by Reece Hirsch
“What was that?” Zoey asked.
“An FAO Schwarz employee was pissed off because he was getting laid off after the Christmas rush so he gave us the passcode to the store’s intercom system. We hacked in and broadcast to the entire store that, as part of a very special promotion, all items in the store were free for the next fifteen minutes.”
“You didn’t.”
“It was preteen Thunderdome, baby.”
“It’s all very impressive,” Chris said, “but we need to talk about whether you can help us.”
“I really need your help,” Zoey added.
“I’m flattered,” Soma said, not exactly committing himself. “What is it that you need?”
“Someone to drive us to Paris.”
“Why don’t you just rent a car?”
“Because we’re currently wanted by Europol and just about every other law enforcement agency that you can imagine.”
Soma brightened. “So baby did a bad, bad thing.”
“We haven’t done anything,” Zoey said. “Someone is framing us for a cyberattack that’s supposed to happen in the US.”
“That’s poetic justice, isn’t it, Chris?”
Chris grimaced but held his tongue.
“You’re talking about the January 14 thing, right?” Soma added.
“You’ve heard about that?” Chris asked.
“There’s been talk on the chans that something was coming, but I didn’t really believe it.”
“Believe it,” Chris said.
While they had been talking, word of Chris’s identity had spread among the group. Hackers encircled them, each one glaring at Chris. They were all a little too scrawny and anemic-looking to pose much of a physical threat, but they were definitely radiating animosity. Chris hoped that he hadn’t had a hand in getting any of them arrested.
“You’re expecting border checks?” Soma said.
Chris nodded.
“So how do you propose to get across?”
“In the trunk. They probably won’t be searching the cars.”
“But if they do, everyone goes to jail.”
“Worse than jail, because it would be a terrorism charge.” Chris figured that there was no point in sugar coating the situation. Anyone who went with them should know what they might be getting themselves into.
“Why do you need to get into France so badly?”
“That’s our business,” Chris said.
“I wouldn’t do this for him, you know?” Soma said, nodding at Chris.
“I know, but I really need your help.”
“Since this is for you, I’ll drive you myself. For a fee, of course,” Soma said. “Five thousand US.”
Chris had already anticipated pricing. “I can pay you two thousand now. There’s another three thousand at a locker here in Barcelona. I’ll give you the key and the location when you’ve gotten us to Paris.”
“Usually, I’m not this trusting,” Soma said. “But since it’s you two—you have a deal.”
“Thanks, Soma,” Zoey said. “You’re a sweetheart.”
Soma waved off the compliment, then turned to Chris. “Do you know how talented our Zoey is? She’s famous around here for the Centinela Bank exploit.” He smiled. “I hope I didn’t say something that I shouldn’t have.”
“He already knows,” Zoey said. “I told him about CB.”
Soma raised his gray eyebrows at Chris. “And that doesn’t bother you? What’s happened to you, man? I thought you tracked down people like us.”
“Call it a temporary truce.”
“You vouch for him?” Soma asked.
“I do.”
Soma considered for only a moment. “Okay, when do we leave?”
“Right away,” Chris said. “We want to cross the French border tomorrow morning when the traffic will be heavy and they’ll be less likely to search trunks.”
“I have one more favor to ask,” Zoey said.
Soma looked like his patience was being tested. “More than this? What is it?”
“We need a clean, fast laptop with wireless. Whenever we’ve needed access, we’ve had to go to libraries and Internet cafés.”
“I was afraid you were going to ask for something difficult,” Soma said. “Let me see what I’ve got.”
Soma went to the other side of the office and returned with a new MacBook and handed it to Zoey. “There you go. There’s an account that’s been set up using a stolen identity. No way to trace it to you.” Soma turned to Chris. “I hope this doesn’t pose a moral dilemma for you,” he said.
“That’s perfect,” Zoey said, not waiting for Chris to respond. “Thank you.”
Soma left them to get his car keys. As soon as he was out of earshot, Chris said, “I don’t trust him.”
“Do you know anyone else who will risk arrest to drive us into France?”
“No.”
“Okay then,” Zoey said.
CHAPTER 23
As they drove through the empty streets of Barcelona at 4:00 a.m. in Soma’s Audi, Zoey was sitting up front in the passenger seat, where Soma seemed to be trying to talk her into using her web design skills for one of the Hive’s illicit schemes. Zoey appeared impervious to his advances.
Chris had misgivings about traveling with Soma, but he could think of no other alternative that would get them into France in time. For all he knew, Soma might be in league with the Lurker crew. For that matter, Zoey might also be working with them. But even if both statements were true, what did it really matter? The hackers somehow seemed to be tracking their every move, anyway. And Enigma already knew exactly where Chris was headed—to the rendezvous in Paris at Père Lachaise. All that really mattered was that he was probably getting closer by the minute to Sarah. She was deceptively tough, and he knew that, wherever she was, she was holding on.
