Threat Vector

by Tom Clancy

  “It’s unbreakable?”

  “Nothing is unbreakable. You can be sure that somewhere some hacker is doing his best to pick apart Cryptogram and others like it, trying to find a way to defeat its security. But so far no exploits have been discovered. We use something like it here at The Campus, but Cryptogram is actually a generation improved from what we have. I’ll be switching us soon. CIA has something about four gens older.”

  “But . . .” Jack read back over the brief e-mail. “He ordered Kartal to erase the old e-mails.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Clearly he didn’t do what he was told.”

  “Nope,” Gavin said. “I guess Center didn’t know his man in Turkey didn’t remove them. Or else he didn’t really care.”

  Jack answered back: “I think it’s safe to assume he did know and he did care.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because Center sat there and watched us kill Kartal’s buddies and he did not warn Kartal that his cell was under attack.”

  “That’s a good point.”

  “Jesus,” muttered Jack, thinking about the implications. “This bastard Center takes his computer security seriously.”

  “A man after my own heart,” Gavin Biery said, with no indication of sarcasm.

  —

  After the English-language e-mails had been checked, they went to work with the translators on the other electronic correspondence, but there was nothing of interest save for some communication between the members of the Libyan ex–JSO cell and some back-and-forth chitchat between Kartal and an old colleague in Tripoli.

  Next Biery tried to trace the e-mail address from Center, but very quickly it became clear that the mysterious benefactor of the Libyan cell was using a complicated spoofing system that bounced his connection from one proxy server to another around the world. Biery tracked the source of the e-mails back through four locations, finally making his way to a node at the South Valley branch of the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Library system in New Mexico.

  When he announced this fact to Jack, Ryan said, “Nice work. I’ll talk to Granger about sending a couple of operators there to check it out.”

  Biery just looked at the younger man for a moment before saying, “Don’t be naive, Ryan. The only thing I have managed to do is rule out Albuquerque’s South Valley branch library as Center’s base of operations. He’s not there. There are probably another dozen relay stations between him and us.”

  When that did not pan out as they hoped, Jack and Gavin began going through Kartal’s financial software, tracking the wire transfers Center sent to the Libyans as payment for their footwork in Istanbul. The transfers came from the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank Ltd. in Dubai, and at first they looked like they would be a solid lead as to the identity of Center. But one of Biery’s computer geeks hacked into the bank’s account-holder data. A trace of the owner of the account revealed that the money had been illegally transferred out—electronically stolen—from a Dubai-based hotel group’s employee payroll fund.

  While this was a dead end as far as identifying Center, it did provide a clue. To Biery, the computer network expert, this was evidence that Center was himself a skilled hacker.

  Scanning through the systems file folder, Gavin found something interesting. “Well, hello there,” he said as he began clicking open files, moving around windows, and firing his cursor all over areas to highlight lines of text at a speed that Ryan found impossible to track with his eyes.

  “What is all that stuff?” Jack asked.

  “It’s a pretty nice attack tool kit.”

  “What does it do?”

  Gavin did not slow his manipulation of the windows and files on the screen. Jack guessed he’d looked at about twenty different files in the past forty-five seconds or so. As he clicked and, Jack assumed, absorbed all the data on the screen in front of him, he answered, “The Libyan could have used this stuff to break into computers and computer networks, steal passwords, get hold of personal information, change data around, clean out bank accounts. You know, the usual bad stuff.”

  “So . . . Kartal was a hacker?”

  Gavin closed all the windows and turned around in his chair to face Jack. “Nah. This isn’t real hacking.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is a tool kit for a script kiddie.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s the term for someone who can’t write malicious code themselves, so instead they use a ready-made package like this, created by someone else. This attack tool kit is like a Swiss Army Knife of cybercrime gadgets. User-friendly hacking materials—malware, viruses, key loggers, password-breaking code, stuff like that. The script kiddie just sends this out to a target computer, and it does all the work for him.”

  Biery’s attention returned to the monitor, and he began looking at some more files. “There’s even an instruction manual for him here, and special tips on how to gain access to computers run by network administrators.”

  “If he gains access to a single computer run by an administrator, he can see other things on whatever network the computer is part of?”

  “Right-o, Jack. Just think of yourself. You come into work, light up your node, put in your password—”

  “And then do whatever the hell I want.”

  Biery shook his head. “Well, you have user-level access, so you do whatever the hell I let you. I have administrator access. You can see a lot of data on our network, but I have a lot more access and control at my fingertips.”

  “So this Libyan had the tools to slip into certain networks as an administrator. What kind of networks? I mean, what type of companies, industries? What could he get into with these scripts?”

  “The type of industry doesn’t have anything to do with it. He could target any industry. If he wanted to steal credit card numbers, for example, he might attack restaurants or retail point-of-sale or something like that. But if he wanted to get into a university system, an airline, a government agency, a federal reserve bank, he could do all that just as easily. The tools to break into networks don’t discriminate by industry. The tools will do whatever they can to find a way to root into the network via different attack vectors and vulnerabilities.”

