by D S Kane
Cassie looked at their attorney. He nodded, saying, “I’ll take care of the hygienics.”
Cassie had arrived at the Hoover Hotel loaded for bear. She had her bodyguard, her attorney, and a mother’s rage. None of it was necessary.
Leaving the attorney behind to sort out the legalities, Cassie hustled her daughter to the car. Once they were safely on the road, she took Ann’s shaking hand and said, “Ann, tell me in detail what happened.”
Ann told her everything from the time the aircraft took off until it landed and she was arrested.
Cassie started to speak, then stopped. She tried again, but all that came out of her mouth was, “But, but—”
“Yeah. I know. Sort of confounding. Especially when the FBI rewards you for saving nearly two hundred people by arresting you, huh?”
Cassie sighed. “Yeah. I understand that you broke the law, but still. Makes no sense.”
Ann nodded back. “Right. So I should have just died along with so many other innocents?”
“I understand your anger. But still, I need you to take a step back. Let the Swiftshadow Group do the rest of the work—William, Betsy, and me. We’re all hackers, and we have more experience than you do. College must be your primary objective.”
“Mom! No way! This is my battle, first and foremost.”
Cassie shook her head. “I don’t think you get it. This one could be dangerous. Take a back seat. We’ll do the heavy lifting.”
Ann shook her head. “You can’t stop me. Why shouldn’t I?”
Cassie stared at Ann, trying to hide the fear she felt. “No. I don’t want you in danger again. No way are you getting involved.”
“What are you gonna do? Lock me up?”
Cassie paused. She shook her head. “Ann, be reasonable. Whether you’re at the university or here, there’s no good way to protect you. William, Betsy, and I, well, we have the Swiftshadow Consulting Group to protect us. Nearly two hundred mercenaries. At least let us try first. When we have the dangerous part of this done, we’ll include you. Promise.”
Ann frowned. Cassie could tell that she was seething.
She touched Ann’s shoulder. “Raising your voice won’t win an argument. You should know better.” She paused for a few seconds, until Ann nodded. But her eyes told a different story.
“And using parental authority as a weapon is never a good idea—especially with me.” Ann waited until her mother nodded back.
Cassie was quiet for a few seconds, thinking. “Okay, then. It might work best for us to make a formal action plan.”
Ann frowned. “We’ll need Jon. He’s the best planner.”
“In that case, we’ll have to get Avram involved, since Jon reports to Avram.”
In a few minutes they had reparked the car in the garage under the Swiftshadow Consulting Group’s office on K Street, a few blocks away. But, Avram had already left for the night.
Cassie punched Avram’s number into her cell. He answered on the first ring. “I’m busy now. With a lady. And it’s late. Did you recover Ann?”
“Yes. We just wanted to update you on what happened. You already know that Ann was arrested after she hacked into the flight control system of the aircraft she was on, after its engines failed. The headline is, she kept nearly two hundred people from dying. Seems the plane was hacked first by a hostile force.”
Avram was silent for a few seconds. “Wait, they told you they arrested her for saving the aircraft from a crash?”
“They say she broke the law, hacking into the flight control systems.”
“Nonsense! Let me think. Okay, then, what do you recommend we do?”
Cassie took a deep breath. “We need to assess our alternatives and make a plan to find the hacker who started all of this.”
“Hmm. You want Jon. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a problem I’ll need to address before we can have Jon make a plan to do anything. Now that Swiftshadow Consulting Group is a United Nations-based contractor, and Jon is technically a UN employee, I’ll need the Secretary-General’s approval for any project we undertake. I’ll get started on that before you contact Jon. I’ll get back to you very soon.” He terminated the call.
“Mom, I already spoke with Jon.”
“Well, that’s not something we’ll tell Avram. Right now, I have a bit of work to do. You stay here. I’ll be a few minutes.” Cassie walked into her office and closed the door, leaving Ann outside in the lobby. Cassie sat at her desk and used her personally customized Tor Browser to hack into the database of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Still fuming, she found and deleted all the FBI’s records relating to Ann’s arrest.
CHAPTER 7
November 26, 3:16 p.m.
Sashakovich-Ainsley home,
220 East Kirke Street, Chevy Chase, MD
With the Thanksgiving weekend over, Ann packed her suitcase and pulled it down the stairs to the compound’s entrance. The house smelled of the meal they’d just finished, a store-bought turkey, and a divinely delicious tureen of barley mushroom soup.
Ann remained angry about how the adults still treated her as a child when she was truly one of them. She was sure that without her they would mishandle her situation.
She knew there was danger here, and she was absolutely sure the danger would hunt her whether or not she hunted it back. Ann would need to be prepared and careful. She had no intention of taking a back seat when the stakes included her own life.
One of the compound’s bodyguards met her at the door and nodded. The man was extremely well-built, and spoke without any accent. “Let’s get going, Ms. Sashakovich. Your flight is in about three hours.” He led her to the black Ford Explorer and popped the hatch.
She shoved her suitcase in and entered the car, taking the shotgun seat and placing her notebook computer’s case on her lap. As the bodyguard pulled the car through the gates of the compound, she muttered the words, “Not fair.”