Soon they were on a highway headed out of the city and north through the Costa Brava, where beach towns clung like barnacles to the rugged coastline that extended to the French border. They drove slowly by necessity along the road that snaked beside the Mediterranean. Chris figured that any police would be more likely to be hunting for them on the main highway, which was inland. They passed through the sleepy beach towns of Blanes, Lloret de Mar, and now Tossa de Mar.
There are few things as desolate as a beach town at night in winter. The dun sands of the beach at Tossa de Mar were presided over by Vila Vella enceinte, a fortified medieval town that occupied the hill above. The fortress, with its stone walls studded with turrets and towers with parapets, seemed incongruous so near to a popular beach. Several small fishing boats were pulled up on the sand. Unlike Barcelona, where the locals seemed to stay out all night, Tossa de Mar was shuttered and vacant.
Chris struggled to stay awake. The last sleep he had gotten had been on the plane to Barcelona, and that had been fitful. But he didn’t want to waste any time, so he opened up his laptop and tried to concentrate once more on the coding of the Lurker virus. The yellow streetlights strobed in reflection on his computer screen as they sped along the coastal road.
A particular segment of the coding mystified him. Something seemed out of place. Lurker was designed to expire six months after activation. At that point, the virus would effectively disappear from the hard drives that it had infected and cease to spread to other computers. Chris could not understand why a black hat hacker like Enigma, whose intent seemed to be to cause as much destruction possible, would put that sort of fail-safe mechanism into a virus.
Despite his best effort, Chris fell into a deep, exhausted sleep, still mulling over the riddle as he drifted off.
He was awakened by the thrumming of his prepaid cell phone. For a long, groggy moment, Chris tried to pull apart the tangled threads of reality and dream. The dream consisted of an image of his unlined sixteen-year-old hands drifting down to a black plastic computer keyboard in underwater slow-motion. With the index finger of his right hand, he reached out to press the Enter key. Something bad was about
to happen. He didn’t want to hit the key, but his hands were not under his control, scuttling across the keyboard like two pale spiders. It was a familiar, recurring dream and the phone was not part of it. His eyes focused on his phone’s screen and he was suddenly fully alert. It was a text from Enigma, and it read:
ENIGMA: Hola, Chris.
Chris stared at the screen, still getting his wits about him, then he hurriedly typed out a response, his fingers fumbling over the keys.
CHRIS: Is Sarah alive?
ENIGMA: She’s just missing her little finger. Mickey Mouse gets along just fine with four and so will she.
CHRIS: What do you want? If you want something from me, just release Sarah. I’ll do it.
ENIGMA: I wish it were that simple, Chris. I really do.
CHRIS: Then what do you want?
ENIGMA: Just wanted to make sure that you’re still on schedule to make it to Paris.
CHRIS: We’ll be there. But I’m surprised you need to ask. I thought you knew our every move.
ENIGMA: Actually, I do. Hope you don’t have any trouble at the border checkpoint. If someone placed an anonymous call telling them to watch for a blue Audi …
CHRIS: We wouldn’t make it to Paris then, would we?
ENIGMA: You just keep running the maze, little rat.
CHRIS: What’s in Paris?
There was no reply, and he received no further texts from Enigma. He had to assume that Enigma was simply jerking his chain. They really only had two choices: proceed on to Paris, or give up any hope of finding Sarah alive.
When Chris looked out the window, he saw that they were driving through Girona, the capital of the Costa Brava region, which lay inland, away from the beach towns. Girona seemed to be two cities, one on top of the other. First, there was a modern and fairly nondescript metropolis that wrapped around the Onyar River. But when you raised your eyes, there was a medieval fortress and cathedral lit for effect and glowing palely atop the hill overlooking the city. One city for the living, one city for the dead (or, at any rate, for the tourists).
Zoey was asleep up front, her head resting against the car window, her lips parted slightly and her breath fogging the glass.
“You awake?” Soma whispered.
“Yes,” Chris said, not anxious to start a conversation.
“If you don’t mind me asking, what are you working on back there?”
“I think you should stick to driving.”
“Just making conversation. You called this a cyberattack, yes?” Soma said. “Are we talking some kind of weaponized virus?”
Chris remained silent as they wound their way through the city, trying to get back on the highway.
“All right. Have it your way,” Soma said. “Your loss. I might have helped you out of sheer boredom.”
Now that Chris was awake, his attention turned again to a seemingly random series of numbers, letters, and symbols that were buried in the coding of the Lurker virus to no functional purpose. The sequence read:
b:9y7c6ykh0y6yd\M3:R-I-II-III:RS:MCK:R:AAA:P:FP,MD,WE,XO,ZS,JV,AH,BC,QK,RT:G8U9O3M3G0R3O5M2N1Z\%phgopaigihgiaog22590808adsrcobjfre_w2k_x86i386guava.pd.
In extraneous segments of code like this one, hackers sometimes buried a calling card, something that they could use to claim credit, at least among their friends. Chris felt certain that there was some significance to the sequence, but no matter how long he stared at it or how many code-breaking techniques he tried, it refused to render up its meaning.
