He fished for that knowledge, but there was nothing there. Just a vast black wall without window or door. Impenetrable. Immutable.
“Please…,” he said. But to whom? And for what?
Beside him, the dog whined.
He closed the cases and sat down, patting his pockets for something to feed the animal. Found nothing. There was a wallet, though. Stuffed with currency from four different countries. Plenty of euros.
The photo ID was his face, but the name was different. Kurt Grobler.
The man stood up slowly, took several long breaths, and then picked up the cases. He walked and walked until he found a convenience store. In there, on a local paper, he discovered that he was in Florence.
There were cans of dog food on a shelf, and he bought a dozen, as well as every kind of treat he could find. He paid for it, asked where he could find a cab, and took the taxi to the Hotel Bernini Palace on the Piazza di San Firenze. Big hotels were easier to become lost in. Fewer people noticed. And they allowed service animals.
Once he was inside his room, he fed Ghost, ordered room service, went into the bathroom to shower.
And was gone again before the water even hit his skin.
CHAPTER 39
PHOENIX HOUSE
OMFORI ISLAND, GREECE
“Explain to me what it is you’re doing.”
Scott Wilson pulled up a chair and sat next to Bug. He’d brought a peace offering of a quadruple-shot espresso with four Red Bull pumps and topped with chocolate whip and mocha sprinkles made special by the RTI barista, Mustapha. Wilson had winced while watching the drink being made because there was enough caffeine in there to give a coronary to a bronze statue of Atlas. It was known around Phoenix House as Bug’s Chug.
Wilson watched Bug sip—and sigh. The RTI’s chief of operations sipped from a cup of green tea with a drop of alfalfa honey.
“Which part of what I’m doing do you need explained?” asked Bug, dabbing at foam on his upper lip.
“You know what I mean,” said Wilson mildly. He was a short and very thin man who—to a casual stranger—looked like someone wasted by sickness. That was deceptive, though, because he was actually very fit, slender, and wiry. With his quiet business suits, striped club tie, pocket square, and thinning medium brown hair brushed straight back, he looked like a merchant banker or perhaps an estate lawyer for old money. Wilson had exceptionally pale skin and ice-blue eyes, both of which gave him a somewhat washed-out look. His Eton accent was precise and clipped, and his smile often looked more like a wince.
Bug, although about the same height and only a few pounds heavier, was his polar opposite. He had medium brown skin, black hair in dozens of braids, very thick glasses with heavy purple frames, a rather hopeful attempt at a beard that refused to look authoritative, and an earring fashioned to look like a hatchet stuck in the lobe. He wore a Wakanda Olympic Bobsled Team T-shirt, jeans that were so ancient it was impossible to tell the brand or original color, and flip-flops. The walls of his office were lined with shelves on which were hundreds of very rare and lovingly preserved superhero action figures, most in their original unopened packaging. The newest additions of which were the Marvel Legends: Silver-Shirt Luke Cage and Crimson Dawn Psylocke. There were also framed photos of Bug with Chadwick Boseman, Stan Lee, Lupita Nyong’o, and Danai Gurira.
Wilson, a very patient man, waited for Bug to decide how to answer.
“It’s authorized by the Big Man,” said Bug.
“Fair enough,” said Wilson. “But what is it?”
Bug grinned. “I’m doing to Kuga’s online presence what the Visigoths did to Rome.”
“I rather assumed that. Please give me some details.”
“You ask Church about this?”
Wilson smiled. “He said to ask you.”
“Ah.”
“Ah, indeed.”
Bug looked at the specialty drink, smiled, picked up a blue Sharpie, and wrote Attempted Bribery on the cup, sipped, and set it down with the words turned toward Wilson.
“Okay,” he said, “so we know Joe is out there doing some damage to the Kuga labs, right?”
“We do.”
“He’s hurting their R&D and taking some very bad people off the checkerboard.”
“Apparently,” agreed Wilson.
