Cyberian Affair

by Mark A Pryor

  “I thought my secrets were safe behind the dark net, but now you tell me the NSA can see anything they like.” Niko shook his head and went to the kitchen. “You thirsty?”

  Her only response was the sound of tapping on the keyboard.

  He selected a pale ale from the refrigerator and grabbed a glass. “Have you found Sokolov’s money yet?” He set the glass next to the couch and took a seat.

  “Making progress. I discovered a bank account tied to Sokolov’s nephew. He is the owner and the only employee of a business called Altai Associates. For some reason, Russia’s GRU pays Altai over two billion rubles each month.”

  Niko did a mental calculation. “That’s thirty million dollars from Russian military intelligence. What does Altai do?”

  “It is a service provider, but there is no mention of the type of service. Of course, it does not make sense for a one-man company to deliver any service worth that much money. It must be a shell company—used to launder or funnel funds secretly.”

  “Where does the money go?”

  “I am still trying to figure that out.”

  “I hope NSA doesn’t realize what you’re doing.” Niko turned to his laptop when it beeped. “Zatan just appeared online at his favorite dark web site—Runion.”

  “That is a dangerous site. Hackers and con artists lie in wait for newbies.”

  “Hackers and con artists? Like the two of us?”

  Vyper smiled. “Which one are you?”

  “Definitely the con artist.” Niko projected the image of his laptop screen to the TV. “Zatan believes I’m a naïve newbie. The only reason he talks to me is because I know Prixster. You’ll find our conversation interesting. We always meet up in the public chat room. They speak English there.”

  A message appeared on the screen:

  Zatan666: U there anarch?

  “He saw me come online. My handle is Anarch. I’ll see what he wants.”

  Anarch13: U bet

  Zatan666: Private

  “This must be important. I have to join him in our private chat room. We speak Russian, so I’ll translate for you as we go.”

  Although Niko spoke fluent Russian, sometimes his grammar and word choices reflected his Ukrainian roots—even in text. Zatan didn’t disguise his disdain for Ukrainians.

  Vyper set her laptop aside. “What does he want?”

  “Last time we chatted, I gave him your list of Onion router nodes near Sevastopol. He told me I was full of shit—these couldn’t be real. Well, he checked it out, and now he’s asking where I got the information.”

  Niko typed a response. “I told him I used Prixster’s program to search for Onion routers.”

  When Zatan’s response came back, Niko burst out laughing. “He said, ‘Give me the fucking thing.’ I’m going to tease him a bit. When I finally give it to him, I want his hungry anticipation to overcome his instinctive suspicions.”

  “Do not overplay it,” said Vyper. “We need him to accept it. Once he does, my spyware will give me control of his computer, and he will never know.”

  “Let me show you how a con artist sets the hook. I’m going to tell him Prixster does not share with strangers.” He typed it in.

  The response came back immediately. “He says, ‘Prixster doesn’t have to know.’ I’m going to play hard-to-get.”

  Ten minutes later, Niko decided he had played with him enough. “That’s it. I made him promise not to share it, show it, or say anything to anyone. Zatan agreed and I’m sending it to him now.”

  Vyper’s face lit up. “You did it! We are a team. We will get Sokolov. I am so glad you decided to stay.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips. Then she stood and walked to the kitchen.

  Although the kiss lasted only a few seconds, the warmth of her body and scent of her hair lingered. As she walked away, he whispered under his breath, “I love you.”

  Weaponize

  Chapter 14

  Fresh from his shower, Niko slipped a pair of cargo pants over his BVDs and pulled a T-shirt over his head. He couldn’t remember much from his dream last night, but Vyper was in it and they made love.

  One day…maybe.

  Niko heard her footsteps in the other room. No surprise, she always got up early. Maybe she received a message from Zatan’s computer. It should have responded by now. After all, Niko gave him the spyware program two weeks ago.

  He entered the kitchen, and his heart warmed at the sight of Vyper. Her silky black hair draped over her green track suit, the zipper resting low enough to tease him with her curves. “You look beautiful this morning. That top brings out the color of your eyes.”

  “You are sweet.” She smiled and grabbed two cups. “I made coffee. You want some?”

  “Sounds great.” Niko sat at the table and opened his laptop. “Anything from Zatan’s computer yet?”

  Vyper handed him a cup of coffee and sat in front of her computer. “Yes, I received the first communication early this morning. Extracting data from his system is a slow process, but this transmission included information about more Onion routers on the dark net.”

  “I thought you had full control of his computer. What takes so long?”

  “He knows security, which makes it more difficult. The program you gave Zatan was simply a beachhead. Its main job was to discover unprotected methods to communicate—and to do it without being detected. It sent a few documents. I have to study them before I modify the spyware.”

  “Did the documents tell you anything of interest?”

  “Give me a minute.” She typed a few commands. “Zatan’s computer was on a network in Vladivostok—at a major internet connection point near Eagle’s Nest Hill. It seems he is less technical than you thought. His job is supervisory and financial.”

  “That’s perfect.” Niko opened his notes on Zatan. “Who did he supervise? What kind of financial stuff?”