Chris wasn’t having any luck with the fragment of code, but another component of the virus was suddenly beginning to make sense. He thought that maybe he knew why the Lurker virus had a six-month expiration date built into it. The virus was designed for a demonstration. Like the Los Alamos test, as Enigma had mentioned to Middendorf. The impending attack was not intended to cause unlimited collateral damage, and the expiration date ensured that.
While the Lurker virus had clearly been designed for a very particular purpose, Chris had not yet been able to identify the segment of code that revealed the virus’s target. Maybe Ed or the team at BlueCloud was having better luck with that. But there could be little doubt that, no matter what the specific target was, Lurker was intended to be a weapon of cyberterrorism. What would happen if Enigma and his band of hackers turned such a powerful virus loose on a major US city? It was a deeply disturbing prospect.
The intercepted message board chat between Enigma and Middendorf had been full of ominous pontificating about a new era of cyberwarfare. Thus far, cyberwar had been a term bandied about occasionally in the press, but there was little evidence that it had actually been waged. One of the first publicized incidents occurred in 2008, when Russian troops invaded the South Ossetia region of Georgia. During that military action, it appeared that the Russian government had also conducted a multipronged cyber campaign to cripple the Georgian government. As Russian troops poured across the border, the Georgian government had difficulty responding, due to crashed websites and disruption of the VoIP phone system. It was a relatively crude effort, but effective.
More recently, the Obama administration had considered, but ultimately rejected, the use of cyberwarfare tactics against Libya to disable the Qaddafi government’s air-defense system. The administration again declined to use a more targeted cyberattack that would have knocked out Pakistani radar so that they wouldn’t detect the helicopters carrying Navy Seal commandos in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Reportedly, Defense Department officials didn’t want to be the first ones to “break the glass” on a dangerous new form of warfare.
The adversary had no such qualms. Enigma and Middendorf had spoken of a “cyber Hiroshima.” Chris wondered how the world would have reacted if the first atomic bomb had not been detonated by the United States in 1945, but rather by a terrorist group. In 1945, everyone knew instantly that the world had changed irrevocably, but some comfort could be taken from the fact that the United States was the only nation that held the secret of the atomic bomb. What if Lurker was the cyberwar equivalent of Hiroshima’s Fat Man bomb? And what if such a terrible new weapon was unveiled not by an accountable government, but by a nameless, faceless group of hacker terrorists? Chris realized that the worldwide panic that would ensue could be nearly as destructive as the attack itself.
When the first atomic bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert, Robert Oppenheimer said that he thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” What if the next Oppenheimer felt the same sentiment, but without the horror and remorse? Chris stared out the window of the car, absorbed in these terrible thoughts, as the first shades of dawn began to appear over the rust-colored hills of Catalonia.
CHAPTER 24
Ed de Lamadrid had hardly left the firm’s computer forensic lab in the past thirty-six hours and his thought processes were getting a little glitchy. An early winter dusk had just faded from ember to cinder, and the office was emptying out, but Ed was determined to keep working for as long as he could keep his eyes open with coffee and energy drinks. When he was on a tear like this, Ed liked to keep the lights down so that the lab was lit mainly by the glow of computer monitors, giving the room an unearthly luminescence. He thought of it as Spaceship Ed.
He was feverishly analyzing the Lurker virus to understand its target and how it worked. Ed hoped that when he found the answers to those questions, they would help exonerate his friend Chris. As his hands moved over the keyboard, Bach’s Goldberg Variations played softly in the background. Ed had hated classical music until Chris introduced him to Bach, but now it was an indispensable part of his work process when he required deep concentration.
Ed had noticed that the attorneys and staff were starting to cast not-so-subtle glances at him as they passed the doorway. Everyone knew how close he was to Chris. Most of them probably assumed that he had either collaborated with him in the terrorist plot or provided assistance to him now that he was on the run. If there had been eve
n a shred of evidence implicating him, Ed would have been suspended from work.
“When was the last time you slept?”
Ed spun around in his chair, startled by the quiet voice so close behind him. Managing partner Don Rubinowski stood in the doorway, immaculate and unflappable in a bold striped shirt, pinstriped suit pants, and suspenders. Ed distrusted lawyers—they were a little too adept at tailoring themselves to their situation. And Don Rubinowski was exactly the type that made Ed most uncomfortable. Talking to Don always felt like playing chess with a computer, with each of his responses eliciting a subtle recalibration. Ed’s data security peers were the exact opposite in temperament—they tended to be obstinate, opinionated, unfiltered, certain that something either worked or it didn’t. The only lawyer that Ed trusted was Chris, who was less like an attorney and more like a member of his own geeky tribe.
“I don’t know, it’s been a while,” Ed said. “That Lurker virus is a bear.”
“Well, we all appreciate the effort you’re putting in. Even with Chris gone, BlueCloud is still an important firm client.” After a brief, calculated pause, Don added, “Oh, and speaking of Chris, have you heard from him?”
“No, but if I did, I would certainly let you know.”
“Of course you would,” Don said. “It’s a shock, isn’t it? I was his friend, too, you know. I didn’t want to believe any of it.”
“So you really think Chris is responsible for killing those people on that plane in Albuquerque?”