The Gomorrah Gambit

by Tom Chatfield

  The minutes slouch past with agonizing slowness until, at last, a new message arrives.

  Please send required verification.

  The same again. It’s all automated, of course. No people, no risk, no mistakes. And Azi has failed to send what’s needed. Desperately, he browses everything he can access about Jim, numb fingers moving as fast as he can make them across the phone’s slipping screen. It’s too busy here for him to stay much longer—too ordinary. The night’s secrecy is evaporating. What will he do if this doesn’t work?

  Then he finds it, on the forums: a public exchange between some of the most senior members of Defiance and several new names, repeating what appear to be stock phrases in English and German. A stilted conversation about Jim: a code, hidden in plain sight. Azi double checks, copies the link, pastes it into the email and waits, praying he has found the necessary form of words.

  A minute, then a new message appears. Azi has to read it five times before he can believe what he is seeing.

  Welcome Jim Denison. Please specify client OS.

  This is it: access. After taking another long breath and peering over both shoulders in turn at the street’s gathering light, Azi types a single word in response.

  Android.

  A further few minutes, then a link appears. He clicks, downloads, installs, and waits for a secure connection to the darknet’s private servers. Everything is bespoke. Only a named and verified user of the client software can even detect Gomorrah’s existence.

  Achieving a secure connection seems to take forever. Azi blinks, frets, paces, passing the phone from hand to hand. Then, the next time he looks at the screen, a single phrase is hovering in crisp white letters against the darkness.

  This is Gomorrah.

  He’s in.

  Hardly daring to breathe, he taps the screen. There’s a pause, then a cloud of smaller type appears. It’s some kind of user agreement.

  I, Jim Denison, endorsed by the Defiance party, currently based in Berlin and resident of Thrale Road, South London, agree to abide by this service’s code of conduct: to accept supervision and monitoring via this device, to deliver all goods and services as promised, to pay in advance in entirety, to maintain absolute discretion, and to obey all of the above upon pain of death. I submit to these terms in perpetuity.

  And people complain about Facebook, Azi thinks, tapping to agree. At least the phone hasn’t asked for a drop of his blood. One more tap, and the marketplace opens.

  As with almost every darknet destination Azi has frequented over the years, what appears next on his screen is disturbingly ordinary. Gomorrah closely resembles a spreadsheet: heavy with text and selectable columns, awkward to scroll on a mobile device. It’s like an old-school eBay for evil.

  Azi starts to browse. If you’re buying, you either bid on predetermined offerings with countdown timers or enter a special request together with timescale and budget. If you’re selling, you specify a service and a reserve price. The interface is impressively uncluttered, and the existence of an Android client is an unusual touch, but otherwise it has the counter-intuitive dullness that marks a genuine illicit marketplace.

  There are also, however, some major differences from the marketplaces Azi is accustomed to researching on Tor. For a start, there are no drugs. In general, drugs are far and away the most popular darknet products, thanks equally to the level of demand, profit and ease of transportation. On Gomorrah, everything on offer appears either to be a service, a software exploit or some hard-to-obtain hardware—and the pricing levels are stratospheric.

  Bidding on ownership of a five-hundred-thousand-machine botnet is at three million dollars. A set of next-generation NSA microwave listening devices is a few hundred thousand. Remote exploits for the latest Predator drone firmware are at ten million, and climbing fast. Almost nothing is off limits, up to and including the most closely guarded data and software of several intelligence services. If even half of this is real, the world at large needs to rethink the meaning of cybersecurity.

  What shocks Azi even more than this, however, is the handling of payments, complaints and disagreements. Profound paranoia is a required state of mind for conducting any darknet business. Encryption keys are ubiquitous, as are cryptocurrencies; false identities are created and abolished according to regular schedules; it’s assumed that law enforcement will at some point shut down almost every site that’s out there.

