Kingdom of Lies

by Kate Fazzini

  “Why would I want to put myself in this kind of risk?”

  He gestures around the room. The reporter, named Frances, assumes he’s referring to the overflowing stacks of computers when he adds, “And give up all this?”

  His computers are not “computers” as a consumer might think of them. They are computers that control each car’s engine. Each of them is the size of a small, thick textbook. Accordingly, some are even filed like books on a bookshelf. The rest are bursting out of drawers and piling up on the couch.

  He doesn’t like when the reporter calls him a hacker. He has a PhD in string theory, he likes to remind her.

  The reporter was in a jam, so he sold her one of his hacked cars. A ’99 Chevy Lumina, a used cop car that looked like it was beaten with golf clubs. It drives like a Porsche.

  The reporter wants to talk to him about his business, but Victor keeps turning the conversation to Donald Trump. The man from Queens has turned into an obsession for Victor. He shows the reporter a detailed map on his laptop of precisely how Trump will win the election. She tells him he’s crazy. Never gonna happen. He won’t even win the primary, she says.

  He gets annoyed. Trump will win Michigan, Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, he insists.

  “You will see.”

  She laughs.

  The reporter has come out to New Jersey to find out if assassination by car hacking is possible. It’s one of the perennial what-ifs that she gets asked about the most. A tall tale, heretofore theoretical, that everyone from military generals to cybersecurity PR flacks to sociopathic executives seem to hope is true. It’s part of the greater collection of apocalyptic cyberliterature under the headline of “Cyber Pearl Harbor” or “Cyber 9/11.”

  Huge lie, she thinks. Thirty years of this lie and so little to show for it. A court of lies. A kingdom of lies.

  Everyone wants to scare their bosses, to maximum effect. More fear equals a bigger budget to combat that fear when what they are really doing is stoking it. The reporter just wants an answer, for today anyway. Some proof that this one little hallmark of horrific cyberthreats is legitimate. And if it is, an explanation of how it can be pulled off.

  “Sounds like beginning of conspiracy theory,” Victor says, a wry grin on his face. “Diplomat A dies. Diplomat A’s supporters say he was assassinated by unknowable person related to Politician B. Conspiracy theory remains in perpetuity, benefiting all.” He lights a cigarette, a long Parliament. “Yes, it can be done. But who would want to do such a thing?”

  The reporter’s mind reels. “OK, wow. But how?”

  He looks at her with eyes narrowed to tiny slits. “Too hard to explain.”

  “I’m serious, so you go in, the same way you would tweak the—I don’t know—fuel pump output…”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No shit. So explain it to me so I can understand.”

  “Would you like me to explain to you string theory, too? Maybe before lunch? You won’t have any hope of understanding that, either. This isn’t even my field, not even close. Someone would have to understand the complexities of the entire car network. People like this exist, but these are not run-of-the-mill idiots on the internet. CIA, Russian intelligence, Mossad, this is very complicated. Probably easier to dangle diplomat over tank of sharks.”

  The reporter doesn’t answer, hoping he will continue. Victor does not.

  She tries to fill in the space with more questions. “But can’t you do it remotely? As the car is passing by?”

  He pulls a face—pure exasperation. He collapses his head and shoulders down. Rubs the area between his eyes. She reminds him how many people have written articles about the threats to our consumer products, that, wired as they are to the internet, they could be turned against us, to be used for terrorism.

  “Not my thing. Why are you so worried about cars? I’m worried about the electric grid.” But he just pets his rabbit and turns his attention to a Trump rally in Fort Lauderdale on Fox.

  “Look at this man, he is an animal,” he says, a bright smile on his face. “He will win, you will see.”

  * * *

  The reporter has learned a lesson through these conversations, that the significant cyber incidents indeed don’t happen without a person behind the scenes who has a deeply felt reason for inflicting pain. People need reasons to do what they do, and hackers are people. Money is the usual reason, followed by loyalty to country—like Russia’s intelligence directorate—or loyalty to a cause, like the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters.

