Arch Enemy

by Leo J. Maloney

  Francine might as well have been salivating. “Are you kidding me? This kind of story could take me on the interview circuit and land me a book deal and get me an internship at the New York Times. Let’s get this ready for the next issue.”

  Chapter 56

  Morgan reclined in the seat of the empty Gulfstream jet after his gourmet meal. After a hell of a couple of days, it felt damn good to stretch out in luxury for a few hours, rest his weary legs, and apply cream to the mass of mosquito bites that covered most of his skin. He glanced out the window, clouds white in the moonlight far below. They must be somewhere over Spain. He pulled down the blind. He didn’t care for heights.

  He closed his eyes for a rest, but that didn’t last for two minutes before the flight attendant cleared her throat and set a computer in front of him. “A little dessert, sir.”

  The screen came on and resolved into the Zeta War Room as seen from around the big screen. Kirby was sitting like he owned the place, at the head of the table. Shepard was in his usual seat at the far end, on the side. Almost every inch of the table was strewn with reams of paper that seemed to have their own chaotic order.

  “Whoa, that’s not a great angle for you,” said Shepard. “Look at the size of those pores.”

  “How about we get to the point? I’m missing precious sleep for this.”

  “This is your debrief for your next mission,” said Kirby. “Our analytical team has gained access to the data on Dominic Watson’s hard drive.”

  “Yeah? What did you find?”

  “Chat logs and forum posts,” said Shepard. “Thousands of pages’ worth. We’ve been piecing together the story while you were off tramping in the jungle. Here, I’m sending them to you now.”

  A folder full of text files popped up on the screen. Morgan opened a file at random. It was a chat log for a conversation between a capt_omega and trackoverflow. It was mostly gibberish, peppered by the odd ha-ha or lol.

  O’Neal trudged in from the lower right corner of the screen with another ream of paper in her hands, two or three hundred sheets’ worth, her light frame bent under their weight. She slammed it down on an empty corner of the table, adjusted her glasses, and swept her bangs out of her eyes. “Here’s the last of the trickster convos.” Morgan looked through the files Shepard had sent and saw that it was spelled Trixxter. “Hi, Morgan.”

  “Karen. Any of you care to fill me in on why I’m going to Dublin?”

  “When we first made contact with Watson, he was spooked,” she said, rifling through papers. “He wouldn’t say what it was that had gotten him scared, but I got the impression it wasn’t Acevedo. He said he wanted to disappear. We promised to make that happen if he—” Her voice faltered, her gaze was cast down. “If he did this for us.”

  “We knew that Watson was on a number of electronic security forums,” broke in Shepard. “People who get together to talk about hacking. Mostly about how to stop it. That’s what most of this is.”

  “I found a conversation he had saved on his computer,” said O’Neal, holding up one of the packets and setting it back down in its original place. “That’s packet number 27D, for the viewer following us at home. A couple months ago, one of them, a guy whose handle is tridentkatana—yeah, I know—shared with the group a security breach he had found in major networks. It could allow a hacker to see certain off-limits information in databases.”

  “What are we talking about?” said Morgan. “User passwords?”

  “That’s what he figured at first,” said Shepard. “He took it to the group because he wanted their help figuring out if it really was what he thought it was. They could stand to make a lot of money from big tech companies like Google that pay rewards for this kind of thing.”

  “And was it as bad as they thought?”

  “Turns out it was worse,” said O’Neal. “It was a vulnerability hidden in the programming language of all the major encryption protocols. I’m talking about something that could give a hacker free range over all encrypted communications. I’m talking government, major corporations, private e-mails. Anything. They were calling it Blackrot.”

  “Their little circle was sitting on the biggest tech story of the decade,” said Shepard. “This could shake the bedrock of Internet security. Everyone would scramble to protect their data. Connections would be down for days, possibly weeks. Banking activities would halt. The stock market would take a nosedive. We’re talking major panic.”

  Morgan’s brow furrowed.

  “But wait, it gets worse,” he continued. “Because this gives them access to government communications as well. Watson’s group found out that exploiting this breach leaves a signature. And they were finding that signature everywhere. This means someone has been using the Blackrot vulnerability to get where they’re not supposed to go. And I mean everywhere. For months, at least. Not only e-mails but banking and secret government databases.”

  “Do we think this had something to do with Watson’s death? That it’s the same people that attacked me at the apartment?”

  “Show him,” said O’Neal.

  “About a month ago, Watson got this message.” It popped up on Morgan’s screen.

  Being followed. They are on to us. Trust no one.—Meatatron

  “Meatatron was Guillermo Santos, native of Albuquerque, New Mexico,” said O’Neal. Shepard showed him the picture. “Killed in a car accident two days after that message was sent.”

  “He wasn’t the only one,” said Shepard as he cycled through the photos. “Philip Sykes, handle tridentkatana. Killed six days later in Liverpool. Asphyxiated by a carbon monoxide leak in his apartment. Elizabeth Nguyen, handle Trixxter.” The screen showed a chubby woman in glasses and bobbed hair. “Killed three weeks ago in New Jersey. Hit her head and drowned in her own bathtub.”