  “Like?”

  “Like passwords called ‘password’ or ‘admin’ or ‘1234’ or ‘Letmein’ or something else easy to guess, or ports left open that would allow access, or information that is not behind the firewall that might reveal information about who has access to what info, so then the attacker can target those people via social media and the meat space, so that he can make an educated guess about what their password might be. A lot of it is the exact same social-engineering stuff you spies do.”

  “Back up a second. What the hell is the ‘meat space’?”

  “The real world, Jack. You and me. Physical stuff. Not cyberspace.”

  Jack shrugged his shoulders. “Okay.”

  “Haven’t you read any William Gibson?”

  Ryan confessed that he had not, and Biery gave him a look of utter bewilderment.

  Jack did his best to get Biery back on the task at hand. “Can you tell who he used the attack tool kit on?”

  Biery looked it over for a moment more. “Actually, nobody.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, but he never launched any of this stuff. He downloaded it one week to the day before you whacked him, but he never used it.”

  “Where did he get it?”

  Biery considered this for a moment, and then he opened the drive’s Web browser. Quickly he scanned through the history of the webpages Kartal visited, going back several weeks. Finally he said, “Script kiddies can buy these tool kits on the Internet on special underground economy sites. But I don’t think that’s where he got it. I’d bet money
that this Center character sent it to him via Cryptogram. He got it after the e-mails between them ceased and Cryptogram was launched, and the Libyan didn’t go anywhere on the Internet that would have these tools for sale.”

  “Interesting,” Jack said, but he wasn’t sure what that meant. “If Center sent it to him, maybe it was part of a bigger plan. Something that never got off the ground.”

  “Maybe. Even though this stuff isn’t the highest-level hacking known to man, it can still be pretty damaging. Last year the computer network of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland was hacked. The FBI spent months and millions on the investigation, only to find out that their culprit was a seventeen-year-old operating out of a karaoke bar and cybercafé in Malaysia.”

  “Damn. And he used a tool kit like this?”

  “Yep. The vast majority of hacks are done by some flunky who only knows how to click his mouse. The real malicious code is written by what are called black-hat hackers. They are the bad guys. Kartal may have the attack tool kit on his machine, but I have a feeling Center is the black-hat who sent it to him.”

  —

  After all the documents were mined by Jack for intelligence value, Gavin Biery began hunting through the device’s software, looking for any clues as to how Center had been able to remotely operate the camera. There was no obvious application to do this present on the drive, and no e-mails between Kartal and Center discussing Center’s access, so Biery concluded that the mysterious Center had probably hacked the Libyan’s computer without his knowledge. Biery decided he would take as long as required to ferret out the hacking tools Center used in order to learn more about Center’s identity.

  In this endeavor Jack Junior was out of his element; he could no more pull intel out of raw software code than he could read Sanskrit.

  Ryan rejoined his fellow analysts and went to work looking into the Libyan cell and their mysterious benefactor via other means, while Biery spent virtually every waking minute when he was not working on other Hendley/Campus IT duties huddled in his lonely but secure conference room with the Istanbul Drive.

  It took Gavin weeks to open and test and retest every one of the hundreds of executable files on the drive in order to see what it did and how it affected the rest of the machine, and when this task yielded nothing of value he then drilled down into the source code, the text-based instructions of each program, tens of thousands of lines of data that, ultimately, revealed nothing more than the executables.

  Then, after he’d expended weeks of effort, he began digging into the machine code. This was the computer language sequence, long strings of 1’s and 0’s that really told the processor what to do.

  While the source code was high-tech and arcane, the machine code was nigh on indecipherable to anyone but an expert in computer programming.

  It was mind-numbingly boring, even for a guy who lived for computer code, but despite suggestions from his fellow computer geeks that he was chasing ghosts in the machine, and nudges from the top brass at Hendley to hurry up or declare the exercise fruitless, Gavin kept working at his slow, methodical pace.

  —

  Jack had been thinking about the night in Istanbul and the subsequent monthlong investigation while he waited for his computer to boot up. He realized he’d lost track of time for a moment, snapping out of it to find himself staring at the camera above his computer monitor. It was a built-in device that was sometimes used for Web chat communications with other departments around the building. Even though Gavin had pronounced the company network impregnable, Jack still spent a lot of time with that twitchy feeling that he was being watched.

  He looked deeply into the camera, still thinking of that night in Istanbul.

  With a shake of his head he said, “You’re too young to be paranoid.”

  He stood to head over to the break room for a cup of coffee, but before he walked off he grabbed a Post-it note from a pad next to his keyboard, then stuck the gummed portion of the paper over the camera lens.

  A low-tech solution to a high-tech problem, more for his own peace of mind than anything else.

