by Reece Hirsch
Don stepped out of the doorway and into the lab. He strolled around a bank of computers, causing Ed to swivel in his chair to follow him.
“At this point,” Don said, “It doesn’t really matter what we believe. What matters now is what the FBI and Homeland Security believe.”
“I guess that’s right,” Ed said. He wasn’t about to give Don anything.
“And assuming that the FBI is right about Chris, then it means that Chris was never the person we thought he was. He was somebody else all along.”
Don approached a whiteboard covered with a scribbled sequence of code. “So this makes sense to you?”
Ed shrugged in acknowledgment.
Don shook his head. “Might as well be Sanskrit as far as I’m concerned. More of a right-brain type myself.”
“Most lawyers are.”
“In light of everything that’s happening, you’re probably wondering about your position here at the firm now that Chris is gone.”
“I wasn’t really thinking about that,” Ed said.
“Well, you will, and I want you to know that your job is secure here. The firm wants to maintain a presence in this data security practice area, and we want to keep a computer forensic lab. When the dust settles, we’ll recruit a new partner to fill Chris’s spot.”
“Maybe Chris will return to fill his old spot himself. Innocent until proven guilty, right?”
“Maybe, maybe. But that seems pretty unlikely right now.” Don looked Ed in the eyes with his best closing argument gaze. “The point is that we want you to know that you have a home here at Reynolds Fincher—and it would be a shame if you were to jeopardize that out of some misplaced loyalty to someone who looks pretty damn guilty.”
So there it was—the transaction. The firm wanted him to sell out his friend Chris and, in exchange, he could keep his job.
“I appreciate the vote of confidence.” That was what Ed said, but what he was thinking was very different.
CHAPTER 25
January 12
To loosely paraphrase Samuel Johnson, the prospect of being locked in the trunk of a car focuses the mind. And when Chris’s mind was thus focused, his first realization was that any plan that involved being locked in a car trunk probably was not a very good one.
Two miles from the French border, they pulled off the road and prepared for the border guards. Soma turned the Audi off onto a rutted trail that cut across a field and into a stand of pine trees. They didn’t want passing motorists to see Chris and Zoey climbing into the trunk. Chris arranged some blankets and tried to figure out how he was going to fit inside. The sun was over the horizon now and a light breeze rippled the field of chest-high grass.
“You’re tall, so we’d better get you in there first,” Zoey said.
Chris crawled inside, curling himself with his back against the wall of the trunk.
Zoey sized up the remaining space, which was not that big. “Okay, I’m going to try this spoon-style.” She put one foot delicately into the trunk like she was stepping into a swimming pool. Then, not so delicately, she tumbled forward, knocking the wind out of Chris.
“Are you okay? Sorry,” she said.
“Fine,” Chris said when he had recovered his breath. Zoey settled in with her back to him.
Soma placed his hands on the lid of the trunk. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said with a smirk. Soma was one of those people who always seemed to be speaking in ironic quotation marks. Chris really hated that.
The trunk slammed shut and they were cast into darkness, except for a few dusty shafts of light that seeped in through the lock and around the seams of the lid. The ignition turned and the car began to move. The shock absorbers were shot, and he felt every bump and pothole as Soma drove back over the trail that crossed the field.
“Hands,” Zoey said. “Hands.”
Chris realized that he had placed a hand on Zoey’s hip to steady himself as they were shaken about. “Sorry.”
Things went smoother once they were back on the highway, but the trunk grew warm under the midmorning sun. The car’s air-conditioning didn’t ventilate the trunk. Chris could feel the rise and fall of every breath that Zoey took. She didn’t wear perfume, but she smelled nice nonetheless.
“Do you think Soma’s still taking us to the border?” he asked. “I don’t like trusting him like this.”
“I think he’ll come through,” Zoey said. “He likes me.”
“Yeah, but he really doesn’t like me.”
“True, but he doesn’t get the rest of his fee until we hand over the locker key.”
