Freedom™

by Daniel Suarez

  Philips sat alone at the dining room table looking at a powerful laptop linked in to the ranch’s expansive network. A laptop they’d given her and which she was certain was riddled with spyware.

  Aldous Johnston had named half a dozen world-class cryptanalysts and software scientists working on Operation Exorcist—but she hadn’t actually seen any of them. She’d just been here, waiting. Even though this was supposed to be an emergency, they hadn’t asked her to do a damn thing. She’d left a dozen messages with Johnston’s admin assistant to find out when she’d be able to get an outside line to talk with Deputy Director Fulbright back at the NSA—as they agreed she could—but no one had gotten back to her. All she had was 24/7 access to food, music, and a huge library of movies.

  With representative democracy about to be subverted, kicking back and watching television wasn’t high on her priority list. However, she’d turned on the news to give the impression that she was behaving normally. Recent experience had shown that predictable patterns of behavior were more likely to keep the data gods off her back, and she wanted to foster the belief that she could be trusted.

  The news was all bad—civil unrest in the Midwest, the dollar had fallen to record lows against the euro and yuan, and stock markets around the world were incredibly volatile, spiking and falling. Chaos.

  And the resounding theme of the media blitz was unmistakable: you are not safe—you need security.

  Philips listened to the news as she sat at the dining room table examining the plastic RFID bracelet affixed to her wrist. She held it up to the light to try to see through the thin plastic band. Boynton had said it was tamper-resistant, and she assumed this meant it had a wire antenna braided into its length that would be severed if the bracelet were broken. The whole ranch complex was littered with RFID readers—she’d spotted no less than six here in the bungalow. The sudden loss of a signal would undoubtedly put her unique RFID number into alarm and summon security to investigate.

  Unless she could slip this digital leash, she wasn’t going to be able to escape or do anything else without their knowledge. It was becoming apparent that she was under house arrest—at least until Operation Exorcist was completed. By then it would be too late. They would have taken over the Daemon and solidified their control.

  Philips knew an RFID tag was just a circuit attached to an antenna. It used energy from a radio wave to activate the circuit and broadcast its unique ID on a specific frequency. That’s how it could broadcast its location to Sky Ranch Security without needing a battery.

  The ISO 15693 standard common for RFID proximity cards and mobile payment systems meant this bracelet was probably operating at 13.56 MHz—which was a commercial frequency.

  Philips had attended conferences where hacker groups demonstrated homemade devices able to harvest and spoof RFID tags at will. The question was whether Philips could build something similar with the materials here in the bungalow. If she could make them think she was home when she wasn’t, she might be able to trip up their plans.

  The place was packed with consumer electronics—but not a lot of them wireless. She’d gathered the few wireless devices she had onto the dining room table to examine their FCC labels.

  There was the cordless phone handset and its base station—a 1.9 GHz DECT unit. Not much use. Likewise, all of the television and stereo remotes were infrared, not radio based. There was the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi transmitter in the laptop. This was a decidedly more crowded spectrum here on the ranch, but also useless for interacting at 13.56 MHz. Of course, she also had her Acura TL car remote entry key, which she recalled worked somewhere in the 300-400 MHz range, but attached to the same key chain she had her RFID gas payment fob, which she had disassembled to reveal a tiny clear plastic bulb containing a spool of copper wire connected to a small circuit board. It was the proper frequency, but there was a problem: its code was burned into the circuitry at the factory. Unchangeable—at least theoretically. And she had no specialized tools.

  Philips looked back up at the cable news playing on the television. Now in addition to the fighting in the Midwest, a series of major Internet outages had begun to “grip the nation”—or so the media claimed. It was being blamed on sabotage. On domestic “terrorists” blowing up critical fiber-optic lines at vulnerable junctions. The very things they were doing to stifle dissent were being used as the justification for making draconian measures permanent. And everywhere was video of smartly attired private security forces rushing to rescue besieged towns, to restore service. How was it possible that they could do all this? How could they possibly get away with it?

  Philips sighed in exasperation—but then stopped cold. On the wall next to her a message was spelled out in brilliant red laser light:

  Your room is bugged.

  The butter knife she was planning on using as a screwdriver dropped from her hand with a clang. The glowing message changed to read:

  Open the service door and do not speak.

  She turned around.

  There at the rear service door stood a man dressed in a black

  Nomex flight suit, body armor, and utility vest. A balaclava covered his head and advanced-looking night vision goggles covered his eyes. In his gloved hands he held a laser pointing device aimed at Philips’s dining room wall.

  She recovered from the shock and walked to the service door. After a moment’s hesitation she opened it.

  The intruder ducked past her and closed the door, holding a gloved finger to his lips.

  He pulled a wandlike device from his utility harness and started scanning the walls, light fixtures, and furniture with it.

  As she watched, Philips listened to the news playing in the background, continuing its litany of financial and social woes. Philips turned up the volume.

