Back in the apartment overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, Jake stood and watched while Sheldon worked his machines. The once-pristine space was now strewn with take-out containers and cans of Coke.
Jake smiled wryly. It was the first time he’d heard anyone say anything nice about his father. He would have never considered using his dad for this, but Eamon had convinced Jake to give the old man a chance. “Yeah, he is good at fooling people.”
“Beautiful,” Sheldon added, turning back to his computer monitors. “We’re already getting ping-backs. Our Trojan is in at Commerce Bank.” He grabbed a piece of pizza. “Like I told you, the higher you go in the executive food chain, the less they think the rules apply to them. How many times do you think these guys have been drilled by their security group—do not stick a memory key from an unknown source into your computer?”
Jake played along. “How many?”
“A million times. But drop the right lure in front of their noses, and whammo! With all that equipment guarding those banks it’d be like getting into Fort Knox, but these guys are handing over the keys.”
“Won’t they detect it?” Jake asked. This was all new to him.
“Eventually. But average detection times are on the order of weeks, and we only need days. We’ll work sideways through the network, from private banking into the production servers. Shouldn’t take more than a few hours. Detection will be hard because we’re not trying to exfiltrate data.”
“Exfiltrate?”
“I mean we’re not trying to steal information. What we’re going to do is modify data on a minute level that’s hard to detect,” Sheldon explained. “If you knock a system down, it’s easy to locate the ‘problem’ and stop it. But making small changes here and there? That’s much more tricky. People don’t usually do what we’re doing.”
“Meaning what?”
“There are three main types of attackers in cyberspace. Nation-states are usually interested in espionage. They want information, but don’t want to mess with the system. Then you have criminals. They want money, and again, don’t want to mess with the system. The third are hacktivists. They want attention.” Sheldon turned from his computers. “We’re in a whole new category. We’re going to rock and roll.” He smiled. “Literally.”
“Sheldon, I wanted to ask you something.” Jake sat.
“Sure, anything.” Sheldon still had his attention locked onto the information flowing across his screens.
“Seriously, we need to talk.”
Sheldon disengaged and turned to Jake. “What?”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I can.” Sheldon shrugged.
“That’s not an answer. This is dangerous. You could go to jail, even be killed. This isn’t a game.”
Now he had Sheldon’s full attention. “I know that. I never thought it was a game.”
Jake put a hand on Sheldon’s arm. He needed to know. Anna’s life depended on these people, and while Jake was thankful for their help, he couldn’t figure Sheldon out. He didn’t want any surprises.
He gripped Sheldon’s arm tighter. “Why are you here? Jin’s life is threatened, her cousin was murdered, and I understand why Wutang is here by her side. Me? I’m trying to save my little girl’s life, figure out what happened to my friend.”
Sheldon tried to pull away, but Jake held on to him.
“What, so now you think I have some hidden motive?”
“I don’t know, Sheldon, you tell me.” Did he want access to the Bluebridge systems? They didn’t need a loose cannon, especially one as bright and technically competent as Sheldon.
“Okay, okay. Let go.” Sheldon pulled his arm free and rubbed it. “I want to do my part, you know?”
“No, I don’t know.” Jake shook his head. “Explain it to me.”
Sheldon rubbed his face. “My grandfather died last year; he was ninety-one years old. He fought on the beaches of Normandy. He volunteered. It seemed crazy to me, so I asked him about it. He said he was scared, terrified, but it was the right thing to do. To preserve freedom, our way of life. He said it was his generation’s moment.”
“And that’s why you’re here?”
“Yeah, I mean, I’m a scrawny nerd. I ain’t going to be any help on a damned beach fighting the Nazis, but here”—he pointed at his computer screens—“here I can make a difference. This is my fight, my way to protect freedom. To do what my grandpa did.” He wiped his eyes with the back of one hand.
What a crazy kid. A crazy good kid. “Okay, Sheldon, sorry. I needed to know. You’re brave. Your granddad would be proud.”
“Thanks.” Sheldon’s face lit up. His computer pinged. “Hey, can everyone get in here?” he called out, returning his attention to his monitors. “Because our darknet meet-and-greet session is on.”
Eight video windows opened, spread across the three LCD panels in front of Jake and Sheldon. A face appeared in each of the windows, showing an array of young men and women. Wutang and Jin walked over from the kitchen, containers of noodles in their hands. Jin had been quiet all day. Her cousin Shen Shi’s funeral was tomorrow, and she was still the main suspect in his death.
“Jake, Jin, Wutang, I’d like to introduce you to our Group of Eight,” Sheldon said, bowing to the images on-screen. They smiled back.
“Are you guys some kind of famous hacker network?” Jake asked.
“Maybe soon,” Sheldon laughed, “but I made up the name last night. Your friend Joey Barbara was helpful in getting us connected. Let me introduce you.” He pointed to a dark-skinned boy with a wide face. “That’s Mr. Imran Zkhaev of CyberVor, famous for the ID theft of a billion passwords last year.”
The boy smiled on-screen and waved. He didn’t look more than nineteen.
“A billion passwords?” Jake whispered to Sheldon.
