So she was way out on a limb, possibly wasting hours of precious time, but she had little choice. She hoped that if back of the UHaul van was filled with hostages, Mike Charles would be among their ranks.
The UHaul passed an intersection with a dirt road, and Sam saw a police car turn in their direction and tuck in behind the truck. Interesting. Should I try to flag down the cop? That could certainly be useful. The van’s driver was far more likely to pull over for a policeman than for a redhead in a Hyundai, big boobs notwithstanding.
She accelerated to catch up to the cop car, and dialed 911 to start coordinating with him through the local emergency dispatcher.
A recording told her that the wait time to speak with a 911 operator was fifty-four minutes. Bastards. I’m going to stop paying taxes.
She had nearly caught up to the police car when it suddenly pulled out to pass the UHaul. Can’t catch a break right now. Oncoming traffic prevented her from following right away.
Brake lights. The moving truck was turning left, getting ready to head south down a dirt farm trail. Decision time. There was almost no plausible reason for a white Hyundai to follow a moving van down a dirt road in Nowhere, Oklahoma. If she followed, they would certainly make her.
Patience pays, Sam decided. She passed the intersection and continued west, noticing as she did so that the cop car had turned down the same dirt road. The cop now led the moving truck southbound over what looked like a poorly maintained jeep trail.
“The plot thickens,” Brock said.
“You don’t say. There’s almost nothing out here. Why would the cop and the moving truck choose the same dirt trail?” She adjusted the rearview mirror to watch the cop car and moving van disappear over a low promontory, dust flying in their wake.
Once she was sure they were out of view, she whipped the steering wheel around, using both shoulders to flip a U-turn, and gunned the little engine to charge back to the previous intersection. Then she snuck her way southbound, driving slowly to kick up as little dust as possible as she followed the two vehicles down the dirt road.
There was nothing but tumbleweeds and prairie as far as the eye could see. She checked the gas gauge, and reckoned they had an hour before they’d need to stop to refuel using one of the reserve cans they’d finagled from the rental agency.
Her phone buzzed. Dan Gable. “Have they performed a cavity search on you yet?” she asked with a chuckle, the phone jostling with the car’s bumps and jolts on the dirt road.
“Funny you should ask,” Dan said. “My welcome is definitely wearing thin.”
“It was only a matter of time,” Sam said. “NSA isn’t known for its interagency collegiality. What have you learned?”
“They’re closing ranks here,” Dan said. “Something’s definitely up. They’ve sealed off the local server farm, and they’re also not letting anyone leave the building at the moment.”
“It does make a girl wonder what they’re hiding.”
“Doesn’t it? Plus, there’s a bit of an inquisition going on as well. I’d guess they’ve called in and interviewed a few hundred of the employees who didn’t show up at the start of the workday, and workers are still trickling in.”
“Sounds like great gossip fodder,” Sam said.
“Right-o. They’re starting to add two and two, piecing things together based on the interview questions.”
“Which are…?”
Dan chuckled. “Amateurish. ‘Have you ever inserted a USB device into your computer at work, or used any other unauthorized device?’ That kind of thing.”
“Smooth,” Sam chuckled. “So smart money says the rumors are true, and the virus originated inside NSA.”
Dan agreed. “Those implications are huge,” he said. “Their servers are just two or three nodes removed from almost every personal computer in America, and maybe three or four nodes removed from every computer on the planet with an internet connection.”
“My God. How?”
“Byproduct of all the spying they deny doing.”
How could I have forgotten. NSA was busy hoovering every bit and byte of the US citizenry’s telecommunications. Once you stole all zillion emails and phone conversations, you had to store them someplace, and the data center in the bowels of the Fort Meade fortress seemed like as good a place as any.
“So by virtue of their spying on us, they’re in a great position to infect all of our computers with a virus?” Sam asked sarcastically.
Dan laughed. “Careful. What if they’re listening now? But you’re right. I did some bar napkin math earlier, and even using conservative propagation rate estimates, it’s bound to be the fastest and most comprehensive malware penetration in evil geek history.”
