by J. G. Sandom
They discussed the pedigree and potency of consumer-generated media and news. “More news coverage is being generated today by ordinary people blogging and tweeting than by all the news organizations combined,” said the duck.
“More books and more music self-published. It’s a bottom-up world,” said the lobster.
“The long tail is the dog.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more. Want to Friend me?”
Without warning, the crowd near the dance floor exploded, seethed and shuddered. A girl screamed and the crowd tore apart. Decker felt his pulse quicken as a circle opened up near the balcony. Two men—one with the head of a moose, the other a walrus—stepped into the clearing.
“Not again,” said the lobster.
“What is it, a fight?” Decker asked.
“Sort of.”
The walrus and moose started to curse at each other. They circled about. Then, in unison, they suddenly stopped. They turned, faced the crowd, leaned down and picked up two objects, holding them high in the air directly over their heads—like trophies.
At first, Decker couldn’t make out what they were. They looked like toaster ovens from this distance, with arms. He squeezed through the crowd to get closer.
The men put the objects back on the floor and whipped out what appeared to be some sort of controllers.
As Decker drew nearer, it finally occurred to him. Robots! Small motorized gladiators. Moments later, the two robots lunged at each other.
They stabbed and they parried with spatulas and carving forks. They spun madly about on their wheels. The crowd pressed still closer, desperate to follow the action. Someone screamed. After several false parries, the first of the robots, with an arm like a claw, caught the second on the lip of its armor. They grunted and squealed, gears starting to smoke. The first robot slipped a bright silver spatula directly under the other one’s belly. Slowly but surely, as the crowd chanted around them, the first robot lifted the second one a foot off the ground, until—with a waving of arms—it tipped over and rolled onto its back.
Its bright silver casters continued to spin. Long thin metal legs squirmed in the air. It looked like a stainless steel cockroach, some giant metallic palmetto bug, wiggling and clattering about on the floor. Decker had a hard time looking away.
“Too bad we can’t settle all of our differences this way,” said Lulu. She was standing right next to him. She was so tiny, Decker hadn’t noticed her sneak up beside him.
“Come on, you can help me hand out the presents,” she added. “Before the Visigoths tear my condo to pieces.”
CHAPTER 16
Friday, December 6
With Decker’s assistance, Lulu brought out a platter of going-away presents for one of her colleagues, a psychology professor named Pamela who was teaching in Moscow the following semester. They were mostly gag gifts, like condoms emblazoned with the sickle and hammer, anti-Polonium jelly beans, and a host of electronic jamming devices. Pam gave a brief tearful speech, thanked her colleagues and friends, and the party began to break up soon thereafter.
When the last guest had finally departed, Lulu lowered the music and flopped down on a sofa in her workroom, an alcove off the main room near the balcony. It had been closed off during the party by curtains and—now that they were open again—Decker could see why. The place was littered with electronic knick-knacks and half-built PCs, motherboards, soldering irons, components of all shapes and sizes on workbenches nearby. She’s not very organized, he considered. Then she took off her mask.
Decker sat down on the sofa beside her, trying not to react. He took off his mask. He looked at his feet, and then up at her face once again.
In her early to mid-thirties, Lulu was startlingly beautiful—in spite of her eyebrow and nose studs, half-hidden tattoos, dark makeup and spiked EMO hair, tipped with purple and pink—which Decker hadn’t expected. Her appearance made him uncomfortable. Not the counterfeit covering. In his business, people put on all kinds of disguises. He was used to the masks people wore. It was because what lingered beneath still came out so profoundly, in such unyielding yet vulnerable lines...despite all that crap on the outside.
Lulu suddenly shivered. She reached into some hidden side pocket in her PVC bodysuit and pulled out an iPhone. “God, it’s fucking freezing in here,” she complained. “Now that everyone’s gone and, with them, their body heat.” She started to tap away at the screen. “This outfit may look cute but it’s hardly angora. Though that would be interesting. Can you imagine? Angora?”
