Invisible Armies

by Jon Evans

  “It wasn’t him,” Angus says, in a tone that brooks no dispute.

  “Then you’ve been hacked.”

  A moment’s silence. Then Estelle says, “What?”

  “Of course,” Keiran says, a note of wonder in his voice as all the pieces slot into place. “That’s how they ambushed Jayalitha. That’s why that roadblock was waiting for Dani. They’ve been reading every email you send and receive. That’s why it’s taking me so long to crack their system. Their security’s top-notch because they’ve got a pet hacker to harden it.” It is terrible news, but he smiles, pleased to have solved the puzzle.

  “How can you be sure?” Laurent asks.

  “Because it’s the only answer that makes any sense.”

  “Car!” Danielle warns.

  It takes another second before Keiran can hear it. They all tense, ready to flee into the bush. Keiran wonders how fast Estelle can run on her twisted ankle. But the vehicle that comes into view is not a Jeep filled with Kishkinda’s men, but a very welcome bus, and one relatively unoccupied by Indian standards; Estelle even gets to sit. It takes them twenty minutes to get back into Calangute’s dust, heat and noise. Keiran’s opinion of the place hasn’t changed, he still feels it should be nuked at the first available opportunity, but he has to admit he is glad to be back.

  * * *

  “You haven’t just been hacked,” Keiran says scathingly as he descends to the kitchen, where the others are eating a full English breakfast. “You’ve been owned. Your machine was a zombie. There was a keylogger and a packet sniffer storing everything you typed, every message that went in and out, FTPing them nightly to an anonymous server.”

  After a moment Angus says, “I take it that’s bad?”

  “Very. I’ve cleaned it up. Wasn’t easy. This P2 is a slippery bastard. Writes brilliant code, too. Elegant. Whoever he is, he’s very, very good.””

  “P2?” Estelle asks.

  “The hacker on the other side.”

  “How do you know his name?”

  “His handle,” Keiran says, “and I know it because he went and bloody well signed his code, didn’t he? Talk about chutzpah.”

  Laurent looks quizzical. “Handle?”

  “Online name. A hacker tradition. And sensible precaution, against identification by the authorities, and identity theft by your fellow hackers. It’s like the old myths. These days, people who know your true name really do have power over you. Whether they know it or not.”

  Angus and Estelle give Keiran you’ve-gone-slightly-mad looks, but Laurent nods thoughtfully.

  “You didn’t send or receive the address of this house via email, did you?” Keiran asks Angus.

  The Scotsman shakes his head. “Booked it over the phone. Friend of a friend.”

  “But you have checked email from here. That’s a risk.”

  Estelle looks at him, worried. “They could track us down just from that? Just from checking email from inside this house?”

  “It’s unlikely. But it is possible. Just. They’d have to hack the uplink, though, and the people who run satellite ISPs are not newbies, we’re probably safe.”

  “Probably,” Danielle says. “That’s so comforting.”

  “The universe doesn’t do ‘safe’. Especially for us here and now. Angus, you need to cancel that ‘secondary base of operations’ plan. Sooner we all get back to Europe the better.” He smiles. “I’d stay and be a tourist, but I can’t take the gunplay.”

  Nobody else gets the reference. Keiran sighs and says, “Can you bring me some breakfast? I’ve got work to do.” He turns around.

  Estelle blinks. “What kind of work?”

  “Teaching this P2,” Keiran says, “that LoTek is not to be fucked with.”

  He climbs the stairs, enters his room, closes the door, sits down in front of his laptop, and opens the door to another world.

  * * *

  Keiran first used a computer in 1981. He was five. Four years later his parents gave in to his incessant whining and bought him a modem to accompany his Commodore computer. He unwrapped the modem, connected it, and dialed into a BBS for the first time on Christmas Day 1986, ten days before his father left his mother for the last time.