The dirt road angled to the southeast and rose to the top of a small hill, and Sam caught a glimpse of the cop car and moving truck a couple of miles in the distance, still kicking up a dust trail. She thought she could make out the top of a building further in the distance, but she wasn’t sure.
She thought about the virus attack staged from within NSA. “So what’s the point of the virus, anyway?”
“If I was going to try to hack my way into twelve Federal Reserve systems at roughly the same time, I’d probably want to recruit several hundred million computers to help me do it.”
“So they’ve turned all those computers into an army of robot hackers?”
“That’s my hunch. But the server farm is locked down tighter than a nun’s nethers, so I have no way of confirming what happened.”
Sam rounded a slight bend in the trail, undoubtedly carved to avoid a small copse of scraggly trees growing defiantly in the middle of the wasteland, and caught sight of a dilapidated barn and farmhouse in the distance. The UHaul and police cruiser appeared to have parked between the two buildings.
“Thanks, Dan. Gotta run. There’s a thing happening here. Keep digging and keep me posted.” She hung up without waiting for a reply.
She stopped the rental car, put it into reverse, and drove back around the bend, hoping the skinny trees would make their car more difficult to spot. Then she and Brock stepped out, snuck up to the edge of the promontory, and squinted against the sunlight to watch events unfold at the farmhouse.
A man got out of the cop car. Even from a distance, Sam could tell he wasn’t wearing a police uniform. Strange. She was pretty sure there was some sort of a regulation that prohibited driving a government vehicle for personal business.
The man walked to the truck’s side window and conversed briefly with the driver, then walked over to the barn. He wrestled to open a recalcitrant barn door, then got out of the way as the driver repositioned the moving van. It backed up to the barn entrance, and the driver got out. Fatass, Sam thought as she watched him spit in the dirt and waddle around to the back of the truck to open the loading door.
She couldn’t see into the van, but she heard the harsh tones of barked commands, and saw Fatass gesticulating with his hands. She saw motion from within the barn, and thought she caught a glint of sunlight off of a shotgun barrel.
“Gun,” Brock said quietly.
Sam nodded. Looks like these are our boys.
She squinted and used her hand to shade the sunlight from her eyes. “My God,” she whispered. Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing? It looked as though the van’s driver, the man from the cop car, and a third person were hustling more than two dozen shirtless people from the back of the moving van into the barn.
“Holy shit,” Brock said. “They’re herding those people like animals.”
23
Seattle, Washington
Sabot slid the mouse pointer over a minimized window and clicked to bring it to the forefront. It was a computer script he had written in a little more than an hour, and it had been running for almost as long. It was still humming along nicely, so he made a copy of the output file, and opened the copy to examine its contents.
He smiled. A little over two thousand Bitcoin accounts had been created automat
ically since he’d set the script to work in earnest.
It wouldn’t normally be a bright idea, creating thousands of new Bitcoin wallets from the same computer. It would certainly raise eyebrows, and would be a telltale sign in the event of an investigation of any sort.
So Sabot had hidden his tracks exceptionally well. He had programmed his computer script to use a particular tool, common among denizens of the Dark Web, the seedy underbelly of the internet where hackers, script kiddies, and hangers-on guarded their true identities and locations with a determined ferocity. The tool sampled the IP addresses of computers currently online, and masked a hacker’s activity behind an IP address it selected randomly from among active users. The tool made it seem as if another computer’s fingerprints were left at the scene of the crime.
Each of Sabot’s new Bitcoin accounts thus appeared to belong to a different user. That was a key part of his plan. Sabot had learned that, contrary to popular belief and Justice Department misinformation, Bitcoin wasn’t nearly as anonymous as cash. Every transaction was permanently recorded for posterity. So it was extremely important to cover your tracks, and extremely difficult to fence money in the Bitcoin world, and Sabot figured the best way to do obscure the thefts he was about to perpetrate would be to make it appear as if thousands of people were involved, rather than just a single person.