“What are you doing?”
“Raising the temperature. My loft is a smart home, IP-enabled. You know: the Internet of things. If I wanted to, I could preheat my oven from here.”
“Or, you could—I don’t know—stand up and turn it on with your hand.”
“What are you, a Luddite?” she asked him. “You work with computers all day.”
“I’m as fond of technology as the next guy. I just think we rely on it more than we have to. More than we should. It’s a crutch, an addiction to some. I...Why do you hate the cold so much?” he asked, desperately trying to pull away from the crash.
“I was caught in a snowstorm once as a girl. Got frostbite on three of my fingers.”
“Are you serious? What happened?” he asked her, but she didn’t respond. She simply stared at her hand for a moment, daydreaming in silence.
Then she said, “I even have an aftermarket self-starter in my car in the basement so I can get her going from here, heat her up during winter remotely. I wish I could find a teaching gig in New Mexico. Somewhere warm. Anywhere but the northeast. Or Nevada. I don’t think Arizona. Too fascist. And I’m not a big fan of LA.”
Without warning, something fell to the floor only a few feet away. Decker leapt to his feet. He reached for his weapon when he saw what it was.
Some kind of toy. Another robot. Except that this one looked like a miniature dinosaur. A plastic T-Rex perhaps nine inches tall.
It started to wail without warning. “Bad boy,” said Lulu as she rolled to her feet. She rushed over to it.
The dinosaur squatted. It paused for a moment, quite still, and a piece seemed to break off from its hindquarters. Then it jumped, clawed the air. It shrieked and began milling about in tight circles.
“Bad boy,” said Lulu again. “Bad Marty.” She wagged a finger at it. “You stop that right now.”
“Marty?”
“Short for Dean Martin. You know: Dino. It’s a Geo Dino-Bot. I’m helping a friend of mine to refine him.”
“Don’t tell me it...poops,” Decker said, looking down at the piece which had broken off from the rear end of the robot. “Isn’t that taking realism a bit too far?”
Lulu laughed. “Just one of his lithium batteries. I programmed him to eject them whenever capacitance levels drop below ten per cent. He’s got three of them. Normally, he charges himself up with AC while he’s sleeping but there’s a bug in his programming.” Lulu dipped a hand into a nearby desk drawer and removed a fresh battery.
The Dino-Bot kept prancing about. Finally, she scooped it up in her arms, dropped in the fresh battery, and left the robot outside on the balcony.
“Why don’t you just turn it off?” Decker asked.
It kept attempting to claw its way in through the glass door but at least it was quiet now.
“I don’t know. I do sometimes. When I have to. But it just breaks my heart.” She shrugged. “He’ll calm down eventually.” Then she smiled and said, “Besides, Marty’s my watchdog. I can see what he sees through the Net. Have you eaten? I have some roast pork with red peppers and noodles in the fridge. Home made. My ninety-eight year old grandmother taught me the recipe. World-renowned. I could heat up a plate for you. Or did you already have enough finger food?”
Decker looked down at Lulu, at her large black on black eyes. It had been a long time since anyone had worried about his eating habits.
“Thanks, but I grabbed something at the airpo
rt. You...you make a good cat,” Decker said. “Your costume, I mean.” But he didn’t know what he meant. In fact, he had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. “Before,” he added, trying to recover. “On the phone. You told me you found something. Something important.”
Lulu sat down on the sofa. “I read your report,” she said. “But I’d rather hear it from you. From the beginning.”
Decker was reluctant to tell Lulu everything, despite her security clearance, but he found himself sitting beside her and delivering a summary of everything that had happened to date: the discovery of the Westlake security breach; the manipulation of DoD software; the attack on his home; the raid against the Crimson Scimitar cell on Seventy-second in Brooklyn.
