by Sean Parnell
“Yes, sir.” Turner spun back around and jogged the other way toward his corner security office, but his on-site two men and one woman were already bursting out onto the main floor and breech-checking their MP-5K submachine guns. Turner snapped out some orders and all four of them fanned out to secure the main elevator entrance and emergency exits. So far this appeared to be only cyber mischief, but it might be followed by something kinetic.
“We’re fucking under attack,” Betsy Roth spat.
Pitts heard that and said, “Ya think?”
Then the isolation tank locks slammed back open again, the doors swung open, and all the personnel came streaming out onto Main, including Meg Harden, who looked just as bewildered as the rest. One of those who’d been working on a surveillance package in the Keyhole project was Dalton Goodhill, who barreled his way toward Pitts and said, “Mike, this is all part of one big bag of shit.”
“I concur,” Pitts said.
“And where’s Steele?” Goodhill demanded.
Mike Pitts looked at Goodhill as if he’d left his own toddler sitting in a locked car on the freeway.
“You’re his keeper, Blade. Why the hell are you asking me?”
At that juncture, Ralphy had just finished downloading the last thirty minutes of activity history from the Program’s main server and dropped it all onto his laptop, because his good sense told him that, in short order, he wasn’t going to be able to do very much in this space anymore.
Then, all the screens on all the workstations went blank, the dishwasher in the kitchen turned on, the blinds on the SCIF windows dropped at full speed, the lights went out, and the overhead sprinklers fired, causing a spate of curses, tumbles, and stubbed knees in the dark.
The doors to the elevator wouldn’t open, and neither would the emergency exit. Ferris Copeland switched on the light on his iPhone, gripped it in his teeth, fetched a sledgehammer from his office, and battered the door’s push bar until the whole thing broke from its hinges.
But no one panicked, and no one left. They were all Program employees. Ferris just wanted to keep their options open.
“People, remain at your stations until we figure this out,” Pitts called out to the TOC through the sprays of cold water from above. “And don’t worry, you’ll be getting a clothing allowance,” he quipped.
“Over my dead body,” Mrs. Darnstein, the comptroller, muttered from somewhere.
And because they were all in the dark and anonymous, someone commented, “That can be arranged,” and the ensuing laughter was a brief relief.
But Ralphy Persko wasn’t laughing, or staying.
He snatched his laptop, stuffed it into his messenger bag, and turned to his two best sub-geeks, a young man named Kilo and a girl named Frankie, who were both holding up cell phone flashlights and staring at him as if they were all lost at a rock concert.
“You two, follow me,” Ralphy ordered, and he ran for the emergency door.
Chapter 25
Crestwood, Washington, D.C.
Mrs. Jepson was sweeping the front porch of her family’s brownstone on Sixteenth Street NW when her top-floor tenant, Ralphy Persko, showed up in a blue Hyundai with Uber and Lyft stickers in the windows. She stopped sweeping, arched her aching back, adjusted the green bandanna hugging her salt-and-pepper dreads, and watched Ralphy get out of the car with what appeared to be two young friends.
One was a tall skinny blond fellow with a long ponytail, the other a petite young Caucasian girl with a crown of tight black curls that Leah Berkowitz, one of Mrs. Jepson’s best friends, would have called a “JewFro.” It wasn’t a term that Mrs. Jepson would dare use nowadays but had been perfectly all right back in the 1960s, when they’d all been freethinking hippies.
All three of the young people were burdened with oversize laptop cases and grocery bags, from which Mrs. Jepson could see Red Bull six-packs and frozen taco meals bursting. The car pulled away and Ralphy and his crew headed for the wooden front stairs, which were badly in need of a paint job.
“Ralphy, please don’t tell me you’ve been fired by the Smithsonian.”
“Oh, no, not at all, Mrs. Jepson.” Ralphy smiled as he hustled up the stairs. “Just got off early today.”
“That’s good news, then,” Mrs. Jepson said. “Had a little worry there about rent on the first.”
“Have I ever been late?” Ralphy said.
“Nope.” She cocked her head to look past his shoulder. “And who might these fine young people be?”
Ralphy stopped and his Program compatriots nearly smashed into his back.
“Oh, this is Kilo, and Frankie, my friends.”