  Anji Anderson was on screen as part of a panel with other pundits. She spoke authoritatively for someone who had a few short years ago been a lifestyles reporter. “People can’t simply blame others for their plight. They need to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, but it appears that some people don’t want to do that. They want to take from others in pursuit of what they call”—air quotes—“ ‘fairness.’ ”

  The stranger meanwhile was teasing a small bugging device out of her dining room lamp with tweezers. He held it up for Philips to see, then placed it in one of several chambers in a small metal box.

  He continued scanning for bugs as Philips followed him

  It took nearly twenty minutes, but by the time he was done, he had located eight bugs in all—from the bar to the bathroom to the bedroom. The stranger then sat down on a changing bench at the foot of the bed and removed his hood and goggles. Jon Ross sighed in relief and smiled at her. “There we go.”

  “Jon! My god . . .” She rushed to hold his face in her hands. There was that slight crinkle at the corner of his eyes when he smiled that she missed so much. Before she had time to think about it, she was kissing him passionately. After a moment she pulled back to look at him.

  He gazed back, and then pulled her close, kissing her harder, longer, and with a strength that almost squeezed the breath from her.

  He eventually relaxed his hold. “I thought I’d lost you.”

  “How on earth did you find me?”

  He tugged on the silver chain around her neck, coming up with the amulet he’d created for her.

  She scowled. “You gave me a tracking device? How romantic . . .”

  “It’s more an amulet of protection.”

  “Protection from what?”

  “From Loki—and people like him. I didn’t want his machines harming you.”

  She studied the amulet and then turned back to him. Philips pointed to the metal box on the nearby table. “You’re sure they can’t hear us?”

  Ross nodded. “Bug Vault. It produces generic sounds of human habitation—footsteps, television, stuff like that. It’ll make them think their bugs are still in place.”

  “How the hell did you get past ranch security? This
place is surrounded by the best surveillance system money can buy.”

  “Yeah, they’re using the latest technology—a Beholder Unified Surveillance System designed by Haverford Systems. State of the art.”

  She looked puzzled.

  “Let’s just say it has some flaws built in, compliments of the Chinese people.”

  She sat down next to him. “I was worried I’d never see you again.” Philips looked at him gravely. “But why would you take such a stupid risk to come here?”

  “I came to get you, Nat.”

  “What made you think I needed rescuing? This is where I need to be. They’re about to launch Operation Exorcist, and unless I can stop them, they’ll take control of the Daemon.”

  He contemplated her words. “The Weyburn Labs people have expanded on the work you and I did at Building Twenty-Nine. They’re starting to crack their way into the Daemon’s darknet. I don’t know how they did it, but they’ve started spoofing people and creating darknet objects. They used it to capture Pete Sebeck, and he’s here on the ranch now.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “From Pete Sebeck.”

  “Peter Sebeck is alive?”

  “Yeah, look, it’s a long story, but Sobol rescued Sebeck from his execution and sent him on a quest to justify humanity’s freedom. The Major just kidnapped Sebeck and brought him here. There’s about to be a serious showdown, Nat, and I need to get you out of here.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Loki Stormbringer is headed this way with an army of machines. There are two dozen darknet factions on his heels. Once Loki’s army is gathered, this whole place will be a war zone.”

  “The Loki?” She sat on the arm of a nearby sofa and shook her head. “I can’t leave, Jon.”

  “Why not? This isn’t your—”

  “Look, you have no idea how happy I am to see you, and I can’t tell you how much it touches me that you risked your life to rescue me. But I can’t go. The plutocrats are planning to execute some sort of cyber warfare attack. Physically storming this ranch won’t stop it. I need to figure out what they’re really up to and stop them. Luckily, I have some clues.” She brought him over to a huge stack of documents on a nearby desk. “They’ve given me tech documentation on Operation Exorcist—but something about it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Operation Exorcist?”

  “Yes. Remember the Destroy function of the Daemon—the command that destroys all data in a Daemon-infected corporation? Well, they’ve come up with a blocker.”

  “How the hell did—?”

  “They figured out that if they use a formatstring hack they could inject executable code through the tax ID function parameter. It puts the Destroy function into an infinite loop so that it doesn’t return a value.”

  “Meaning the Destroy command won’t be issued . . . making the Daemon harmless to them.”

  She nodded.

  “Can they really inject it into all the Daemon-infected networks?”

  “The Ragnorok module is a Web API. They can invoke the function from anywhere.”

  “Jesus . . .”

  “They could do it with a script. They’re using the Daemon’s own high availability against it.”

  Ross gestured to the piles of technical documents marked “Top Secret.” “But you said something’s not adding up.”

  “Yes. I’ve spent the last forty-eight hours examining all this, and it just looks too rosy.”

  “A ruse?”

