The Director: A Novel

  “Let’s start with Berlin. How did the recruiting trip go?”

  “Aces all the way.”

  “Who did you pitch?”

  “The guy’s name is Malchik. Actually, that’s his handle. You want all the details? I gave them to Denver already. He checks out.”

  “Yes, of course I want the details.”

  “His real name is Misha Popov. He lives in Germany, but he’s a Russian hood. He is a serious fucking hacker. I mean it. He’s got a network that’s the best.”

  Morris shook his head. “Impossible. I’ve already got the best.”

  “I’m telling you, this guy Malchick scared me, and I’m the guy who scares other people.”

  Morris shrugged. “What does he have?”

  “Zero-day exploits stacked up like a deck of poker chips, that’s what. Plus, he has the little goonies who are going to keep cranking them out—the Cerberus Club kids, who hate big business and secrecy so much they can penetrate every bank and intelligence service and pussy parlor on the planet. And thanks to Malchik, they are unwittingly passing it to us.”

  “How much did he cost?”

  “Twenty-five million U.S., for six months. In three installments. Wired to his account in Vaduz.”

  Morris sat back in his chair and shook his head. “For a hacker? He’ll gag on it,” he said.

  “Quality costs money.”

  “We’ve never paid anybody that much.”

  “Pownzor, don’t worry, man. If he delivers, he’s worth it. If he doesn’t deliver, I’ll shoot him. Money-back guarantee.” He pointed his finger toward Morris and pulled down his thumb like the firing hammer of a revolver.

  “That’s reassuring. And keep your voice down, please, especially when you are talking about shooting someone.”

  Junot leaned toward his boss and spoke in his ear.

  “Thank me, Pownzor. Please say, You did a good fucking job in Germany, Ed. Thanks a lot.”

  Morris backed away and shook his head.

  “You want my hand on your dick? Forget it. What about Switzerland?”

  “Basel is cool. Nice buildings.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking.”

  “The river is beautiful, too.”

  “Cut the crap. Is it all wired down?”

  “Food is surprisingly good.”

  “Fuck off, Junot. The BIS platform is ready, correct?”

  “Of course it is. You saw all the lights blinking, all the beacons in place. It’s phat. We own the systems administrator. What more do you need?”

  “We need the database administrator. I’ll dox her, too, to be safe. I just want to make sure you got out without leaving any traces.”

  “Clean as a Swiss asshole.”

  “They’re going to come looking for you.”

  “So what? They’ll find a club sandwich on room service and a four-course meal that cost a month’s salary, but that’s it. No traces.”

  Junot bobbed his big rock-hard head contentedly. Morris shrugged, which was his version of approval.

  Morris was hungry. He rose and found the barman, who delivered two cottage pies and two more pints of ale.

  Junot attacked the food with the ferocity of a man who hadn’t had a proper meal in four days. Morris ate eccentrically, as he did everything; he skimmed off the mashed potatoes on top but left the layer of ground beef on the bottom, teasing the residue with his fork so that its surface was rippled in waves.

  “Don’t play with your food. That’s what my mother said,” said Junot when he had finished every morsel of his own cottage pie.

  “Well, my mother told your mother to piss off, because her son was going to Stanford, whether he ate his hamburger or not.”

  Junot laughed. “I love you, boss.” The chiseled bald man reached out to give him a kiss, but Morris backed away.

  “You pervert,” said Morris. “We need to talk about tasking your asset, and then I am out of here.”

  “Tasking? These are geeks, man. Let the IOC take care of them.”

  “We’re staying away from Headquarters. Weber wants me fired, and then arrested.”

  “Don’t pick a fight with the boss, Pownzor. Bad idea.”

  “I don’t need Weber. My authorities are direct.”

  “What does that mean? ‘Direct’ from where?”

  Morris cleared his throat.

  “The top.”

  Junot looked at Morris skeptically.

  “And the director’s not in that loop?”