“Frankie.” Mrs. Jepson nodded at the ponytailed youth, then did the same at the girl and said, “Kilo, that’s an unusual name for a young lady.”
“It’s the other way around, Mrs. Jepson. He’s Kilo, she’s Frankie.”
“Ahhhh.” Mrs. Jepson nodded up and down but was obviously confused. “Are you having a party this evening, Ralphy?”
“No, we’re just working on an after-hours project, writing a video game together.”
“I see.” She was satisfied as long as Ralphy wasn’t turning from a model tenant into a hellion. “Well, have fun.”
“See ya later.”
Mrs. Jepson went back to sweeping, and Ralphy led Kilo and Frankie through the stained glass front door, and they all headed up the long stairwell.
“The Smithsonian?” Kilo whispered.
“Whatever,” Ralphy mumbled.
“What game are we writing?” Frankie scoffed. “Cutlass Heart Attack II?”
“Shhh!” Ralphy hissed.
He was already thumbing a fob on his key ring as the trio panted onto the third-floor landing, and then all four locks on his door fired and they were inside and dumping their gear. Frankie looked around at Ralphy’s expansive apartment, six slanted windows, pop art throw rugs, and extremely nice furniture—for a generally slobby geek—and whistled.
“Wow, epic digs, boss.” She was wearing a Nationals T-shirt, though she’d never been to a game in her life.
Ralphy ignored the compliment and pointed over to his long workbench along the apartment’s far wall.
“All right, people, set us up over there, all three machines. Anything on that bench that looks like it’s safely removable without doing me damage, move it over here.” He pointed to the coffee table in front of the couch with his flight simulation setup. “Pull the plugs on all my desktop stuff, and I mean everything: my routers, PC, Mac, even those two wireless printers and the freakin’ TV cable. I want us dead, connected to nothing, like we’ve been hit with an EMP. Got it?”
“But how we gonna uplink and work this problem,” Kilo said, “if we got no water pipes?”
“Hot spots only, from our cells,” Ralphy said. “I’ve got repeaters and boosters, but we’re not going to use a single freaking thing that I’ve been using before. If Main II’s been compromised, then we’re going to assume that I’ve been too. Clear?”
Kilo and Frankie looked at each other with buggy eyes. They’d never seen their ketchup-stained team lead act like this at the office before, and certainly not at their regular Starbucks over a cream latte, so this was super weird.
Ralphy had taken the grocery bags into the kitchen and was sticking tacos in the freezer and Red Bull in the fridge. Then he ran the sink and filled up the glass tank on a Lebanese hookah he’d picked up the year before at a cyber security conference in Doha. When he emerged from the kitchen with the hookah and a box of French tobacco, Kilo and Frankie were still standing there, staring at him.
“What the hell, people? Get your asses in gear, we’re under attack!”
They nearly leaped from their gym shoes, grabbed their Alienware laptops, and scrambled to the worktable. . . .
Two hours later, the apartment was completely dark, the only illumination coming from the oversize laptop monitors and the orange bleeds from their keyboards, through which swirls of smoke from
Ralphy’s hookah curled like giant spiderwebs. Ralphy had drawn all the window blinds, just in case some adversary was out there somewhere and using a laser window-glass vibration reader to eavesdrop on their conversations. The long workbench was strewn with taco wrappers, Red Bull cans, stained paper napkins, and bowls of sunflower seeds.
Ralphy had set himself up in the middle of the worktable in his office chair, with Kilo to his left and Frankie to his right, both perched on wooden barstools and hunched before their humming machines. Each was deep in the World Wide Web (via the latest version of Tor, The Onion Router, to mask their IP addresses) through a boosted hot spot on a burner smartphone, of which Ralphy always kept a handful over at Main II and had stuffed a bunch in his bag. In the background, Insane Clown Posse banged out “Hokus Pokus.”
After two hours of brain-breaking work, they’d eliminated international “black hats” (computer hackers) of certain geographic origins, based upon historical talents and the unlikelihood that any of those not only would have discovered the Program, but also would be so bold as to launch an overt assault. So, on a large whiteboard mounted on the wall, Frankie had crossed off South and Central America, North and Central Africa, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Japan, Israel, and all the “Stans.” This didn’t mean that the attackers couldn’t be physically located in any of those places, but that they would not likely be of those origins, making it somewhat easier to uncover their footprints by using linguistic patterns and algorithms.
