Cyberwarfare

by Pendelton C. Wallace

  Dr. Moore stopped. “Elaine, what happens if the AG won’t let him see an attorney?”

  Elaine sighed and lowered her head. “They have other methods of extracting information.”

  “No. You can’t.” Dr. Moore’s eyes widened. “He’s an American citizen. I’m not even sure he’s involved in this crime.”

  Elaine started walking again at a brisk pace. “It doesn’t matter. He holds information vital to our national security. If he’s not willing to divulge this himself, then we will have to find a way to force him.”

  “Is it true, the rumors I heard?” Dr. Moore struggled to keep up with the taller woman. “Did the President really authorize you to use CIA interrogators?”

  ****

  Mary Beth entered the break room and went directly to the coffee machine.

  Bear sat at the table, with a can of Diet Coke in his hand and a bag of potato chips in front of him. Go to jail, directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.

  He didn’t understand why Mary Beth didn’t like him. He couldn’t think of anything he’d said or done to make her feel this way. He’d never said a word to her that wasn’t the truth.

  “Hi, Mary Beth.”

  “Hi.” She didn’t even turn to see him.

  Bear took a swallow of Coke. “May I speak with you a moment?”

  He could almost feel the wrinkling of her nose.

  “What do you want?”

  “I have a problem. It’s about Ted.”

  That got her attention. She sat down opposite him.

  “What? Have you heard anything?”

  “No.” He grabbed a chip from his bag. “That’s the problem. I can’t find a trace of him. It’s like he was abducted by aliens.”

  A tear formed in Mary Beth’s eye. “We’ve got squat. My contacts have looked everywhere. He just disappeared.”

  “Okay, so here’s my dilemma.” He turned the bag towards Mary Beth.

  She shook her head.

  “We know he was arrested by the FBI. The asshole that took him said something about the Patriot Act.”

  “Un-huh.”

  I’ve done a lot of research on the Patriot Act. I’ve talked to his lawyer, Chris Hardwick, about it.”

  “I know Chris.”

  He felt an air of superiority from her. “As far as Chris can tell, no one has ever been released from the Patriot Act by their lawyer’s actions. He says it’s all but impossible.”

  “Okay, I get that.” Mary Beth sniffed.

  “I … uh … I shouldn’t be telling you this. It could land me in prison if it ever got out.” He munched another chip. “Mary Beth, I know we got off to a rocky start, but I really need your help. We’re trying to accomplish the same goal.”

  She stared silently at him.

  “I need to tell you something, ask your opinion. But you can’t tell anyone. Can you keep this a secret?”

  She thought for a long moment. “I’m a woman of integrity. Cat taught me that. If you lose your honor, you can never get it back. I can’t promise you I’ll be silent until I know what it is. I won’t participate in anything illegal or immoral.”

  He ran his hands through his bushy red hair and interlocked them behind his head. He stared at the ceiling.

  “That’s just it. It isn’t exactly legal. We do this kind of stuff here all the time. We hack into people’s lives to help our clients. Can’t we do it to help our boss?”

  Mary Beth sat her coffee cup down with a thud. Coffee spilled over the rim. “Bear, what are you getting at? You want to break the law to help Ted?”

  “It’s a bad law. The Supreme Court should toss it out. It takes away our constitutionally guaranteed rights.”

  “The Patriot Act?”

  “Yeah. I know how to hack into the NSA’s system. I can get in and out without them ever knowing it. But the question is, should I?”

  He crumpled his Coke can and tossed it towards the trash can.

  “You know that goes in the recycling?”

  He ignored her. “I’m thinking, if I can find Ted’s records there, maybe I can do something. You know … like changing the records or ordering his release. I know it’s wrong, but we’re talking about Ted. Should I do it?”

  “Jesus, Bear. You sure don’t bring me the easy ones.” She got up from the table and began pacing. “Let’s see. Ted was arrested for something he didn’t do. We think. We don’t even know why they arrested him.”