  If the reason isn’t money or identification with some type of faction, it could be simple curiosity or something equally unpredictable. There are people like Dieter, who have managed to turn their curiosity into a profession, but at that point, the motivation becomes money—at least, enough to make a living doing what one enjoys.

  Victor has an important point. For so long, worries about the damage hacking may cause us have been pointless and arcane. Why would somebody bother hacking a pacemaker? Why would a foreign nation risk a kinetic, guns-blazing war by meddling with our power grid?

  Victor knows it’s not the grandiose plots and huge explosions that should concern us but the gentle tide of insecurity that has been rolling in for 20 years. The little bits of erosion that, over time, change absolutely everything. The slow march on our infrastructure, dams and electric grids and wireless fidelity, that has been underway for decades.

  21.

  The Spaniard

  These days Dieter Reichlin is drinking coffee by the gallon. Sig Himelman’s life has turned into a real-life soap opera. He is ashamed of himself, but he can’t get enough.

  It’s the summer of 2016 and the Russians are pulling all kinds of crazy shit on the Americans. It’s been a roller-coaster ride from Dieter’s recliner in Helsinki.

  Fucking bad passwords. That’s how easy it is to break into an American political party, he muses. No problem for even a nontechnician.

  Then there’re the simmering resentments, the complacency of social media, the utter disregard for technical privacy, the racial issues, such an enticing treat for a good social engineer. A hot cauldron of fucked-upness that Dieter suspects will play out well after November, but, he is confident, there is no way Trump can win.

  Dieter is trying to come up with a new topic for a Norwegian magazine for which he occasionally writes. He wants to take on the attacks by Anders Behring Breivik, but with a twist: cyberterrorism. How the next mass attack may be carried out by cyber means. He doesn’t know where to start. For one thing, it’s not terribly feasible, but the assignment is high profile and he wants to make it work.

  So he procrastinates by flipping open his window into Sig’s world, where something weird is unfolding. Something far more interesting. Something that started early in the morning yesterday, even earlier in Romanian time.

  Sig has been using a tracking service to ping a cell phone, then a computer. It’s unclear if they belong to Sig, and Dieter is intrigued momentarily. Both keep coming back with the location right there in Arnica Valka. Then silence for one hour.

  Then Sig tries logging into a Bitcoin wallet. The balance is zero. Silence for another hour.

  Then chaos. Twenty email messages, some of them checking on business deals. Others plying new women from Craigslist. Lonely hearts stuff. Sig is going above and beyond his usual charm, and all before 8 a.m.

  Then Sig creates a new email address, HRH13023@romamail.ro. Then a message to an email address Dieter hadn’t yet seen. One that makes him sit up in his seat at attention.

  R.Kreutz@ram.college.ro

  I don’t know where you are but please I beg that you forgive me. I don’t know why you would leave but I am so worried about you and about dear Henry. You both are everything to me. I am not upset. I love you. Please come back and things can be the way they were.

  Dieter leans back in his seat. René Kreutz. Henry. Things had just taken an unexpected turn to say the least
.

  He thinks for a while. Walks to the fridge and grabs a tomato sandwich. Thankfully there is some egg salad left from the previous evening. He piles that on top of the sandwich, making a small mountain. He puts on another pot of coffee before going back to the Sig Himelman show.

  Next Sig creates another new email address. RomanianLad991@romamail.ro. He uses this to email what appears to be another lonely heart from Craigslist.

  I am terribly sorry to hear what happened to you in Marrakesh in 2011. You can email me here from now on at my real address. I have a good friend, a Russian friend, who was injured in the same blast, if you can believe it! I know you are Muslim and so are probably not interested in a man like me, someone who is not Muslim. But you are so beautiful. And so pure. So divine. I have spent the past week thinking of nothing but you. It’s hard to work, hard to even think clearly. I think the fact that my friend was injured there and you are too is a sign that God is bringing us together. God or Allah or however we refer to Him at a given moment.