Chris tried to gauge if the Audi was slowing or speeding up. The hiss of the tires on the pavement seemed very close at hand, reminding him of a streaming water faucet.
After about ten minutes, the car slowed to an idle. Chris had been right. Border checkpoints had been put in place, regardless of the Schengen Agreement. They were probably in a line of cars advancing toward a team of agents.
The car inched forward. The temperature in the trunk inched upward. Chris and Zoey were both sweating. Chris reached up to wipe perspiration from his forehead before it rolled down into his eyes. There was no talking now. If they were discovered in the trunk, they would be in the custody of Europol and/or Homeland Security within the hour. Chris wondered what sorts of interrogation techniques DHS was using these days, but he quickly decided that was not a helpful exercise. And it meant nothing to him compared with what he imagined Sarah must be experiencing.
The car advanced a bit and they could hear the sound of French being spoken in an authoritative tone. They were at the checkpoint. The car didn’t move for one minute, two minutes, perhaps even five minutes. Chris couldn’t lift his arm to check his watch, but it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. For all practical purposes, time had stopped.
Chris could feel Zoey’s body tense beside his. This was taking too long. Perhaps there was something wrong with Soma’s passport. He was the sort of person who would use false credentials. What if he had the audacity to use a fake passport, jeopardizing their lives in the process?
The voices speaking French grew louder and seemed to be coming from all directions. The border guards were circling the car. He tried to remain absolutely motionless. Zoey must have been holding her breath, because he no longer heard the rustling of her inhale and exhale.
Then the trunk echoed with a loud bang. Chris thought for a moment that someone had fired a gunshot. He hoped that he hadn’t reflexively kicked the wall of the trunk. He really couldn’t be sure. He stared at the roof of the trunk, expecting it to pop open at any moment, but it remained shut.
The Audi rolled forward again, slowly at first, then accelerating. Chris realized that the sound had probably been a border guard slapping the trunk, urging Soma on his way. Chris and Zoey had both jumped at the sound, and now their pulses and heart rates were slowly ticking down to normal. Chris didn’t have to ask Zoey if she was okay. They were so closely entwined that he knew without asking.
“You think he’s ever going to pull over and let us out of here?” Zoey asked.
“Yeah, when he stops finding this amusing.”
When Soma finally opened up the trunk, a smirk was still lacquered on his face.
“Gauloises?” he asked, offering his pack of cigarettes.
Chris and Zoey shook the numbness from their legs and arms, walking around in another field of tall grass identical to the one in Spain. The same cool breeze rippled the tall grass here, but Chris appreciated it much more after over a half hour in the trunk of a car. He checked his watch: 8:45. They had eight hours to make it to Paris for the meet-up at Père Lachaise. Rain clouds the color of fresh bruises hung over the northeast horizon where they were headed.
CHAPTER 26
Soma drove quickly through the French countryside south of Toulouse. It was an overcast day that deepened the color of the winter wheat fields. Off in the distance, in a crook in the rolling hills, the red-tiled roof of a farmhou
se stood out like a drop of blood on a tablecloth.
On another day, Chris would have appreciated the landscape and the ancient villages with their crumbling stone walls. But not today. Chris watched for police cars at every bend in the road and kept Soma in line whenever he crept over the speed limit. He didn’t want to make Europol’s job easier by getting pulled for a speeding ticket. The CIA and a host of other law enforcement agencies were probably still looking for them in Spain, assuming that they wouldn’t be able to cross the border.
As they made their way toward Paris and Père Lachaise Cemetery, Chris continued to puzzle over why they were instructed to meet at the grave of Gholam-Hossein Sa’edi. He unfolded the printouts on Sa’edi, reviewing what he knew about the author.
When Chris looked up, they were driving over the historic Pont Neuf into Toulouse under a sky full of clouds that seemed to be lit from within by a pale sun. The seventeenth-century bridge was suspended over the Garonne River by asymmetrical arches of stone and the city’s trademark pink brick. The arches were reflected in reverse in the waters of the Garonne, forming a series of ellipses.