  At age thirteen, the year his sister was first arrested, Keiran’s teachers began to realize that he was more than merely very bright, that he was a once-in-a-lifetime student. A maths teacher took him to a university computer laboratory, where he connected to the Internet for the first time. It was in 1992, at age sixteen, shortly after his mother’s death, that he first used the World Wide Web, which at the time was an engineering curiosity that consisted of a few thousand sites, almost all of them universities, connected to a de facto hub in Switzerland.

  He has never lost his sense of wonder at what the Internet can do. At what it is. Keiran sits at his laptop and strikes keys; the resulting electrical signals travel around the world, amplified and transformed, converted to radio signals and back to electricity, through an incredible jumble of interconnected cables and wireless antennae and orbiting satellites; and only seconds later, a hard drive spins in Dakar, a monitor flickers to life in Los Angeles, sound emerges from a speaker in Kathmandu. The Internet is like a second nervous system, enormously more powerful and more diffuse than the one that commands the muscles of his body, and every machine connected to it is both appendage and sensory organ. Being online is like being superhuman. The exception being, of course, that Keiran’s body is only his own, while the godbody of the Internet is shared among anyone who can afford access. Most people are cripples, barely know how to twitch a finger, take a breath. But Keiran is an acrobat.

  As is P2. That much is already clear. Keiran feels invigorated, to have an actual adversary. He has been battering at the walls of Kishkinda’s corporate computers for weeks now with no measurable result. Now he knows why. There is a champion inside those walls, repelling his every assault.

  An unknown champion. Nobody on the blackhat IRC channels, no blogger, no search engine, has ever heard of a hacker named P2. He examines the traces left on Angus’s computer. The keylogger and packet sniffer are off-the-shelf, common hacker tools, available to anyone who knows how to use Google; tracking them back to P2 would be like trying to trace a generic Phillips screwdriver to a particular hardware store. The zombie code, however, is unique. This is the program that ran constantly and invisibly on Angus’s computer, and connected to a “zombie server” on the Internet at regular intervals to communicate, essentially saying to P2 every day, “I am here, master, and this machine is yours, ready to obey your orders!” along with “Here is everything Angus typed, read, emailed, or saw on the Web today!” It is the smallest, least detectable zombie code Keiran has ever seen. And there is no record of it ever having been used anywhere else.

  The only clue is the zombie server itself. And that must be approached with caution. Keiran only has two current advantages over P2. One of them is Shazam, his secret weapon. The other is surprise. P2 doesn’t yet know that he has been discovered, and reaching out to his zombie server in the wrong way could trigger an alarm. Like a Tom Clancy submarine hunt, where active sonar, emitting a loud ping and seeing how it travels and echoes through the dark water around you, may help you track down your quarry, but also warns the target of the hunt.

  Keiran tries passive listening instead. He searches on the zombie server’s IP number, its unique 32-bit identification code. As he suspected, it too is a zombie. By day, it is a mild-mannered print server at a small Silicon Valley copy shop: but at P2’s command, it becomes a conduit through which P2 rules his ‘botnet’, the collection of machines secretly controlled by his zombie program.

  Keiran can tell by the zombie code that P2’s botnet is elegant and secure; encrypted communications, multiple fallback servers, a secure login protocol. He wonders how many machines are under P2’s spell. Some hackers command multiple botnets of tens of thousands of computers. Or even more. Shazam, which for all intents and purposes is Keir
an’s botnet, is more than seven million machines strong. But not even Shazam can help Keiran trace down P2, not with the sparse available data. His opponent remains invisible.

  Keiran shuts down his computer and rubs his bleary eyes. Four hours have passed since he entered the room. He has a vague memory of Estelle bringing him breakfast, and himself eating it one-handed while typing with the other. But he hasn’t learned anything tangibly useful yet. First round to the enemy.

  * * *

  After a much-needed nap, Keiran returns to the Internet. DHL’s web site reports that Danielle and Laurent’s fake passports have left Los Angeles, arrived in Dubai, and should arrive at the DHL office tomorrow morning. Danielle and Laurent still haven’t said where they want to fly to. He goes downstairs to get an answer. Angus sits in a chair, reading documents in a black binder; Estelle is in the bath, soaking her wounded ankle; and Danielle and Laurent are gone.

