They left the fabrication area and returned to Neptune’s offices, passing sales, human resources, IT, and upper management before ending at a tidy closet, secured with a badge-activated lock, for Neptune’s network equipment. “Great,” Alien said, checking color-coded cables labeled by use and location. The more organized IT was in a hub like this, she had learned from experience, the greater the odds the network was secure everywhere else.
At the end of the tour, Rafael set Alien up in a conference room. She booted her laptop, plugged a six-inch black wireless antenna and special-purpose Wi-Fi-monitoring network card into the USB ports, and ran a free software program called Kismet. Unlike with the company credit card, Richard had been happy, even enthusiastic, to outfit Alien for this assignment, promising, “This is the top-of-the-line gear.”
And he was right.
Within seconds, a list appeared of nearby wireless access points and their respective clients, traffic, signal strength, and encryption, if any.
“How can I help you help me?” Rafael asked.
Alien turned and looked out a window to the parking lot.
“I’m going to take my laptop for a walk,” she said.
As Alien circled the Neptune building, she kept adjusting the antenna. Every few yards, the names of new access points appeared on her screen—some from Neptune, some from neighboring buildings, including ones she couldn’t see. Whenever she detected a Wi-Fi network, Alien checked to see whether it was using an outdated encryption standard called WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy); if so, she tried to crack it. Once she completed her initial walking tour, she sat down on a bench outside Neptune’s main entrance, paused Kismet’s packet capture feature, and checked the length and file size of the results.
When she got back to the hotel that night, she’d produce a map that showed the relative strengths of access points that were available from each location.
Alien looked up. Blue skies. The sun shone, its heat tempered by a gentle breeze. She smiled as she walked past the parking lot, along the tree-lined highway access road, testing how far away she could get a signal, until the ocean came into view.
Alien met Rafael back in the conference room. “I have to go through and analyze the results, but I was able to get into your barcode scanner network and manufacturing equipment network from all the way down the street,” she said. “Pretty close to the highway.”
“No kidding.” Rafael tugged his shirt collar.
“I have a pretty nice antenna,” Alien said. “But anybody can order it on Amazon. And your manufacturing network is still using WEP encryption.”
“I know,” he said. “We can’t upgrade to WPA”—Wi-Fi Protected Access, the new standard. “Our vendors don’t support it.”
“Well, I captured a bunch of packets,” Alien said. She swiveled her laptop to show him the raw data. “If you want, I’ll do a live demonstration for your execs and then they can decide if they want to invest in security.”
“That would get their attention,” Rafael told her. The factory and its physical contents weren’t Neptune’s most valuable resource. Its plans and data were. With them, a competitor could save itself hundreds of millions of dollars in research and development costs. Worse, America’s foreign adversaries could leap a generation in their own military capabilities. What did a water tub test matter if an enemy stole Neptune’s technology and used it against the United States?
“Really? The highway?” Rafael asked after a lengthy pause.
She nodded.
“We’re leaking,” he said.
“Everyone is,” Alien said.
Alien got home from California the afternoon of Wednesday, July 4. Her only meaningful mail was a cluster of credit card statements indicating overdue payments. Tents and sleeping bags, camp food and cooking gear filled the Fireberry living room. A dozen friends and housemates ran up and down the stairs, adding to the heap before a camping trip to Maine.
Eddie, her old friend since college, was with them. As he gave Alien a hug, the sleeves of his V-neck tee tightened around his biceps. “I’m so excited,” he said. “It’s going to be the best weekend ever! You’re beautiful! Come with us!”
Alien laughed. It felt so good to see Eddie again. And she really wanted to join them.
“I can’t,” she said wistfully. The Pentagon presentation was Monday morning. In the meantime, she had to write the Neptune report and prepare.
Alien spent Sunday afternoon rehearsing for her presentation. When she heard raindrops pitter-patter against her skylights, she thought of her friends and their camping trip.
Where are they? They should have been back hours ago.
Looking forward to hearing their stories of the trip, she’d chosen the latest flight to Washington she could.
At five p.m. Alien called her housemate Kinza, who didn’t answer.
Alien called Eddie but got his voice mail greeting. “Have a beautiful fucking day and don’t hold nothing back!” he said.
Alien smiled.
Seven p.m. came and went. Alien had to head to Logan. Maybe they stopped for dinner.
She was lugging her suitcase down the stairs when her phone rang. It was Kinza.
“What’s going on?” asked Alien. “Where is everybody?”
“You didn’t hear?”
Alien waited, afraid to answer.
“Eddie’s missing,” Kinza said.
Alien hated herself for flying to D.C. instead of driving straight to Maine to join the search party. “Can I move up my return ticket?” she called and asked a customer service rep at one a.m., after checking in to her hotel.
“I’d be happy to assist you,” the woman said. She typed. “There’s a two p.m. flight this afternoon,” she reported. “The change fee is a hundred and fifty dollars.”
Alien pictured her pile of credit card bills, plus the additional line item for this hotel room. “You don’t have a bereavement fare?” she asked.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” the woman responded. “May I ask the name of the deceased and the telephone number of the funeral home?”
