Zero Day: A Novel

by Mark Russinovich

  Manfield pushed Sue into Greene so hard the pair fell back against the bed. Drawing his pistol, Manfield said, “Quiet now. If I have to make any noise, I’ll kill you both. Tell me what I want to know and nobody gets hurt.” Gesturing with the gun, he motioned for them to sit. They sat on the edge of the bed.

  “If you want money,” Greene said, attempting to take charge of the situation, “I’ve got—”

  “Shut up!”

  “—plenty right there on the desk…” Greene stopped and stared at the barrel of the gun, the energy draining out of him.

  Manfield moved slowly to the desk and glanced down. With his free hand, he pocketed the cash without counting it.

  “Who are you?” he said to the man.

  “Joshua Greene.”

  “What are you to her?”

  “Why … we’re…”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “He’s my boss,” Sue said, understanding what the Brit wanted to know.

  “Ahh. I get the picture.” Better and better. “Sue, lie on the bed, facedown. Pile the pillows over your head. And don’t move. You”—Manfield indicated Greene—“come over here.” Greene hesitated, looking at Sue for an anguished moment. “Now.”

  Sue lay across the bed, rolled uneasily onto her stomach, then crawled up the bed, inching her way slowly. She pulled the pillows to her, then piled them over her head, feeling very young. How does he know my name? she thought. What does it mean? From a distant childhood memory she found a prayer and began to say it to herself.

  Greene rose, then crossed to Manfield.

  “Over there,” Manfield said, indicating the floor in the corner. Greene walked slowly, like a man condemned, as if each step was one of the last he’d ever take.

  When Greene’s back was turned, Manfield put the automatic away and brought out the knife, snapping it open one-handed. “I have a few questions. I’m sure you’ll tell me what I want to know.”

  On the bed Sue made a small sound, perhaps a sob, muffled by the pillows.

  WEEK FOUR

  ROOTKITS PROLIFERATING AT DISTURBING RATE

  By Arnie Willoughby

  Internet News Service

  September 1

  Nearly one-quarter of all malware located in the Windows operating system is found to be stealth rootkits. This is the result of a recent survey by an alliance of cyber-security companies. “Rootkits are the fastest growing segment of malware,” said Arliss Scarbrough, the alliance director. “Rootkits are generally not detected by existing antivirus software. They implant themselves deep within the kernel of the operating system.”

  Infection rates are reportedly increasing by 100 percent each month, and at this rate rootkits will soon represent the majority of malware present in computers. “Rootkits can be used to cloak any type of virus and make it very difficult to detect and remove the malware. This is an especially disturbing evolution in cyber-security,” said Scarbrough, who advocated increased financing for rootkit detection software.

  Internet News Service, Inc. All rights reserved.

  44

  MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY

  CENTRAL PARK

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1

  10:05 A.M.

  Just north of the Pond, Jeff and Daryl sat at a picnic table. He placed her portion of the ravioli in front of her, along with the plastic utensils, as she set down their coffee and two unopened bottles of water. Jeff peeled the top from his coffee and blew steam from the hot brew as Daryl took her first taste.

  “Hmm. Good,” she said. “I was getting sick of bagels and rolls all the time.” Jeff nodded in agreement. He’d felt the same way, which is why he’d suggested the impromptu picnic. Watching Daryl relish her first bite, he felt pleased with himself for remembering that both of them were more than the sum of their work, even though in the back of his mind he’d hoped that fresh surroundings might inspire fresh insights.

  They ate and sipped coffee in silence for a few moments longer, then Daryl said, “Do you think our Dragon Lady is your IT manager?”

  “I’m curious myself. I’ll know in a bit. I haven’t been in touch with her since we messaged last night.”

  “Let me know anything she’s learned.”

  Jeff nodded as he took a bite. He glanced up and his eyes fell on a couple spreading a blanket in the morning sun. The air was cooler but still more summer than fall. Scattered about were other couples and individuals out walking, talking on cell phones, listening to iPods, tossing Frisbees. He wondered for a moment how different their lives would be in two weeks if he and Daryl failed. Would the machinery of this great city grind to a halt? Would the power grid collapse? He could scarcely imagine every catastrophe that was possible.

  Returning his attention to Daryl, Jeff asked, “Why are you back in the city?” He’d been idly wondering about that since hearing from her. “I thought you had an important government agency to run?”

  “I’m following up on something here.” Putting down her fork, she added, “And I wanted to see you.” Realizing how that sounded, she tacked on, “For a reason.”

  “Other than my good looks, you mean?” Jeff said, with a grin before realizing he was actually flirting with her. He’d always found women so complicated, far more complex than the most difficult computer problem. Even gentle Cynthia had thrown him for a loop every so often. But Daryl, he was finding, wasn’t all that difficult. Her mind worked very much like his did, and she was no more geared toward failure than he was. They were on the exact same wavelength, in his view. He was completely comfortable with her. Sure, she was drop-dead gorgeous, but since she didn’t make much of her looks, Jeff realized he hadn’t either. Now, though, with the sun highlighting her golden blond hair and a smidgen of tomato sauce accentuating her full lips, her beauty was hard to ignore.