The bodyguard smirked. “Be cool. Your parents fear this hacker. I don’t blame them. Now that everything, including this car, your cellphone, microwave ovens, the aircraft you rode on that got hacked, is connected through the Internet of Things, we’ll have to be perpetually vigilant about our safety. Hackers now have the power to easily kill anyone whenever they want It’s no longer white hats versus black hats. Now, anyone can be both, depending on the situation. Worse still, trying to sift through millions of hackers for black hat criminals will inevitably bring with it a trove of innocent white hats by mistake.”
Ann sighed. She’d need time to figure out the complex nature of her exposure to the unknown enemy. Maybe the bodyguard was correct.
She sat quietly as the SUV approached Reagan. The bodyguard escorted her to the security gate and said goodbye. Once through the security line, Ann went to the gate and sat in sullen silence.
Her cell buzzed. She scanned the screen. The sender of the email was UNKNOWN.
The message left her wearing a frown. It read:
I know who you are. Sorry I almost inadvertently killed you. Heed this warning: Stay away from me, and I will forget about you. But, should you come looking for me, I will end you as fast as I can.
She forwarded the email to Cassie, William Wing, and Avram. This was getting serious.
* * *
Dinner trays of fast food covered one entire side of the conference room table. The sun had set over an hour ago. Avram, William, Betsy, and Cassie sat eating their meal of fast food from various venues. They’d been discussing the mystery hacker.
Avram reached into a folded envelope he’d had in his pocket. “These just arrived from the Ness Ziona. New beta modules of the Bug-Lok device.” He handed one each to Cassie, William, and Betsy.
“Oh, I love it. That new tech smell,” Betsy sneered. “So, do these work any better than the last batch?”
Avram read the note that was also in the envelope.
Version 11.6.08. Solved the battery-size issue by
using more body chemicals and sending them out with body waste. Solved the transmission issue by active search and piggy-back software to link with nearest WiFi. Solved the unit-life issue by hardening the shell with one extra layer of rejection-proof chemical coating. Michael says this will be the final version. He wants you all to try it as soon as you can. He suggests you try the new, tiny version of the thumb drive to give you access to the new operating system and a robust set of files.
Cassie shook her head. “Not tonight. Maybe in a few days. I still have some jet lag.”
William and Betsy nodded. Each muttered, “Me too.”
Cassie swallowed a bite of hamburger on a bun with hoisin sauce. “Back to the mystery hacker. What clues can we glean from the email message? Highly skilled, young, and paranoid, but does this hacker have a mission of vengeance or are they just bat-shit crazy? We have no clue. If the hacker is now threatening Ann, we have to do something soon, before they do.”
Avram scowled. “There are other possible motivations for the unknown enemy. Possibly not just a hacker. Quite possibly an intelligence service from one of any number of countries. Even if we knew the face of the enemy, we have no plan. And I haven’t yet received word from the UN to get permission for Swiftshadow to get involved in this. This entire enterprise is off the books right now.”
Betsy had watched the proceedings from the kitchen. She took a seat.
William and Betsy nodded. William said, “Dangerous, too. We need to have a complete plan, strategy plus tactics, including a complete decision tree of alternatives for when something goes sideways, so we won’t be caught in the undertow.”
Jon Sommers poked his head through the door. “Hello, all. I was just checking in when I overheard all of you discussing something. The word ‘plan’ drew me here. What’s up?”
Avram said, “We’re discussing a mission that is currently unsanctioned. At this time, it isn’t clear whether we’ll do it or not, and if we do, whether it must remain off the books unless and until it is sponsored by the UN. I’ve been in touch with them, in writing, but have not heard back yet from our handlers. There is no mission plan as yet, and that’s where you come in. We need to find the location of a hacker. No one has any idea who they are, what they look like. Not even their gender. Not a clue.”
Jon said, “Okay, then. I’ll be right back.”
He disappeared for a minute and returned with an old beat-up whiteboard and dry-erase markers. “Got this from Ben-Levy’s old office in Mossad’s basement. He left it to me in his will.”
Avram smiled. “Yes. I’ve seen it before. He planned the attack on Syrian air defense that brought down their nuclear bomb research facility a decade in the past using that board. But, Jon, we really could use something more modern for this one. The UN has a slew of smart boards. They’re isolated from the network. Even though this conference room is air-gapped and uses a hard-walled LAN, that old piece of crap Ben-Levy gifted you has no place in modern planning.”
Jon shrugged. “Just plain good luck. He erased the felt-tip markings residing on the board, remnants of missions that the old man had been part of. “Let’s start. Where do you think a rogue hacker might find the support they need to survive and thrive?”
William said, “That’s just it, Jon. A hacker can survive anywhere there’s a data connection.”
Jon frowned back. “Yes. But some places are not so good. Let’s eliminate all those with poor data connections as a start.”
It was two hours before they had an answer to this first question. Over two-thirds of the United States and over half of the rest of the world were good hiding places.
CHAPTER 8
November 27, 10:02 a.m.
