Feral: An Our Cyber World Prequel

by Suastegui, Eduardo

  “Well, they were pulling down,” the kid replied. “The Chinese crew clamped it down an hour ago.”

  “What time is it over there now? Afternoon, right?” Martin knew he didn’t have to ask that. The screen to the right of the kid’s main monitor displayed the Shanghai and Beijing stock exchanges, with the top right of the screen ticking off the local time.

  “That’s right,” the kid replied. “Trading has just restarted, but stocks only.”

  Martin nodded at the parts of the screen whose numbers didn’t budge. “No bonds. No Treasury bills.” He chewed on the inside of his lip. “What’s the damage?”

  “Since we’ve been tracking?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Half a bill.”

  “Five hundred million?”

  “Yeah. We’re thinking closer to a full bill, but we can’t know for sure.” He lowered his voice and stole a look over his shoulder at the suits whispering behind them. “And the Chinese ain’t telling. They’re just screaming a lot, but no specifics.” He leaned over to Martin and lowered his voice another notch. “I just hope they stay cool and don’t start tossing nukes our way, you know?”

  “It won’t come to that.”

  “You sure, man? This is serious. If they can convince themselves we did it—”

  “We didn’t do it.”

  “Yeah, somebody please tell them that. I mean, we’re sniffing and tracing with kid gloves, but they’re not stupid. They can see us. It can look like we’re cleaning our tracks rather than trying to figure things out…”

  “Maybe we should cool it, then,” Martin said.

  “Yeah, tell the suits that. All the way down from on high. Figure this out on the double, turn the smoking gun over to the Chinese.”

  “They know we’re in there then. The Chinese, I mean. Because the President probably told them.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.” He sneaked another look over his shoulder. “Look at them. They’re not acting like we’re proceeding under the spirit of international cooperation.”

  “Hey, Dennis,” another kid shouted from the other side of the room. “Sending you an IP. Check it out. I think it’s got the goods.”

  Dennis—that was the kid’s name, Martin recalled now—turned back to his main screen and machine-gunned a string of key strokes. An assembly language screen popped up, and he brought his nose within inches of the display to scrutinize the data.

  “See what I’m seeing?” Martin heard behind him. The kid from the other side of the room had materialized next to him.

  “Uh-huh.” Dennis looked up at Martin. “Fancy stuff.”

  Martin shrugged, not getting the big deal excitement. That his code was “fancy stuff” had long ago been established.

  “Look closer,” Dennis said, as if reading his mind. “This isn’t quite your stuff, unless you’ve been moonlighting.”

  Martin rolled his chair closer as Dennis made room for him. It didn’t take long for him to see what Dennis and his teammate meant. Martin’s eyes were scanning his code, but it wasn’t his code. The disassembler showed it plain enough: new functions, new variables, what looked like new objects, even if the translation mangled their nature somewhat.

  Martin turned to Stan Beloski, who had drawn nearer and now stood over his shoulder.

  “See?” Martin said. “Further proof—”

  “It’s her code,” Stan said.

  “Yeah. Well, my code with alterations.”

  “More than alterations,” Dennis interjected. “This shows she’s quite capable of enhancing—” He cut himself off with a frown, then turned back to the screen, pushing Martin aside. “It’s like—”

  “Like she wrote in the first place,” the other kid said.

  “You got that right,” Dennis replied.

  Martin shook his head. He waved a dismissive hand. “That’s just supposition. Like you can tell whether it’s someone’s original code from the way they modify it and make a new version.”

  Dennis faced Martin with a deepening frown. “Of course you can. That’s what forensics is for.”

  “So you can tell.”

  “Of course I can.” Dennis thumbed in the direction of his colleague. “And he sure can. That’s what we majored in and specialized in once we came to work at the…” He paused to cast a sideways glance at Stan. “For our team.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Stan said, crowding in closer, as if there were any space to do that. “You’re saying this was her code all along?”

