As Garner left the classroom he found Rose waiting for him in the hallway.
"How's it going?" she asked just to start some conversation.
"Wentworth is an amazing professor," he began. "He gives you something to do that you understand to keep your interested while you are working on the parts that you don't understand."
"I know," Rose agreed, "he's the best. I've had him for several classes. What is he having you do right now?"
"We are discussing how to find information on the web. He gave us an assignment to try to find an old friend that we have lost touch with. He gave us some pointers on how to begin and then said that we should be creative and going beyond that."
"Well, you should look up yourself," she chided, "and find out what kind of dirt they have on you." She laughed; completely unaware of how close she had come to striking a nerve. But Garner was used to her random boisterous humor and just laughed along with her. However, he did think of that Milford guy who turned things against him in Indiana. It would never hurt to dig up a little dirt on a guy like that. You never know when it might come in useful.
Garner worked through the night on the assignment. Lights were going on in his head regarding the technology and the ways it could be used. By the time that Rose woke up the next morning, he had a pretty good idea of what he was going to do next.
"Good morning, Garner," Rose said cheerfully. "I see I'm not the only one who pulls all-nighters."
"This stuff is amazing," Garner began with enthusiasm only slightly damped by his lack of sleep. "You can find anybody, especially if you know how to look. There are search engines and telephone books and sites that help you find email addresses. And even if a person is trying to hide there are sites that provide criminal records and credit reports."
"Criminal records and credit reports?" Rose asked raising an eyebrow.
"Well, I didn't get to any really," Garner admitted. "I was just reading some news groups and chatting with some other people online. Some of the sites require passwords, but some can be hacked."
"So you're going to become a hacker?" Rose asked, amused by Garner's newfound thrill with the technology.
"Not at all, but I do have an idea," he replied. "I want to set up a web site called The Finder. It will be for people who would like to find a lost love, or a high school sweet heart or even a spouse who deserted them. They submit the name of person and whatever descriptive information they might have. Then for a fee, we find the person using all these resources."
"Why don't they just find the person themselves?" asked Rose.
"Maybe they can," Garner admitted. "But on the other hand maybe they aren't as familiar with the technology or maybe they don't know where to look or maybe they don't have access to some of the subscription sites. If we do this over and over for a fee, we'll get really good at it and it will be worth it for someone to hire us rather than look for themselves."
"And who exactly is 'we'", she asked grinning.
"Well, if figure I could hire students fairly cheaply to do the searches. Once we have a standard approach to the searching, anyone with minimal skills could probably handle it. And then for more difficult searches they could turn it over to somebody with more experience, like me."
Rose grinned at him as he reveled in his newfound status and expertise.
"But, I will need your help," he admitted. "I need you to help me build the site so people can request searches and provide credit card numbers for the fees."
"Piece of cake," Rose said, her grin turning more into beaming as she felt proud of Garner for the new pursuit that he was about to embark upon. "It sounds like a pretty straight forward E-commerce site. Actually, it will be a lot simpler than most. You don't have a product catalog to put online and maintain. You'll just have a list of services that won't take more than a page. You'll need a form so they can enter the request and you'll need to be able to take credit card information. I think we can use a third party for the credit card information so you are talking about a site with only a half a dozen pages. We can knock it out over the weekend."
Having designed the site in her mind Rose relaxed as though the job were actually done. That weekend the new service went online and within a few days requests started coming in. The fee structure was fairly simple. For $9.95 they would spend up to fifteen minutes searching the standard places that customers really could handle for themselves if the felt so inclined. Since Garner could pay students $10 per hour to do the searches, labor would only be 25% of his costs and the rest would go to overhead and profit. Service level two would provide a half an hour of searching and would include searches of subscription databases as well as a host of undefined, privileged sources. Finally, for somebody who was willing to go all out, they would charge $50 per hour and look for aliases and other things in a genuine attempt to track the person down. He could pay the specialist $20 per hour and still make a profit of $30 per hour for each of them. His fix costs would remain the same whether he had one request or fifty. And his only incremental cost would be incremental costs for additional computers. But he could lease a computer for a couple of hundred per month including the Internet connection. If he could use it five hours per day, twenty days per month he would get a return of $2000-$3000 per computer. It was a sweet deal.