“They’re a Russian mob hacker collective based in Omsk, a small town between Mongolia and Kazakhstan,” Sheldon whispered back. “We want to crack ID theft rings, they’re the guys.” He pointed to the person next to Imran and raised his voice. “And next we have Sasha of TeslaTeam in Serbia.”
A young blonde girl waved and smiled.
“And what do they do?” Jake whispered.
“They’re our connection into the Assassin Market.”
“What?” Jake hissed.
“And next to Sasha we have Johnny Jones and cOsmo, representatives of the Anonymous and Chaos Club collectives.”
The two men nodded. Their images flickered.
“Those are the old school,” whispered Sheldon. “Our denial of service experts.”
“Are those their real names?” Jake whispered back.
“Course not. The images we’re seeing are modified as well.” Sheldon raised his voice. “And across the bottom we have some of my associates, Justin, Lindsey, Joshua, and Phil.”
“And they’re hackers too?”
“No,” Sheldon admitted, “not hackers. These are peers of mine who run network security for some Fortune 500 companies.” He wagged his head. “Could be hackers if they wanted, but they have a whole different set of tools and expertise.”
Sheldon turned back to the people on-screen. “You all know Mr. O’Connell and Jin and Wutang from the background information I sent you.” He cocked his thumb at himself. “I’ll be the point person coordinating our activities, but Jake’s going to be the tip of the spear.”
“Nice to meet all of you.” Jake nodded and smiled. He’d never felt so out of his depth.
Wutang and Jin smiled and waved as well.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Sheldon said, starting his meeting, “as you can see from the data I’ve sent you, Bluebridge, one of the largest financial institutions in the world, appears to have gone rogue. It is the alpha DAC, the DAC daddy”—he sniggered at his own humor—“the top-level organism that has spawned a wave of other digital corporations that have infiltrated human and financial systems worldwide. It has landed in our laps to stop it.”
“We’re going to unleash a four-tier plan to degrade and destroy Bluebridge’s freedom to operate while Jake and his team take out the head of the snake.”
“First,” Sheldon said, pointing at Imran and Sasha, “we’ll begin by ‘outing’ individuals who are working with the autonomous corporations. CyberVor and Tesla Team have already infiltrated several of them. We’re going to offer up the names of these individuals to authorities. The goal here will be to spread a viral rumor that the anonymity shield of these organizations isn’t absolute.”
“The CIA and NSA are already hot on the heels of these things,” added Wutang. “We’re going to start drip-feeding them what we know, turn up the heat.”
Sheldon nodded. “Exactly. And second”—Sheldon pointed at the Anonymous and Chaos Club team members—“we’re going to unleash denial of service attacks against Bluebridge to try and slow it down a bit. At the same time, I want to get inside some of the large corporations Bluebridge invested in, start disrupting their systems.”
Johnny and cOsmo nodded.
“And importantly,” Sheldon said, nodding at his colleagues in the bottom row, “we need to protect MOHAWK, and that’s what you guys are going to be doing. Keep the pipes open, layer security around it. I’ve distributed information about what we’ll need from each of you. Have you read the materials?”
Sheldon waited for them all to nod.
“I need to keep the fourth part of our attack confidential for security reasons,” Sheldon continued. “It’s extreme, but these are desperate times. You’ll know when it happens, because it will be front page news everywhere in the world.”
He paused.
“Now’s the time for anyone to back out. Once we start, there’s no going back. If we fail, we’ll be hunted down. Jail time or worse. Does anyone want to leave? No recriminations. I would understand.”
This time Sheldon waited longer, but nobody budged or said anything. He smiled. “Good. Then we’re all in this together. We have a lot of work to do.”
He turned to face Jake and Jin and Wutang. “Our first phase of the operation begins tonight.”
▲▼▲
Cormac stood in the rain and stared up at the forty-floor, windowless building in front of him. So this was the biggest high-rise data center in the world? It didn’t look like much.
He looked down and shifted his gaze to his left, past the Brooklyn Bridge to the apartment complex beside it. This was as close as the old man had been able to pinpoint the current location of Jake O’Connell. From this point onward, he was going old school. Visual surveillance. The rain didn’t help, but Cormac was patient.
There were eight buildings in the complex, over a thousand apartments, but it wouldn’t take more than a day or two for him to survey them. Jake would need food, which meant deliveries of some sort, and Cormac knew what his girlfriend looked like—the one who’d rammed him with her bike at Rockefeller Center. And his employer had added a new target, Liu Wei. Apparently his friends called him Wutang.
Cormac’s dance card was full up, but this would be it, at least for this employer.
A few days ago, Cormac received a message about the Assassin Market, a digital corporation operating on the darknet. It let people anonymously contribute cryptocurrency toward financing a hit on anyone in the world.
Cryptocurrency. It was a strange new world.
He’d almost dismissed the idea out of hand, but it attracted him. Operating independently, no boss, just the job. He would be like a force of nature, ridding the world of people who’d earned public ire. Already, there was a healthy list, starting with prominent bankers. The top-paying jobs were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Yes, after this, he was going fully independent.