  “Not always. You may hear gossip from your Blackwater buddies about how I’m under a cloud. Forget that. I have all the authorities I need.”

  Junot nodded. Loyalty was his code. But it had to be reciprocal.

  “What about my money?” Junot asked.

  “Denver wires it every month to the accommodation address in Warsaw, just like you wanted. But why Poland? It sounds insecure. Are you fucking someone there?”

  Junot winked. “The money doesn’t stay there. It goes to an account in the Caymans.”

  Morris rapped Junot’s bald head with his knuckles. “You’re not as stupid as you look,” he said.

  “I’m your bitch, Pownzor. Now what do you want me to tell Malchik?”

  “Tell him Hubert needs to get inside big financial databases. We want exploits that will crack Linux, SWIFT, Oracle, all the trading platforms. We’re going after hashed data, so we’ll need to crack the hashes in real time. We need this stuff yesterday. No bullshit. He should deliver now or he can kiss the money goodbye.”

  “What if he asks what we’re using all his exploits and hash crackers for?”

  “Tell him to fuck off. We are paying him twenty-five million to deliver product, not to ask questions. If he gets too curious, it’s time for your money-back guarantee.”

  “You are a hard dude, man.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m just smart.”

  Morris and Junot left the pub separately. Junot returned to the bed-and-breakfast, where he stayed for another day before moving on to a new safe house Morris had rented for him in the East End of London. Morris spent the afternoon on a local field trip that was the real reason he had told Denver to route Junot to Milton Keynes.

  A few miles to the east of the “new town” stood a modest country house in the village of Bletchley, perhaps forty-five miles north of London, near the main railroad line that connected the capital with the north. The name of this country estate was Bletchley Park, and it was here that British cryptologists had managed to crack German “Enigma” encryption machines and read Germany’s most secret messages during World War II.

  The mansion house stood at the foot of a broad lawn. It was a plain house, of red brick and white clapboard, thrown up in the 1880s by a financier from London. A white cupola crowned the roof, but the rest of the structure was undistinguished by any architectural adornment. The temporary huts where the code-breakers had worked were gone. The country house still stood, its physical ordinariness a counter-monument to the brainpower that had been assembled here.

  James Morris strolled the grounds where Alan Turing and the other misfit geniuses of their day had labored against the barbarians and done work that, quite literally, had saved civilization. Morris thought, immodestly but with his whole heart, that he was involved in a similar endeavor.

  25

  BRISTOL, ENGLAND

  James Morris worked like a man who knew he was running out of time. Grantchester was too hot now: He relocated his command post to Bristol, in the West Country. It was easy to disappear, if you knew how to vacuum your electronic exhaust. From Bristol he directed the network that he had assembled. He provided each member the same template of operations: Penetrate your target with malware that finds a hole in the code; exploit through “social engineering” the human weaknesses that allow you to gain control of a systems administrator or database administrator. He stopped communicating even with the covert clearinghouse in Denver, lest they understand what he was really doing.


  Morris chose Bristol for the same reason he had chosen Cambridge: It had a university that excelled in mathematics and computer science. So many amateur hackers were online that Morris could mask his own digital tracks. He took an apartment along the Queens Road, near the university, and filled it with servers and screens. He lived on caffeine in various forms and a new favorite food, Ramen noodles, which he consumed day and night.

  Morris had five principal operatives: Edward Junot in East London, his gofer and enforcer; Emmanuel Li, the Chinese director of his “institute,” who had left Grantchester for a new hideaway; Misha Popov, the Russian tough guy in Berlin, known by his handle “Malchik,” who ran a string of unwitting German hackers; Yoav Shimansky, the Israeli who had served with the IDF’s Unit 8200; and the Chinese graduate student Bo Guafeng, who tapped into his hacker connections back home. Morris had other people in other networks: hackers picked up from the semi-anarchist libertarian groups that flourished at the margins of the cyberworld. But he used them now mostly for chaff, to distract and deceive.

