The Canton Connection Read Online Free PDF

his cell phone.
    The building had once posted a color-coded terrorist warning sign in the lobby. But Jake noticed the warning sign was gone. Was it really true that the nation no longer faced dire threats? How about losing the A root server?
    Jake took a deep breath. His task was to pursue the connections between Chu’s murder, Stacy Stefansson, and recent attacks on the A root server. He hoped by unearthing what was behind Chu’s murder, he could expose any existing cyber threats.
    The elevator dropped him off on the fourth floor, while Hoffkeit proceeded to the top. His only command to Jake before the elevator doors closed was, “Come to my office when you’re through.”
    The elevator had deposited Jake on a floor he had visited several times before. The entire crime lab used to be situated there, but most of its work had since been moved to more spacious quarters on the Marine base at Quantico.
    Now the hallway led to smaller offices behind closed doors. Hoffkeit’s aide led Jake to a room at the back of the building, where Jake had once interrogated a witness in a gun smuggling case. It was a sound-proof, surveillance-proof chamber.
    Swinging idly from side to side in one of the swivel chairs sat Stacy Stefansson.
    She was no longer wearing her tank top and jeans. She looked professional in a navy blue pants suit, which didn’t fit his image of her as a computer programmer. He was having a hard time getting a fix on who she really was.
    “Good morning. I’m Special Agent Jake Maguire,” he said, reaching for his badge. But he changed his mind and offered a handshake instead.
    “So that’s the name behind the face,” she said. “I saw you at the funeral.” An intelligent brightness played in her baby blue eyes.
    Her grip was firm.
    “Sorry about the cold hands,” she said. “There’s no control unit for the air conditioning.”
    “And I’m sorry,” he said, “to have frightened you off at the funeral.”
    She didn’t respond. Maybe she was just as uncomfortable about the ir brief encounter the day before.
    He decided to get right down to business.
    “I understand you work for Verisign,” he began, flipping her file open.
    “Do you know what I do?”
    “I understand you work on something called the A root server…”
    She lowered her eyes and grinned, then looked at him. “You don’t have a clue what this is all about, do you?”
    “If you could fill in some background information about the server…”
    “Okay. Let me know when this gets over your head.” She stood and walked over to a white board that stretched across an entire wall of the room. She picked up a black marker and drew a small box at the top center of the board. “Say this is the A root server,” she said.
    He nodded.
    “This computer holds all the DNS addresses for the .com domain. Most people think this is a single, physical server that sits in some office. That used to be the case. The root zone file used to reside on a single computer at the top of a hierarchy of computers.” She drew lines down to a second tier of boxes. “Our company used to have that file.”
    “I thought you still did.”
    “Now we maintain the file, but it resides on thirteen different servers.” She filled in thirteen boxes on the upper-most tier, and drew lines downward from each box to the second tier of servers.
    “So there’s no hierarchical structure?” Jake said.
    “It’s more disseminated, using anycast addressing.” She drew a bottom row of boxes. “So any computer in the world can find a domain name by referencing any one of these root servers.” She drew lines upward to demonstrate computers requesting addresses from the thirteen servers.
    Jake kind of got it. If he sat at his computer at home and opened a web browser, he could type in the name of any website in the world and the internet would find the exact computer where the website was located and connect his computer directly to that website. “So all the web traffic