“My friend is missing—not dead,” Alien told her.
“Oh,” the woman said. “The bereavement fare is only for after someone has died.”
Alien opened her purse and paid the regular change fee with her backup backup card.
He’s still here—he has to be.
After hanging up, Alien tried Eddie again. The same message answered. His voice mailbox was full.
Alien stayed up all night. She called Eddie again and again, until it was time to shower, down an Adderall, and get dressed.
Alien tried and failed to smile as a Pentagon police officer took her picture the next morning. He printed a barcoded fluorescent yellow laminated badge and told her where it had to be displayed, directly above her bent spoon pin on the jacket of a new brown-striped black skirt suit. To the right of the photo, Alien saw, was her name, the Pentagon Force Protection Agency logo—an eagle, wings unfurled over the iconic five-sided building—and, in all caps, ESCORT REQUIRED.
Under that was printed the name and phone number of her escort, Melvin Harris, of the Information Assurance Branch of PENTCIRT—the Pentagon Computer Incident Response Team.
“Welcome,” said Harris, who carried himself like a soldier but was dressed in dark blue civilian trousers and a crisp white short-sleeved shirt and blue and red rep tie. “We’re going four rings in, two stories down, six corridors over,” he told her. “Should take about twenty minutes.”
Alien grimaced, already regretting her choice of two-inch stiletto heels. “Lead the way,” she said.
They walked, stopping multiple times at checkpoints for badge swipes or ID verifications. Alien complied automatically, meanwhile examining her surroundings. Access control equipment varied from door to door. Wonder if they have a consistent procurement policy for their security systems, she thought. Then, well into the windowless bowels of the building, a gift shop appeared, selling coffee
mugs and challenge coins, Iraqi “Most Wanted” playing cards, and a T-shirt with red, white, and blue sequins in the shape of the Pentagon.
Her feet screamed.
At last they reached the basement auditorium: four hundred black-backed seats and a gray stage fringed with black velvet. Flags surrounded a podium behind which Harris loaded Alien’s PowerPoint slides on his own secure laptop. Her talk title—“Defending Yourself Online”—appeared on giant mounted flat-screen monitors to the left and right.
The gist of her presentation—on encrypting email and hard drives, installing firewalls, and avoiding viruses, keystroke loggers, and other malware—was the same as it would have been for almost any client. Keeping military information safe, however, involved much higher stakes than even the highest-profile corporate or government case, since the worst possible outcome was not just lost time, money, and trust but deadly warfare. Meanwhile, everyone was a potential adversary, from what InfoSec professionals called “script kiddies”—inexperienced and juvenile (in both senses of the word) hackers—to well-funded offensive hacking experts in the service of other nation-states.
People filed in, some in suits, some in military dress, some in normal work clothes, all with ID badges.
“Ready?” Harris whispered after an A/V guy clipped a mic to her. It was a few minutes to nine. The presentation, including the Q&A, was scheduled to last two hours.
Alien nodded. She felt nothing now—not fear, not excitement. She wanted to finish this and get back to Cambridge.
While she was being introduced, Alien glanced down at her left wrist. At work, she always wore a Raymond Weil watch with gold hands and a small, easy-to-read white face her mother had given her as a college graduation present. It wasn’t there. She must have left the watch in her hotel room, Alien realized.
“Everyone—please remember afterward to fill out feedback forms,” Harris said.
Alien opened by thanking the audience.
“What a privilege to be here,” she said.
The normally bustling Fireberry was empty. Lights out, no music. This gave it a haunted quality. Alien carried her bags up to the third floor. She shed her suit and heels and threw on shorts, a T-shirt, and sneakers. She ran to Star Market, filling the Volvo with apples and bananas, cereal and granola bars, cheese and tortillas, soup and sliced bread, peanut butter and jelly. It was just like one of her usual grocery runs, but without the return trip home.
She drove alone to Maine.
Her friends waited, crammed three or four to a room, in an Econo Lodge in South Portland. With them were Eddie’s mother, father, and sister.
Alien hugged them, one by one.
They all played cards after dinner. “What happened?” Alien asked.
“We walked around the lake Saturday afternoon,” Kinza told her. “We were nearly back to camp when Eddie wandered off on his own. He had taken some acid. The rest of us started a fire. He never came back.”
“He’s fucking with us,” said Alien. “It’s Eddie.”
Kinza smiled. She bit her lip to keep from crying.
“When Eddie does come back, I’m going to kill him for this,” Alien said.
Finding Eddie was a forensics case, Alien told herself.
First thing the next morning she visited the campsite, turning from a wide tree-lined lake to the start of the forest trail where Eddie had gone missing. With several friends, she combed the twisting path, calling, “Eddie! Eddie! Eddiiiie!” If he was out here in the woods, however, he’d hidden himself too well.
Uniformed state police officers visited the hotel that evening. Their leader, a fit fifty-year-old sergeant with a crew cut and a mustache, passed out copies of a topographic map. “The dots mark everywhere we’ve looked,” he said.
Eddie’s mother saw the marks for the campsite, forest trail, and surrounding mountains. “But why are there all these dots in the lake?” she asked.
