He returned his attention to the bracelet. “Tape?”
With long, precise strides, Sasha stepped into the kitchen. A rattling and slamming of drawers followed. From the same drawer she’d gotten pen and paper earlier, she took out a roll of clear tape. She started but froze an underhanded throw, and she brought it to him instead.
“They’ll know it’s been cut.”
He shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. Depends on refresh rate, right?”
She cut him a piece of tape, and he used it to keep the bracelet reattached. Not the neatest job, but it looked like he’d preserved the alignment and tight fit.
“Now what?” she asked.
Martin looked around. He aimed his chin at a slider door that led out to a balcony.
“I jump, virtually?” she said.
“Yeah.”
She extended her hand. “You stay here. If I’m going to jump off a balcony, even in the virtual sense, I’ll own it all the way.”
Martin handed her the bracelet. Momentary surprise gave way to appreciation when he saw her drop to her knees and walk on all fours to the slider door. Once there, she unlatched it and opened it wide enough to crawl onto the deck. She went lower, on her stomach, as she traversed that last stretch. From the edge of the balcony, Sasha looked left and right. Her surveillance took a few seconds before she tossed the bracelet over the banister and to her right. Then, still on her stomach, she slinked back into the apartment.
She closed the door and crawled to her left, where she pulled on the strings to draw dangling vertical blinds.
“Happy?” she said.
The distant sound of gunfire pre-empted his answer.
23» White Paper
As it turned out, InfoStream headquarters featured a vault within a vault, accessible only through another thick, pressurized metal door that lead to a clanking, metal staircase. Going down, Sasha squinted to make out what lay below. Stacks of boxes and scratched tan file cabinets came into view first. The smell of fresh paint interlaced with airborne dust.
“Initially we intended this basement for storage,” Odehl said, out of breath more from stress than the downward climb. With an exhaled huff he added, “Now we use it for… other purposes.”
Sasha looked around as lights came on. A wide open space with semicircular rows of computer terminals stretched up to a wall of computer equipment racks. Six large screens arranged in two rows of three faced the semicircle from the wall at the front of the room. At a glance, it looked like a control room of sorts. She wished she could call Chana now to tell her how in she was. She had a shootout and a streaking car ride from her apartment back to InfoStream to thank for it.
That thought made her pause. Convenient, wasn’t it? Did that mean Chana had a hand in it? Had she given an external assist to move things along?
Odehl’s ramblings brought Sasha back.
“We have a couple of beds through there,” he said. “Sofa beds. Pretty comfortable,” he added with a tentative tone.
“No need to get apologetic about it, Robert,” Sasha said. “So long as we’re free of nasty needle punctures and bullet holes, this place will be a vast improvement over the prior arrangements.”
Odehl shot her a disapproving look. Martin grinned, but with evident reluctance. In his eyes she detected something else. Relief, maybe even thankfulness that she was safe.
“Heard from Cynthia?” Martin asked.
“She’s fine,” Odehl said. “Doing some cleanup.” He waved at a doorway ahead and led them through it. Inside two couches lined against opposite walls. Two desks and computers in the center of the room faced each other. Odehl went to one of them and rolled its chair to the side of its desk.
Martin did likewise with the other chair, then went over to one of the couches to get it ready.
“But I didn’t get a chance to bring my cute pajamas,” Sasha said, not at all surprised when neither of them smiled.
Odehl had gone topside over an hour before. Neither he nor anyone else had come down to check in on them.
“I guess they trust us,” she said with a coy smile.
Martin shook his head. He looked exhausted, tired with the kind of weight that comes after an adrenalin spike followed by nothing.
She went over to him and pulled a chair next to him. “You, OK?”
He shrugged.
She reached out to him, stopping midway, feeling stupid about it.
He smiled.
She leaned in the rest of the way and rested her hand on his. “I’m sorry to put you through this.”
He shrugged. “It’s not your fault.”
“Isn’t it?”
“You wanted to be with me. That’s all.”
So simple. So straight up. No pretense about it. No soft-pedaling around it. He’d boiled it down to the bare essence. He’d said it the way she should have from the start—to him, to herself.
“That’s right. I did.”
He waved around the room. “And here we are. Together.”
“Not quite how I dreamed it, but I guess I’ll take it?”
She left out the rest, the part she didn’t have to say. No need to mention the irony of it all. How they’d left them alone. A part of her questioned it. She’d scanned the room for cameras. If they existed, Martin’s handlers had done a masterful job concealing them. She doubted it. The room and its surroundings seemed to harken back to the seventies. Old furniture, thick, crusty paint on the walls, rusted metal fixtures. It all suggested a backup space. Yeah, a storage room turned into something more, but most decidedly unplugged, except for the key parts.
“Yeah, funny,” Martin said. “Without the laughter.”
“I guess we should get some sleep.”
He stood up. With sure but slow steps—as if trying to be casual about it—he sauntered to the door and closed it. He first eyed, then slid toward one of the couches, removed the seat cushions and pulled out the built in bed. It craned out with the screech of rusted joints and springs. He eyed Sasha for a moment, smiled. At the desk he turned on a small lamp, then headed for the door again, where he flipped off the overhead lights.