  Here, however, there are indications of what he can only call a quiet, service-orientated confidence. Payments are accepted in a wide variety of currencies. Real names are known to the system. As he had hoped—but hardly dared to believe until now—cash is readily accepted by couriers and fixers, with all kinds of real-world encounters easy to facilitate (payments, trafficking, murders). It all feels extremely convenient, even civilized; a far cry from the darknet forums where nine out of ten assassins for hire are either FBI agents, blackmailers, or both. Enforcement and reliability are guaranteed, because the people behind this most discreet of marketplaces have their gaze fixed upon every single user—and an ability to punish failure in the most absolute terms.

  In his two decades of peering through the holes in the modern world, Azi has never seen something that makes the unthinkable feel this mundane; a purchasable compendium of hacks, vulnerabilities and manipulations that would ordinarily take lifetimes to locate. It’s as if someone announced an auction expressly designed to hasten the collapse of civilization. Which, now that he thinks about it, couldn’t be more perfect for his purposes.

  Opening a sub-section devoted to urgent local cash services, Azi outlines Jim Denison’s immediate need.

  Berlin-based transportation urgently required. Fifteen thousand euros cash, departure in one hour, discreet central location. Sealed package to be taken cross-continent.

  Triumph and fear boil in Azi’s chest, alongside incipient exhaustion. He’s on the run, he’s on his own and he has no idea what the hell is going to happen next.

  It’s time to hit the road.

  Nineteen

  Dr. Tal does not have a high opinion of dentists. Kabir discovered this when the agony of his rotting molar finally prompted him to ask the doctor for help. Dentists, Kabir has learned, are little better than glorified nurses. Dental nurses are worse even than regular nurses. Then, somewhere beneath even these half-humans in the chain of being, there are the kind of people who expect world-class trauma surgeons to peer into their stinking mouths.

  They’re on the road. Muhammed the German is driving their requisitioned off-roader, Dr. Tal is seated in the front passenger seat, Kabir is crammed in the back alongside sundry medical supplies and firearms. Since the Caliphate was declared, fighters have continued to flood into the Islamic Republic—the new Minister of Education in Mosul is himself a German ex-trafficker—and this means Muhammed’s sister is traveling a well-trodden route. This in turn means that they may be up a shitty creek with no means of propulsion if too many recruiters or recruitees profess ignorance of her existence.

  To make matters worse, Kabir has a USB key stuffed up his arse, delicately wrapped in a surgical plastic bag that previously contained one of Dr. Tal’s facemasks. In a metaphorical sense, at least, Dr. Tal is sniffing his rear end, and this brings Kabir some comfort as he bounces from side to side, watching dust rise in torrents behind them.

  He’s not quite sure what data the USB key contains, but some of it must be good. It took him barely an hour to Google and download the necessary exploits, using a borrowed admin account whose details he has watched one of his superiors type out with a single slow finger every day for the last month. In what he hopes is an effective insurance policy, he also downloaded a lavish selection of malware and then activated the lot. With luck, they’ll put it down to a foreign cyberattack.

  Dr. Tal and Muhammed look pretty chummy, as they have for much of the last week, but this doesn’t mean much. Kabir’s experience out here suggests that people like Dr. Tal don’t have friends, only acquainta
nces who are more or less convenient; and Muhammed is currently a great deal more convenient than Kabir. Up front, Dr. Tal heartily slaps Muhammed across the shoulder, joking about today’s trafficking traffic. They have passed some military and civilian four-by-fours, but the bulk of the other road users are a motley succession of independent traders hauling oil across the Republic in the biggest tankers they can get hold of.

  The traders buy their oil, under license, directly at the fields in crude form. It’s a strategy that transfers most of the risks and costs away from the authorities, but that produces infamous traffic jams. Once the Americans begin their air strikes in earnest, Kabir thinks, there will be a great deal of burning.

  As they ride out an especially aggressive bump, swerving simultaneously to avoid being overturned by a tanker, Kabir watches Dr. Tal clench and unclench his fists against the dashboard. The man is formidable, his lazily sprung physical strength always on the edge of violence. No wonder he fits in so well. Dr. Tal is perhaps the sanest man Kabir has ever met, because his obsessions only make him more effective. There’s no pity or hesitation in him. At this point, bouncing like a sack of rice in the dusty and overheated air, Kabir reaches a decision. He needs to start thinking like Dr. Tal if he wants to make it out alive.