The defining characteristic of Sa’edi’s life seemed to be his struggle for political and intellectual freedom in Iran, which went hand in hand with his opposition to Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamists. Maybe Enigma was a zealot who was aligned with anti-Islamist groups. Or perhaps he intended to offer the Lurker virus to one of those factions so that they could use it against Iran or another Islamic fundamentalist state. So far, Enigma hadn’t sounded particularly ideological about anything except the disruptive potential of cyberwarfare, but Chris still knew very little about him. Chris sensed that he had the information to solve the mystery of the virus and its creator, but it wasn’t coming together.
Despite Enigma’s assurances, Chris wondered if Sarah was still alive. The image of her severed finger stayed in his head. Most kidnap victims were dead three days after the abduction, but this was not a typical kidnapping. There was no indication that Enigma was a sexual predator, and it wasn’t about ransom. Somehow, this was about him.
The hours passed in a daze. He eventually nodded off. When he awoke, the rustic villages had given way to billboards and nondescript office parks. They were reaching the suburbs of Paris. The lowering sky finally delivered on its threat and the rain started to fall in fat, dirty gray drops.
It was time to part ways with Soma. Chris still didn’t trust him, and the sooner that he and Zoey could be on their own again, the better. They had never told Soma the exact location of their meeting. Two hours remained until the rendezvous at Père Lachaise, which was on the eastern edge of Paris in the 20th arrondissement. Chris thought they could use the time to make contact with Ed and see if he had learned anything new about the virus.
Chris had Soma stop in the 20th arrondissement in front of a WiFi-friendly looking café. Soma turned around to face him from the front seat.
“So that’s it, is it?” he asked.
“That’s it,” Chris said, handing over an envelope containing a key and the location of a bus station locker in Barcelona.
“Things were just getting interesting,” Soma said. “And you’ll need a ride to get around Paris, won’t you?”
“Thanks, but we’ll take the metro,” Chris said. “You already took a big risk to get us here. I don’t know why you’d want to press your luck.”
“She knows why,” Soma said then, nodding at Zoey, “even if you don’t. I live for this.”
“And what is this?” Chris asked.
“The things that nobody wants you to know. It’s what we do. And I’ve got a feeling that you two are on the verge of learning some very big and very bad secrets.”
“I get it,” Zoey said. “But you have to remember that this will probably end with Chris and me in some supermax prison for life. They have our names, so we don’t have a choice. You do.”
Soma smiled. “You care about me after all, don’t you?”
“We’re going to have to insist,” Chris said, “but we appreciate what you’ve done.”
“Okay,” Soma said. “If that’s how it has to be.”
Chris and Zoey climbed out of the car and onto the noisy, bustling streets of Belleville. If Belleville were a French wine, its bouquet would have exhibited notes of fried garlic noodles, wet pavement, and car exhaust. Belleville was a working-class neighborhood in which Greek, Armenian, and North African communities existed side by side, along with Paris’s second largest Chinatown. The tan stucco of the storefronts was worn away in spots, exposing ancient red brick. Across the street was the Marché Belleville, an open sidewalk market where vendors hawked vegetables, meats, and flowers in a dozen languages. The Indian fabric stand was a riot of color, and the Babel of voices from across the street sounded like a bad day at the UN.
They entered a café frequented by denizens of the nearby music clubs. Chris sat down at a computer and attempted to connect with Ed in San Francisco. After waiting a half hour for Ed to respond to a text, they established a Skype connection. Ed’s hair was tousled and his face looked puffy. It was 8:00 a.m. in San Francisco, and they had clearly woken him up. Ed liked to work late, so he tended to start his day at the computer lab at 11:00 a.m. He was in his slobby bachelor’s apartment in lively North Beach, a French poster for Blade Runner mounted with thumb tacks on the wall behind him.
“Look at you two, a couple of outlaws,” Ed said. “You look different, Chris.”