“I can’t help with that,” said Bug. “Not directly anyway. So, instead of sitting here doing nothing and going slowly out of my mind, I decided to see what kind of fun I could have with Kuga’s network online.”
“And by fun, you mean…?”
“Maybe it’s better if you don’t know.”
Wilson’s smile looked like thin plastic. “Tell me anyway,” he said.
“You won’t like it,” said Bug.
“Would you like a comprehensive list of all the things I haven’t liked recently?”
“Not really.”
“Just tell me,” said Wilson.
“With details or the highlights?”
“Let’s start with the highlights.”
“Sure. Well, we know that Kuga has some hotshots on the cyber warfare team, cyber espionage team, and cyberterrorism team.”
“You think they’re separate teams?”
“Sure. Maybe with some crossovers, but it’s easy enough to see that their online strategies operate according to different philosophies. Maybe there’s one or two guys overseeing it, but the actual attacks are all over the place. You see, they’ve been going after their competitors with sophisticated attacks going back a few years. I mean before Harcourt Bolton was sprung from that black site prison, which means he had infrastructure in place to run that part of things. That means Kuga not only had people already in place, but whoever was in charge of that division knew how to pick top talent. When I realized that I put some of my people on it, mostly looking for known or suspected top-tier black hat or black-leaning gray hat hackers who have either vanished recently or who’ve gotten rich.”
“Did you find any?”
“Sure. The one thing about the kind of hacker who specializes in this stuff is that a lot of them are young, and they have egos. They want to be known for what they’ve done. They tag it, usually by working some kind of smart-ass code into whatever software they wrote to do the intended damage.”
“What kind of damage?” asked Wilson. “And who are the targets?”
“Well, before Ohan was killed, his network had been thoroughly hacked. Dissected, really. We’ve acquired enough of his laptops, external drives, and even one mainframe—thanks to Arklight—and those files are riddled with malware. Those are applications designed to perform a variety of very malicious tasks. All kinds, too, and my bug-hunter guys were able to isolate each. There were malware strains designed to create persistent access to a network, which allowed Kuga to spy on Ohan’s day-to-day business operations. Other malware was planted to clone IDs, passwords, and the kind of encryption coding used to hide numbered bank accounts. We found these little bits of code left in the system, hidden inside Trojan horses, that pinged Kuga every time a transaction was made above a certain dollar amount. Kuga was able to review the purchases, which is how—I’m guessing—he was able to know which products and product lines were selling for top dollar, what the swings in sales numbers were, and who was buying the stuff.”
“Clever.”
“Very, and that code is a real bitch to find. Maybe two or three of the world’s top cybersecurity companies or groups could have found it, but then again, maybe not.”
“But you found it,” said Wilson. Not quite making it a question.
Bug sipped his drink and didn’t comment on that.
“We also found spyware that was so thoroughly wired into Ohan’s personnel records and business contacts that it gave Kuga a great laundry list for recruitment. Kuga’s team was siphoning off people from Ohan even before Arklight killed him; and within two hours of Ohan’s body being discovered by police, Kuga had his human resources people out there scooping up the rest of
the top talent. Very smooth, which tells me that it was something set in place for just such an event.”
“How is this you being a Visigoth?”
“I’m getting there,” said Bug. “Kuga’s people also did a massive amount of phishing attacks—using all kinds of tricks to get Ohan’s customers to hand over valuable information, such as passwords, credit card details, intellectual property, and so on. That worked so well because no one but Ohan was ever supposed to have the email addresses used in that level of black market sales. The fact that they were receiving emails at all made them appear legit. Which, by the way, is stupid. People are stupid. Most people should never be allowed anywhere near a computer or email or the internet.”
“You’re preaching rather than explaining,” said Wilson, sipping his tea and privately regretting having asked. He wished it were cognac in the cup instead.
But Bug was clearly getting into gear. He went through a whole slate of other kinds of attacks.