  “I am sending you what I received. There is a staff list, payroll, and some financial spreadsheets. If we are lucky, he may have included some bank account numbers. Perhaps some of the staff members will match the visitors to FANTAZIJA.COM.”

  Niko took a quick look at the documents. “I can’t help you with this data. It isn’t my strong suit.” He glanced at his news feed. “And my Trotsky communications aren’t working very well, either.”

  “What do you mean? The attacks were in the news for quite a while, and the police followed your leads.”

  “Yeah, but the investigation has stalled, and the attacks are seldom mentioned any more. The police and the media aren’t treating this as a Russian attack. Their focus is on finding the missing conspirators, and they don’t have any new clues.”

  Vyper took his hand. “How much more can you do? You are only one man.”

  “One man—that’s it!” said Niko. “That’s the problem. It’s the old way of doing things. It may have worked for Deep Throat during Watergate, but modern communication doesn’t work like that. Today everyone uses the internet—especially social media. It’s time to weaponize Facebook.”

  “Like Russia has been doing with our elections?” She clicked away on the keyboard. “I’ve read about it. I understand the technology, but I do not understand what kind of messages to post.”

  “Leave it to me. First, we have to come up with a goal and a targeted marketing plan.” Niko glanced through his Trotsky messages. “Our goal is to convince the public that the Russians are bad, and they attacked the United States.”

  “Everyone already knows the Russians are bad.”

  “I wish you were right, but a lot of Americans don’t seem to care about Russia—either way. We need people running around with their hair on fire, demonstrating against the Russians.”

  Vyper giggled. “Hair on fire? Why would anyone do that?”

  “It doesn’t matter, it’s just an expression. I plan to engage the emotions of the public. Every time the word Russians is mentioned, I want everyone to think ‘dangerous enemy’
. I need to get them excited.”

  “How?”

  “You gave me those psychographic models and all the Facebook and Google data. Now I have detailed information on the largest groups of like-minded people who are active on the internet. For example, there are those who believe the Russians threw our election, and there are others who believe a deep state is undermining the government. Some groups hate immigrants, others hate guns. There are tin-foil-hat conspiracy theorists.”

  “Those people never agree on anything. Which groups do you plan to influence?”

  “All of them.” Niko smiled. “Those psychographic models reveal what their hot buttons are, what they already believe, what they don’t believe, how they reach each other online … everything. I need to set up a few hundred identities—liberal, conservative, Christian, atheist—and become a member of each group. I can play on their hot buttons to gain trust, then build suspicions against Russia.”

  “I may be able to help. I have a few thousand identities online, and I have bots that can control them as a group. You can pretend to be thousands of people. You decide on the messages and the targets, and I will control them like sock puppets.”

  “Thousands of sock puppets? You can control that many? They’d look like a grass roots movement.”

  “Sure, let me show you.” As soon as Vyper typed in a command, a warbling sound from her laptop interrupted them. She pounded her fingers on the keyboard in rapid bursts, glared at the laptop, and typed some more.

  Niko peeked at the screen but couldn’t make sense of what she was doing. When she finally stopped, he shook his head. “What happened?”

  She looked up from the keyboard. “Someone was on an Onion router I just used—a hacker. It accessed the routing tables. I had to stop it and delete all evidence of my communication. Then I scrambled the system.”

  “You crashed it?”

  “Actually, I bricked it. That router will not come back online any time soon.”

  Niko smiled. “I just thought about the poor guy who owns the computer you killed. He probably installed TOR software to pirate some music. I’ll bet he doesn’t even realize he’s on the dark net. Then, unknown to him, two hackers sneak inside his computer and start a fight.”

  “If he did not want to pirate music, he would not get caught up in this.”

  “You’re right, but I picture him sitting in his bedroom, playing a game, when the computer suddenly shuts down. When he tries to start it up, it just sits there like a brick.”

  “I am being cautious. Perhaps it is only a coincidence, but it makes me worry when I see a hacker rummaging through a router I am using.”

  “You’re the expert.” Niko scooted closer to her and looked at her laptop. “You were about to show me those online identities I can use.”

  Vyper typed a command, and the warbling sound interrupted them once more. “Not a coincidence,” she said, as she bricked another router. “Someone is searching through the dark net, and they bumped into me twice.”

  “What can we do? Would it help to sign onto a different private network?”

  “Yes. The person who is searching may be looking for Onion routers near the Los Angeles network I have been using. We should switch to Atlanta or Chicago. Better yet, use a different private network each time you go online.”

  Niko rested his hand on hers. “If you hadn’t stopped them, could they have located you? Identified you?”

  “It is possible. Depends upon who it is.”

  “Who could do this?”

  “This is beyond most hackers. It was probably someone working for a government.”

  “Like Russia?”

  Vyper’s smile faded. “Yes, and I believe Sokolov is searching for me.”

  “He doesn’t even know who you are. Why do you think he’s looking for you?”

  “Last night, a system administrator at the National Bank of Cyprus died. He slashed both his wrists.”

  “We stole Sokolov’s money from that bank.”

