Swarm

by Guy Garcia

  Tom was transported by the notion of cyber Robin Hoods stealing from the rich and powerful and giving to the poor and powerless, or at least shaking up the system of privilege and patronage that to him no longer seemed to guarantee life, liberty, and the equitable pursuit of happiness. He had invented himself from nothing, working odd jobs and taking online computer programming classes, sensing that if there was any way for a Latino-Native American nobody to make a mark, to level the playing field, it was in an arena where what you looked like and where you came from didn’t matter, where the only numbers that counted were ones and zeros. If you knew what you were doing, it was enticingly easy to turn those integers into hard cash. Tom was past the point of trying to justify his intentions; he was simply the product of a society that had given him no alternative, no other option than to join the enterprising rogues who roamed the back alleys of the cyberverse. To those with guts and the right skills, ruminations about night and day, black and gray, and legal and illegal were extraneous or subject to interpretation. Why wait for an actual bank to open when the digital back doors to its loot were always on and waiting to be pried open? Or even better, who needed keys when you were the one helping to install the locks?

  The trick was to figure out a filch that would never leave a trail back to home base, something that blended in so well with the scenery that even the victims had no clue that they’d been punked.Tom had taken up the habit of visiting 4chan chat rooms in which hackers traded tips on what they quaintly referred to as “social engineering.” Torrents of pilfered data, some of it proprietary, some of it not, streamed constantly through the Net like an underground river. And there were packs of hungry predators always watching from the sidelines, waiting for a scrap of information that caught their attention.

  The idea came to Tom when someone posted a list of mailing addresses from a major magazine publisher. It took him about twenty minutes to duplicate the subscription renewal form and set up a secure proxy on a blind server in Singapore. The algorithm required to operate the con took him much longer, and the morning sun was seeping around the window shades by the time he was finished. Tom’s code added five dollars to the actual price of each subscription and spammed his phony e-mail to the publisher’s pilfered customer base—all 275,000 of them. When a subscription was renewed, the program would shave off the extra five dollars and send it to a proxy bank account in the Cayman Islands before forwarding the correct balance due to the fulfillment company. The publisher would get paid, the subscribers would get their magazines, and no one would be the wiser that an extra five dollars from each transaction had been collected by Tom. All he had to do was sit tight and watch the Web do its wondrous work.

  5

  The jeep shuddered and lurched as the curtain of sand closed around them like a malevolent fog. A fine powder had seeped into the passenger compartment, clinging to everything inside, including the air. Duggan pulled the dust mask tighter over his mouth and nose to keep from inhaling it.

  “When a haboob like this kicks up,” Davis announced with apparent relish, “you can’t even see the damned base from the air!”

  Duggan wasn’t worried about the weather. If he was spooked by anything in this unhinged no man’s land, it was the Afghanistan camel spider, a fist-sized venomous, demon-faced arachnid that could supposedly chase a person at a pace of ten miles an hour. He’d seen pictures of US soldiers holding them up between their hands like lobsters. Duggan could imagine the damned things out there in the dark, scurrying around, hiding under rocks and in the eaves of local houses. He knew it was wimpy for a grown man to be spooked by bugs, even big ones, but as a child, he’d been stung by a bee, his whole arm swelling up like a sausage from the allergic reaction, and ever since, he’d been skittish about any insect that pierced skin or craved blood.

  “There was a haboob the night before the Westlake incident,” Davis said.

  “You think that had something to do with it?”

  “Dunno. But storms like this can definitely mess with your head.”

  Davis rattled off more facts as he drove: Since the nominal end of the war, the allied base in Kandahar was technically under the jurisdiction of the Afghan army, and the US personnel assigned there were mainly tasked with training and technical support. “Since the official withdrawal, we are here at the pleasure of the Afghan government, such as it is,” Davis said with a smirk. They were out in the open now, zipping past a complex of low buildings that were noticeably unlit. Duggan couldn’t help wondering if Davis’s speedy pace was because of the haboob or because driving slowly was unwise.

  “I’m here to make you as comfortable as possible and help you with your mission,” Davis said. “I also got you clearance for a bunk at the officers’ quarters. Not the Four Seasons, but tolerable.”

  “I’d rather stay with the men, if that’s all right.”

  Davis shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  Duggan tied the bandanna around his neck and pulled up his collar. The mountains around them were shapeless blotches, but he could feel their presence. “How many of the Americans are here on combat duty?”

  Davis grimaced. “We don’t use that term anymore. Just a few hundred or so special advisors to watch our backs. Like I said, we’re here primarily for training and logistics.”

  “What was Westlake doing here, training or logistics?”

  “Communications.”

  “Meaning?”

  “His job was to assist the Afghans with building and maintaining their own wireless networks.”

  “But he was trained for combat obviously.”

  “Everybody here is trained for staying alive, if that’s what you mean,” Davis replied. “It goes with the territory. Westlake’s job on the base was to assist the locals with communications logistics. That’s all I can tell you.”