“There’s the MITM stuff,” said Bug with real enthusiasm. “That stands for man in the middle, which is where the attacker intercepts communications between two parties in an attempt to spy on the victims, steal personal information or credentials, or perhaps alter the conversation in some way. Now, you might try to tell me that MITM is old stuff and that end-to-end email and chat encryption prevents that kind of thing, but you’d be wrong.”
“I wouldn’t dare suggest such a thing,” said Wilson faintly.
“MITM has undergone a lot of upgrades and—at worst—looks like tech-support messages from the internet or email provider.”
“I see,” said Wilson, who barely did.
“What’s a bit more dangerous are DDoS attacks, where the bad guys flood a target server with traffic in an attempt to disrupt and perhaps even bring down the target. And I’m not talking some pansy denial-of-service attacks here—because most sophisticated firewalls kick their asses pretty easily these days—but superprograms that can hit multiple compromised devices belonging to the target and bombard them with traffic. We’re talking tens of thousands of emails, robocalls, text messages, and even social media posts. The target is buried and has to abandon their email addresses, domain names, and stuff like that. Kuga’s people usually hit them with political stuff from the opposing parties or, using the go-to they all like, filling the in-boxes and chats with kiddie porn. Then dropping dimes to whichever law enforcement agency has jurisdiction. It’s almost impossible to prove that the kiddie porn was planted, and by then, reputations are shot, jobs lost, security clearances removed, and lives destroyed.”
“Ugly, but I can see how it would be effective.”
“One of Kuga’s favorite tricks is zero-day exploiting. They are clearly following R&D on the latest business and e-commerce software, like when a new software-driven product launches, they slip in code to screw it up or totally hijack it. That’s bad enough for the good guys, but when they hit a major company doing some off-book shady stuff, like maybe doing backdoor deals with bad actors among the more negative foreign governments—then that company has to pay up or they’ll lose more than business. Or, if Kuga wants to screw up the flow of business, he has his people look for some vulnerability in the software—and there’s usually something—and then do as much damage as possible until a fix is found.”
“That sounds nasty but useful.”
Bug sniffed. “It’s okay. Not enough companies and organizations monitor for this, and done right, it creates a tunnel through a firewall. That’s a nice pipeline for introducing malware or other fun stuff.”
Wilson sat back and listened as Bug went on and on about the different types of cyberattacks, including business email compromises, cryptojacking, drive-by attacks, cross-site scripting attacks, password attacks, eavesdropping attacks, AI-powered attacks, and IoT-based attacks.
By the time Bug was finished, the chief of operations was somewhat dazed. He got to his feet, patted Bug on the back, mumbled, “Jolly good, keep up the good work,” and shambled out. He was back in his own office before he realized Bug never actually answered his question about what he was doing.
But Wilson did not dare go back downstairs for another round.
CHAPTER 40
CIVITELLA IN VAL DI CHIANA
AREZZO, TUSCANY, ITALY
Alexander Fong crouched behind his desk and listened to the gunfire. And the screams.
So much gunfire, so many screams.
But now … less of each.
He had a gun of his own, but it was a little .25 automatic that he’d only ever fired once, and then badly, missing the paper target with four of the six bullets in the magazine. The two that hit the paper missed anything of value. As for screams, he had plenty of those; they were still bottled up inside him. Ready to be let out if whoever was killing his people got through his office door.
That seemed likely.
Fong wondered if he should simply put the barrel of the little Raven Arms pistol under his chin and pull the trigger.
Would it work, though? He’d heard stories about people missing. Or maybe that wasn’t the right way to phrase it. Missing the right part of the brain—the part that would switch the brain off forever. Last thing Fong wanted was to be a cripple or a vegetable.
The gunfire paused for a moment.