  She turned to face Bear. “The law he was arrested under is questionable but has never been tested in court. You say you can get into their system and change his records …’

  “I didn’t say I could. I said I might be able to.”

  “… The question is, should you try?” She shook her head. “My heart tells me to do whatever you can to help him, but my head says it won’t help him to do something illegal. If they find out, you’ll both end up in prison.”

  Bear fingered the collar of his SLUT T-shirt.

  “I know. If it was just me, I wouldn’t even hesitate, but I have a family. What happens to them if I’m in prison?”

  He saw that his comment hit Mary Beth hard.

  She sat back down at the table. “You can’t do it, Bear. You have responsibility to your family.” She thought for a moment. “But … you could … Do you know anyone else who’s as good as you are, who doesn’t have a family to consider, who might do it for the thrill?”

  Bear smiled and crushed his now empty bag of potato chips.

  Chapter 27

  Chris sat in the interrogation room, drumming his fingers on the table. How long is this going to take?

  Eventually he heard noise in the hallway and a guard’s voice.

  “Turn around,” the guard said as he unlocked the door.

  Chris watched Ted turn to face the guard. The guard removed the handcuffs. Ted shook his hands to get the circulation going again, then turned to enter the room.

  ‘Chris!’ Ted leapt forward and grabbed his best friend in a big abrazo.

  “Take it easy, Tiger.” Chris pushed him off. “We don’t want your fellow inmates to get the wrong idea.” And we don’t want the Feds to know how close we are. We’re just client and attorney.

  The guard closed the door and Chris heard a loud click. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in a prison cell, but the click had the sound of doom to it.

  “Man, I’m so damned glad to see you.” Ted wiped a tear from his eye. “How’d ya get in here? They told me I couldn’t talk to an attorney.”

  Chris seated himself on one side of the table and gestured to Ted to sit. “Something happened. The NSA contacted me and said they wanted me to talk to you. You know anything about this?”

  Ted smiled. “I just told them I wouldn’t talk to them without my attorney. I was expectin’ them to waterboard me.”

  “How’s it going?” Chris asked. “Are you all right?”

  “The food’s not bad.” Ted grinned at his friend. “I have a clean bed to sleep in and a hell of a lot lower stress level in here than if I was at home workin’.”

  “Still the wise-ass, huh? I hope you’re enjoying your vacation.”

  Ted started to speak, but Chris raised his hand, palm out.

  “Before we say anything, you need to know that attorney/client privilege doesn’t apply here. Under the Patriot Act, the government can listen in and record conversations between an attorney and his client.” Chris lowered his hand and sighed. “You could spend the rest of your life in Guantanamo Bay if the Attorney General thinks you’re a threat. Let’s not give them anything to work with.”

  “Shit. These guys don’t mess around, do they?”

  Chris shook his head. “No, they don’t. They have a huge problem, and they’re looking for a scape-goat to blame.”

  Ted shook his head and reached out for one of Chris’s hands. “Chris,” he said in a soft voice. “I know who did this.”

  “By this you mean …”

  “E
verything. It’s all comin’ together. He released the CryBaby virus; he took control of those cars and crashed them; he started the microwave fires. Everything. He even tried to kill me a couple of times.”

  Chris just whistled. “Okay, so tell them and maybe they’ll let you go.”

  “What kind of lawyer are you, Bro? What I know is the only leverage I have. If they discover the culprit while I’m in here, they’ll just let me rot. If I don’t tell them, they’ll torture me. One of the guards was joking about it yesterday.”

  “So, what can you do?”

  “No, what can you do. I want you to negotiate a settlement for me with the Justice Department. They release me and let me work on this in my office, and I’ll tell them everything I know.”

  Chris leaned forward and turned his head slightly. “What do you know?” He kept his voice soft so that the microphone couldn’t record it. “I have to know what my bargaining chips are.”