Back at the bed, he sat to kick off his shoes. His pullover long sleeve shirt came off next. Then he sat there, smiling at her.
“That’s your bed, I take it,” Sasha said.
“The one and only.”
“One and only? Aren’t you going to help me with mine?”
“Only if you want to.”
Sasha couldn’t help herself. She grinned. She kept grinning as she stood and walked over to him. No, as a matter of fact, she didn’t want help with her own sofa bed.
She sat next to him. Side by side they remained there for a few moments, like two teenagers trying to figure out what to do next.
“Are you sure about this, Martin?”
Palm up, he held his left hand in front of her. She didn’t hesitate to take hold of it. For a few moments she buried her head into the side of his neck. Then they kissed.
Sasha woke up to the tap-tap of a keyboard. It took her a moment, after squinting and rubbing her eyes to make sense of her woken reality. Martin. Who else? How long had he been up? Had he gone to sleep at all?
She sat up and looked beyond him. He’d put away his sofa bed.
“So here’s what I think,” she said.
“Uh-huh.”
She stretched and supinated her back. “The shooting, Samuels literally falling on his head, all of it—a big ruse to get us stuck down here, whiling away at our code.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Two computers, two beds. That kitchenette and coffee pot down the hall. What else do we need?” She slid to the edge of the bed. A chill went up through her when she set her feet on the cold floor.
Martin kept typing. All right, so he’d awoken in one of those lost-in-his-work moods she’d seen back in their joint college days.
She stood up. For a brief moment, she almost asked for the location of the restrooms. But she remembered u
sing them the prior night—which wasn’t the prior night at all, only a few hours ago. All part of the same bloody, muddled morning.
Closer to the door, she smelled a familiar scent. “Coffee?”
“Uh-huh.” He rattled off a furious string of keystrokes.
“Is it any good?”
He looked up. He shrugged. “Yeah. Machine’s the same brand as in your apartment.” He went back to his typing.
Sasha did her thing in the restroom. On her return, she found the coffee. Steam still rose from the pot, testifying as to its freshness. In the nook where the machine stood, she also found a box of pastries alongside a shallow stack of napkins. She returned to the office with a mug in one hand and a chocolate croissant in the other.
At the doorway, she considered her options, electing to go sit on Martin’s couch. About five feet away now, she could see, if not read, his screen. It looked different than she’d expect. A white screen, single window pane from edge to edge. Large lettering, Times Roman, not the usual Monotype font one would find in a code editor. Neither did she see the usual bolding and color highlighting.
“Writing a love letter?” she said.
He had stopped writing. He swiveled his chair around to face her. “White paper.”
“Hmm. So like a term paper. When is it due?”
“Three years ago, unfortunately.”
“May I know the topic? Or is it too classified for me?”
He grinned. “Maybe. Whatever.” He shrugged. “Let’s say that if it were, you wouldn’t be here.”
“I’m sure that’s the way Cynthia would have preferred it.”
He nodded and frowned a bit. “You know, things can’t stay the way they are.”
“I suppose it’s awkward.”
His frown deepened. “Awkward isn’t the word I’d use. More like on the edge of a cliff.”
She restrained a frown of her own and took a sip from her mug. “You make it sound so dangerous.”
“You don’t think it is?”
“I see your point,” she said, acknowledging the prior night’s events.
“If we don’t do anything. If we let the status quo roll forward, we’re headed for a catastrophe. A big one.”
“OK.” She drew another sip to search out the proper response. “Sounds a bit alarmist.”
“Alarmist? Are you kidding? Look at what just happened? They hacked into a government system and traced your bracelet. Of all the bracelets in use, boom, right to you.”
She fought back the urge to thank him for his concern for her safety. “I guess you have reason for worry there.”
“Worry? We have to start running.”
“Running… that sounds promising. Do you have a particular destination in mind?”
“We have to bullet-proof ourselves.”
Now she frowned. What was he talking about? “Bullet-proof ourselves?”
“Yeah. We can’t let our systems just dangle, exposed, out there flapping in the breeze for anyone to come and hack into. That’s no longer acceptable. We have to safeguard ourselves, and even go on the offensive. If nothing else, we should ruggedize our key digital infrastructure.”
On the one hand she found his passion endearing. On the other, she deflated inside. No, he wasn’t talking about them: Martin and Sasha. He was talking about the dear Homeland.
He pointed at the screen. “That’s what I’m working on. A ten step program to…” He made a tight fist. “To snuff the very possibility of Cyber threats.”
“I take it you mean more than the next latest and greatest firewall.”
His hand flailed a dismissive wave. “Firewalls are target practice. Everyone knows eventually you find the hole and burrow through it. But what if there was something else? Something that hacked you back the second you tried to hack into it?”
“That assumes you can detect the hack in the first place.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, so.”
OK, so he was dreaming. Dreaming big. Envisioning bigger. She shouldn’t throw cold water on that. “All right, so let’s assume you can.”