  I know somebody who could help get you a passport here. As I said, I own a successful company and I am looking for a secretary. But more importantly, I am looking for a companion, someone to share my big house with, spend money on. Somebody to love and who will love me in return. I have had a hard life too, but that makes times like these even sweeter. I have been unlucky in love. I was scammed by my last wife, she stole so much money from me. But I have hope that someone as pure as you could bless my life and change these views.

  It’s so bizarre. Dieter can’t quite make sense of what is happening.

  “Did you pile egg salad on top of that?” his wife’s voice intrudes on his spying. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work. Mikael Blomkvist would never do that.” She is referring to the male, middle-aged hero from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

  “Blomkvist? No, no, no, I am Lisbeth Salander!” Dieter sucks in his stomach in imitation of the novel’s slender young female hero and hacker extraordinaire.

  “You couldn’t hack your way out of a paper bag. And you’ve gotten fat on top of it.”

  Dieter smiles, aware as he is that sharp barbs like this mean sex might be around the corner. It adds another level of intrigue to this strange morning.

  “Well,” he says, choosing his words carefully, “you’re an accountant. You’re not even part of the narrative.”

  His wife throws her head back and feigns laughter. A hearty do-not-wake-the-babies laugh.

  “Read this,” he says.

  She does. He has shared with her many iterations of the Sig show, of which she disapproves. She sips her coffee again. Raises her eyebrows dismissively.

  “Typical. Dangerous for her, if her passport is on the line. He got her involved in his illegal shit, then tied her down with a baby. That’s terrorism. Of the domestic type. Imagine what else he feels entitled to?”

  She gets up. One of the children is calling for her. She flicks her nearly white hair in his direction as she walks away.

  Dieter is satisfied. He has an answer. He has his thesis for his article. And he will be having sex tonight.

  * * *

  René doesn’t sleep until they get to Munich. They stopped once in Hungary. She has never been there and has always wanted to visit. She believes, but can’t recall for certain, that she has family here.

  She looks everywhere for Sig. But he is nowhere. He’s sent a message to her email address, a short one. She ignores it.

  In Munich, it’s nighttime again. They have been traveling for 24 hours. Henry is bubbly and talkative in his carrier. It’s much colder here, so she buys him a cap with some of her remaining cash. She briefly considers finding a hotel, but something tells her to keep going. She doesn’t like the weather. The people look too straitlaced. She imagines they can tell she’s a criminal. She sees the next train from Munich terminates in Malaga, Spain.

  Probably warmer there. She speaks some Spanish. It’s close to Gibraltar, she knows. A tax haven. So probably some criminals around. She wonders if she will always only be comfortable in the company of criminals.

  She tries to ask the teller in German whether it’s nice in Malaga this time of year. The teller answers her in English. “Oh, I believe it’s to be twenty-one degrees Celsius and sunny tomorrow.”

  Malaga it is.

  22.

  The Project Manager

  In Malaga, René Kreutz finds a one-bedroom attic apartment. It’s modest, but has a beautiful deck with flowers and sunset views. The house is owned by a Muslim family too busy with their own children to pay any attention to what she and Henry are doing.

  She starts applying for jobs. She withdraws little bits of the Bitcoin money at a time. She keeps to herself. Talks to no one.

  The sun begins to thaw her out, though. By September 2016, she is more open. She leaves the house more often, starts to recognize the faces in her neighborhood, and even brings Henry down to the beach. It’s hard to find a job. Spain is in a recession. But she has enough to get by for a year if she absolutely has to.

  Every so often, the couple who own the house—Norah and Muhammad—leave her meals by the door, cookies; at Ramadan, whole servings of kebabs and salad and soup. On one of these occasions, they run into each other. She invites them onto the balcony for a conversation.