  “They went to the beach,” Angus says.

  Keiran stares at him. “The beach? Angus. We’re trying to hide. None of us should leave the house until it’s time to go to the airport.”

  “Come on, mate. Have you seen that beach? Five thousand sunburned whiteys. They’re safer there than they are here. And we needed some shopping. The cupboard is almost bare.”

  “So they took a taxi. Because hiring a driver for the week is morally wrong. A decision which already nearly got us all killed. If I were Kishkinda, I would go to every taxi driver in this city with our pictures.”

  Angus stiffens. He clearly hadn’t considered that possibility.

  “From now on,” Keiran says, “certainly until we leave the country, I’m in charge of security, because you clearly do not understand the meaning of the word. You or anybody else. I expected better of Laurent. He’s a soldier.”

  “I gave them Estelle’s mobile. I’ll give them a call.” Angus draws out his phone.

  “No you fucking well will not,” Keiran says savagely.

  Angus stops and looks at him. “Why not?”

  “Because mobile phones are the least secure communication device ever devised. If Kishkinda has an in with the company, they might triangulate your location and theirs. That’s not likely, but mobile conversations are totally insecure, foreign roaming phones are easy to pick out, and they have an expert hacker on their side. You call and ask them where they are, and there’s a nonzero chance P2 listens in.”

  “Ah.” Angus looks at his phone as if it might explode in his hand.

  “I’ll go look for them. On foot.”

  “What about the airport?” Angus asks.

  “What?”

  “If they know they’re here, they know we might leave the country. How do we know we won’t get stopped at the airport?”

  Keiran smiles. “That’s better. Now you’re thinking like a hacker.”

  “Well, what are we going to do about it?”

  “You’re going to trust me to take care of things. Now, I’m off. If I’m not back in three hours, do yourself a favour. Get out of the country by any means possible.”

  The walk to Calangute takes longer than Keiran expected. The enclave of walled, expensive houses north of the tidal river is larger than it seemed from inside taxis. Furious guard dogs howl rabidly as he walks past featureless gates. The interiors of these properties may be perfectly manicured, but outside their walls it is still India; weeds fight their way through cracks in the uneven road, and the dirt on either side is stained with betel juice, sprinkled with glittering crumbs of shattered glass, cigarette butts, torn plastic bags, dog turds. The whitewashed concrete tunnel that bridges the river is so cracked and crumbling that Keiran would be reluctant to cross it in a heavy car. Cows stare at him as he emerges onto the south side of the river and begins to walk south.

  A pair of child beggars approach and he waves them off. They chase after him, mewling pitifully and tugging at his pant legs, until Keiran feigns an intent to strike them and they scramble away to find another mark. He keeps walking. By a tree by the side of the road, a young woman with very dark skin nurses her baby. Her red sari is tattered, and her face is lined and gaunt despite her youth. She can’t be out of her teens. She stares at Keiran as he passes as if he is a ghost. He expects a plea for money but she says nothing. He walks for another ten paces, trying to pretend she does not exist. If she had asked for money it would have been easy to keep walking and forget her. But her silent, otherwordly despair is somehow haunting.

  “Why not?” Keiran mutters to himself. He could have died last night. Somehow that is a justification. He doesn’t know exactly why this needs justification. He turns around, withdraws his wallet as he approaches the young woman, peels out five twenty-pound notes, and offers them to her.

  She stares at him uncomprehendingly at first, then slowly reaches out and touches them, as if to ensure that they and he are real. Her expression does not change but her eyes come to life, stare at him searchingly. He presses the money into her warm hand. She holds them loosely and he wants to take her hand in his and close it over the notes, try to impress upon her that they are important, they can change her life. He suddenly realizes the probable futility of the gesture. She’s probably never seen British pounds before in her life. She might not even realize that they’re money. Even if she does, where will she go to change them to rupees? She will surely be cheated, stolen from. He should give her rupees, but he doesn’t have enough to matter to her. He should go change the money himself, come back and give her nine thousand rupees instead of a hundred pounds, but he can’t bring himself to do it, to further bridge the gap between himself and this woman, this encounter is too heartbreaking already. Instead he just says, lamely, “It’s money.”

