Enigma: The Rise of an Urban Legend

by Ryan Schow

  He wondered, how many other people had their faces smashed on this same floor waiting for help? It was such a civilized waiting area earlier.

  He went and screwed that all up.

  “Get him up,” a woman said. She bore an authoritarian air about her he resonated with. She sounded very in charge.

  “Whitney Clark,” he said, agents holding him on either side like he was a flight risk. “I’m not exactly a friend, because we don’t know each other, but I am here in a friendly capacity.”

  “You’re the one who locked down our system.”

  “I am.”

  “Do you understand what that means?” she said. He could tell he’d completely ruined her morning coffee, and perhaps her morning constitution as well. “This is an act of cyber terrorism.”

  Besides the two agents at Brayden’s side, there were two other agents for a total of five. He wasn’t putting off that air of “fleeing the scene of his crime.” No, he was perfectly still.

  Totally calm on the outside. Shitting his pants on the inside. He forced himself to shift. Brayden to Enigma. Easy.

  Go.

  In that immediate change of state, be became Enigma, the eighteen year old who strolled into the FBI’s own office to tell them he’d hacked their system and stolen their passwords. Like it was no biggie. Like he owned them. Which he did.

  “You start throwing around that word, terror, but it’s just a game you people play to fortify your position as federal police,” he said. “I get it. I really do. The better question isn’t whether or not I understand what this means, it’s whether or not you know what this means.”

  “I’m perfectly clear on the fact that you committed untold counts of felony cyber terrorism.”

  “You say tomato…” Brayden said, grinning.

  Agent Whitney Clark was a red headed woman with bold green eyes who looked like she hadn’t been dicked or even had a sex-charged gaze slide her way in years. The PUA in him couldn’t help wondering how much sexual energy she had built up in that soccer mom body of hers. He wondered if he could coax it out of her.

  It wasn’t a physical attraction he had for her, rather, he simply found himself drawn to the challenge. Force of habit these days.

  “In my back pocket is a phone number you’re going to want to call.”

  “For being smart enough to lock us out of our own system, you sure suck at this ransom thing,” Agent Clark said.

  “You haven’t even asked what I want,” he replied.

  Brayden couldn’t help wondering how many freckles she had under that smooth layer of foundation. A few little speckles peppered the edge of her nose. They weren’t cute. They seemed more like they were interrupting something needing to be said. Or perhaps all she had left in her heart was venom. It wasn’t out of the question.

  “Most people, when they hack us then hold us hostage,” Agent Clark continued, “they don’t want us to see them when they’re making demands.”

  One of the other agents, a six foot one inch blonde haired man with gym muscles, a pretty decent beard and gobs of attitude, he squeezed the metal cuffs tighter, which hurt like hell. Brayden wouldn’t admit this, but goddamn, it really, really hurt!

  “This isn’t a ransom,” Brayden said. “And the demands won’t be on you. The number you’re going to call is to the feds in Washington. If you guys had parole officers, which you don’t, the number in my back pocket would lead to mine.”

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m the guy that hacked you guys two years ago. And I’ll tell you what I told the last guy. I only got caught because I chose to get caught. Any minute I want to ghost out, you’ll never find me again. Ever.”

  “That’s what every criminal says,” the agent at his back muttered.

  “Stow it Charles,” Agent Clark said. Then to Brayden: “Now you want to get caught again? Is that it?”

  “I’m simply here to complete the terms of an earlier arrangement with the man at the other end of that number in my back pocket. The number you’re not calling right now.”

  “Get the number, Charles.”

  “Uh…wait. Agent Clark, I’d appreciate you getting it since the last time I let a guy touch my ass was never.”

  She rolled her eyes and said, “Get the number, Charles.”

  “Left pocket, Charles, and if you stay too long I’ll tell them what I found while I was in your system earlier this morning.”

  Everyone gave him a funny look the uptight agent fought to ignore. As far as Brayden was concerned, he could say anything he wanted at this point and it would cast its intended doubt upon the man.

  Charles handed the number to Agent Clark. She opened her phone, dialed the number, waited, then said, “This is Special Agent Whitney Clark with Cyber Action Teams calling from the Las Vegas field office. I have a—” She paused, looked at Brayden, raised her eyebrows as if to ask the question.

  He cleared his throat and said, “Brayden James.”

  “I have a Brayden James here and he asked me to call you.” She listened for a moment, then said, “He hacked our system this morning and is holding our passwords hostage.”

  “That was just an attention getter,” Brayden said.

  Agent Charles clamped down on the cuffs so hard Brayden’s knees gave and he groaned uncontrollably. A few of the other agents snickered, but quietly, to themselves.

  Agent Clark covered the phone, leveled Agent Charles with hard, anxious eyes. “Loosen those cuffs,” she snapped. Charles waited a little too long, and as she was about to tell him again, he used a key to loosen them.

  Brayden looked over at the receptionist he first saw when he came in; she was watching everything with a dutiful, if not judgmental eye. He winked at her. She frowned. Any guy in cuffs, he had to be a criminal, right? Guilty until proven innocent?

