," continued Ian, "having found these identical blocks of log files covering the period of the break-in and the identical period three days previously, I was naturally suspicious. I logged in remotely to the server using the credentials Cordell had given me yesterday, and did some further research and analysis from my hotel suite. I found evidence of deleted folders and files, which I couldn't recover, but I was able to determine some information from a recovered back-up NTFS file that confirmed my suspicion that at least some of the files were executables."

At this point, Otis looked confused, and Ian spotted his concern and paused to address it.

"Sorry Otis, NTFS is like an index to the files stored on the disks. It tells the OS, the operating system, which cluster or part of the disk to go to to find the file it is looking for. It used to be called a file allocation table or FAT, but with later versions of Windows, particularly on Servers, NTFS is used more commonly. I'm trying to keep this as simple as I can so I'll try to avoid the more technical jargon. Essentially, for some reason or another, this index was backed up at some point, and by examining it I was able to see that some folders and files no longer exist, and I can see to an extent what type of files they were. Some of them were executable, that is they were effectively programs that could be set running in the background. Unless they did something that we noticed, they may never have made themselves known to us."

Otis nodded his head in understanding and signalled Ian to continue.

"So anyway, I have a number of anomalies, and whilst I can't say definitely exactly what happened, I can make a very good guess at what might have happened."

The other four people in the room looked at him expectantly; Graham nodded for him to proceed.

"It looks like someone with admin and root access rights installed an executable file that ran in the background, certainly for several days and possibly for up to a couple of weeks."

Ian looked nervously around the room – two of the very few people who might have had those rights were sitting in the room. When he got no obvious reaction, he continued.

"It looks like the rogue file was programmed in advance to copy a particular block of log files a few days ago, and to store that block somewhere, possibly in memory but more likely in a text file somewhere in one of the deleted folders. At a pre-determined time, shortly before the break-in, the background running program then disabled the alarms on the system. This action would of course be recorded in the real log files."

Again, Ian looked at the brothers and saw a questioning glance pass between them.

"Disabling the alarms would, of course allow the perpetrators of the robbery to break-in without setting off the alarms, if they knew exactly when they would be disabled. After they made their escape, the still running executable would be able to reset the alarms, which is why we could find no problem with the system yesterday."

At this point, Cordell interrupted. "But we checked the log files. As you know, there was no record of the alarms being disabled on the night of the robbery!"

"That's the crucial point," answered Ian, "the executable was still running. At some time later, it grabbed the saved block of log-file records and somehow used them to overwrite the real log-file entries from the night of the robbery, obliterating the records of the alarms being disabled and re-enabled. It's as if someone snipped out with a pair of scissors an article from the front page of a newspaper, and then slipped in an alternative article of exactly the same size and shape. At first glance, there was nothing wrong with the system on the night of the robbery – we were reading the "newspaper article" that had been substituted for the original. It is only because my "belt and braces" script identified duplication in random log-file scripts that I even suspected it. Very simple, and yet very sophisticated. And there are some unanswered questions still to be solved."

Otis now sat forwards, a very concerned look on his face.

"Can you prove any of this Ian? What are the unanswered questions?"

Ian paused before answering.

"I can't prove a thing I'm afraid, except that there is a duplicated block of log-file entries, and that some folders and files have been deleted, As for the unanswered questions, the executable certainly isn't running now, and doesn't exist any longer on the disk. What happened to it? What or who deleted it? There ought to be some trail. A file can't easily delete itself without trace whilst it is running. I can't find any trace of another file that might have done the clean-up operation, nor any log entries that show the files being deleted. It's a bit like a Russian doll, with one doll inside another. If there was another file that did the clean-up, where is it? If a third executable was called to clean-up the clean-up file, where is that? And so on."

Otis called for a short break, and the two brothers left the room, leaving Graham, Ian and Suzanne behind. Graham broke the silence.

"Ian, I have a couple of immediate questions. How confident are you about this conjecture of yours about what might have happened, and how can we protect our system's reputation and prevent it happening again somewhere else?"

Ian was quick with an answer; he had obviously already asked himself both of these questions.

"I am 90% confident that my speculated series of events is close to the truth, although I am concerned about the unanswered questions. The obvious weakness that this event has highlighted in our system is the use of un-encrypted log-files. If we used encrypted log-files, copying and substituting blocks would be impossible without leaving a trace. I have already e-mailed the boys back in Edinburgh to create a security patch and rush it out to our clients. If this could happen once, it could happen again."

Graham nodded in understanding. "Well done Ian, you've done a great job so far."

The complement from his superior went some way to compensating for the lost sleep and deprivation of the preceding evening, and Ian didn't fail to notice the blush of pride that passed over Suzanne's cheeks. Before anything else could be said, the brothers re-entered the room and took their places around the table. Otis started the discussion.

"Ian, what you have said sounds plausible. Cordell and I have just been talking outside. The question for us is if this is approximately what happened, we need to determine who might have done it, and how we might 'get our own back' if you get my drift. I assume that you will put in place whatever measures are needed to prevent a recurrence, but we want our property back! It's a question of reputation."

Graham stepped in to explain that Ian had already put in place measures to prevent any repetition. After apologising for the apparent weakness in the system that had contributed to the robbery, Graham concluded with a question of his own.

"As I understand it, this could only have been achieved by someone with, what did you say Ian, admin and root access rights to the server? Do you have a list of candidates?"

Otis looked at Cordell, who nodded almost imperceptibly.

"The list is small, less than a handful. There is one candidate that stands out, but it is hard to see how we could gather any proof. Three weeks ago we dismissed our IT manager for sexual harassment. He had the access, and the motive. Maybe our exit procedures weren't tight enough. Maybe he had continued access or a back-door route into the system after we let him go."