Fong listened, praying that his people had managed to cut the invaders down. He had no idea how many there were. He’d only caught a glimpse of one man—big, dressed in body armor and wearing a helmet and balaclava. A man who moved like a soldier. There was a dog, too. Also armored. They had torn into a group of Fong’s administrative assistants. In the four seconds he’d watched, the carnage was terrible. Like nothing he’d ever seen. Fong was so far removed from anything his employers did that all he ever got to see was the sanitized versions on the news. Sure, he’d heard stories, and some of them were extreme to the point of grotesque absurdity, but that was different from actually seeing it. Those stories were abstractions. What he’d seen in the foyer of the administrative suite was brutally real.
He was aware of the historical irony of what was happening. His direct supervisor, Rafael Santoro, had chosen this building because it was in the square outside where Hermann Göring’s Nazis massacred 244 civilians from this town in retaliation for the killing of two German soldiers. Except the townsfolk were innocent—the killings had been done by partisans. The slaughter in the town square, way back in June of 1944, had had the opposite effect of what Göring intended. Instead of cowing the civilians, it had sparked an increase in guerrilla activity and gave the Germans no real peace. When the war ended, any surviving Germans were hunted and torn apart. Santoro held that up as an example of how not to manipulate people into cooperation. Fear of what might happen was always more effective than having martyrs to rally the passion of resistance.
Was irony the right word? Maybe it was karma. Or something. It was hard to structure his thoughts.
The pistol felt like a toy in his hand. Stupid little gun. Weren’t these things supposed to make him feel strong?
The silence outside seemed to stretch. All he could hear now were the cries of crows and ravens. The birds seemed to be everywhere these days. He hated them. They touched some unspecified and atavistic dread buried deep beneath the surface of his introspection.
But … why wasn’t anyone yelling anymore?
Fong hid where he was, not daring to even peek out from behind his desk. His hands were sweaty, and he was afraid that if he had to shoot, the gun would just slip out.
Then there was a sound.
Not a scream. Not a gunshot. Not the creak of an opening door.
It was a growl.
And it was right above him.
Fong raised his head slowly and stared up. Amazed. Dumbfounded. Terrified.
There, crouched on top of the very desk behind which he cowered, was the dog. Big. White, except for its muzzle, which glistened with an awful, dreadful crimson. The animal bared its teeth.
Tho
se teeth.
Some were dog teeth. The others…?
They were metal. Pasted with red. Twenty inches from his face.
Fong fumbled with the pistol, trying to bring it up. Uncertain if he’d racked the slide. Was there even a bullet in the chamber? God, he couldn’t remember.
A shadow fell across him, and he turned to see that the man was here, too. Both of them had come into his office without making a sound. The gun in the man’s hand was big and ugly, and it was pointed at him.
CHAPTER 41
BLUE DIAMOND TRAINING CAMP
CADDO MILLS, TEXAS
They called it a camp, but it was really a gymnasium, part of a middle school that had been closed due to redistricting and budget shortfalls. The windows were all sealed and blocked, and there was a stout metal security fence around the perimeter, with a guard station at the entrance and regular foot patrols.
Bunny pulled the old Ford into a slot next to the GMC, and they got out, waiting as Saxon finished a call inside his car. Then he got out, still smiling. He was a smiler, that one, and Top Sims didn’t like the smile at all. It was the kind of smile alligators wore right up until they took a bite out of you. There was nothing at all trustworthy in that grin, as if he knew no one trusted him and wanted to assure them that they shouldn’t. Top thought about how much fun it would be to bust out every one of Saxon’s flawless teeth and maybe knock the lantern firmness out of his jaw. Maybe kick his balls up into his chest cavity for good measure.
But all that was unlikely, since Saxon was a low-level talent scout, and messing him up would endanger the mission. Fun to think about, though.
“So what’s the play here, Flagg?” he asked Saxon.
“Let’s go see,” said Saxon vaguely. He paused. “You boys carrying?”
Top and Bunny hesitated as if surprised by the question. Bunny gestured to his ankle.
“Got a Colt Mustang XSP,” he said.
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