  The jeep slowed as it approached a gate manned by American troops. A high-powered floodlight glared in their direction, until the guards recognized Davis and waved them through.

  “Where exactly did the shootings take place?”

  “We just passed it—between the gate and the basketball courts. I’ll show you tomorrow.”

  “What about the Afghan checkpoint?”

  Davis downshifted. “We moved the internal perimeter back to increase the buffer zone after the killings,” he said. “The American and Afghan troops are now kept in non-intersecting areas—which is probably for the best since, technically speaking, we’re not even supposed to be here. This way everybody keeps his dick clean.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Listen, I’ve seen my share of green-on-blue casualties,” Davis said, his voice rising over the wind. “Locals come into our bases dressed in NATO uniforms and open fire and blow themselves up and nobody ever opens an investigation or flies in on business class.” Davis looked askance at his passenger. “No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  The jeep halted in front of a single-story tin-roofed structure with screened windows along one side. There were lights on inside, but the canvas flaps were pulled down. “This is your stop,” Davis announced. “You can use Westlake’s old bunk. It’s the last one along the wall to the left, just before the showers. Breakfast is at six sharp.”

  “l’ll be there.”

  Duggan put on the goggles, got out of the jeep, and grabbed his duffel.

  “Here, take this.” Davis held out a gun. Even in the dark, Duggan recognized it as an Austrian Glock 23 with a tritium night sight, the same .40-caliber pistol he had used at weapons training camp. “You know how to use it, don’t you?”

  “I have one back home,” Duggan said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Hang on,” Davis said, cutting the engine. “On second thought, I’d better introduce you. The guys have been a little jumpy lately.” He handed Duggan a bundle of camouflage clothing. “I guessed your size from your picture. You’ll fit
in better if you wear them.”

  As they approached the barracks, Duggan could hear the muffled throb of house music and male conversation. When Davis swung the door open, a dozen faces turned in their direction. The soldiers, most of them in T-shirts and regulation pants, jumped to attention. Davis told them to be at ease. They had interrupted a card game, with one of the bunks serving as a makeshift table. The other GIs had been reading or playing games on their phones. There was an open bottle of Jack Daniels, several empty beer cans on the floor, and a whiff of marijuana in the air.

  “Men, this is Jake Duggan from the State Department,” Davis announced, ignoring the signs of alcohol and pot. “He’ll be staying with us while he does due diligence on Westlake’s personal electronics. Please make him feel at home. He’s here to help us get to the bottom of what happened to Donny. As you were. Good night.”

  Davis closed the door on his way out, and the men immediately shifted to clean-up mode, dumping the cans and stowing the bottle and cards and plastic casino chips, displaying obedience without fealty. It was clear that Duggan had violated their personal space, which was already reason enough to hate him. The fact that he was there for some sort of official probe made him virtually radioactive. He looked into the eyes of the men who had watched one of their own massacre allies in cold blood with no warning or provocation, and he saw the residue of shock and disbelief in their vacant stares. Nothing would ever be the same after that day, and Duggan’s presence in their midst was just a reminder of the stigma they would endure for the rest of their lives, a kind of guilt by association that no investigation or explanation could ever undo.

  “Nice to meet you,” Duggan said, trying to break the icy silence. No dice. “Okay, well, please go back to what you were doing. I’m looking forward to meeting you all, but right now I’m tired and I’m going to bed.” Duggan walked to the end of the room and put down his duffel.

  “Not that one.”

  The men were looking at him as if he’d lowered himself into Donald Westlake’s grave.

  “You can use Fisk’s bunk.” One of the men pointed. “It’s that one over there.”

  Duggan picked up his duffel and moved it to the empty bunk across the aisle from Westlake’s. He grabbed his shaving kit and went to the bathroom, careful to check for anything crawling around the toilet or under the sink. Splashing water on his face helped, but he was still rattled. Duggan took an antacid from his kit and washed it down with water from the dispenser. When he came back, the lights were out and all conversation had ceased. This wasn’t going to be easy. He hadn’t expected the warmest reception, but he might as well have been a venomous snake dropped into their quarters without warning and curled up in their dead friend’s bed. Goddamn Davis—the son of a bitch set me up. He should have seen it coming, but it was too late to back down now.

  The haboob was still hissing outside, but not as fiercely as before. As Duggan’s eyes adjusted to the nocturnal gloom, he couldn’t help noticing a laptop on the long wooden bench near Westlake’s bunk. It was the reason he was in Afghanistan, and the sooner he got to it, the sooner he could leave. But it would have to wait until morning.

  Duggan broke the oppressive silence with a question. “Is that Airman Westlake’s computer?”

  “Yes, it is.” The voice came from the bunk to his left. It was calm and comprehending, almost cordial. Duggan figured that at least it was unlikely that he’d get strangled in the middle of the night. Nonetheless, he kept the Glock that Davis had given him cozy under his pillow.

  “Good night, guys,” he said to the soldiers in the darkness.

  Nobody answered.