Over the next few months, Garner's service was doing really well. He rented some office space on the first floor of his apartment building where the apartments had been designated for professional offices. He had a local area network installed and eight computers. He had a full time office manager who doubled as a system administrator and a large, but widely varying number of students working for him as independent contractors for a straight ten dollars an hour.
"I understand, from Rose, that your search service is going very well." Professor Wentworth said to him one day after class. "Just how good do you think you are at tracking down people?"
"If they can be found," Garner said proudly, "I will find them."
"Good," said Wentworth. "See if you can track down Franklin V. Haggerty. If you can find him then your claim is probably true and I might be able to use you on some consulting assignments that I do with Intercontinental Detective Agency. If you can't find him, don't feel to bad about it. Haggerty is a pretty slippery guy."
Frank Haggerty was a colleague of Wentworth's at Foggy Bottom University who had disappeared suddenly under very suspicious circumstances right before it was discovered that he really wasn't who he claimed to be. Since then Haggerty had been working in the underground of the web culture with a group that called themselves the Masters of Veracity. It was techno irony because they always masqueraded as other users. Haggerty spent his time hacking and disrupting things whenever he had a chance.
Garner was not sure if this was an assignment or a contract. He had reservations about working for Intercontinental, especially since it was a couple of their operatives that had nailed him in the Food Lion case. But he felt that it would be to his advantage to be on the good side of Wentworth so he agreed to take it on as a challenge. As it turns out, it was quite a challenge, but once Garner broke through a few spoofed IP addresses and rerouted email addresses, he managed to find Haggerty. Then one day, while he was in a chat room a new voice entered the discussion on a private thread.
"My name is Frank Haggery of the MOV. Why are you looking for me?" the line on his screen said.
At first Garner was a little taken back. But he quickly got his composure and replied. "I am taking a class with Professor Wentworth at Foggy Bottom University. He gave me your name as a challenge. It was not easy to find you." Garner typed.
"What are you planning to do with the information?" Haggerty queried.
"I was planning to give it to Wentworth. He said he might have some consulting work for me." Garner replied.
"You might want to think twice about that," the line said.
"Why? Are you trying to hide?" Garner asked.
"First of all, I have some information about you." Haggerty claimed. And then he pasted a file into the chat stream that contained the information he had dug up on Garner. It included most of the scams Garner had pulled, his arrest record in Indiana, creditor claims for New York and a host of other incriminating information. "As far as I can determine, you are just some two bit con man. If you decide to reveal my whereabouts to Wentworth, I will deliver this information to him."
"If you sent this information to Wentworth, he will be able to track you down by tracing your email." Garner claimed. Garner understood bare-knuckle threats and was beginning to like this cyberspace thug who was trying to intimidate him.
"You are naïve if you think that is the case," Haggerty offered. "I can make the email look like he sent it to himself.
"How can you do that?" Garner asked.
"By setting up blind email addresses," Haggerty replied. "It really isn't rocket science."
The wheels began turning in Garner's head. "OK, Haggerty," he typed, "I'll keep my information to myself if you keep yours. That's a wash. We'll just call it even. But I have an idea that you might be interested in. That is if you are interested in making a lot of money."
Of course, Frank Haggerty was interested in making money. Especially since he would be making it right under Wentworth's nose. Garner explained his idea to Haggerty and Haggerty worked out the payment arrangements. In order to handle his new venture, Garner had to rent another workstation for 'special assignments'. It was password protected and accessible only by him. And before long, Garner was working a long con in Cyberspace. It was his dreams come true. It was the birth of E-Confidence.