  As Jack turned he took one step toward the hallway before he stopped suddenly, heaving in surprise.

  In front of him stood Gavin Biery.

  Jack saw Biery virtually every workday, and the guy never exactly appeared to be the epitome of good health, but today he looked like death warmed over. Here at eight-thirty a.m. his clothes were wrinkled, his thinning gray-brown hair was askew, and dark baggy circles hung pronounced above his fleshy cheeks.

  On the best of days Gavin was a guy whose face looked like the only light it ever saw was the glow of his LCD monitor, but today he looked like a vampire in his coffin.

  “Holy shit, Gav. Did you spend the night here?”

  “The weekend, actually,” answered Biery in a tired but excited voice.

  “You need some coffee?”

  “Ryan . . . at this point, I bleed coffee.”

  Jack chuckled at this. “Well, at least tell me your shitty weekend was worth it.”

  Now Biery’s soft face tightened into a smile. “I found it. I freaking found it!”

  “You found what?”

  “I found remnants of the malware on the Istanbul Drive. It’s not much, but it’s a clue.”

  Jack pumped his fist into the air. “Awesome!” he said, but internally he could not help but think, It’s about damn time.

  NINE

  While Ryan and Biery headed together down to the technology department, John Clark sat in his office, drumming the fingers of his good hand on his desk. It was just past eight-thirty; the director of operations of The Campus, Sam Granger, would have been in his office and working for more than an hour already, and the director of The Campus and the “white side” operation, Hendley Associates, Gerry Hendley, would just now be settling into his office.

  No reason to put this off any longer. Clark picked up the phone and pushed a number.

  “Granger.”

  “Hey, Sam, it’s John.”

  “Morning. Good weekend?”

  No. Not really, he thought. “It was fine. Hey, can I come talk to you and Gerry when you guys get a moment?”

  “You bet. Gerry just walked in the door. We’re free right now. Come on.”

  “Roger.”

  —

  Five minutes later Clark stepped into the office of Gerry Hendley on the ninth floor of the building. Gerry stepped around his desk and executed the left-handed handshake that most everyone in the building had been offering Clark since January. Sam stood from a chair in front of Gerry’s desk and led John to the chair next to his.

  Out the window behind Hendley’s desk, rolling Maryland cornfields and horse farms ran north toward Baltimore.

  Gerry said, “What’s up, John?”

  “Gentlemen, I’ve decided it’s time to face facts. The right hand is not coming back. Not one hundred percent. Say seventy-five percent, tops, and that’s only after a hell of a lot more therapy. May be another surgery or two in my future.”

  Hendley winced. “Damn it, John. I’m sorry to hear that. We were all hoping this time under the knife would be the one that made you one hundred percent again.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  Sam said, “You take as much time as you need. With the ongoing investigation into the Istanbul Drive, the stand-down could last several more weeks, and if analysis doesn’t—”

  “No,” John said flatly with a shake of his head. “It’s time for me to pack it in. To retire.”

  Sam and Gerry just stared at him. Finally Sam said, “You are a crucial part of this operation, John.”

  Clark sighed. “I was. That son of a bitch Valentin Kovalenko and his henchmen ended it.”

  “Bullshit. You’ve got more capabilities than most of the National Clandesti
ne Service at Langley.”

  “Thanks, Gerry, but I’ve got to hope the CIA is sticking to paramilitary operations officers who can hold a firearm with their dominant hand if required to do so. That skill is beyond my capabilities at the moment.”

  Neither Gerry nor Sam had a response to this.

  Clark continued, “It’s not just the hand. My clandestine fieldwork potential was damaged by all the press about me last year. Yeah, the heat is off at the moment, most of the media ran off with their tails between their legs when it came out that they were spreading propaganda for Russian intelligence, but think about it, Gerry. It will just take one intrepid reporter on a slow news day to do one of those ‘Where are they now?’ stories. He’ll tail me here, they’ll dig a little deeper, and then next thing you know 60 Minutes will be down at reception with a camera, asking for a moment of your time.”

  Hendley’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll tell them to get the hell off my property.”

  Clark smiled. “If it was only that easy. Seriously. I don’t want to see another convoy of black SUVs with FBI tactical guys pulling up on my farm. Once was more than enough.”

  Sam said, “The kind of expertise you possess is invaluable. How ’bout you hang it up, operationally speaking, and transition to more of a behind-the-scenes role?”

  Clark had thought about this, of course, but in the end he realized that The Campus was set up as efficiently as possible.

  “I’m not going to just roam the halls here, Sam.”

  “What are you talking about? You keep the same office. You continue to do—”

  “Guys, we’ve been in stand-down mode since Istanbul. The entire team is working their computers eight hours a day. It’s a sad fact that my grandson is better with a computer than I am. There is absolutely nothing here for me to do now, and, should the Istanbul Drive get resolved and the operators get the green light to go back into the field, in my diminished capacity, I won’t be taking part.”