  Dennis shrugged. “Yeah. I can write you the report, but it’s all—”

  “You do that,” Stan said. He turned to Martin. “If you have any technical reasons to non-concur with their determination, now would be a good time to offer them.”

  Martin rolled his chair away from Dennis and raised his hands. “I don’t do reports. I only write code. That’s what I’ve always said.”

  “Verbal will do,” Stand replied. “Is it true, Martin?”

  Martin crossed his arms, wondering if Stan was latching onto this latest finding to get Martin off the hook. Doing so might make Martin’s future in Stan’s project more certain, wouldn’t it?

  Martin decided that suited him fine. Maybe he could get something out of it, too. “We need to bring her in.”

  “Excuse me?” Stan replied.

  Martin turned in his chair to face him. All around him, people pressed in. “Hire her. If you really think it’s her, take her off the field. Bring her on your team, and you’ll have the full solution.”

  “That’s very interesting,” Stan said. “But you haven’t answered the question.”

  “Oh, but I think he has,” Cynthia said, stepping up. “He’s answered it loud and clear.”

  Martin swiveled his chair and faced his terminal again.

  Agent Cynthia Odehl and Martin returned to the small office they’d used earlier. They sat in more or less the same arrangement. Stan sat in silence, arms crossed, at the head of the table while Martin and Cynthia faced off.

  “You know why they assigned me to this case, Martin?”

  Martin shifted in his seat. Where was she going with this?

  He shrugged. “Daddy wanted you close by?”

  She held his gaze for a few seconds before replying. “You have a good education.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Mine’s not as stellar.” She smirked. “It’s more… diverse. Double-major, once in business management, once in psychology, with some theater arts spritzed here and there.” She made a spraying motion with her fingers.

  “Impressive. Am I supposed to ask you out for coffee now, or are you more a Martini kind of gal?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Martin could see Stan grinning. Before him, Cynthia held a thin, but firm smile. Her eyes regarded him playfully, but with an incisive bite to them.

  “What kind of agent am I, Martin?”

  Martin paused to recall their earlier encounter. “Something or other about collections.” He raised an index finger and twirled it. “Which goes perfect with your business thingy. A bill collector.”

  Her thin smile widened a bit. “Not that quaint.” She leaned forward, resting her weight on elbows that in turn pressed against the table. “I collect something far more valuable. Irreplaceable assets. The human kind.” She raised an eyebrow. “Now do you get why my background fits this situation so well—or at least why my superiors would think so?”

  Martin nodded. Enough playing around. “A business degree so you can understand what’s going on with the markets. A psychology degree so you can head-shrink me. And the acting part in case none of this works out and you have to stay in L.A. to audition for the next diaper commercial.”

  She chuckled, on the verge of full out laughter. Stan kept grinning.

  “So who are we recovering?” Martin said. “Not me, I take it, since I’m right here.”

  Cynthia sharpened her gaze. “Who, then?”

  Martin swallowed. “When you
say collection, what exactly do you mean?”

  “We employ a range of options and tactics. It depends on the situation. More to the point, on the cooperative spirit of the person we set out to recover.”

  Martin stopped himself from swallowing again. Last thing he wanted to do was give her any indication of his unease. Dumb try. Those eyes of hers were reading him as if he were made out of cellophane.

  “Do you think she will be that, Martin? Cooperative?”

  He shook his head. What could he say? Did he know Sasha well enough to make a judgement one way or the other?

  “You two spoke recently?” Cynthia asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “How did she seem towards you?”

  He shook his head again. “We haven’t seen each other in a long time.”

  “A couple of years.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But she was, shall we say, agreeable?”

  “Agreeable to what?”

  “In a general sense.” She huffed a bit, either acting or truly put off by his response. “She wasn’t arguing with you, or shouting at you, or punching your chest.”

  “We talked. No one was bleeding afterwards.”