  They ask why she came to Spain. She tells them that she came here for the sun and the weather, that she and Henry were getting sick with allergies and colds back in Bucharest and she needed a change. She’s hoping to finish college, which she started back home. Hopes to find a job soon. Something in technology. She has a background in it, she tells them, but on the support side, she is not a technologist.

  “What company was it?” Muhammad asks.

  She hesitates, not having meant to let her guard down with anyone, and nervously blurts out, “TechSolu.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.” She feels some relief. “What kind of company?”

  “Ransomware. Mitigation,” she says, taking a sip of water. “I mostly did customer service, to be honest.”

  “Any project management? My brother works at Insite—have you heard of it? They have a technology office here.”

  René has heard of it. It is based in Silicon Valley and is one of the biggest technology companies in the world.

  “I think I know somebody there,” René says, the evening Malaga breeze making her a little careless. “But that was a long time ago.”

  “Well, if you want to put together a resume, I’ll send it to him. They’re desperate for project managers. And the ransomware thing—I’m sure they’ll be interested. Good place for moms to work—they love women!”

  Norah gives her husband a sideward glance, a hand motion to settle down.

  René hasn’t heard from Sig since the email he sent in March. She nods and smiles. “I will. I’ll do it right away.”

  * * *

  Caroline Chan and Charlie Mack and Bob Raykoff and Joe the Kool-Aid Man and Carl Ramirez, who is still in Singapore, and Bo Chou, who is also in Singapore, and the reporter who is friends with Victor and everyone else who ever worked in cybersecurity at NOW Bank have been reading every last bit of information they can get their hands on about the Venice hackers now that an indictment has been issued.

  The FBI has been quiet about its progress, hasn’t spoken to anybody about what was happening. Then, suddenly, the indictments. Two Israelis, Yuval Dev and Ivan Misrachi; one Russian Israeli, Leonid Kravitz; and a money launderer named Tony Belvedere.

  The information they were stealing, the allegations maintain, was being used for a pump-and-dump scheme. For most of the people following the case, it’s the first time they’ve seen all of the details pulled together in one place, even though they were intimately involved in what happened.

  Two of the alleged conspirators are picked up in December 2016. The indictment outlines the numerous other banks, software companies, and newspapers that were hacked at the same time. The perpetrators had 100 million
names to work with.

  The ringleader, Dev, used the information to contact his customers and try to offload certain stocks in an effort to manipulate the securities market.

  The trail goes well beyond the relatively simple, straightforward cybercrime that Caroline and her compatriots were fighting in the summer of 2014.

  In particular, between approximately 2007 and July 2015, Dev owned and operated unlawful internet gambling businesses in the United States and abroad; owned and operated multinational payment processors for illegal pharmaceutical suppliers, counterfeit and malware distributors, and unlawful internet casinos; and owned and controlled Coin.mx, an illegal United States-based Bitcoin exchange that operated in violation of federal anti-money laundering laws.

  Dev earned hundreds of millions this way. He concealed $100 million, at least, in Swiss banks and other places across the globe, within 75 shell companies, in brokerage accounts. He even stashed some of it in asset management accounts, maybe at NOW Bank. Dev and his compatriots used 200 different aliases and 30 false passports issued from 16 different countries.

  Dev bragged about his exploits, the government says. “We buy stocks very cheap, perform machinations, then play with them. Buying stocks in the U.S.—it’s like drinking freaking vodka in Russia.”

  * * *

  Dev would call and lie to people whose personal information he’d stolen. Like Bo, Dev would lie about where the information came from and claim he got it from a publicly available “investors’ database.”

  In emails, Dev would discuss the low risk of law enforcement intervention. Like Valery Romanov before him, he wasn’t afraid of the authorities until he had a reason to be.

  “In Israel, you guys probably don’t have to be afraid of the USA, meaning that even if there is some case, they won’t be able to do anything?” Belvedere asked him in one exchange, to which Dev replied: “There is nothing to be afraid of in Israel.”