Over the next three days, I spent all of my time in a massive programming effort. I started on a Friday, and I didn't have any client appointments until the middle of next week. Luckily, I don't need much sleep, and can fall asleep when needed, so the 18-20 hour days were not hard for me to do. I worked on each of the programs, tweaking them to become more efficient, testing them to make sure that they worked properly. I used one of the Linux systems to test the access programs, tested the logging bypass programs, etc. Because I knew that those programs had to be quite stealthy, I spend a lot of time making them small, efficient, quick, and hard to detect. By the time I got done, you would really have to know where to look to find them.
I also worked on the scripting programs I would use to insert the programs into other systems. They had to work quite fast, copying, inserting, replacing, and hiding their tracks in just a few seconds. If the programs stumbled at any point in the installation, they would have to backtrack out rather quickly, so that no pieces were left around for later detection
The other programs I worked on were the retrieval programs. I needed to have those data files routed to some safe locations for later retrieval. I set up some dead mail drops on various public access systems, and wrote some mail retrieval scripts to move saved mail around to their eventual final locations. I wanted the scripts to move data to several places before I retrieved them, to help deter detection just in case. And I would retrieve the data files from several different locations, almost randomly, so that data retrieval would not be detected easily.
You might think I was being a bit paranoid. But it seemed to me that there were some powerful forces behind the Problem, and they would be looking for any signs of detection. I had to make sure that my data gathering was as obscure and stealthy as possible, to reduce the chance of detection.