  It was just a trickle at first, five hundred dollars in the first week, twelve hundred in the second. Then the trickle turned into a gusher. He hauled in more than sixty thousand dollars over the following three weeks, and the money kept coming. It was around this time that Tom decided that the best way to protect his anonymity was to open source his online identity as Swarm. He did this by using a random number generator to append numbers between one and ten thousand to the end of each of his messages, in effect cloning himself into a swarm of Swarm permutations, none of which could be traceable to his actual IP address or physical location. As an added precaution, Tom’s online interactions as Swarm were disconnected into separate packets that took their own routes to a proxy server, where they were reassembled and automatically erased as soon as they were completed, leaving only a trail of thousands of discarded bits of information distributed across an ocean of disconnected dead ends with no discernible content, sender, or receiver.

  Tom opened the encrypted Cayman account to check on his latest balance, which had climbed to $129,000. He celebrated by punching the air with his fists and grabbing a Red Bull from his mini-fridge. He was wondering how long his illicit payday could last when an instant message popped up on his screen, inviting him to enter a contest in which the winner would be awarded a piece of software worth millions or possibly billions of dollars. It also said that anyone capable of solving the puzzle would be considered for membership in a “an elite confederacy of like-minded individuals who have no boundaries in their abilities, resources, or ambitions.” All he had to do was solve a puzzle that would certify his programming skills. The answer to the puzzle was embedded inside the security firewall of a major commercial corporation. He had one hour to solve the puzzle, and he would receive only one clue: blue.

  Tom stared at the message, calculating the pros and cons of answering the dare. He knew that federal agencies often used cypher ploys to attract and recruit talented programmers. But that didn’t rule out the possibility that the same tactic could be used as bait to lure black hat hackers who were wanted by the authorities for breaking the law. On the other hand, Tom also knew that covert hacker collectives looking for new conscripts used the same method to locate and harvest allies with the skills needed to crack the defenses of corporations and government agencies. Was this enticing invitation a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or a trap? Tom figured the odds of winning the contest were slim, but as long as he participated as Swarm, the risk seemed minimal compared to the potential payoff. It was probably a hoax anyway. What was the harm in giving it a shot?

  Tom looked at his watch and opened a browser to the Fortune 500 list. One company immediately caught his attention: Spectrum Bio Industries. SBI was an umbrella corporation for a constellation of firms engaged in everything from sustainable energy to human genome research. It took him about forty minutes to pierce the company’s firewall and another ten to find what he was looking for: a buried file in the SBI database labeled Code Blue. The only problem was that Code Blue required a separate password for entry. With less than nine minutes left, he decided to go with his gut. Tom opened the Wikipedia entry on the visible light spectrum and looked up the electromagnetic wavelengths for the color blue, which are between 450 and 495 nanometers and 670 and 610 terahertz. He typed 450495nm670610THz in the password box and pressed enter. A link to an anonymous chat room appeared on the screen, along with this salutation: “Welcome to the MM. Your life is about to change forever.”

  “Bingo!” Tom said, clicking the link.

  macktheknife247: hey, Swarm. nice work on the riddle. We had faith in your abilities, but we had to be sure. The revolving IP address is a nice touch. We enjoyed your magazine scam too.

  swarm9020: excuse me?

  macktheknife247: don’t be coy. we have no interest in your lunch money, and covering your tracks is always a good move.

  swarm2008: who is this? how did you find me?

  macktheknife247: you can call me mack, as in the knife. all you need to know is that you’ve been on the illuminati’s radar

  swarm6630: are you web security?

  macktheknife247: ha-ha, do I sound like a cop? it’s your talent for smart mobs and programming chops that we appreciate. your skills are more valuable than you can imagine

&nb
sp; swarm9828: so I’ve heard. What happens now?

  macktheknife247: nothing yet. consider yourself a top-level recruit.

  swarm1875: I thought I was a member of your group

  macktheknife247: not quite, but you’ve definitely passed the first hurdle

  Swarm4898: what’s the second one?

  macktheknife247: you’ll find out soon enough

  swarm5158: what do you mean by recruit? it sounds like you’re building an army

  macktheknife247: something like that

  swarm3220: how will I find you?

  macktheknife247: mack has been known to hang at 4chan/b/. but you already know that. just be ready

  swarm4283: for what?

  macktheknife247: for the wind that wipes the slate clean

  macktheknife247 has logged off

  6

  Duggan awoke with the Afghan sun in his eyes. He looked at his watch and cursed. He was already ten minutes late for breakfast with Davis, and he hadn’t even touched Westlake’s laptop yet. A few of the men were already gone, and the rest were still cradled in the bunks with pillows over their heads. To avoid eye contact with the intruder? Duggan showered, dressed, and hurried out for a look at his new surroundings. The wind was still gusting, but the haboob seemed to have lost its breath. The landscape around him was flat and nearly treeless, almost every building in sight a drab tin-roofed structure. Power lines and barbed wire completed the bleak far-flung outpost motif. Off to the opposite side of the barracks, Duggan could see a couple of recreational sports fields, including the infamous basketball courts.