Kill Switch

by William Hertling

  Besides, she knew nothing about their backend systems. She had no idea what computers they had, what their network topography looked like. She’d be hunting blind.

  Hunting. Blind. A hunting blind.

  Hunters set up blinds in the woods. Waited for their prey to come to them.

  Maybe she couldn’t fabricate a presidential executive order, but she could probably manipulate the president into creating a legitimate one, if she gave him something tempting enough.

  Both the president and the First Lady were active Tapestry users.

  If their private data was exposed in such a way that suggested the government itself had leaked the information, the president would go on one of his legendary tirades. He could potentially order the stop of any wiretaps into Tapestry, which would have the effect of delaying the FISA court order.

  She stopped pacing. She needed to get to a safe house.

  She sanitized herself of traceable electronics and left Tapestry headquarters in hurry. Outside, she walked a few blocks and entered a gym where she had memberships under her name and an alias. In the locker room she changed her clothes, added heels to alter her gait, and a long, bulky coat to disguise her shape and missing arm. She left through another exit, walked down an alley to a garage she rented where she kept an old, pre-computer car.

  She grabbed a bag with a computer and accessories out of the trunk and brought it up to the front seat with her. She drove to Northwest Portland and parked in the basement garage of a condominium, a building she’d scoped out before. Pulling a charged smartphone out of the laptop bag, she used a door entry code she kept up to date by sniffing phone data from building residents through the Tapestry client.

  Before she entered the building proper, she ran a hack to disable the building cameras. She made her way up to the common area on the fifth floor. As expected, given the mid-work week time, the common room was empty. She positioned herself in a back corner. When she started her laptop there were over a hundred wi-fi access points to choose from, both from the building she was in, as well as the apartment building across the street. High density living was a panacea when it came to net access.

  What she needed was the appearance of a pre-existing government backdoor into Tapestry, a tap that gave access to the private Tapestry data.

  Of course, the President and First Lady’s actual messages were protected, encrypted such that even Angie couldn’t access them without using backdoors that would put their clients into diagnostic mode. She didn’t dare do that because the government was almost certainly monitoring their phones and would detect Angie’s tampering. Without that access, Angie couldn’t determine what either of them had said privately and therefore couldn’t leak any significant data.

  But it was no secret that the President didn’t trust the First Lady. If Angie created messages that gave the appearance of communication between the First Lady and a third party, the President would freak out.

  But whom? And what sort of scenario? A romantic tryst? Leaking government information? A business liaison? The romantic interest seemed like it had the best potential to inspire a jealous rage, but it also seemed cliché. Promises of business favors was more viable.

  She did a quick search, correlating the First Lady with assorted business people. She found a promising connection with the CEO of a hotel chain.

  The hacker community had screenshots and PDF reports from PRISM, the government’s surveillance suite. She used these existing screenshots to fabricate new images, showing exchanges between the First Lady and the CEO, with vague language about a government contract in exchange for even more vague reciprocity.

  She created new messages in the First Lady’s Tapestry account, then deleted them. The system wouldn’t maintain the message, but it would keep the meta-data trail, showing that messages with corresponding timestamps and sizes had been deleted. It meant that when a forensics team analyzed the First Lady’s account, they’d see a deletion trail that exactly matched what had been leaked. It was not real evidence, but it created the appearance of corroborating evidence, and that was what mattered.

  Then she submitted the screenshots to anonymous leaks accounts at two major newspapers, informing each that she was submitting to more than one paper. That would help ensure they didn’t sit on the leaks for too long.

  The shit should hit the fan before the day was out.

  Chapter 28

  Alice messaged Enso to get down to the war room pronto.

  That was unlike her, so he dropped everything and made his way down to the basement.

  The war room had an ever-present tang of body odor, heavy with stress. Three dozen or so analysts and hackers worked together in the cramped room. Borrowed from assorted agencies and groups, they were all tasked with full-time work on BRI.

  There was a smaller, glass-walled enclosure at the end of the room, and Alice was in there with two others. She gestured for him to join them.

  Most of the people in the room were deep into their oversized displays, but a few noticed him enter and looked as if they might try to get his attention. He made his way down the room, holding his hand up to forestall interruptions.

  “What’s up?” he asked as he entered.

  “You’re going to like this,” Alice said. “Tell him, Cassie.”

  Enso turned to the other two. One female, one male, both geeky and shy. He tried to remember where he’d gotten them from and failed. Maybe Air Force intelligence?

  “Prime Subject left the office today,” the woman said.

  “That’s Angie,” Alice said.

  Enso frowned at her. “I know who Prime Subject is.” He turned to Cassie. “Go on.”

  “She went to a gym, changed clothes, and picked up a car a few blocks away. We caught a few seconds of this on satellite and correlated with local surveillance cameras. We went active on satellite tasking and followed her to an apartment building. We switched on full monitoring as soon as she entered the building, and redirected data traffic from within a six-block radius through STARFISH.”

  Enso glanced at Alice.