  She smiled. “That, too. But there’s something we need to do that you won’t want to.”

  “So you figured to pitch it to my face?” He pushed aside his unexpectedly amorous train of thought, wondering what she was up to.

  Daryl hesitated, and for a moment Jeff felt a chill as the warm feeling he’d had vanished. “Fly to D.C. and meet with George Carlton. I’ll go with you,” she added hastily, taking that moment to touch him briefly on the arm.

  Jeff felt a tight grip on his throat. “You’re not serious, are you?” His voice sounded foreign even to him.

  Daryl pursed her lips. “I am.” She leaned forward and spoke quietly. “Nearly all the triggers are date-related, and we’re ten days out from the event. And we’ve got zilch. I’ve sent so many messages, made so many calls, cornered so many people, I’ve worn out my welcome. There is nowhere else I can go at this point so it has to be him. Carlton is the chief of counter cyberterrorism at DHS. If he wants to, he can wield a lot of clout. I’m being ignored and the security vendors are way behind the curve on this one. If he can get even one of them moving, we can spare a lot of people a lot of damage.”

  Jeff’s face turned rigid. “There’s nothing I can say to him that you can’t.” The very thought of seeing Carlton face-to-face caused Jeff’s bile to rise. “And he’s not going to listen to me. We’ve a track record in that regard, you’ll recall.”

  “I know you don’t believe this, but I think George respects your work,” Daryl argued, looking intent. “I’ve sensed it in how he’s mentioned your name the time or two it came up. I personally think he feels badly about not listening to you.”

  Jeff gritted his teeth as he spoke, trying to hold back his anger. “‘Feels badly’? He damn well should. A lot of people died because of him.”

  “Maybe. But things were so bad in those days, I doubt he could have stopped what happened. Really, Jeff. He was your boss, but only a very small fish at the CIA. His superiors would have still been studying your report while the planes flew into the Towers.”

  Jeff raised his voice. “We don’t know what would have happened. He could have told someone, at least! He could have done more! At the very
least, he could have tried!”

  Daryl looked around to see if anyone was paying attention to them, then turned back to the conversation. “We all could have done more, except maybe you. But we have to focus on the here and now. You’ve seen this virus firsthand, in far greater detail than I have. Between the two of us maybe we can get him at least to lean on the vendors. They’re the ones with the resources to counter this.” Determined to get Jeff to see her point, Daryl refused to back off. She was desperate and willing to do just about anything to get him to join her in what she saw as their last hope.

  “Excuse me.” Jeff rose and made his way to the nearby public men’s room. Inside, he scrubbed his face with cold water, fighting back the tears. Pulling out a handful of paper towels from the dispenser, he rubbed his face nearly raw. He stood quietly and drew several deep breaths, releasing them slowly. Who am I really mad at? he thought. Carlton? Or myself? The answer still wasn’t clear to him. After nearly ten minutes, he returned to the table.

  “There’s this,” Daryl said, as if he’d never left. “My team has determined that the Superphreak virus propagation avoids IP addresses owned by software security vendors. Think about that, and the effort that’s gone into creating it. It’s also one of the reasons why the vendors aren’t giving this priority.”

  Jeff’s voice was steady as he said, “I agree, someone’s put a lot of thought into this.”

  “There’s more.” She was speaking so quietly he almost couldn’t hear her over the background buzz of conversation and traffic. “It only targets U.S. and European computers.”

  Jeff was stunned. “The rest of the world is excluded?”

  “Yes.” Daryl bit her lower lip and seemed to struggle for self-control.

  “My God,” Jeff whispered, almost to himself. “They’re after the West then, not just the technology. It really is an attack.” There was nothing left to discuss. “You win. I’ll go.”

  “Good.” She pushed the remainder of her food away. “We’re on the noon shuttle flight and are meeting him at three.”

  45

  PARIS, FRANCE

  5ÈME ARRONDISSEMENT

  GRAPHISME COURAGEUX

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1

  12:05 P.M.

  Gaullist protesters marching in opposition to Arab immigration had all but closed the routes into central Paris. Labib had decided it was pointless to try to drive to his office. He’d called to tell his secretary he wouldn’t be in. Most of the staff, she told him, had done the same thing.

  Labib dressed casually, left his car parked outside his house, then took a taxi as far as he could into central Paris. Once he reached the closed streets, he began walking, staying off the main arteries, clogged with demonstrators. It was a beautiful late-summer day. The morning air was invigorating, though he knew the city would by afternoon be sitting in a stifling heat.

  Weaving his way down side streets and alleys, he reached the back entrance to Graphisme Courageux nearly two hours after leaving his house, where he found Michel Dufour hard at work.

  Dufour nodded as Labib entered. “The front staff never arrived.”

  “The French. I’ll never understand them. Where are we?”

  “Just a moment. Let me finish this.” Dufour continued typing as Labib dug a bottle of water out of the small refrigerator they kept in the office. He sat at his desk and waited. Finally Dufour stopped, turned toward him, and said, “Do you want an overview of the attack?”

  Labib nodded.