  After a moment she inclines her head to the side. She understands, he can see it in her eyes. She may be ignorant but she isn’t stupid. Maybe she can use it. Maybe this is the moment that will save her ruined life. Maybe it won’t change anything. Maybe her life is fine and she is just wearing old clothes and sat to rest on her way back home after a hard day – although this doesn’t seem likely. Keiran doesn’t want to know. It is too much already to treat her as a human being; actually caring about her would be unbearable. He turns and walks away quickly, strangely numbed by the encounter, almost insensate, and twenty steps later nearly collides with Danielle and Laurent as they walk the other way, oddly distant from one another for a couple usually so inseparable. Laurent carries plastic bags full of groceries.

  “Hi,” Laurent says, surprised.

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “How much did you give her?”

  Keiran shrugs and looks away, like a teenager. He can feel himself blushing. “What are you doing here?” he demands.

  Laurent says, “Went to the beach, went shopping, decided to walk back.”

  Danielle doesn’t say anything. Her expression is distant. She hardly seems to have noticed Keiran.

  “Come on,” Keiran says. “I was looking for you.”

  “That was a good thing, what you did,” Laurent says.

  “Come on,” Keiran repeats, angry now, at having been seen and patronized by Laurent. He leads them back towards the house. On the way he makes a point of ignoring the woman in the red sari.

  * * *

  “To India,” Angus toasts, with a glassful of Kingfisher beer. “In all its beauty and madness.”

  Laurent lifts his glass. “Mother India,” he says simply.

  They look to Danielle, but she is lost in sullen thought and says nothing.

  “A fine balance between hope and despair,” Estelle says, quoting something.

  Keiran wishes she hadn’t said that. It makes him think of the women he gave money to in the throes of his earlier moment of madness. “Goodbye and good riddance,” he says gruffly, and drains his glass. The others follow suit, Angus giving Keiran an annoyed look before he drinks.

  “So what’s the schedule tomorrow?” Estelle asks.

  “We pick up the passports at nine,” Keiran says, �
�get to the airport at ten, which is the same time three honking great tour groups arrive. It’ll be easy to lose ourselves in that paleface crowd. Hopefully by then Danielle will have some idea where she wants to fly –”

  “Will you please shut up about that,” Danielle says angrily.

  Keiran looks at her, surprised. “All right. Sorry.”

  Danielle shakes her head, clearly overwrought. Competing emotions play on her face, none of them good. Laurent reaches out an arm to her, but she shrugs it off angrily, gets up, and stalks upstairs. Angus, Estelle, and Keiran look at each other uncomfortably.

  “I’m sorry,” Laurent says. “Excuse me. I’ll go talk to her.” He stands up, and as if on cue, all the lights go out.

  A bewildered few seconds pass before anyone reacts.

  “Fucking hell,” Keiran says.

  Then Estelle’s voice, “There are candles in the kitchen.”

  “No, there’s a generator,” Angus says. “In the crawl space underneath.” The house is built on stilts a few feet above ground level, as with most sensible construction in tropical areas prone to rainy-season floods. “It’s supposed to come on automatically if the city power goes out. Give it a few moments.”

  “It’s not working,” Keiran says. The generator would have chugged into life already if it was going to. Electric switches don’t operate with a fifteen-second delay.

  “The owner swore up and down everything worked,” Angus says, exasperated.

  There are scrabbling sounds in the kitchen, then a match flares, illuminating Estelle in profile. It dies out as she opens a cupboard; then another comes to life, is perpetuated as a candle. Estelle returns to the table with two candles and candle holders.

  Footsteps descend the stairs. “Now the power’s out?” Danielle asks angrily, as if this is the fault of someone present.