  Loud enough for the blonde, belligerent Agent Charles—and only Agent Charles—to hear, Brayden said, “Guys like me can burn your whole life down in a single afternoon.”

  “Are you threatening me?” he said.

  “If you’re so stupid you can’t see a threat like that, you don’t deserve to wear the badge,” Brayden hissed.

  Agent Charles made a big production of loosening the cuffs, but when he secured them again, they were as tight as before.

  “Yes,” Agent Clark was saying into the phone. “Yes. He’s right here. Okay.”

  Agent Clark, in her JC Penny pantsuit with her overworked-out body and her caramel smelling coffee breath, she turned and handed Brayden the phone.

  “Remove the cuffs,” she told Agent Charles. He did. Brayden rubbed his wrists then took the phone.

  “Brayden here.”

  “You sanctimonious little prick,” the gravely voice in the phone growled.

  “Before you get all shouty and start cussing and threatening me, the only reason I’m here is to fulfill my end of the agreement, albeit ahead of schedule.”

  “You should’ve called first.”

  “I’m starting six months early, and I want you to know I’m serious.”

  “You used a computer.”

  “Only to see if I could be of assistance to the Vegas office. That’s where I am. And do you know what I found?”

  “What?” the voice asked. Looking up, he saw everyone paying extra close attention to the conversation.

  “Swiss cheese. Not the kind with a few giant holes and a lot of solid Swiss. More like lacey Swiss, where there’s nothing obvious but upon closer inspection there are so many holes any kid with a laptop and a hard-on for phishing could slip into the network unnoticed. I can be of assistance here. And I’m ready to get on with my life.”

  “That violates our agreement. It also means you’re going to prison for ten years in a maximum security prison.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “I can do whatever I want to you,” the voice barked.

  The thing about threats is sometimes, and this is only sometimes these days, due process st
ill has a place in our legal system. More and more though, the Constitution and Bill of Rights were being overlooked by certain factions in power—especially a handful of rogue, power hungry members of the intelligence committees—and this had him a little worried. Like maybe this man’s bluff was bigger than Brayden’s and he’d really stepped in the shit here.

  “How embarrassing is it that your cyber defense team’s front door was wide open? Didn’t you learn anything last time? Because if I can get in the network’s front door inside of an hour on a three year old computer, and I’m rusty from not even seeing a computer in two years, how easy would it be for anyone else to just waltz right in unannounced? Think about it. I’m not here to flex my digital dick, I’m here to close up the network holes and show you how to secure your system using this office as the framework for the entire company. I’m a friend. This is a 360 win if you think about it. All of us win all the way around.”

  “Is that an Alex Jones reference? Did you just say 360 win?”

  “Do we have a deal then?” he asked, sidestepping the small talk.

  After a long, harrowing moment, he said, “Put the other agent on. The woman.”

  Brayden handed the phone to Agent Clark whose face was red from Brayden’s accusation that her network was not only unsecured but full of holes.

  She listened intently, nodded a couple of times, looked back at Brayden then made the smallest, almost impossible-to-see nod at Agent Charles, who cuffed him again.

  “What the hell is this?” Brayden asked. Inside, he felt the dreaded chill that comes with getting busted by the feds.

  Agent Clark stuck the number Brayden had given her in her pocket, hung up the phone then said, “Take him to holding.”

  “For how long?” Brayden asked as he was being hauled away.

  “I have you for forty-eight if I want,” she said, sharply.

  “Good luck getting your passwords back,” he called out to her.

  Agent Clark said, “Wait, Charles.” The big man stopped, looked at her. Then she said, “Those cuffs look a little loose. Tighten them just in case.”

  Agent Charles, that blonde son of a bitch, he did what he was told and that was when Brayden started groaning like a muzzled dog.

  2

  After what felt like an eternity in a deep holding cell Agent Charles said was “not on any tour of the facility you’ll ever see,” Agent Clark walked in with two sodas, both looking chilly the way you used to see canned sodas in commercials forever ago. You know, that ice-cold perspiration on the can’s outer skin.

  Those sodas look incredible, he thought.

  He was sweaty as hell because they were keeping the room stifling hot. It was surely a ploy to make him uncomfortable, agitated, off-balance. That and he was handcuffed to a center pin in the metal table. He couldn’t move his hands much. They were a bit tingly from being elevated for so long, so he kept flexing them to keep the blood flowing. And the metal chair he was sitting on? Low to the table, super unpleasant.

  Agent Clark popped the soda’s top, drank deeply, gave a little contained burp, then said, “Your friend’s not sure what he wants to do with you. My God this soda is delicious.”

  He looked at the soda, then her, then back to the soda.

  She raised an eyebrow, looked at him and said, “I’ve got two, you want one?”

  “Yeah.”

  She popped the top of the new can, looked at him for a moment, then chugged half the soda and burped again, this time without restraint.

  “Yeah,” she said, straight faced, “this one’s just as good as that one.”

  “There are a lot of things my parents failed to teach me,” he said, “but good manners wasn’t one of them.”

  She gave a polite laugh then said, “I used to frighten my brothers, the way I could burp as a kid. Just needed some air, a bit of carbonation, and my hand to God, I could rattle the kitchen windows. You can’t do that kind of shit as an adult, which really stinks because it’s a pretty decent skill I possess.”

