His worst nightmares

William Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun (1805)

[Italian original]

“What a story!” Massimo thought disconcertingly after he had finished reading Giorgio’s e-mail. 

Besides, those strange events seemed to mysteriously intersect with a few instances in Giorgio’s recent life which had occurred before he had been suffering from hallucinations.

His master's studies on ancient religions, his university teaching activities and especially his contagious passion weren’t liked by everybody, especially in a city like Rome, a big Mediterranean centre; lazy, tolerant (and indifferent) but also the seat of the immense organizational, economic and ideological power of the Vatican.

Such a power acted as a magnet for individuals and organizations among which dark forces escaping control could always take root. What worried Massimo were not a few articles in Spanish that had appeared in odd spiritual journals, in which George's activities were stigmatized as 'corrupting', but rather a series of anonymous letters addressed to his master and containing veiled threats which always ended with the Latin words:

Draco rufus
modicum tempus habet.

[The red dragon
has little time].

What did this sentence mean? Giorgio thought that the 'red dragon' was him so the words meant something like "your days are numbered." However, why was he the 'red dragon'?

A Vatican codex of the Bible in Greek and in Latin

He supposed the phrase to be the result of an assemblage of two passages of the Book of Revelation (or Apocalypse of John) in the Vulgata Clementina translation of the Greek original. More precisely, two words from 12.4 (draco rufus) and three from 12.12 (modicum tempus habet). In most interpretations draco rufus, the red dragon, was the devil. Giorgio, therefore, as a scholar of late antiquity's religions & gods, was a follower of the devil.

Massimo was perplexed. He knew that to the first Christians, all pagan deities were considered living infernal demons, and those who adored them, followers of the infernal powers. But who supported such notion today? To today's Christians the ancient gods were just non-existent.

Another depiction of the Red Dragon by William Blake (1805). Detail

Besides, if this was the right interpretation of the sentence in the letters (i.e. that Giorgio’s days were numbered), the biblical passage had different and more complex meanings that were open to multiple interpretations.

In any case, someone was threatening Giorgio, that much was clear. And perhaps he was using the imaginative language of the ancient revelation to enhance the psychological effects of the threat.

All this sadly brought Massimo back to Deirdre. The girl had by now reached home and might switch on her PC at any moment.

Massimo thought about their last date at the pub. At the end of the evening, when they were standing in the street in front of the pub’s entrance and were about to say goodbye, he noticed the beautiful red gold necklace that Deirdre was wearing around her neck.

"How beautiful! It brings out the red of your hair. The place was so dark I had hardly noticed it. Now though it shines under the light of the lamppost "
"It's a gift from a friend."
"There's a small Greek inscription engraved on it. May I read it? I'm a fan of ancient languages."

It was true but it was basically just an excuse to get closer to her and perhaps touch her lightly, if possible.


He felt the young woman’s breath on him as he was deciphering the Greek words.

"It's about a red dragon - she said. I always loved the fantasy genre. But I must rush home now. I always receive late-night emails from my boss that I have to answer before going to bed. He's always travelling around the globe. Now he's in South America.
A la prochaine Massimo."
"A la prochaine Deirdre."

The girl smiled at him and walked away with brisk steps. There was something so charming in her ways.

Which though hurt Massimo this time, since the sentence he had just read on her necklace was now obsessively whirling in his head … the red dragon has little time … the red dragon has little time…

How was it ever possible?

The gold necklace bore the Greek original words inscribed:

δράκων πυρρὸς ὀλίγον καιρὸν ἔχει

Which corresponded exactly to the Latin words taken from the Vulgata: draco rufus modicum tempus habet.

From that night the thought of who Deirdre really was had haunted Massimo.

Massimo is waiting at his BackTrack Linux box for Deirdre to reach home

The girl, for some strange alchemy of the human heart, was a bit like a glimmer of hope in the darkest phase of his life - save for his early childhood, when he tragically lost his father.

But now that sentence … It was very unlikely that words from different passages in the Apocalypse of John had been assembled in exactly the same way in both the letters sent to George and in the inscription carved on the girl's necklace.

Yes, Massimo thought, the odds in favour of mere chance were definitely low.

A 'received mail' ding brought him back to reality. Deirdre must have switched on her computer as Massimo had received a reply to the e-mail he had sent her.

“Hi Massimo.
I would love to see you again soon as well. I am leaving for a few days, but I’ll be back at the beginning of the next week. Call me.
Deirdre.”

Massimo already knew Deirdre’s IP address from their previous chatting sessions. He activated his powerful Backtrack Linux tools. In less than a minute he knew all he needed to know: the number of vulnerable ports, domain name, operating system’s, firewall’s and antivirus’ types & versions (versions have well-known vulnerabilities so they are a key element in any attack), the diagram of the network she was on and so forth.

After acquiring the administrator privileges in her machine he sent her a trojan horse that was invisible to any anti-virus software for the simple reason that it had been created by him and his students in the security labs of the training company he worked for. They had just modified the old and (in)glorious Netbus created by Carl-Fredrik Neikter, a Swedish programmer. He then connected to the Trojan server with its client software. The magic was done. Deirdre's desktop appeared on his screen.

Deirdre seemed artistically very gifted. Her desktop wallpaper was a splendid collage of images with an intriguing Nordic flavour: a fireplace with burning logs, a small white cottage on a sea coast swept by the ocean wind, a pair of white birds walking on the foam of a rough sea … images from a misty world deprived of sun and so far away from his but for this same reason terribly fascinating.


One thing though made him start. Three small red dragons were at the sides of her screen - the top, the right-hand side and the left-hand side - and were joined by three thin lines so as to form the vertices of a triangle that was aesthetically pleasing but also rather disquieting.

He did not have time to watch any longer since a sound from his Linux box alerted him that Deirdre’s PC was being checked remotely by someone or something. He had to act quickly so he started to capture and analyse the incoming traffic into her system. Yes, someone (or an automatic script) was actually remotely executing commands on her PC. And there, among the mass of data captured, he found what he feared:

netstat –an | find "12345"

The command meant that someone (or something) was checking the 12345 port, from where trojans of the Netbus kind - exactly like the Trojan horse of the myth which opened the city's gate to the enemy - usually allow the conquering of the machines that host them.

He had been caught. Connecting the trojan to its default port had been a mistake.

Fortunately Massimo’s IP address was concealed behind the Tor anonymity network. It was therefore very unlikely that they would get to him. But what kind of organization did Deirdre belong to? She had mentioned only two people, her and her boss. Only two people? Utilizing a costly IDS (Intrusion Detection System) that only medium- or large-sized corporations implemented?

In fact what he was expecting at any moment occurred. Deirdre's desktop vanished from his screen. The trojan had been identified and destroyed.

ψ

Massimo slumped into his chair. He knew he could counter attack with a much higher level of sophistication.

But as of now it seemed his worst nightmares were coming true.