  “And Quentin Ferguson, AKA Captain Omega.” Thirtyish, black, shaved head. “Killed two weeks ago, right here in Boston.”

  “Did he have a connection to Dominic Watson?” Morgan asked.

  “They were friends,” said O’Neal. “Like, in real life.”

  “You found evidence that they met on the computer?”

  “No,” said O’Neal. “I knew them personally. I was at Fergie’s funeral.”

  Ah. Her reaction finally made sense.

  “That’s how we first made contact with Watson,” she continued. “Dom told me he was spooked. Fergie’d come up to him a few days before he died. They had gone silent in the forum. But Fergie had found out all their names as an exercise, and he knew that the others had died. He told Dom, and Dom became desperate for a way out. He confided in me about some things, although most of it I’m only learning now.”

  “And now he’s dead,” said Morgan.

  O’Neal seemed stricken anew with grief and guilt at the reminder.

  “Yes,” said Shepard. “But we caught a break. There’s one left. Séamus Quinn, alias trackoverflow. He lives in Dublin.”

  “That’s where I come in?” asked Morgan.

  “This is the last member of their circle,” said Shepard. “Someone is killing them off for what they knew. If we are to get to the bottom of this, we need that last man.”

  Chapter 57

  Andrea Nyhan frowned as she stared at the list of active processes running on the Acevedo server. It was her job to know each of those scripts backward and forward, including what they did, their priority status, when they were running, and about how much processing power they took up at any given moment.

  This was why this particular process was bothering her so much.

  “Marvin, come see this.”

  Marvin Brainard, fat and fussy, pulled up a chair, scraping along the carpet, and set it down next to her. The chair squeaked under his weight. “What is it?”

  “It’s this weird background program,” she said. “Shows up as this, here.” She pointed to where it said btrck.exe.

  “Looks like the backup tracker for XT. There’s always a bunch of instances running.”<
br />
  “That’s what I thought,” she said. “But see the name of the process? It’s for the older version of the software. They changed the process name in the latest update. See, it’s running here, look.” She pointed to another process labeled ibtrck.exe. “Somehow they’re both running.”

  “Someone forgot to update their tags. That or it’s some of the old software that wasn’t scrubbed in the update.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I checked, though. There’s nothing left after the update, not even in its original location. And yet there it is. Plus, it’s behaving weirdly. The processing patterns are all wrong.”

  “That’s why we call it a bug.”

  “Maybe.” She chewed on her pen. “But if I were to install a worm, this is exactly the way I’d do it.”

  “Honey, you’re paranoid.”

  “Isn’t that what we’re paid for?”

  “Got me there.” He looked at the process log, lost in thought. “Well, I guess there’s no harm in running this by Steve. Just in case.”

  “Later,” she said. “I’m going to poke at it and see what else I can figure out.”

  She ran a number of diagnostics, trying to pin down exactly what it was doing and where it was coming from. The regular tests came out normal. She then tracked the program’s location on the drive and navigated to it. If the usual tools weren’t working, she was going to decompile it and find out what it did by looking straight at its insides.

  She opened her decompiler, hit Open, navigated to the program file, and double-clicked it. The computer processed the request for a few seconds and an error message popped up.

  FILE NOT FOUND.

  “What the—”

  She opened the folder that had contained the file. It wasn’t there. She refreshed it, made sure that the computer was displaying hidden files, checked for it through different programs. No dice. It was gone.

  She banged on her keyboard.

  This attracted Brainard’s attention. “Your elusive little process giving you trouble?”

  “It’s disappeared.”

  “What do you mean it’s disappeared?” He bent down over her keyboard and performed a few checks.

  “I’ve done that already,” she said. “It’s just not there anymore. It’s like the program was smart enough to notice that someone had found it out. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “Could I have some pen and paper? I’d like to jot this down.”

  She handed him a pen from her cup and opened her top drawer for a scrap of paper. She dug through some important documents and found a sheet from a yellow legal pad. She tore a piece off the bottom and gave it to Brainard, who jotted down the names of the processes and their locations on the server.

  “I’m going to look into this on my computer,” he said. “I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

  She exhaled, looking at her screen.

  Her attention was drawn to the yellow sheet of paper on her desk, the piece missing from the bottom that she’d torn out to give to Brainard. She frowned. She couldn’t think of what it might be. It certainly wasn’t hers.

  She unfolded it. At the bottom was a phone number, and above it—

  GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN—D

  Andrea was struck by nausea. D? As in Dominic? How long had this been here?

  Something was very wrong, and she wondered whether she even wanted to find out what that was.

  Chapter 58

  The train pulled in to the snowy platform at Wicklow Station, which was a squat yellow stone building with four brick chimneys protruding from its roof. Morgan came out into the cold—a wind more bitter and biting than in Boston—and passed through the station to come to the street on the other side, where Mick Larkin was leaning back in the driver’s seat of his 2001 Ford Focus, still baby-faced with his blue eyes reading a newspaper.

  He nearly jumped in his seat when Morgan knocked on the window, and then his mouth erupted into a broad grin.