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Almost thirty.”

  “Well I don’t give a shit about your gastrointestinal superpowers or how carbonation seems to fuel you. It’s just flat rude to be drinking both sodas while I’m sweating like a hooker in church over here. I’ve got a puddle under my asshole for heaven’s sake.”

  She slides a can over, and as he reaches for it, the cuffs stop him. He’s half an inch from the soda can and getting pissed. Agent Clark gives a little laugh.

  “It really is the little things that make a day delightful,” she mused. “Now that we’ve got the pecking order established here, I want my team’s passwords back.”

  “With groups like Anonymous hacking personnel files of the CIA, Homeland Security, the IRS and the FBI,” Brayden said, “how are you not afraid?”

  “Fear is for the spineless.”

  “Or the stupid. You have no idea how easy it was to hack you.”

  She shifted in her chair.

  “Fair enough,” she said.

  “You think anyone from 4Chan is just going to walk in here and offer their services to you the way I am? You should be thanking me, not being the terrible hostess you’re currently being.”

  Reportedly 4Chan was where the infamous hacker group Anonymous spawned from. Everyone on the 4Chan site was tagged Anonymous and then assigned a user number. Like Anonymous42833, or Anonymous17546. None of the members knew each other, but they all worked together as a cohesive unit, filling in each other’s questions with answers, or piecing code together when necessary. The defining edge of this group was their shared mindset: freedom from oppression, freedom without restriction, freedom and absolute digital domination.

  “4Chan is a joke,” she said.

  Brayden laughed out loud and knew he had a woman who had spent too much time looking at the outside of a problem to know just how rancid it was on the inside.

  He tried to stop looking at the Coke can.

  “You see, it’s statements like that that make me think you might be totally unqualified to do this job,” Brayden said. “The very fact that you’re so dismissive of a group that’s got you over their knee most days has me thinking you might actually pass up what I’m offering, and that would be very, very stupid, Agent Clark.”

  “First off, I’m practically going to sleep over here with that fairy tale—”

  “And second?”

  “Second, what are you offering?”

  He started by telling her everything he found when he hacked her team that morning. How four of her agents spent enough time on the darker places of the net to have fallen victim to a really nasty Trojan horse that penetrated her shitty, Swiss-cheesed firewall and embedded itself into all four of their Operating Systems and was now nearly undetectable.

  “You’re talking about a rootkit?”

  “Worse. This is a bootkit. And not the kind that’s used to hook and patch Windows, get a load into the Windows Kernel and then gain unrestricted access to the entire computer. This little gem slips in cleaner, with virtually no detection. When I say virtually, I mean 99.999 percent undetectable.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “Because two years ago, I wrote the code and gave it away on 4Chan.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “If it’s the best available, and virtually no one on the planet can see it, much less disable it, would you rather be the victim or the creator?”

  “The creator.”

  “That’s how I knew what specifically to look for.”

  She thought about it for a moment, finished the last of her first soda, then snorted a long, dramatic breath in through her nostrils and said, “Bullshit.”

  “Agent Charles, Agent Kessler, Agent Pope and Agent Romanova have this virus. They also email each other the best free sites to look at uninfected porn.”

  “Like I said, bullshit.”

  “Their best porn was infected.”

  “They
can go wherever they like to stop predators and hackers. If they want to look at free nudie pictures to check for malicious code, then yes, they can do that, too.”

  “The places your agents went was exactly where your garden variety basement tweakers go. You know, the black hat hackers who crave chaos. That’s where they go and attach undetectable malicious code to only the best pics. Fat chicks or anorexic chicks, girls with obvious pimples on their butts or rashy spots from where the model first shaved her crotch and now has all those scars from ingrown hair…you aren’t going to see anything but the occasional and very obvious Trojan horse attached to pics like that. It’s the top shelf variety that gets the worst malware. That’s where your agents picked up this particular menace. Agent Charles’s computer was ground zero. Then that fat-headed knuckle dragger emailed a picture of this gorgeous sixteen year old blonde to Kessler, Pope and Romanov, who all opened the file and unknowingly unleashed hell. They actually opened it over and over and over again.”

  “They’re just doing their jobs,” she said, nonplus.

  “I understand cracking down on underage porn is a necessary part of your job, but you didn’t see the emails, or how hard Agent Charles scanned the pic set for viruses. Talk about intent, Agent Clark. What exactly are the rules about interoffice sharing of underage porn?”

  “Like I said, what they’re doing is just part of the job,” she said, sounding a little less sure of her agents.

  “The girl’s legs are spread open so wide, you can practically see her unborn children. Or at the very least, her tailbone. From the inside.”

  “You’re embellishing and it’s rude,” she said.

  “Yes, you’re right. But I’m trying to emphasize my point. Which is that your fancy 256 bit encryption doesn’t mean squat if it’s a boot virus because the computer always assumes the operating system is cleaner than a nun’s vagina. On reboot you’re thinking you have a shiny new system, that nothing could just get there on its own, but it can. What I’m here to tell you is it did.”