  Ted leaned towards him and whispered in his ear. “I know who did this. I suspect that he had many helpers. I suspect that he has a secret hideout somewhere, where he can run his operations. I know what he’s planning next. It’s big. If he’s successful, he’ll bring our whole economy, maybe the whole world’s economy, crashing down. I’ve already written the code to stop him; we just need to distribute it.”

  “Whew,” Chris whistled. “You don’t settle for small change, do you?’

  Ted shrugged.

  “Okay. I’ll talk to them, to see what I can work out. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t even tell them your shoe size.”

  ****

  Bear sat in his office at his Bellevue home. It was the penultimate man-cave with a big-screen TV, surround sound, a refrigerator and microwave, and sports memorabilia all over the walls. A pennant from BYU, a framed Ken Griffey Jr. jersey, a signed Edgar Martinez bat, and a life-time of other trinkets and toys.

  He sat behind a locked door. His family was all asleep. The hands on his Seahawks clocked ticked over to four a.m. Time to get started.

  He reached in the fridge for another Diet Coke and picked up a burner phone. He wouldn’t dare make this call on his own cell phone.

  The phone rang six times, then he punched in a code and hung up.

  The waiting began. Was she even there? This was how she said he could reach her. Funny, her. The most feared hacker in the world and it’s a her.

  A bell rang in his computer and a message popped up on the screen.

 

  A Virtual Private Network. Using Peer to Peer Tunneling Protocol (PPTP), she drilled a tunnel through the Internet that no one else could break into. This was the most secure mode of communication Bear could think of.

  A log-in screen appeared, and he entered his user name and password. He thought he would never use this.

  When he met the Joker at DEF Con in Las Vegas, the world’s largest hacker convention, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Of course, she didn’t announce herself to the world as the Joker, but he knew. From things she said and questions she asked, he uncovered her secret identity.

  She was a small woman, no more than five-foot-one, and probably didn’t weigh a hundred pounds. Her short black hair was cut in a page-boy. She wore no makeup and dressed in sweats.

  After the conference, Bear tracked her down. He learned everything he could about her. As much as he liked to say he was the world’s best hacker, he knew he wasn’t even close. This small woman put him to shame.

  She had been in the Army, working for Cyber Command. She discovered leak after leak, hack after hack, and her superiors wouldn’t let her do anything about it. Russian, China, North Korea, and Iran all intruded into America’s cyber backbone. She wanted to strike back, but the powers that be wouldn’t let her. They didn’t want the enemy to know they were on to them.

  When her hitch was up, she melted into civilian society and began her path towards revenge. She restlessly attacked the states and organizations that invaded American cyber-space. During the election, she changed the Kremlin’s home page to tell them that if they didn’t stop interfering in American politics, she would destroy their systems.

  Bear waited. In a couple of minutes, he got a message inviting him to a video chat. He accepted.

  A window opened on his screen with the Joker herself staring back at him.

  “Uh, hi,” Bear said.

  “Hi, Bear.” She didn’t sound overly friendly. “I never expected to hear from you.”

  Bear looked at his screen. She was in some sort of computer room. There were servers in the back ground, and he could hear the constant humming of the air conditioning.

  He felt sweat on his brow. “I never thought I’d need to talk to you. I figured I’d just hunker down and let you do your thing.”

  She took a sip from a cup on her desk on the screen. “Well, now that you’re here. What’s up?”

  “I have no right to ask you this.” His palms felt sweaty. “But I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Ask me what?”

  “My boss, Ted Higuera …”

  “I’ve heard of him.”

  “… was arrested by the FBI. You know all the cyber-attacks that have been happening all over the country? They think he did it.”

  A slow grin spread across her face. “Then he should rot in hell.” She reached for her mouse.

  “No! No, wait.” Bears eyes got big. “He didn’t do it. We know who did. We know what’s going to happen next. We went to Microsoft to try to fix the problem, and they just ignored us.”

  She leaned back in her chair and tented her fingers. “So, what does this have to do with me?”