  Out of the blue, Dr. Tal announces that it’s time to stop. Through his window Kabir can see the slender white-and-red chimneys of a power station, shivering in the heat. It’s elegant, almost like a mosque, the light glancing off the unrippled water in what he assumes is a cooling pool. Kabir imagines bombs falling from the sky, the towers tumbling, the shockwaves snapping every bone in his body. He has got to get out of this place. He has got to get into a town with dentists.

  They pull over, onto scrubby grass beside the shade of a lone rocky outcrop. Kabir snaps a few shots for the greater glory of Dr. Tal’s social media presence, and stares into as much of the light as he can bear. The sky is vast, the land is flat, the sun is merciless. Muhammed the German and Dr. Tal drink deeply from their water bottles. Kabir waits before being given permission—a contemptuous nod—to do the same, weighing the moment. He has so many questions to answer.

  How soon can he kill them both?

  Twenty

  Having expected the unexpected, Azi is disappointed to discover that being covertly transported across Europe in the back of a truck is just as unpleasant, disorientating, frightening, claustrophobic, disempowering, dull and constipation-inducing as he would have guessed.

  He is seated inside a wooden crate of modest proportions, having specified his needs with paranoid precision: leave a receptacle just large enough to fit one person at a quiet location, leave inside it a day’s worth of food and water (and a bucket, which was the service provider’s one suggestion during their terse exchange), then collect said crate and convey it by road to an isolated spot on the outskirts of Athens.

  He has five thousand euros left after paying for his passage. He left the rest of the cash outside the crate, crammed into a plastic bag: an inflated fee for a transfer entailing no false documents, but, he knows, worth every cent if it can guarantee discretion.

  Azi is taking Anna’s instruction to lie low extremely seriously. To prevent tracking, he dispatched his NADIR phone into the back of a long-haul lorry with one well-aimed throw, before relinquishing the comforts of Berlin’s Wi-Fi networks and removing the batteries from every scrap of stolen hardware on his person. Now that he’s helplessly confined, the merits of all of this have begun to feel less clear. Is Odi still alive? Should Azi have stayed closer to Berlin? Shivering at the memory of bullets gouging through chipboard, Azi suppresses his doubts.

  Going unrecorded, Azi reflects, is becoming one of the twenty-first century’s priciest privileges. Hence the twin (and sporadically overlapping) classes of people who get to indulge in luxuries such as privacy, silence, clean air and sound sleep: the very rich and the very bad. Poverty may guarantee irrelevance, but it no longer keeps you off the grid.

  Then again, nobody is doing much effective surveilling of anyone in Greece these days, which is one of the reasons—Azi tells himself—it makes perfect sense for him to head there. It’s a nation wobbling in geopolitical earthquakes: unemployment, asylum, immigration; the aftershocks of financial crisis, building their resonance into new disaster. It’s the badly latched gate into and out of Europe—its loans and politics curdling, its police armed and dangerously underpaid. Even the refugees are desperate to move on.

  If Munira is still alive—and he is currently trying to keep all other possibilities far from his mind—then the Greek capital’s semi-functioning underside should be an ideal place for picking up intel, asking questions and seeking discreet assistance. It’s also much too late for him to change his strategy; although not for him to endlessly re-analyze his choices and fears.

  Above all, it’s the dead bodies that keep coming back to Azi. Locked in sweating darkness, he sees himself stepping again and again over corpses in the warehouse. Sometimes, a bullet topples him to join them. Sometimes, one of them has Munira’s face.

  There are approximately twenty hours left of this bumping, agonizing, uncertain journey—assuming he isn’t simply pulled out of his crate and executed—and, desperate to put some distance between his thoughts and present reality, Azi finds himself tumbling into the past.

  July 1998. With school behind them, Azi and Ad had stabilized the routines of their friendship into something almost perfect: hours of companionable silence devoted to hacking, Internet Relay Chat and forum banter; multiplayer games of Doom II and Diablo; research into the intricacies of all the above; and as much tepid lager as they could bear to drink, neither being prepared to confess that they didn’t like the taste.