  She huffed again, with more oomph behind it this time. “You said we should bring her in. By that I take it you meant you’d talk to her, pitch her on joining the team?”

  He shrugged. “Sure.”

  Cynthia smiled and nodded. “Great.”

  Martin turned to Stan. “So, we’re OK with that? Bringing her in?”

  “Sure.” His grin gone for good, Stan gave him a blank stare.

  “All the seniors OK with bringing her in?” Martin asked.

  Stan maintained his blank expression. “Let’s say it’s been discussed and pre-coordinated for some time.”

  “Let’s focus on the present, shall we?” Cynthia interjected.

  “Yeah, lets,” Martin said. “And here in this present moment, I do your dirty work. You’re the collections agent, but all you do is pull the strings. Mine. And I go off and do the collection for you while you wave and point me in the right direction.”

  “How about we call it tutelage.”

  “Whatever. I go play spy and double agent for you, and I bring her in.”

  Cynthia shot Stan a sideways grinning glance. “You were right, Stan. He’s absolutely brilliant.”

  Martin would have taken her remark for mocking. But a part of it—and a significant one at that—felt to him like flirting. He wondered whether his mind played a trick on him, because the idea of her flirting with him struck him as a desirable thing. And he wanted more of it.

  14» Fractured Code

  Sasha looked at the laptop’s screen one more time and did her best to act defeated. The smell of automobile oil and gasoline and rust and whatever else clogged this auto shop made it easy for her to act disgusted and wrinkle her nose like someone had given her great offense.

  “They’ve stopped it,” she said.

  The other two guys squinted, as if that would let them ascertain for themselves the full technical scope of what the screen showed.

  “How could that be?” the younger of the two said, the one that went by Robbie—or Rabbie, if he was stupid enough to use his Iranian name. When he had introduced himself in Farsi, she couldn’t tell which way he’d pronounced his name.

  Had it been that long since she’d come out of Iran as a child approaching her teenage years? She snapped herself out of that to answer Rabbie’s question.

  “They closed the market. Not much I could do if there’s no pipe to work with.”

  The other guy, Gabe, pointed at the screen with objection written all over his face. “But it is open now. They’re trading, no?”

  “Not T-bills. That’s still closed.”

  “Oh.”

  These two guys were supposed to be technical. Who exactly had they sent? Two college kids still trying to tell the difference between the Escape and Backspace keys, from the looks of them. All right, she was being overly harsh and hyperbolic in her inner vitriol, but really, couldn’t they send someone more qualified?

  She told herself to refocus. Why ask such a dumb question? First, they wouldn’t dare send the best. Not unless they could assure their safety. Why risk your best players in hostile territory? And second, this all worked to her advantage. All the better to give them halfway answers and partial solutions without them having the wherewithal to call her out on her deception.

  “Still,” she added. “We pumped quite a bit of cash, didn’t we?” Which should have more than covered her siphoning of funds from Iranian backed funds in the US, she didn’t add—the funds no one thought were Iranian, of course, but which she’d tapped into with her hack.

  “How much again?” Gabe asked.

  “Seven fifty, give or take. Mostly give.”

  Gabe glanced over at Rabbie-Robbie. The two of them nodded at each other like they were trying to convince themselves and each other that, yeah, oh, man, they had rocked this.

  “Seven hundred and fifty million?” Rabbie-Robbie asked to make sure.

  Sasha tapped the screen. “Plus change.” Where change amounted to a little short of another quarter million.

  Gabe did some more of his vigorous nodding. “And it looks like the Americans did it.”

  “Yup. Uncle Sam’s holding the bag. Except the bag is empty, but who’s going to believe that?”

  Gabe and Rabbie-Robbie let out a nerdy nervous laugh.

  “OK, here’s the deal guys.” She stood up, holding a DVD disc in her hand. “All the code you need is in here.”

  “That’s a little retro,” Rabbie-Robbie said through his not so cute, trying to be cool accent. “Couldn’t afford a flash drive?”