When he was finished, Lulu nodded and said, “H2O2 used an undocumented feature of the Solaris OS that bound rpcbind, the portmapper, to a port above 32770. Then he went up to the daemon with his NFS request and used nfsshell to mount the file system remotely. The Westlake server, it turned out, was vulnerable to a PHF hole and—”
“I’m not really much of a computer guy,” Decker said, interrupting her. “I’m a cryptanalyst forensic examiner.”
“Oh, I thought...” Lulu shrugged. “In layman’s terms, H2O2 tricked the PHF CGI script to execute specific commands,” she explained. “Westlake was using an Apache server running under the ‘nobody’ account. The box was locked down but the config file was also owned by the ‘nobody’ account, which meant that he was able to overwrite the contents of the httpd.conf file.”
“Those are laymen’s terms?” Decker laughed.
“You need to know what he did in order to understand its significance. Because the system administrator at Westlake had changed the ownership of the file in the conf directory to ‘nobody,’ H2O2 could use the sed command to edit httpd.conf so that the next time the Apache server was started, it would run as root. Then, by using the same PHF vulnerability, he’d be able to gain full control of the system. That’s what he wanted, of course. But he needed to wait until the system rebooted itself to get in. Understand? Conveniently, there was a power outage in Waltham that evening.” Lulu sneered. “That’s where Westlake’s located. Now you tell me a surge in the grid blew a transformer in Brooklyn, exactly outside where Hammel was holed up. And only a few days ago, although it wasn’t much publicized, a couple of workers were electrocuted at the Shannon Nuclear Power Plant in Pottstown, PA, when a faulty generator went haywire. Again, a computer malfunction. Of course, we’ve known about trapdoors in our electrical grid for some time now. Like land mines, just waiting to go off.”
“Planted by whom?”
“The Chinese. The Russians. Who knows? Take your pick.”
“Jihadists?”
“There’s no way of telling. Until they become active, it’s hard to even locate them. How’s your daughter?” she asked out of nowhere.
Decker was taken aback. “What?”
“Your daughter. Wasn’t she in your townhouse in Georgetown when it was bombed. I thought I read that.”
“She’s fine,” Decker answered. It was hard to keep up with her. Lulu was all over the place. “Is this why you called me? To tell me how H2O2 broke into Westlake, about that power outage?”
“No,” Lulu answered. “There’s more.” She looked over at him. “Based on my analysis of the data taken from the hard drives recovered in Brooklyn, I think the Crimson Scimitar cell was set up. Hammel. His whole gang. And I don’t mean from Iran. All those communications, those instructions. They were meant to look like they came from Tehran, from the Brotherhood’s leadership council within the Revolutionary Guard. But they didn’t. They came from someplace quite different.”
“From where?” Decker asked.
“North Korea.”
Lulu stood up. She glided to a table nearby where she picked up a few pieces of paper. “And worse,” she continued. “Although I’m not sure I should be telling you this. They also seem to be communicating with someone at the NCTC. You may have a mole at the Center.” She leaned forward and gave him the papers.
Decker took a moment to scan them—line after line of pure hex code. “What is this?”
“They bounced me about the world pretty good but I was able to trace some communications and financial transactions back to Dandong, in the Liaoning Province of China. The North Koreans run hacking posts all throughout that region since the power and communications grid is more stable there. Certainly better than what they have in their own country. I can’t penetrate their Unit 110 networks remotely but this was embedded in three of the files. It’s an IP address.” She pointed at the paper where she had circled a series of numbers. “I don’t know whose it is. I’d have to hack into your systems to find out the ID of that particular workstation, which I’m not anxious to do. But that’s a Center IP address. That I know.”
Decker stared down at the page. She was right. He read off the digits one by one to be sure.
“Until I find out more information,” he began, “I’d really appreciate it if you’d not say anything about this to anyone.” He could feel his heart flutter. “If you don’t mind. Let me handle it.”