Ralphy was leading his team with queries, instructions, and self-checks, and they were all speaking in a vernacular that would have sounded like an alien language to anyone but a graduate of the NSA’s cyber warfare school.
“Okay, recap this logic train,” Ralphy said as he stared at his monitor. “Servos, pneumatic, first things to fire down in the garage, controlled by Pentaur Bravo, the second server in Copeland’s realm.”
“Affirm,” said Kilo, “and that’s the first of a series of waterfall triggers, which could have been inserted as a logic bomb, or might be a zombie drone, active, real time.”
“Which means,” said Frankie, “that because our physical systems and controllers came over from DoE, designed for nuke power plants like Calvert Cliffs, our cracker out there figured out how to bypass NEST protocols.”
“Or he got in through a sloppy back door the DoE geeks forgot to shut down,” Kilo said.
“Or, he Trojaned an ass crack and left a time bomb so it’d open up today.”
“Why ‘he’?” Frankie huffed. “Could be a she, ya know.”
“Okay, they.” Ralphy rolled his eyes, which were getting blurry and stung from all the squinting and smoke. His laptop was displaying all the Main II activity logs, from all the computers in the TOC and all four tanks, from five minutes prior to the garage doors slamming until the moment he’d unplugged and beat feet. “Can we move on, please?”
“Hey, is it possible it was just war driving?” Frankie posed, meaning that a group of malicious hackers, of which there were hundreds worldwide, had simply stumbled upon a faulty crack in the Program’s computer defenses and decided to party. “I mean, that happened over at the DNC. . . .”
“No effin’ way.” Ralphy shook his head vigorously and took a long pull on his third round of Bull. “My cans are plugged into my malware scanners, and every time some a-hole pings us, even by accident, it goes off in my head like an ambulance siren.”
“But who, boss? Why?” Kilo was twisting his long blond ponytail in front of his neck and had already chewed out an ounce of hair. “They manage to drop a payload on a supertight locked-down government bat cave, and all they do is slam some doors, kill the comps and lights, and get us all soaking wet?”
“For now, Kilo,” Ralphy cautioned. “For now.”
“We’re never gonna backtrack this mother,” Frankie brooded, but she continued to examine the same lines of code that were on Ralphy’s screen, and she ran search matches for previously examined bona fide lines that might reveal a comparative anomaly. “Whoever got inside spoofed the hell out of their footprint, after first using ten iterations of Tor.”
“Yeah,” Kilo agreed, “and we’re not talking here about some Iranian script kiddies.”
“That . . . is . . . correct.” Ralphy was suddenly speaking in a Twilight Zone tone, and he’d taken another long drag from his hookah, so a double stream of smoke was rising from his wide nostrils and spookily fogging his glasses. “We’re looking at a rootkit. Maybe something even planted from inside. We’re looking at a rootkit, and a polymorph, so that every time my bug bots looked for it, it changed its freaking spots.”
“Holy shit,” Kilo said, and at this juncture no one was moving, typing, or fingering a mouse anymore. “Are you serious, boss? Inside?”
“Don’t quote me on that, or even think it out loud,” Ralphy warned. “Not until we burn these a-holes and we’ve got no-bleed, no-smudge fingerprints. Got it?”
Kilo and Frankie both nodded and muttered “Uh-huh” at the same time.
“We’re going to go back now, and look at every friggin’ line of code in every friggin’ comp, server, lap, main- and subframe, from five minutes prior to zero, till we walked out the door. And we’re going to find that trigger. It could be something totally small, like half a line of binary, like three ones and a zero. But whatever the hell it is, it opened the door, and then the friggin’ joker jumped in and shot up the nightclub. And once we find that trigger, I’m gonna hunt down this a-hole’s botnet, and they’re gonna tell me all about his master program, and that’s gonna tell me who the hell he is.” Ralphy turned to Frankie and added, “It’s not a she, or a they. It’s a he. Gut call.”
“Okay, on it,” Kilo said and turned back to his laptop.