  “Cassie is on loan from cyber command, and STARFISH is one of their secret tools.”

  “It lets us intercept all the traffic in realtime,” Cassie said. “I triggered STARFISH right away, because it changes traffic latency by two to three milliseconds. By the time Angie would have been in a place to check latency, STARFISH was already on. She wouldn’t have been able to detect the change.”

  Enso nodded, and Cassie continued.

  “Prime brought up a VPN and started traffic patterns consistent with onion routing over the VPN. We tried but couldn’t break the encryption.”

  “I hope you didn’t bring me down here to tell me that. This is the same story I hear every time from all of you.”

  Cassie shook her head. “The session lasted three hours and thirty-seven minutes. Six minutes before her session ended, we captured two anonymous submissions to news outlets, both originating from the onion network.”

  “You broke her onion routing connection?” Enso asked.

  “No, Quantum linked the two.”

  Enso looked at Alice.

  “Cyber command is letting us use Quantum, too,” Alice said. “One of their dark projects.”

  “Quantum monitors about a hundred million points of interest,” Cassie said. “Websites, chat boards, known hacker hangouts, that sort of thing. It correlates traffic across geography, time, and point of origination. We gave Quantum the details of Angie’s connection, it gave us back a list of activities ranked by probability that they were connected with her.”

  “Quantum is sure these originated with Angie?”

  Alice shoved a tablet in front of him. “Look at these messages. What do you think?”

  Enso started to read them. Alice didn’t wait for him to finish. “They’re clearly inflammatory. What’s the President going to do when he sees this? He’s going to freak out, claim we’re wiretapping him and his family, and order us to shut
down our backdoors into Tapestry.”

  “Backdoors we don’t even have.” Enso shoved the tablet into Alice’s hands. “She’s playing a game, trying to stop the FISA court order. Why? She has to know she can’t succeed.”

  “Over the long term, no,” Alice said. “But maybe she doesn’t need to win over the long term. She could be trying to stall, even for a few days. Maybe to cover up something, data she needs to hide, something like that.”

  “We can’t let this get leaked,” Enso said. “What are our options?”

  “Already taken care of,” Alice said.

  “We crashed the servers the drop boxes were running on,” Cassie said. “Wiped everything. All their data and logs. They’ll have no trail that it was ever submitted.”

  “I hope that’s okay,” Alice said. “We had to act immediately. If we waited, even for a moment, they could have backed up the data to another machine.”

  Enso’s heart swelled. For all the difficulties of working in the government, sometimes things came together perfectly. “Great job. You did the right thing.” He shook their hands. “For once we have the upper hand.”

  Chapter 29

  By the time Angie made it back to the office, it was late, and nearly everyone was gone for the day. She caught up on a final few messages, then contacted Thomas and told him she was on her way home.

  That night, she compulsively checked the Tapestry news feed, the version locally cached on her phone, but there was nothing yet to indicate anyone acting on her anonymous leak.

  “Come to bed,” Thomas said. “You’re cut off.”

  “I need to check one more thing.”

  “What you need is sleep. You have to take care of yourself.”

  “You don’t understand,” Angie said, more sharply than she meant to. “I have to…” Out of the corner of her eye, she realized Thomas was walking away.

  “Thomas, I’m sorry.”

  She followed him to the bedroom, where he was already climbing into bed.

  “This is urgent,” she said. If the gambit didn’t work, she was going to have to come up with a plan B. What was plan B? Just how many ways were there to manipulate the highest echelons of the government?

  He pulled the covers over himself. “It’s always urgent, isn’t it? Everything’s urgent. If it wasn’t important and urgent you wouldn’t be working on it.”

  “Right,” Angie said, concerned that by agreeing she was walking into a trap.

  “You’ll have time for me tomorrow. Except that tomorrow never comes. There’s only ever today. And every today, Tapestry is urgent and important.”

  “I’m sorry it seems like that,” Angie said, climbing in to lie next to him. She stroked his chest. Could she get a senator on her side? Could she blackmail the vice-president? Certainly he had to have some skeletons in his closet.

  “There is no ‘seems’. This is reality. This is fact. I understand Tapestry is important. It’s your life mission and there’s no one in the world better suited to it. But if you think that you’ll solve all of the problems tonight and spend tomorrow with me, you’re mistaken. Sometimes, some days, us—you and me—that has to be the most important thing. Otherwise we’ll never get a turn.”

  “I know, I know,” Angie said, and she did. There would only be so many days with Thomas. She laid her head on his chest. “I love you.”

  Thomas stroked her hair, and Angie waves of exhaustion hit her. She almost fell asleep. No, not tonight. She wasn’t going to miss tonight.

  “Take off your underwear.”

  “Now?” Thomas said. “It’s late. I have to get up early tomorrow. The Tapestry party is tomorrow night.”

  Angie reached down between his legs, felt him get hard. “There’s only today, buddy. No tomorrow. Now are we going to get busy or what?”

  Thomas stared at her. “Well, I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.” He stripped off his undershirt, and climbed on top of her, pulling off her panties and tank top.