  They had also fallen into two complementary roles. Azi provided the strategy, the meticulous preparation and the paranoia necessary for self-preservation, while Ad provided the swaggering ambition and contempt for lesser mortals. They had a good thing going and, like all good things involving teenage boys, it was fraught with bravado and self-sabotage.

  Backed by Azi’s research, Ad’s favorite trick was to ring up a blameless mid-size company, open with some confident-sounding questions about their IT, then ask to be put through to the computer room. At this point, he would pretend to be an administrator from whoever supplied their software. I’m sorry to say that we are ringing round to report an urgent bug. The current version of your software is compromised. You may already have lost data. But I can patch everything up remotely if you just provide a few details…

  It never failed to astonish Azi what could be achieved through the correct combination of fear and hope. After some token queries, which Ad met with a mix of jargon and amicable contempt, the sysadmin on the other end of the line would grant them access to a systems manager account. The same sysadmin would then gratefully stay on the line while Ad and Azi introduced a remote patch permitting backdoor access to the entire database. After this, unless the company was unusually adept at monitoring network traffic, they wouldn’t notice anything amiss until their email system began spontaneously inviting clients to perform sexual acts with one another.

  Over time, Azi began working on pre-scripted lines for Ad to deliver during calls, in search of ever more effective social engineering techniques—as the manipulation of others’ trust and expectations was known. Azi liked knowing the proper name for things. If the scam didn’t work, hanging up immediately would arouse suspicion. Instead, Ad should cheerily promise to send a patch by disk in the post before ringing off. If the scam did work, he should stay on the line for a few extra minutes, exchanging pleasantries and asking if there was anything else he could do.

  Over the years of their collaboration, Azi-the-apprentice had started to feel like Azi-the-brains-of-the-operation—but Ad had subtle ways of pushing back. Sometimes, Ad played dumb then showed his hand: things he knew that Azi hadn’t got around to reading. Sometimes, Ad acted like mere details were beneath him. Sometimes—and these were the
best times—they both got lost in the moment, barely able to contain their excitement when they found a new approach.

  Then there were the worst times, when Ad went on the offensive.

  “Mate, your research is fucking shoddy. I’m doing my thing, chatting my tits off. Only you’ve got the wrong name for their IT supplier, the wrong guy as head of department…this isn’t amateur hour.”

  Azi had learned the hard way that arguing with Ad was never a good idea. Yet he could never help defending himself.

  “It’s not my fault their website is out of date! I don’t even know why they bother having one. And there’s no way you should have told that guy to go and play hide-and-go-fuck-yourself.”

  Ad grinned in a manner calculated to drive Azi crazy. “It was good for him. A…” unforgivably, Ad supplies air quotes “…‘valuable learning experience.’ I thought he was going to cry.”

  Sighing, Azi attempted to leverage the gravitas of his just-turned-eighteen years. “Seriously, Ad, we cannot afford to piss people off. It’s too dangerous. What does your sticker say?”

  Ad’s sticker said FREE KEVIN in black block capitals on a yellow background and was affixed to his pride and joy: an IBM ThinkPad 770 laptop with integrated DVD-ROM drive, handed down as a gift from his mother. Azi would have needed to work non-stop in IKEA for a decade to afford something like it.

  The sticker was part of a campaign run by the American magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly—Ad was one of the few people in the UK to have persuaded his mum to arrange a subscription for him—and referred to the American hacker Kevin Mitnick, aka the World’s Most Notorious Hacker, aka the Person Ad Most Wants to Be and Sometimes Thinks He Already Is.

  Having finally been tracked down by the FBI, Mitnick was being detained without bail under threat of hundreds of years of prison time. So far as Azi was concerned, this made him an example of what his and Ad’s future would look like if they weren’t careful. So far as Ad was concerned, this made him an example of why as many websites as possible needed to be taken down and turned into FREE KEVIN banners, and why the world’s entire non-techy population deserved to be punished for their ignorance. Adopting one of his more artfully innocent looks, Ad fixed Azi with a grin.