  Morris gave each member of his core group a basic toolkit. They had an updated version of the attack suite known as Metasploit, beloved by “white hat” penetration testers and “black hat” hackers who wanted to take systems down. When Morris’s team members had gained access to a system, they could steal its files by typing download; insert files by typing upload; or create a keylogger that recorded every touch of the target’s finger, simply by typing keyscsan_start. The tools were all preconfigured: hashdump stole the Windows hashes that were supposedly protecting passwords and data; timestop changed the recorded times when files had been created or altered. Morris’s team could disable security systems, add backdoors and encode malware into .exe files that were nearly undetectable.

  “It’s too easy,” Morris liked to say. And it was.

  But Metasploit was only the start. Morris provided his operatives with newer, fancier tools that could surmount controls that had been created to deal with Metasploit. At times they’d use older tools like Back Orifice, a pun on Microsoft’s BackOffice software for servers, which could control computers running the Windows operating system. They had ProRat, another Windows tool that allowed insertion of backdoor Trojan horses, aka RATs, or remote access tools, which could infect all the computers on the same local area network. They had Sub7, yet another remote access tool. It was like a medicine cabinet stocked with poison pills.

  Morris liked to hack his own team members, to keep them nimble (and convince himself that the Pownzor hadn’t lost his touch). But it was also a way of sharing the ideology that Morris had believed since his youth, even as he had gone to work for the U.S. government. He was an advocate for freedom. Like so many other hackers and whistleblowers, he imagined that the United States had been hijacked by evil bureaucrats; his experience at the CIA had only deepened that suspicion. The United States had inherited the imperial mission of Great Britain, without realizing it. The British had created the CIA as the operational arm of this post-imperial regime, with Americans toddling along behind. Morris was determined to break that chain. He had imagined two months ago that the new CIA director, Graham Weber, might be an ally. But that was folly. Weber was caught in the ooze and muck.

  Ground zero for Morris was the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. Over the past weeks, he had been studying this financial epicenter. He gathered books from online sellers, using several dummy accounts. The BIS in Morris’s mind had become the hub to which all the spokes of command were connected. It provided the world’s central banks with liquidity, it bought and sold their gold and other instruments that were part of the international repository of financial reserves. It set the capital standards that were the global financial system’s measure of international health. It was the umpire and scorekeeper: It maintained the records attesting which institutions were healthy with adequate reserves and which were dangerously undercapitalized. If it was hacked, he could be a digital Robin Hood, taking money from rich countries and giving it to poor ones.

  Morris believed that by disrupting the BIS he was restoring the state of nature: Malchik, Yoav, Bo and the rest regularly found their screens going dark and then coming alight again with the messages about One World, and the reign of Internet freedom that would follow the end of the old order of 1945. He sent the fastidious Dr. Emmanuel Li pictures of kitty cats and sunsets and people holding hands, with the message: Keep them Free: One World. He thought Li would be reassured by these images of life as a Coca-Cola commercial.

  From his apartment on Queen’s Road, Morris would look down onto the Bristol docks to the Avon River that flowed west into the Bristol Channel. By day, it was an ugly industrial vista. But by night, under the lights, the old bridges and wharves took on a soft lemony glow. Morris would sit on his deck after a day of coding, and watch the lights refract and dilate with the beat of his heart. He took the edge off with a shot of brandy and then retreated to bed, where he read himself to sleep with his monographs about the BIS.

  The more Morris read about the “Tower of Basel,” as one book called it, the more he saw the BIS as a compendium of all the mistakes and conspiracies of the twentieth century. The bank had been created in 1930 to manage the flow of German reparations payments, and its profits were supposed to go to Germany. In the 1930s, it came to be seen as a financial backstop for the Nazis. The Allies seemed united in wanting to liquidate the BIS after World War II, but bizarrely the British had insisted on rescuing it during the 1944 Bretton Woods negotiations—to the point that John Maynard Keynes threatened to walk out of the conference if an American plan for defunding should be approved. Keynes was so agitated about the BIS issues that observers feared he’d suffered a heart attack. The Allies finally agreed that the BIS should be “liquidated at the earliest possible moment,” which Keynes interpreted as, “Not very early!”