But Frankie was looking at Ralphy in a different way than before. She’d never seen him quite so intense and always thought of him like some chubby, awkward, older sibling who’d still be living in their parents’ basement long after she went off to conquer the world. Frankie had a pretty face, with very full lips, a small nose, and deep brown eyes, and those eyes were drinking in Ralphy’s combat composure, and then she turned and went back to work.
Five minutes later, she jabbed a finger at her monitor and said, “There.”
“What?” Ralphy said.
“Binary. Doesn’t really belong in this stream. And it was in the freakin’ HVAC system.”
“Call it,” Ralphy said as Kilo stopped pecking and mousing and looked over.
“One, zero, zero, zero, slash,” Frankie said as Ralphy jotted the code down on a menu from Fridays. “Then, three ones, slash, three ones again, slash, and two ones.”
Ralphy handed the menu to Kilo and said, “Change the ones to dashes and the zeros to dots, and tell me what it says in Morse code.”
“Huh?” Kilo pulled harder on his ponytail.
“Morse code, genius. The stuff your granddaddy used in the navy during World War II.”
“My grandfather was in the army. . . . But why?”
“A hunch,” Ralphy said.
“I got this,” Frankie said as she reached across Ralphy and snatched the menu. She’d already called up a sheet of Morse code from Wikipedia, and after a few seconds, she leaned back and whispered, “Holy shit.”
“What’s it say?” Ralphy asked.
“It says . . . ‘Boom.’”
Ralphy nodded, cracked his knuckles, leaned into his Alienware again, and said, “Come to Papa, motherfucker.”
Chapter 26
Moscow, Russia
Millennial Crude did not operate out of FSB headquarters. In fact, Dmitry Kreesak’s boss, Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Kravchenko, never discussed MC operations with him while they were within the walls of Lubyanka.
Whenever Kravchenko wanted to consult with Snipe on a matter of importance that required kinetic action of the cyber or “contractor” sort, he’d walk by his desk and casually drop a matchbook from one of the many small Moscow cafés that hunkered outsi
de the Kremlin ring. An hour later, Snipe would find the lieutenant colonel sitting at said gloomy establishment at a corner table, reading a copy of Izvestia, and there he’d join him and receive his tasking.
Furthermore, Snipe couldn’t run Millennial Crude operations during regular FSB business hours, because it would have been strange for a cyber security specialist to be away from home station for hours or days at a time. So, he did all of that at night—sometimes all night—far away from the Moscow center in a ghastly neighborhood called Kapotnya, which hosted twenty-seven thousand dirt-poor residents packed into low-rise brick apartments surrounding an enormous oil-processing plant. There was no metro station, the atmosphere was toxic, the teeming markets stank, and it was a pain in the ass to get to, all of which made it perfect.
So, Millennial Crude rented a large flat (subsidized by FSB—cash only) on the fourth floor of a dingy walk-up just off of Kapotninskiy Proezd, which made the trip down there bearable, because it was relatively close to the MKAD highway that ran back northward to civilization. The flat had one large central salon with curtained, oil-fume-stained windows, branching off into four small corner bedrooms and one Soviet-style 1950s “chic” kitchenette, with a tile slab floor and cinder block walls. The heating, which had not yet clicked on despite a late-summer cold snap, came from a local Kapotnya boiler station that pumped hot water up into the building’s cast-iron radiators. But the outside temperature didn’t really matter. Moscow’s deputy mayor for Housing, Utilities, and Amenities decided whether or not you were cold or hot.
However, nothing else about the flat was typical of Kapotnya. The salon wasn’t designed for living. Snipe believed that if you were sitting or taking a meal in a relaxed manner, you weren’t thinking, and he wanted all of his brainiacs firing on all cylinders, always. It was bordered on all sides by long, Japanese onyx-topped worktables, which held massive LG monitors, all cabled to 8Pack OrionX PCs (their $30,000-per-system price tags were covered by FSB’s black budget). The office chairs facing the workstations were self-adjusting Humanscale Freedoms, and every station had a pair of wireless Bose headsets. The overhead lighting was provided by recessed pinpoint spots, and the computers weren’t connected to any commercial internet cables, but instead to an independent antenna array on the building’s roof, which uplinked everything to a satellite bounce.