  Sasha shook her head and rolled her eyes while they shook with another bout of their laughter.

  She waited for them to wind down and shoved the disc into Gabe’s hands. “This is more secure, not spoofable, and harder to erase by remote control. Capisci?”

  Their tentative mirth dissolved. “Oh,” they said in unison.

  “As I was saying, here’s the code. Now, pay attention, because I’d like you to deliver a message to your handlers. Ready?”

  “Yeah,” they replied, again in near unison.

  “This is important, OK?”

  They nodded.

  Sasha let a couple of seconds pass for emphasis. Yeah, she had their attention.

  “This thing we did to the Chinese stock market? It can be done to anyone without the proper protection.” She paused again to look each one in the eye. OK, they were catching on.

  “Tell your bosses that I can make sure it doesn’t happen to them.”

  “How?” Gabe said.

  She grinned and gave him a gentle slap across his cheek. “That’s so cute that you would ask that. As it turns out, it’s for me to know, and for you to find out. And for your bosses to pay for, of course. Tell them I can set up a protection system comparable to, if not better than what the Americans use on their top secret installations.”

  Sasha paused. Should she go on, say something else to push her point across? Nah, they got it. Brevity sometimes provided the best emphasis. Don’t embellish it. Just say it, straight up. People respect that.

  “OK,” they said in unison.

  Gabe added, “So you show us how to do it.”

  “Your bosses write the check, and I’ll get it up and running for you.”

  They went back and forth with a few more minutes of worthless banter. Then they blind-folded her, put her in the car. She heard the garage’s metal door roll up and the clinking of chains and crunching of gears as it came to a stop. After that, they rolled out in the whisper quiet Prius, with her wedged in the back seat wondering if this would work. If they would realize that what she’d given them didn’t amount to much. That it didn’t comprise the full solution, the complete suite of malware she’d launched to perform the attack.

  If they were smart, and she supposed th
ey had their fair share of qualified individuals, they’d see through her fractured code in no time. They would dig deep enough to notice the missing pieces. But it would take them some time. And she hoped that would provide her enough margin to work something out with Martin—to convince him to run away with her to a place too far for goons of any nationality to reach.

  Did such a place exist? Martin didn’t think so.

  She pondered that, where they would go, maybe on a sailboat, moving all the time, totally off-grid, seeing the world, or at least the Americas. That would work, wouldn’t it? Much better than hiding in the darkest corner they could find, she wagered. Always on the move. With enough cash to stay afloat. Literally.

  The image of a sailboat docked in a remote tropical bay kept dancing in and out of her mind throughout the drive. It stayed there after they dropped her off four blocks from her apartment. It drifted into a fog and finally faded as she walked. It snapped shut when she reassembled her cellphone and turned it on, seeing a message from Martin.

  “Hi,” it said. “Need to talk to you. URGENT.”

  OK, so he knew. Of course he did. She hadn’t exactly made it terribly difficult to decipher. She’d left enough of her fingerprints. Now he wanted to talk, like she hoped he would. Because his handlers wanted her to come in. She would in due time accept the offer. But not before she played hard to get, both with Martin and with them.

  15» Reservations

  Something told Cynthia complications would arise. That something also told her of impending danger. In spite of all assurances that this upcoming meeting between Martin and Sasha amounted to little more than a hacker boy meets hacker girl over a quiet three course dinner, Cynthia didn’t think it a good idea to let him go in without a surveillance team.

  Did she feel this way because she didn’t trust Martin? Here, in the back of this crammed Prius taxi, she eyed him. He seemed calm, not so much resolved as resigned. Like he knew what he needed to do, but he would take it on without enthusiasm, and he was OK with that.

  “Ready?” she asked him.

  He gave her another of the nonchalant shrugs she’d almost grown accustomed to. “It’s just a date. What’s there not to be ready about?”