A studio apartment,
somewhere in Pennsylvania
Time to move again. The CypherGhost packed a suitcase, straightened up, and wiped down the room she’d been renting. When she was sure she’d left nothing behind that could identify her, she turned at the door and surveyed the room. There was no indication that she had stayed in the room. But even better, if someone came looking for a hacker, they would find things, but nothing that had her fingerprints.
No more takedowns of aircraft for her. She’d need to be much more careful. Besides, there were so many alternative ways to end her targets. So, aircraft takedowns were now moot. Yes, there were so many other ways a hacker could kill someone without leaving a trace.
She would have to increase her vigilance. No more than one night in any motel from now on. No more than three days in any one city. Buses, not trains or airplanes for transport, since she had heard from one of the hacker boards that bus stations were not as closely watched by those who might track her, while train stations might well be.
Earlier that day, she had hacked into the local and state police to determine the location of every cam in the city she was about to leave, and then once more in the city where she planned to stay the next three nights, to avoid face detection.
She walked out the door. The bus station was too long a hike, but she could take city buses to reach it.
She had spent this morning creating a set of research of Ann Sashakovich’s life. So many of the details were missing and totally unavailable. It was as if all the information about Ann had been edited by someone. More research indicated that Ann’s adopted father now worked for the NSA and had been involved with intelligence agencies since he left the military six years ago. Ann’s mother was notorious. Google contained over six hundred pages on her. Cassandra Sashakovich had earned a PhD at Stanford in economics, had been a consultant working in over a dozen countries, and had become a mercenary after the US government tried to have her terminated. Along the way, Cassandra had become a master hacker.
Now, the CypherGhost knew where Ann had picked up the talents she now might use against anyone who threatened her. From her research, the CypherGhost assumed Ann and she were similar in many ways: their personalities, their motivations, and their work habits. She decided to follow the possible enemy bitch who had screwed up her takedown of the aircraft in which Margaret O’Brien was supposed to die.
She wanted to know where Ann was now. From what she could tell, Ann Silbey Sashakovich would be returning to the Bay Area in Northern California, where she was attending Stanford University. The CypherGhost decided to track Ann and see if the girl was trying to backtrace her own whereabouts. If she found out that the little bitch was trying to find the CypherGhost, she would end the girl’s life. But, maybe her best bet at finding out how big a threat the bitch was would be to travel to California and track her up close. She decided this would be best.
She thought that as she traveled along the way, she could use the time to destroy the lives of those who had destroyed her late boyfriend’s life. The Bible says, an eye for an eye. She vowed to take out all twelve jurors. She’d come back for Judge O’Brien last. First, she’d do the prison guards who were directly responsible for Martin’s health and well-being under their care.
As she sat on the bus, traveling west, something new occurred to her. Marvelous! If I want, I can control an election by hacking the candidates, and, if that doesn’t work, I still might be able to hack the election results.
She grinned. It might be fun to create a government of my own choosing.
CHAPTER 9
November 27, 4:16 p.m.
The Swiftshadow Group headquarters,
2099 K Street NW, Washington DC
William Wing always found the daylight coursing through the windows in Betsy “the Butterfly” Brown’s office a problem for his ability to focus on his notebook’s screen. Too bright! His own office was comfortably darker but too cluttered with computer hardware and software DVDs for them both to sit.
So, they sat in her office, where his fingers flew across the keyboard of his notebook so fast he saw them in a blur.
Betsy watched him at the keyboard and shook her head. “When I want to remain anonymous, how do I behave?”
William had just seen he
r reach another dead end, trying to backtrace the infamous and anonymous hacker who had almost brought Ann’s flight down. Betsy had said one word to express how she felt: “Fuck her!”
William stopped keying and touched her shoulder.
She pulled away. “Hey!”
It had taken nearly a second for his notebook’s screen to catch up. He took a deep breath to clear his head.
He said, “This isn’t like any of our previous exploits. We’re always had a target first, and then had to figure how to take them down. In China there was the Bug-Lok laboratory, in Russia there was the mafiya warehouse. This time, we have to do something we’ve never had to do before. There must be a really good hacker somewhere that knows this person and could help us find them. It’s obvious we need help.”
She said, “Well, if there is, we won’t find them. Most hackers won’t help find another. We all fear exposure and almost no one will expose another hacker. Sort of like honor among thieves.”
William nodded, and said nothing for a while. “Ann would help.”
Betsy shook her head. “Cassie would have a cow. She thinks Ann is already in danger since the black hat threatened Ann.”
“Why don’t we ask Cassie again? We’re getting nowhere. Ann would at least get us nowhere faster.”
She shook her head. “Cassie change her mind?”
William threw his arms up into the air. “Rats! Let’s ask her anyway.”
They took their notebooks with them and walked thirty feet down the hall to Cassie’s office. When they knocked on her door, they heard her say, “Come.”
Cassie’s office was even darker than William’s. The window blinds were closed and the paint was a dark emerald. William remembered his father’s house in the Beijing suburbs and remembered how its darkness made him feel safe and hidden. But Cassie’s office felt different. It was more like the Emperor’s haunt in Emerald City. Her attitude this morning—frowning and fuming as they entered—made him think her desk might explode into flame and smoke.