  And on it rolled, for seven decades: Until James Morris was instructed to shatter this symbol of Anglo-American tutelage.

  Morris used the BIS routing codes and account numbers he had received from Roger to tailor his attack. These codes and passwords made it easier to program the Robin Hood part of his scheme, moving funds from account to account. He had his team develop a string of backups, in case the BIS plan wasn’t enough. This second tier included commercial banks in London and Manchester whose software supported the Bank of England’s reserve management; the London stock exchange; a hedge fund in London and a private-equity fund in Edinburgh. But these were fallbacks.

  To prepare his attack, Morris and his researchers had gathered a basket of exploits that could penetrate all the major systems used by financial institutions: They targeted the “Corebank” and “Alltel” software of Fidelity Information Systems; Oracle’s “Banking Platform” and “Flexcube” software; the Swiss-based Temenos “T24” system; the Indian-owned Infosys “Finacle” suite; the London-based Misys “Bank-Fusion Universal” system; and the German “SAP for Banking.” These software platforms shared a common unintended feature: They all were targets for a determined assault.

  Morris admonished the members of his network to pay special attention to backup systems: Where were they? How could they be accessed? How was the mirrored data from the main institution transferred to the backup center? How frequently was it backed up? Morris had prepared for this as well, studying the leading software vendors that provided data protection and backup services for the financial industry.

  Morris had cunningly dissected the world of global finance. His target in Basel touched, at one or two degrees of separation, nearly every institution around the world. A shock wave transmitted through these institutions would create not just a disruption, but something more. The financial system was like a snowflake: so intricate in its fractal patterns, but so fragile.

  Morris was shopping for milk and cereal and fruit juice at the Tesco near his apartment when he noticed someone was following him. It wasn’t fancy clandestine surveillance, with teams of people in relay and layers of c
overage, but just one person. He was compact and well dressed, with the muscular build of a soldier. He was wearing a blue peacoat and sucking on a piece of hard candy.

  It was only when Morris caught his intense eyes that he realized it was the same man who had approached him in the pub before he had quit Grantchester, the man Ramona Kyle had introduced as Roger. He had given Morris an index card with the time and place for a meeting in London, but Morris had let it pass two days before. Now, somehow, Roger had found his new command post.

  The man followed Morris through the checkout at the market and then down the street to a café, where Morris had planned to get an almond-flavored latte before he went back to work in his lodgings over Queens Road. When Morris sat down, the man took the table next to him. When he got up to move, the man simply walked over to Morris’s table and took the closest chair.

  Morris’s face was impassive, but he was frightened. This was the first sign of surveillance he’d seen; the first indication that anyone knew where he was since he left Cambridge. He played dumb.

  “Do I know you?” asked Morris, peering through his spectacles at the young man in the peacoat.

  “I’m Roger,” said the young man, extending his hand. “You missed our meeting.”

  The cowl of a foreign accent shrouded his voice. It could be Russian, Polish, Romanian; somewhere east of the Danube. He didn’t make any attempt to cover it this time.

  “I don’t do meetings,” said Morris. He grabbed his package and rose from the table and began moving away. But Roger was quicker. He pushed one of the light café chairs so that it was blocking Morris’s preferred exit path, and with the other hand pulled Morris’s bag of groceries away from him and slung it over his shoulder.

  “I’ll walk with you,” said Roger. “Don’t worry, I’m alone.”

  “I don’t want to talk to anyone. Go away or I will call the police.”

  Roger smiled. “Really? I don’t think you will call the police. No games, please. I will talk, and you listen, okay?”