“We know we can. We just have to have the right smarts in place. Not only that, but we let them latch on. We draw them in, except they’re not going into the real thing, but a sandbox we make look, feel, and act like the real thing. And once trust is established that they’re in, we pounce back. We counter-punch and take them down.”
“So you have hackers manning this system, ready to… pounce?”
“Not hackers. Not the human sort, anyway. Something that can pounce faster.”
That got her attention. “Oh?”
“Something that can pre-calculate all the possible moves and courses of action. Something that can determine how best to counter-punch, and then—”
“Fully autonomous, artificially intelligent hacking.”
“Boom.”
She sat up. “Yeah, boom.” She took a long gulp of coffee, too long. It went down hot and scalding, leaving a burned, sour taste at the back of her tongue.
He was smiling. More like beaming. “Sounds like something that might get you jazzed to come to work every morning?”
“First we have to figure out whether it’s something that would work. Hmm. Correction. That should work.”
He stood up and rolled her chair around the desk, stopping next to his. Mug in hand, he stepped out and returned a minute later with a steaming cup of coffee.
Reluctantly, she got up from the couch and joined him at the desk. He walked her through what he’d written so far, she helped him fine tune some points, and they started working on the rest.
While Martin put the final touches on his white paper, Sasha used her limited account privileges to dig into the outcome of her original hack. She took care not to trigger any alarms or allow ITAA technicians to track all that she was doing. That took some doing. She could see how they were tracing and logging her every transaction.
This meant that when she finally concluded her sweep, she could only boast of inconclusive results. But they provided her enough of a handle. Slowly, and gradually, by executing transactions that would prove hard to piece together, she gathered enough evidence to know that the money she’d siphoned off in her New York Stock Exchange hack wasn’t where she’d stored it. Someone had hacked one of her BitCoin accounts, the one she’d stashed at a major service provider. She didn’t dare check her other stash, the one where she’d stored a subset of the BitCoin keys. Doing so would endanger further tracking, no matter how carefully she tread. She’d wait for that. But for now she knew, her main account, holding about eighty percent of the funds she’d siphoned off—that was gone.
During interrogation sessions, she’d told Cynthia and company about a portion of that Bitcoin account getting hacked by the Ukranians. She’d claimed she had let them. Whether Cynthia believed that part or not, it didn’t matter. But the possibility that ITAA had used her pseudo-confession to track down the rest of that eighty percent… Why hadn’t they called her on it, if that wasn’t the case? Or, if not them, who had hacked her account?
She wouldn’t risk any more snooping. But examining her associations, she had but one likely guess.
Four weeks later, after several revisions and with a summary briefing package alongside it, Martin presented his findings to Robert Odehl and the rest of his team. Sasha stayed in the briefing for the first portion during which Martin spoke, and no one else interjected. At the end of the briefing, Martin opened up the floor for questions. No one spoke up. Several people looked in Sasha’s direction. Odehl pushed the intercom and asked for someone to come escort “Ms. Javan” back to her office.
From there, she spent a few minutes imagining the questions. Some would no doubt question her involvement. How much of this had she seen? All of it? Oh, my. And why were they trusting her to be there at all, regardless of the skill and knowhow she brought to the team? She hadn’t even turned over all the money she’d originally pilfered—if they now indeed knew about that.
Did they? That was the question, wasn’t it? A question for which she’d struggled to find a suitable, satisfactory answer.
But maybe she was thinking too highly of herself. For all she knew, they wouldn’t talk much about her—or at all. The lion’s share of the discussion would focus on details: what government infrastructure remained most prone to attack, the most vulnerable, the most precious? What civilian assets would they want to protect in like fashion? What legal ramifications would such protection entail? Yeah, she couldn’t sit in the room with them during discussions about such preciousness.
She sat in her office imagining all that, before her thoughts moved on to dinner plans.
Their sponsors had found her and Martin a new safe house with two rooms, separate, with individual bathrooms. They’d moved in there two nights ago. Last night their benefactors had delivered a boodle of groceries. She’d promised to cook, her contribution to safety, since ordering to-go meals presented yet another way to trace their undisclosed location.
Entwined in a loose embrace while lying on their apartment’s living room couch later that night, she asked, “So, are they keeping me in or kicking me out?”
He squeezed her. “Let’s say you’re not going to get out of doing your fair share of the coding that easily.”
“You must have given them quite the pitch, then.”
“I told you it went well.”
Yeah, it had gone rather well. Well enough to set aside, perhaps even overrule Cynthia’s unveiled concerns. Well enough to go against her rather plain wishes and, at least for now, let Martin and Sasha grow close. For the good of the Homeland, no doubt.
Instinctively, Sasha placed a hand over her stomach.
“You OK?” he said.
“You ask me that a lot lately.”
“You don’t seem yourself.”
No, she wasn’t. Not since that night in that basement. She kept peeing on sticks, remembering what Einstein had said about doing the same thing and expecting different results.
“We’ve been working hard,” she said.
“If you need a couple of days off…”
“Yeah, I think I do.”
Feral: An Our Cyber World Prequel Page 16