  “Vicki, we can stop the attack. We can save the country, but not if Ted’s in a jail cell. We need to get him out. We need to hack into the NSA system and find a way to release him.”

  She laughed out loud. “Are you serious? The NSA? That’s harder than breaking into Fort Knox. Can’t happen.”

  Bear smiled to himself. He did something that even the infamous Joker couldn’t do. “I can get in. I know a back door. I’ve been in their system.”

  She stared at him for a moment. “You’ve been in?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then why do you need me?”

  “I … I can’t do it. I mean, I have a family. If I got caught, I’d spend the next twenty years in prison. I can’t leave my family all alone with no one to take care of them.”

  “And you think I can?” Her eyes flared. “Why is your family so much more important than mine? Why should I put myself at risk for someone I don’t even know?”

  Bear’s heart pounded in his chest. “I don’t mean it that way. This is defending your country. You’ve already shown that you’re on a crusade to punish those hackers who mess with your country. Well, this is the big one. They’ve already caused billions of dollars in damage; they’ve killed people. Are you going to stand by and let them do more damage, kill more people when you have the opportunity to stop it?”

  She looked down at her clasped hands and was silent.

  After several moments, she began to speak. “Okay, Bear. What do you need?”

  ****

  The Orient Air’s Gulfstream G-5 lightly touched down on the runway at Suvarnabhumi Airport outside of Bangkok, Thailand. Orient Air was a CIA front.

  A flight attendant opened the hatchway and lowered the steps.

  “Get up,” the tall CIA agent ordered and hauled Ted out of his seat.

  It had been a fairly comfortable flight, with the exception of the handcuffs. As Ted stepped out of the air-conditioned plane, he was overwhelmed by the heat and humidity. By the time he reached the ground, his clothes were soaked through with sweat.

  Two hardened Humvee’s waited on the tarmac. Ted was shoved in the back of the second one and a black bag was pulled over his head. The vehicles leapt forward, made a large circle, and drove off the runway.

  He lost all sense of time. The ride could have been an hour or a day. When the vehicles stop
ped, Ted was pulled out and his bag removed.

  He was in the middle of a dense tropical jungle. A large clearing surrounded a white concrete-block building.

  Clear field of fire, Ted thought. If anyone attacked the building, there was no cover for a hundred yards.

  The CIA men led Ted into the building. The cold air-conditioned air was a gift from heaven. Armed guards, posted at the door and every fifty feet or so down the hallways, wore black fatigues with no markings, carried AK-74’s and wore sidearms.

  They led Ted to a plain white room with a table and four chairs. It didn’t have the two-way mirrors of his former interrogation rooms, but Ted picked out two tiny video-cameras on the ceiling.

  He sat handcuffed in an uncomfortable steel chair. His sweat soaked clothes stuck to his body and were uncomfortable in the cold air.

  After a life-time, the door opened, and Dr. Elaine Jefferson entered the room.

  “Mr. Higuera, I see you made it. I hope you had a comfortable flight.”

  He flashed a grin at her. “I hated the in-flight movie, the beer was watered down and the chips were stale.”

  “We’ll see how humorous you are when we get finished here.”

  “I won’t talk to no one without my lawyer.”

  Elaine smiled. “We’ll see about that. Do you know where you are? Do you have any idea what’s going to happen to you?”

  Ted stared at her with cold eyes. “I’m not an innocent. You’ve whisked me off to some kind of CIA black site. You’re going to torture me and probably kill me. You’re even more stupid than I thought.”

  Elaine rose from her chair and walked around the table. “Mr. Higuera, you are gifted with insight. What you need to know is that you have two options.” She ran her fingers over Ted’s jaw line. “You can tell us what we want, then spend the rest of your life at Gitmo. Or, you can hold out, in which case you will most surely die here.”

  A sliver of ice ran down Ted’s spine. Can they really do that?

  Elaine walked behind Ted’s chair, grabbed his hair with both hands, and pulled his head back so that he was staring straight up at her.