  “You don’t call, you don’t write,” he said as he got out of the car. “You stinking gobshite yank!” They embraced like the old friends they were. “How are ya?”

  Morgan got into the passenger seat and Mick pulled out so fast Morgan had to grab the handle. Mick was the only bastard Morgan knew who was crazier than he was behind the wheel.

  “How’s Nora? Ciaran?” he asked, wincing as Mick had a close shave with a low stone wall.

  “He’s a downright pain in my ass,” he said. “Smoking, brawling. You should be glad you have a girl.”

  If only he knew.

  “So, yer here on business, then? Let’s get down to it. I found your guy. Lives in Dublin.” Mick grinned ear to ear. “Just like old times, eh? So what’re we talking? Terrorist? Murderer?”

  “Nerd,” said Morgan. Mick shot him a puzzled glance. “Stumbled into something he shouldn’t have, and now he’s marked for death.”

  “You wanna save him?”

  “What I need is to catch whoever’s after him. The people behind this have resources. I don’t even know how far it goes.”

  “You never asked if it was dangerous,” Mick said. “You just asked if it was right.”

  “You haven’t even asked me that.”

  “I know you,” said Mick. “I don’t have to.”

  “Well, it is. Gonna be dangerous, I mean.”

  “Good.”

  “At least let me pay you,” said Morgan.

  “Fook you,” said Mick, extending the words at least three syllables past their regular carrying capacity.

  He’d always been a proud son of a bitch.

  Mick reached in the back seat and picked up a heavy black duffel bag, putting it in Morgan’s lap. “Here’s the hardware you requested. Although I don’t know how the hell you can afford all this stuff.”

  “Two words,” said Morgan. “Expense account.”

  “Seriously?”

  “One of the perks of working for the private sector.”

  “You’ll have to put in a good word for me one of these days,” Mick said.

  Morgan rooted around inside the bag. The first thing he pulled out was the Bullard T4Max thermal imager, a handheld device in a blue plastic casing with a lens on one side and a screen on the other that was somewhat reminiscent of an old home movie camera. This was the Cadillac of its class. It felt solid in his hand. Super high saturation temperature, wide field of view, high-res.

  “This’ll do,” said Morgan.

  Added to the imager was a handheld parabolic listening device (good enough, Morgan thought), a professional-grade lock-pick set, and a gun in its holster along with two magazines. A Walther PPK. He pulled it out to inspect it.

  “Put that back inside, you fookin idiot!” Mick yelled. “You can’t be seen with that.”

  “What? We’re in the car.”

  “My car, my rules.”

  “It might help if you didn’t attract the attention of the police by driving like a maniac.”

  “Like I said, ‘my car—’ ”

  “Your rules. Got it.” Morgan lowered the PPK into the bag. “Well, thanks for the gun.”

  “I remember how partial you were to that wee little piece,” he said.

  “Much appreciated,” said Morgan as he inspected the weapon inside the bag. He then examined each of the thirty picks in the kit, each with a different head, and the six different tension tools.

  He and Mick talked all the way up to Dublin, about old times and trading war stories they hadn’t yet exchanged. It was just under an hour before Mick brought the car to a stop across the street from a low brick apartment, just north of the River Liffey.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Second floor.”

  “Think he’s home?”

  “Records show he works at home, gets food delivered,” said Mick. “Not much in the way of spending outside the house. This fella doesn’t get out much.”

  Morgan pulled out the thermal imager and pointed it at the apartment.

  �
��I’m getting nothing,” said Morgan.

  “Are you sure that thing is working?”

  He turned the lens to the neighboring apartment. It clearly showed the figure of a woman, in the fluid reds and yellows of the infrared signature. Then he turned it back to point at Quinn’s.

  “There’s no one in there,” Morgan reiterated.

  “No one alive,” said Mick.

  “What do you think?” said Morgan. “Move in?”

  “After you.”

  They got out of the car and went to the door of the apartment building. Morgan waited for a lull in foot traffic and drew his lock pick and tension tool while Mick kept a lookout—ready with his police ID in case anyone spotted them. European locks could be a heck of a lot harder than American ones—they tended to come standard with features that resisted lock picking, like mushroom-shaped pins that had false catches. This lock turned out to be that kind. But Morgan had practice. Hard as it was, it still took him under a minute to get it open.

  They came inside and Mick closed the door behind them. They crept up the stairs to Quinn’s door. Morgan grabbed the lock pick from his pocket, but when he touched the door it creaked open. The lock was busted.

  Morgan and Mick walked inside the apartment, and the first thing that was obvious was that someone else had gotten there first. The apartment was completely turned over—all drawers pulled out, all cushions cut open, the floor strewn with papers and objects.

  What didn’t help at all was that Quinn didn’t seem to be particularly neat to begin with. Dishes were piled high in the sink, their smell pervading the apartment, and food delivery boxes were piled on one corner of the counter.

  “Christ, this fella really didn’t get out much, did he?”

  “If there was anything to be found, someone else has found it,” said Morgan.

  “What about Quinn?”

  Morgan took the lead to look at the bedroom and bathroom. “It’s clear,” he said, relieved. “He’s not here.”