The sergeant spoke gently. “Those are dive team locations,” he said.
They searched and waited two more days. Friday morning, Alien inventoried Eddie’s backpack, making a careful list in one of her Moleskine notebooks she used for Elite Defense work. Afterward, Alien folded Eddie’s clothes. When she finished, her hands smelled like the smoke of a campfire she had never seen.
That night, the state police arrived at the Econo Lodge looking for Eddie’s parents. The rescue team leader asked them to come to his cruiser. Alien and the rest of her friends watched from the room where they’d been sharing a pizza.
The trooper spoke quietly, then opened the front door of the cruiser and took out a clear plastic bag that he showed them.
Eddie’s mother began to cry and fell into Eddie’s father’s arms.
Alien’s heart sank. She stepped forward anxiously.
In the bag was what looked like one of Eddie’s Crocs.
Alien and the others soon learned that a kayaker had found it, floating in the middle of the lake.
It was a recovery operation now.
Alien’s eyes were red from crying when she got home. Alone in her room, she checked her work email mechanically. Half her inbox was a message chain with the subject line “Re: Pentagon.”
Alien swore. She’d run out as soon as possible after the Q&A, leaving Harris, her host and escort, to collect the evaluations. She didn’t care what they said.
Alien opened the earliest message from her bosses, bracing for the blowback.
“Congratulations, Agent Tessman!” Bruce wrote, with a cc to all the other Jedis. “You averaged 9.8 on your evaluations. The Pentagon wants us back two more times this year.”
Eddie’s body was recovered three weeks after he disappeared. The first Sunday of September, his thirtieth birthday, friends and family gathered in a park near Fireberry for his memorial service. Later in the month, Alien flew to New Mexico to see Piñon.
Mace. Frostbyte. Eddie. “Why does this keep happening?” she asked Piñon over lunch at a tiny Mexican restaurant on Airport Road.
Alien and her friends encouraged one another to push limits and do daring things on their own. But they were also supposed to watch out for one another. Eddie’s death made her realize anew how difficult it was to do both at once.
“Let’s make a pact,” Alien said, only half-joking. “I’ll go to your funeral if you go to mine.”
Piñon lit an Eagle. “I’m not coming to your funeral,” he said.
Alien was hurt. “Come on. I’ll come to your funeral,” she teased. “I love you.”
Piñon puffed. “I love you too, sweetie,” he said. Then he changed the subject. “Have you been riding your motorcycle?”
“Lots,” said Alien. “I’m not scared anymore.”
Piñon didn’t say anything, but she saw satisfaction in his single nod.
He seemed sadder and a little mysterious when it was time to drop her off at Jake’s house, where Alien was having dinner and crashing on her old boss’s couch. It was a pricey neighborhood, and Piñon’s self-maintained blue Subaru beater contrasted sharply with the sleek new luxury vehicles in surrounding driveways.
“I’ll miss you,” he said quietly.
“Oh, Piñon.” His words sounded so final. Alien hugged him. “We’ll be friends a long time.”
She hopped out and shut the car door. It closed with a thud.
In early October, Alien flew to North Carolina to help a hacked video game company. The week after that, Castle had contracted for a new round of physical pentests in and around corporate headquarters.
Her first day off in between, Alien rushed through a series of errands. She was in front of a pet store, on her way to buy crickets for a new pet frog, Pterodactyl, and lizard, Nancy, when her cell phone rang. Alien saw a Santa Fe area code.
It was the fire artist from the Island commune.
“Hey—I just wanted to let you know,” he said.
Alien’s shoulders shook at the next sentence. Her eyes stung. She buckled.
“How?” she a
sked.
“A heart attack in his sleep.”
Alien struggled to sit down on a step in front of the pet store. She lowered her head between her knees and sobbed.
Alien spent seven hundred dollars—fuck the bereavement fare—to fly back to New Mexico.
Standing the next morning in the middle of the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge walkway, Alien couldn’t reconcile the feeling of warmth from the sun and the cold of the wind. She was with Piñon’s two ex-wives and two grown children.
The high-pitched chirps of American dippers and dusky flycatchers echoed off the canyon walls. The vast steel bridge trembled a bit whenever a vehicle crossed. Clouds swelled overhead, making shadows pass and play.
The family members handed the urn from one to another, each reaching in to scatter Piñon’s ashes to the white water coursing 550 feet below.
I thought Eddie would stay young forever. And I thought Piñon would never die.
“I travel with you to play in the nine rivers . . . ,” Alien read aloud from The Pocket Tao Reader: “The sky will darken soon; / But wanting to stay longer, / I forget about going home.”
The Castle return engagement started two days later. Alien and Jim succeeded at every site but the last, though it wasn’t their fault. They went to the address they had been given of a data backup and disaster recovery center on Chicago’s South Side. To their trained eyes, it looked like an abandoned brick building.
“Is this it?” Alien asked.
“Well, this is the address,” Jim said.
Sleet began to fall. They peeked as best they could through filthy windows and saw piles of old newspapers. No servers. No people.
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