Lulu looked down at him with a cold steady gaze. “You sure that’s how you want to play this, Special Agent Decker? This isn’t the kind of thing you can keep secret. At least, not for very long.”
Decker climbed to his feet. “I won’t need very long.”
Lulu laughed, that same deep-throated sound he’d heard earlier in the hallway, except now that he knew what she looked like, it seemed even more out of sync. “Fine by me,” she replied with a shrug. “I was just doing McCullough a favor. By all means. Keep me out of it.”
“But thank you,” said Decker. He looked down at the floor. That’s where the robot had fallen, where it had flailed about on the ground. “Thanks for your help, though. It was an interesting party. I should be going, I guess. Got a plane to catch.”
Lulu fetched his coat from upstairs and, a few minutes later, Decker found himself outside in the cold once again.
Despite the ambient light thrown up by the city, the night sky was livid with stars. He stared up at the heavens, trying to pick out a Zodiac sign, but the stars seemed intractable. They looked scattered, unmoored.
Decker could not stop thinking about that workstation address. He knew whose it was. After seven years at the Center, he knew all the workstation addresses. But an IP address was just a machine, not a person. He would have to be sure. Before he said or did anything, before he acted, he would have to be certain.
CHAPTER 17
Sunday, December 8
The rickety China Southern Airlines Airbus A300 banked over the Yalu River, buoyed by breezes rising off the Yellow Sea. It was well after sunrise and yet the city still glimmered with lights. Even by Chinese standards, Dandong was not particularly affluent; per capita income was just over $3,000 per year. But compared to Sinuiju, Decker thought, her sister city across the river in neighboring North Korea, Dandong’s skyline made her look like Dubai.
Thirty-plus-story high-rises and hotels lined the riverside. The boulevards shimmered with storefronts and the neon of ubiquitous KTV Karaoke bars. Cars and motorcycles zipped by on wide boulevards. This is the view that the residents of Sinuiju wake up to each morning, thought Decker. He spotted the old Friendship Bridge linking China to North Korea, bombed during the Korean War. It spanned only half of the river. Dandong’s riverbank was towers and hotels and neon, Decker mused, while Sinuiju’s was brown mud, broken trees and worn buildings. The North Koreans didn’t have electricity, let alone private cars. It was like looking backwards in time. Decker had seen the region from space on Google Earth, a night shot across the entire peninsula. One side had been lit up, just as Boston had appeared from the air, a wide swath of light, and the other an ocean of darkness.
The plane came to a thunderous landing at Dandong Airport. There was a brief moment when Decker was stopped at customs but it proved to be nothing. “Welcome t
o Dandong, Mr. Williams,” the custom’s clerk told him, stamping his Canadian passport. Then he waved him on through.
Decker grabbed a cab and made his way to the Crowne Plaza Hotel, an opulent five-star establishment overlooking the river, where he found a reservation waiting for him under the name Toby Williams. His room was on the twenty-sixth floor with an imposing view of the shimmering city. There was a box on his bed from something called Pan-Pacific Enterprises, wrapped in brown paper and string. Decker opened it carefully. Inside, he found a Nikon COOLPIX P100 camera with a telephoto lens, a baseball cap with the Canadian flag on the front, a blue nylon backpack, and—in an envelope—a ticket for a boat tour on the Yalu in less than an hour. But no note, of course.
Decker smiled.
He unpacked, washed his face. Then he slung the camera round his neck, slipped on the backpack and hat, and headed out the door. Moments later, he was in another taxi heading for wharf No. 2.
A series of tourist jetties had been constructed along the banks of the river where boats large and small, fast and slow, moored before carrying groups of sightseers over to the Korean side of the river. The boats didn’t actually make land in Korea, of course, but they traveled close enough to afford paying customers a remarkably close look at the shoreline of Sinuiju, Dandong’s sister city. All for just fifty Chinese yuan, or about $7.50. Once on board, sightseers could even rent binoculars and buy postcards and drinks.