  When they were both naked, he pressed up against her sex. His warmth entered her, and soon Tapestry was gone from her mind, and there was only Thomas, his body strong against hers, pumping between her legs, a wave building, cresting, and crashing.

  In the morning, Angie and Thomas went through their routine, a choreographed dance through bathroom, closet, and kitchen. Each got their morning rituals done with a modicum of interaction. He went into the kitchen, she checked her feed for any activity related to her leaks, found nothing. He made the coffee while she showered. Thomas hopped into the shower when Angie got out, and she went to the bedroom to dress and check her feed again. Nothing.

  She was starting to feel panicked. She definitely needed a plan B.

  She microwaved egg and sausage sandwiches while he dressed, and she brought the food to him.

  “What are the plans for the party tonight?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “The party. You said something about Emily coming over.”

  The Tapestry party was a million miles from Angie’s attention. She had to buy the T2 team time. There was no way she could allow the government to destroy Tapestry with the FISA court order. “Yeah, Emily’s coming to help us get dressed. We’re going to carpool over with her and Jeff.”

  “Is she bringing her new car?”

  Angie shrugged noncommittally, not really paying attention. The FISA court order was like entering a relationship with an abusive spouse who would spy on your every action for the rest of your life. The best plan was to not get into that relationship in the first place, because once you were in it, escaping it took a hundred times more effort.

  It wasn’t merely that escaping the entanglement was difficult, but that the relationship itself was disempowering, so that there was almost no will or power left to fight with.

  She’d been there before with her first husband. She waited until he was drunk one night and used the excuse to drive them home. But the fight to get behind the wheel herself, even when he was drunk, had been almost more than she could manage. Only her total desperation had allowed her to keep pushing to drive. She wasn’t even trying to escape at that point, only to end it all. She had planned to kill them both.

  Death was the final escape, the only solace to the totally trapped.

  Oh.

  There had to be other options, right?

  Chapter 30

  That night Angie felt almost relaxed. Almost. Repard, her old mentor, taught her the importance of believing. It was one of his little lessons, back when they’d worked on fooling the lie detector.

  “The lie detector is easy, Angie. It’s just a machine. Fooling people, people who know you, that’s harder. You have to half believe the lie. But most difficult of all is fooling yourself. To make yourself believe a particular truth. That’s the key, you know, the key to living with yourself.”

  Half the time she hadn’t known what he was talking about, but in retrospect, she thought it was just before he pulled the big con, the hack that had almost sent him and everyone else to jail. He’d probably been talking about how to live with the consequences of his actions. It was clear enough that he had a conscience. If he was a sociopath, it probably would have been easier.

  “Fuck,” Angie said, pain pulling her back to the present. “That hurts.”

  No one ever told Angie what she’d have to go through as the CEO of a tech company. She might have stuck with killing people if she’d known. It was easier.

  “Stop fidgeting.” Emily held her face in place. “Let me finish tweezing you.”

  “Nobody is going to look at my eyebrows.”

  “I will. Look, you’re done. You’re perfect.”

  “Can I stand?” Angie got to her feet and looked in the mirror. She smoothed her dress, adjusted the neckline, and turned sideways, her arm toward the mirror. She’d let Emily talk her into a black cocktail dress a few weeks ago. She wasn’t a complete stranger to girly things, but she couldn’t remember wearing a dress like this since s
he moved to Portland.

  The half billion user milestone for Tapestry had been looming large for a while. The celebration had started as just another corporate function, but enough vestiges of their startup culture still throbbed in the blood of the company that they’d ended up with an amalgamation of wiccan rituals celebrating fertility and a cocktail party.

  Angie almost teared up thinking about the birthing ceremony Igloo had arranged at the company’s first winter solstice party. It was a potluck, because cash was short. Igloo brought in blankets and shaped them into the unmistakable form of labia, and the employees took turns being a baby emerging from a vagina.

  Emily cleared her throat. “Stop that.”

  “Stop what?” Angie said, pulling herself back to the present.

  “You’re worrying about how your stump looks.”

  Angie looked down, and it was true, the sleeveless dress made her stump stand out, but it was the furthest thing from her mind tonight.

  “Everyone is going to look at my stump,” she said, because that’s what Emily expected her to say.

  “Ange, it’s a company party with your employees. They’ve seen your stump. Besides, they’ll probably be looking at your ass.”

  Angie forced a little laugh and turned three-quarters around to check out her bottom in the mirror. “My forty-eight-year-old ass? I don’t think so. I eat too many burgers and sit in meetings all day.”

  Emily smacked Angie’s butt. “It looks great. Besides, I’ve got something for you.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a gift-wrapped bundle.

  “What’s this?” Angie said.

  “Something to go with the dress.”

  “Where are your kids tonight?” Angie asked.

  “With the nanny. She’s working late.”

  Angie set the soft package down on the dresser and tugged at the wrapping paper, trying to steady it with her stump, but in the end just ineffectually sliding the whole thing around. Emily put one hand on the package to hold it in place.