Finishing this job had become a point of professional pride. There was no way he was going to let Jake O’Connell get the better of him. Was it anger that fueled him? Maybe, if he had to be honest. Burned and bruised, he was going to be the laughing stock of his small group of peers if he stepped away.
What was Jake up to? Cormac didn’t really care. All he cared about was ending him. He stared up at the windows of the apartments, their tiny lights glittering in the rain.
One of them held his prize.
AUGUST 30th
Tuesday
41
MSNBC Newsroom
New York City
“Are you serious?” Bill Waiters asked his junior White House correspondent.
“It’s happening right now,” Dan Rogers blurted back, his eyes wide.
He’d only been on the new post for a few weeks, and the senior correspondent was on vacation.
It was supposed to be a quiet week.
“The White House has been attacked?” repeated Bill, still trying to comprehend what Dan was telling him.
Dan nodded, his face white. “The Vice President has been killed.”
A crowd of people gathered around them in Dan’s cubicle in the MSNBC Dayside newsroom. He pointed at his computer screen. “I was talking to Jill Strasberg, the White House Communications Director, on a Skype link.”
“I know who she is.” Bill waved over the rest of his staff. “Is anyone else seeing anything?”
“Nothing, not a peep on the other channels,” replied his head of programming from the back of the crowd. “They’re still on the Luxembourg story, just like us.”
In the background, Bill heard his MSNBC anchor talking about the flash crash in European markets the previous day, an incident centering in Luxembourg. It had wiped out billions of dollars, sending ripples through the financial systems worldwide. The markets were limping to a close on the other side of the pond.
Was it possible they had the first lead on this? An exclusive breaking story on maybe the biggest event since Pearl Harbor?
Bill’s hand shook as he raised it over his head. “Everyone, get on this now. Start cuing the teleprompters.” He turned back to Dan. Before they went live, he had to get further confirmation. “Can you get Jill back on?”
“I think so.” Dan hit the ‘video call’ button on his screen. After two rings, it picked up.
Jill Strasberg’s face filled the screen. “Bill, is that you?” she asked.
“It’s me.” Bill pushed Dan aside. He’d known Jill for years. She was the godmother to two of his kids. “What the hell happened? Are you all right?”
“I’m okay,” Jill replied in a shaky voice. “We’re locked down in the White House bunker. The attackers have cut down all the regular communication channels, so we had to go to back-up on the commercial networks. This channel is encrypted, right?”
Bill turned and looked at his staff members, most of them with blank expressions on their faces. One of the technicians in the crowd around the cubicle shrugged yes, he thought so. Bill turned back to Jill. “Yes.”
He could see other White House staffers he recognized milling around in the background, one of them nodding at Bill as he passed.
“What can we do?” he asked Jill.
“The President wants to go live, wants to address the nation.” Jill swung the camera around, and right beside her was the President, busy getting miked up. He glanced directly into the camera, nodded at Bill. Jill swung the camera around. “Can you do it, Bill?”
This was unbelievable.
“Bill, we got a hit on the AP newswire, reporting some kind of smoke and strange activity at the White House,” said a voice from over top of the cubicles. “A buzz is starting in social media, but still nothing on any of the other networks.”
Clenching his jaw, Bill Waiters made the most important decision of his career. This was the moment he’d been waiting for all his life. “Get this Skype feed into main production, we’re going live in ten seconds.”
▲▼▲
Under the MSNBC logo, the President’s face filled the screen on the large display. His expression was calm and resolute, but his eyes were pained, bloodshot. A bandage was taped across the left side of his forehead, showi
ng flayed red skin at its edges. His face was smudged, and the beginnings of a bruise seeped under his left eye. He looked battered, but not beaten.
“My fellow Americans, it is with a heavy heart that I need to inform you that the White House was attacked this morning, and the Vice President has been killed…”
Sheldon turned down the volume, pushing back his chair to send it skidding across the parquet wooden floors. “Ho—lee—cow, I can’t believe we did this.”
It was ten in the morning, but still dark outside under the heavy rainclouds. It hadn’t let up in three days.
Jake stared at the President on the large screen. They’d spent a sleepless weekend planning this attack, plotting out every detail—but seeing it live on network television was stunning.
Wutang and Jin sat beside him, speechless. They’d spent most of the day to themselves. It was Shen Shi’s funeral today. She hadn’t even been able to talk to her mother.
The weekend had been agony for Jake. All he could think about was his little girl. At least the video images kept coming in. Elle called each time she got one on the phone. She and Eamon were still searching the building sites on Jin’s list. It was reassuring to hear from Elle every two hours, to see the videos, but they still didn’t really know if the images of Anna were genuine.
So Jake was forcing Bluebridge’s hand. Pushing toward a different exit.
“Are you sure you’re all still up for this?” Jake asked grimly.
“One hundred percent,” Sheldon replied. “It’s a good plan.” He stopped pacing to put a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “In fact, it’s genius. Have you ever heard of fever therapy?”
Jake shook his head. “No.”
“In the 1950s,” Sheldon explained, “one of the first big studies of childhood leukemia was conducted. Untreatable back then, and usually fatal. Out of 300 cases, though, twenty-six went into spontaneous remission. Guess what happened in every one of the cases that had remission?”
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