  She nodded. “Jon, they’re planning on launching their Daemon-blocker attack from thousands of machines, and then they’re going to send in police and paramilitary strike teams to seize tens of thousands of data centers around the world—all at once. It would easily be the largest covert operation launched in the history of mankind—by several orders of magnitude—and I don’t see how an international operation this size could be kept secret.”

  “You mean from the Daemon?”

  “I mean from anyone.”

  She picked up a sheaf of documents. “So how am I supposed to believe this? It’s not credible.”

  “So Operation Exorcist is a lie.”

  “Or we don’t know what the real Operation Exorcist is. They’ve basically put me under house arrest here to read through propaganda—so when things go to hell, I can attest to some congressional subcommittee how diligently Weyburn Labs and Korr were working toward defeating the Daemon.”

  She threw up her hands. “But I saw armies of corporate soldiers down at the airfield. Something serious is about to go down.”

  Ross grimaced. “Darknet news feeds have noticed private security forces moving into position to defend property—office towers, media centers, telecom infrastructure, and utilities. Also high-end gated communities.”

  They sat for a few moments contemplating what that meant. The sound of murmuring television voices came from downstairs.

  Ross looked at her. “So I can’t convince you to leave?”

  “I care about you more than you know, but my duty is here.”

  He grinned slightly in respect of her choice, then he moved over to the fifty-inch plasma screen mounted in a hutch in front of the bed. He pulled the television away from the wall on its swivel mount.

  “What are you doing?”

  He produced a small electronic device from one of his harness pockets, and uncoiled an HDMI cable, which he used to connect the device to the television.

  “I’m opening the surveillance system’s back door to other darknet operatives so that they can help us collectively keep an eye on what’s going on here on the ranch. We’ll have a better shot at finding anything important with tens of thousands of people searching with us.” He spoke into D-Space. “Rakh, requesting high-priority Thread: review all camera imagery at Sky Ranch for evidence of complicity in current social disturbances. Publicize findings, ASAP.”

  In a few moments, the screen showed an hourglass with a label reading: Number of Respondents. The number rapidly incremented into the thousands, gaining speed by the second.

  “So . . . thirteen thousand people are searching the surveillance system for suspicious activity?”

  He nodded. “This ranch is on a maximum-priority Thread—we’re all concerned about it. And it doesn’t hurt to have a good reputation score when summoning a smart mob.” He peered at the screen. “Past twenty thousand now.”

  She was stunned. “This is amazing.” She closely watched the screen.

  Almost immediately a “suspicious” item came up on the screen as a link. It read simply: Broadcast News Set—by dPooley.

  “They found something.”

  “Thanks, dPooley. . . .” Ross clicked on the video link and brought up a live surveillance feed of a full-sized television sound stage, complete with green screens. The set looked quiet.

  “A news studio.”

  Ross clicked out to an overhead map of all the cameras in that location, bringing up a 3-D model of the building it was in. “Hang on a second, I have an idea.”

  Philips pointed at the overhead map. “Look, they’ve got a satellite farm. This is a complete broadcasting facility.”

  Ross brought up another view—this one of the producer’s control room. It showed an array of large screens as well as a window onto the studio beyond. “Do you think they’re creating the news here at the ranch?”

  Philips shook her head. “It’s just one studio, and the news is running 24/7 on a dozen channels at once. This has some other purpose.”

  “Let’s roll this back in time.”

  “We can do that?”

  “Yeah. One of the big selling points of the Beholder system was detecting recurring patterns over time—people casing embassies, that sort of thing. It can store huge amounts of video. Here . . .” Ross moved his hands, interacting with invisible controls. “I’m going to run backward to the last time there was activity in this control room.”

  The image of the control room stayed relatively unchanged
, even though the lighting changed very slightly, indicating a passage of time and voltage fluctuations in the overhead lights. Suddenly the room sprang into life, and there were several people in the control booth. Ross slowed down the rewind and kept rolling it back until there was a hand signal being given to a distant anchor person sitting at the green screen desk. He clicked the video into play mode.

  Suddenly audio came through and they could clearly see the computer-enhanced image of the anchor on the central control board screen.

  Philips shot a look at Ross. “Anji Anderson!”

  He nodded. “So it is. . . .”

  “Then she’s here at the ranch.”

  On-screen Anderson was delivering the news next to a disturbing graphic with the word “Cybergeddon” in bold, terrifying letters. She was in midsentence. . . .

  “—responsible for this unprecedented attack on modern civilization. It appears that a cataclysmic loss of corporate data has occurred. The New York and American Stock Exchanges have been closed, along with most other world stock exchanges. Again, we have no word on whether this happened during the blackout, before the blackout, or just before. But if you’re just now joining us, there has apparently been a cyber attack of unprecedented magnitude against the world electrical grid. Most of North America, Europe, and parts of Asia have been without power for the last seventy-two hours.”

  They were showing video of looting and fires looming over downtown areas throughout the world. Some of the scenes were at night.