  “I’ve kept a rough count and believe we have dispatched more than two thousand variations of our core boîtier. I’m launching something like five to ten a day and will keep sending them out through the tenth. A significant number are self-replicating, and that increases the numbers considerably.”

  This was even better than Labib had dared to hope.

  “In addition,” Dufour continued, “I’ve paid to have the new attacks of old boîtiers increased. The purpose is to keep the security companies too busy to pay attention to ours. About two weeks ago we launched a boîtier that blocks automatic updates.”

  “Is it working?”

  “As you know, we can’t be certain, but my sense is that it is.”

  “What else?”

  “As for our own boîtier, I’ve been spending more effort to have them encrypted and compressed. Some variants are encrypted with the activation time or codes that will be automatically published on compromised Web sites. That makes them much more difficult to decipher and should buy us enough time. I wish I’d thought of it sooner, like the noirs. I wish every boîtier had one.”

  “What is done is done.”

  The reality of the cyber jihad had never reached the level of Labib’s dreams or expectations. As he had once described it to Fajer, it would ideally have been unleashed on an unsuspecting West along with a major Al Qaeda attack against physical infrastructure or targets with symbolic value. But that had proved impossible to coordinate.

  The lost years had not proven all bad, though. More and more Westerners were going online, depending on their home computers and the Internet to conduct business and banking. Over those years more and more banks had turned to electronic banking, since it greatly reduced their costs and increased their profits. In theory, a bank of the twenty-first century had no need for a physical office and needed precious few real employees. The profits of such an operation would be enormous, and banks throughout the United States and Europe were racing one another to be the first.

  Computers and the Internet were one of the primary means for the expansion of Western culture and were instrumental to its military and economic dominance in the world. They were the means of the most powerful attack on Islam, perverting and tempting Muslims everywhere, launched since the days of the Prophet. Those who said Muslim extremists would never destroy an Internet they too relied on for communication and the spread of propaganda didn’t understand what was at stake. The Internet would be rebuilt in time, but in the meanwhile, the inflicted damage would be incalculable.

  The military of the West depended more and more on computers and the connectivity of the Internet, as did Western civilian governments. In the United States nearly every government function was tied to the Internet. Social Security and the Fed, to name just two, could be accessed from the Internet. The list was almost endless, which was why Labib had elected to take a shotgun approach rather than to target specific organizations. He’d ordered a series of viruses crafted that could potentially infect every computer in America and every function tied to the Internet. He was trusting that technology would plant the electronic seed of his jihad everywhere.

  The objective was to infect and destroy as much of the information and technology of the West as possible, all on the same day.

  When Labib had finally devised the cyber-attack, separating what he could actually accomplish from fantasy, he had flown by helicopter and met with Fajer high in the Hejaz Mountains at the remote camp of members of their tribe. They’d consumed a traditional Arab meal consisting of al-kabsa (rice cooked with chicken in a pot), dates, hawayij (a spice-blended bread), followed by al haysa, a sweet dessert, while watching traditional dance, performed by the unmarried young women and girls of the tribe. Fajer had pointed out one of the girls, about ten years old, a fragile beauty with doelike eyes and a luminescent face. “My future wife,” he said. “I will keep her here so she is not contaminated by luxury.”

  Labib thought the idea of raising a wife to form was disgusting but said nothing. Though the Prophet allowed four wives, Labib knew from personal experience that the consequences for all were not necessarily good and thought his brother knew this as well. Labib loved his wife and would never take another.

  Late that night, as the camp settled into the evening, amid the smells of smoke and camel dung mixed with the sweet fragrance of cedar native to the region, the brothers sat by a dying fire as Labib told Fajer what the two of them would do for Allah.

  “We will launch our cyber jihad in
coordination with an Al Qaeda attack that will make the World Trade Center seem as nothing. We will destroy billions of dollars in assets, cripple the Internet on which the Western world depends, unleash floods, shut down—even destroy—power plants, including nuclear ones. Airplanes will fall from the sky. Millions of computers will be permanently destroyed, including those containing the records of pensions. The loss of key data will be incalculable. Faith will be shattered. Anger against their government will be greater than ever before. It will cause more damage than the first attack did. The West, the United States of America, will suffer a great defeat. Faith in Western technology will be crippled.

  “In the Muslim world, those who have been mesmerized by false prophets will turn away, while our true brothers who have been tempted by the West for too long will rise up. In Iraq, Iran, and Syria, those fighting the infidel will be emboldened. It will take years to recover from this, years of retreat for the West. It will end with a new caliphate.”

  Fajer’s eyes had blazed with fervor and Labib had never felt closer to him, or to Allah.

  But now he knew some of what he had planned would not happen. There would be no Al Qaeda attack and he could not estimate in advance the full extent of the harm he would cause on September 11. He was certain it would be substantial; it might even be crippling.

  Yet this was only to be the first attack. Already he and Dufour were planning a follow-up, which they would unleash before the United States had recovered from the first. Their assault from this time forward would be relentless and unstoppable.

  The rear door opened and Fajer stepped in, neatly dressed in a dark charcoal Armani suit. Labib had had no idea his brother was in Paris. He grinned and stood up, taking his older brother into his arms. “As-salaam alaikum.”