  Vyper nodded. “Two days before you stole it, I broke into the bank’s system and retrieved the passwords to his accounts. They were encrypted, but not difficult to decode.”

  “You believe Sokolov sent someone to interrogate him?”

  “It is possible. They may have thought he was in on it. If not, maybe they figured he knew something. I plan to search for employees of the Cayman banks and some of the other banks we used to move the money. Perhaps some of them suffered a similar fate.”

  “It might be a coincidence,” said Niko. “It’s only one suicide.”

  “It is not just one. I have been searching for hackers from my past—like we did with your past. I discovered that one of the better programmers from my Prixster days was a single woman in Boston. I learned her name and address.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She jumped from the balcony of her apartment last week—nineteen stories up.”

  “Wow. That takes some determination … it could be another coincidence.”

  Vyper shook her head. “The police found her pet, a small Pekinese, dead in her apartment—neck broken. Someone must have tried to question her.”

  “Did you ever communicate with her as Prixster?”

  “All the time. We were celebrities of a sort. Other hackers followed our chat room conversations. Our online relationship was well-known.”

  “Prixster’s been ‘dead’ for a couple years. It doesn’t make sense for anyone to search for you.” Niko took the empty coffee cups to the sink. “Unless they had reason to believe you were alive—something I recently told Zatan.”

  Vyper walked to the living room and sat on the couch.

  Niko followed her. Normally, he would take a seat on the far end, hugging the arm rest, but today he decided to sit closer to Vyper—just a foot or two closer. “You think Sokolov’s trying to follow the money to you, and Zatan’s trying to find Prixster.”

  She looked up from the computer, her hazel eyes locked onto his. “We are pretty sure Zatan works for Sokolov. They may have concluded I am the same person.” Her hand started to flap. “If they do find me, you will be in danger, too.”

  Niko leaned closer. “I love you.” He reached out and held her head in both hands. “We’ll stop them. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  Vyper’s flapping stopped and she gave a weak smile. She wrapped her arms around his waist.

  He pulled her close and pressed his lips against hers. Sensing no reaction, he nibbled her lips with his, and teased them with his tongue.

  Her eyes closed, and her mouth opened a bit, enough for Niko to reach the tip of her tongue. That must have flipped a magical switch, transforming her into a wanton woman. Her mouth opened wide, and she probed him as much as he probed her.

  He wrapped one arm around her back, leaving the other free to settle on her breast. Even through the velour top, her breast was firm. Vyper’s back arched when he caressed her nipple. She sank lower into the couch. Encouraged, he pulled on the zipper and slid it lower to expose more flesh.

  Niko moved his mouth to her neck and ear, kissing and nibbling everywhere. He moved her top, exposing more skin. His thumb touched her nipple. She reached up, grasped his hair, and moaned.

  He ravaged her breast with his mouth, lips, and tongue. One hand reached for the other breast, while his other hand reached down for her track suit slacks, where Vyper’s hand was waiting.

  He tugged lightly at the waistband, but she held firm. He tugged once again.

  She sat up. “I am sorry. I cannot do this.”

  Niko released her. He was still aroused, and now he was frustrated—but he loved her. “Did I do something wrong?”

  She zipped up her top. “No. I wanted to do this … I thought I could … but I am afraid.”

  “I love you, Vyper. I’d never hurt you. Can we talk about it?”

  “I am not sure how to talk about it.”

  “You’re afraid.” Niko was sure he knew why. “Are you a v
irgin?”

  Her eyes looked off into the distance. “No.”

  That wasn’t the answer he expected. “Were you ever in love?”

  Vyper’s eyes met his. “My feelings for you are … stronger … than I have ever felt before. Maybe that is love.”

  He wanted to make love to her but didn’t want her to pull away. “When you first had sex … did you … have strong feelings for the man?”

  “No.” Her hand began to flap. “I never wanted sex from any of those men.”

  Anger filled Niko’s mind as he pictured a man—more than one man—forcing themselves on her. He rested his hand on hers. “Did someone rape you?”

  Vyper’s head rocked back and forth with no sign of stopping.

  Niko knew he had to leave her alone until she snapped out of it, even though every instinct told him to take her into his arms. He waited silently but remained at her side.

  When she stopped rocking, she placed her hand on his thigh. “You are very good to me … but I will not talk about those men. I refuse to think about them.”

  He squeezed her arm. “I won’t ask about them again. But I have a different question.”

  She raised an eyebrow but remained quiet.

  “Someday, I would like us to have a physical relationship. How about you?”

  Vyper glanced at the floor. “I want to … but not today.”

  Niko gave her shoulder a playful shove. “That means we have something to look forward to.”

  Sock Puppets

  Chapter 15

  Washington, DC

  Niko held Vyper’s hand while they made their way toward the Capitol dome three blocks away. It stood proudly above the crowd on this beautiful March morning. A month had passed since Vyper’s sock puppets began to spread anti-Russian propaganda, and it appeared this demonstration was a direct result.

  The event was scheduled for 1:00, but thousands of protestors had already arrived—mostly young, more women than men, some with children.

  Vyper slowed her pace and came to a stop. “Are you close enough to see what you want?”