“It’s the jacket,” Chris said. “She picked it out.”
“I would have guessed that,” he said.
“Is this a safe connection for you?” Chris asked.
“Yeah, it’s clean. It’s a borrowed computer and an ISP account that no one would connect to me.”
“I think I’ve figured out a few things about the virus,” Chris said.
“Me, too,” Ed said. “I’ve been talking to the forensic team at BlueCloud. I learned some things from them, some I figured out on my own. Let’s hear what you’ve got first.”
Chris explained what he had learned about the Lurker virus’s expiration date and his theory that Enigma might be linked to anti-Islamist groups. Chris asked Ed to search for connections between Enigma and anti-Islamist factions. As Chris continued, Ed began nodding excitedly.
“That’s all consistent with what I’ve got,” Ed said. “For example, when the virus attacks a computer, guess what’s the first thing it does?”
“What?”
“It checks the computer’s keyboard. If the keyboard has the Ukrainian alphabet, it deactivates.”
“That neatly avoids the problem of blowback if you’re a Ukrainian hacker who’s concerned about having your virus take out your own systems,” Zoey said.
“Exactly, and wait till you hear this,” Ed said, clearly pleased with himself. “I know what the virus was targeting—programmable logic controllers manufactured by Sonnen.”
“What are those?” Zoey asked.
“PLCs are tiny digital computers used to control automated processes,” Chris said. “They were first developed to operate the machinery on factory assembly lines. Now you can find them almost everywhere—they run traffic lights, hospital equipment, most of the power grid.” Chris turned back to Ed on the monitor. “Is the virus aimed at all PLCs or just specific types?”
“You saw that there are two different styles of coding in the payload of the virus,” Ed said. “One is very sophisticated. Elegantly coded, disciplined, highly labor intensive—the sort of thing a team of top corporate programmers might have written. The second is an effective but fairly crude edit.”
“Which would be the work of Enigma and his crew,” Zoey said.
“Probably,” Ed said.
“What was the purpose of the edit?” Chris asked.
“I haven’t figured that out yet, but I’m working on it. But I can tell that the previous target was deleted.”
“So what replaced it?” Zoey asked.
Ed shook his
head in grudging admiration. “It’s pretty insidious. When the virus infects a computer, the first thing it does is spread itself to every other computer on that system. Then it looks for where Sonnen software is running. Once it finds Sonnen software, then it checks for connections to Sonnen PLCs.”
Chris leaned in closer to the monitor. “Then what?”
“That’s where I hit a dead end. The coding is clearly directed at PLCs with specific functions, but I can’t make out which ones. If there are no Sonnen PLCs connected to a system, then the virus becomes dormant and inactive. But if the virus finds Sonnen PLCs, it seems to be checking for those that are operating in a particular environment under specific conditions. To identify the target, it’s not enough to just understand the virus. You have to identify the system environment that has the characteristics that the virus is searching for.”
“What happens when it finds what it’s looking for?” Chris asked.
“It injects some kind of rogue code intended to disable the targeted equipment.”
“Have you researched the types of functions that are performed by Sonnen PLCs?” Chris asked.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t help narrow things down. Their PLCs perform pretty much every automated process that you could imagine, and quite a few that you couldn’t. Sonnen’s the PLC market leader in just about every industry, everywhere.”
Zoey interjected. “Most viruses that I’m familiar with hit a target by giving the hacker remote control of a system—root control. Then the hacker basically acts as the guidance system. But this virus is like a self-directed stealth missile. It’s finding very specific targets entirely on its own. Whoever created this is scary good.”
“Or scary bad,” Chris said.
“Of course. Right,” Zoey said, pivoting from her customary prohacker orientation. “But once Lurker has found its targets, it doesn’t immediately take them out, does it? Otherwise, Enigma wouldn’t be announcing a specific date for the cyberattack.”
“Exactly,” Ed said. “There’s a remote activation feature. When he’s ready, Enigma can take out the infected equipment with a keystroke.”