He double-checked that the passwords were being recorded properly. Each account would be completely useless without the correct password. The computer picked a thirty-digit random login credential for each new wallet it created, and logged the password into the script’s output file.
Now for the really entertaining stuff, he thought. Satisfied that he had a solid plan to stash his spoils, Sabot got to work planning his electronic raid on unsuspecting Bitcoin owners all over the world.
Might as well start with the big guys, he figured, navigating to the world’s second-largest Bitcoin exchange service, called BitChange. He clicked a button on his browser window, and the pretty pictures and clean edges of the well-designed web page disappeared, revealing the behind-the-scenes software code that made it work.
Websites were nothing more than database organization tools, designed to pull information from large repositories and display it in 256-color brilliance for users to manipulate. The website – the thing that people viewed in their browser windows – was little more than a skin, a pretty manifestation of the underlying facts, figures, and bullshit sales copy that formed the gristle, meat, and bones of the internet.
Sabot read each line of code carefully. While he hadn’t been at the controls of a computer since his unpleasant experience as an FBI witness had begun, Sabot was anything but rusty. His FBI minders had brought him reams full of printed computer code, which he dutifully perused to ferret out illegal activity, and he was up to speed on all the latest tricks.
He only saw one vulnerability in BitChange’s website code, one so obvious that it had to have been a trap. Time was of the essence – every hacker worth his salt was bound to be putting on a full-court press to swipe as many Bitcoins as possible – but Sabot resisted the urge to take the bait. There was simply too much at stake.
Time to get social, he decided. Humans were the most vulnerable components of any computer network. People couldn’t help themselves. There were simply too many faults in a human being’s core operating system, residual byproducts of a hundred thousand years of evolution as a social animal, and Sabot had no doubt that he would be able to obtain the accesses he needed to begin filling his newly-created Bitcoin accounts with piles of virtual wealth.
His forte from back in the day used to be voice phishing, or “vishing,” the art of calling people on the phone and tricking them into revealing their private account information. But there was no guarantee that the information he needed would belong to an English-speaking target, so his con man’s phone skills might not prove useful.
No matter. Humans were still human, and they found all sorts of ways to do stupid things.
He wanted access to BitChange’s succulent list of subscribers, along with any exploitable personal information that might also reside in the user database. He figured that BitChange’s network administrators would have access to that information.
But who were BitChange’s network administrators? Probably the people who spent the most time on the site, Sabot reasoned.
He clicked on an icon labeled Tor, which was an access portal to the most anonymous place on the internet, an entire sub-network of people using obscured IP addresses either to do bad things, or to hide from other people who were doing bad things.
He typed a lengthy and obscure web address into the Tor browser and waited impatiently while the spinning wheel whirred. His brief patience was rewarded when a website named StarSixtyNine popped open. Named after the old telephone trick that auto-dialed the last caller’s phone number, the Dark Web version performed a similar function in the online world. For a nominal fee – 0.1 Bitcoin in this case – it was possible to download a list of all the computers that had visited a given website over the last twenty-four hours.
Sabot paid the fee, which was now the equivalent of just shy of $300. The dollar’s free-fall into worthlessness had evidently continued unabated since the last time Sabot had checked the exchange rate.
Seconds later, he clicked open the report that had downloaded automatically onto his hard drive.
He skimmed the list of IP addresses, the virtual location codes that identified individual users who had visited the BitChange site. His thought was that the exchange’s administrators, the people who likely had the credentials to see and manipulate user account information, were probably the site’s most frequent users. So he chose the addresses of BitChanges’ twelve heaviest users over the past day.
An IP address wasn’t a terribly useful thing in and of itself, at least not for Sabot’s purposes, so he navigated to another obscure site on the Tor network called “The Pirate’s Chest.” It featured a cheesy picture of a pirate, eye patch and all, and had a single input window.
The site was a repository for all sorts of stolen information. It was a surprising fact that most hackers didn’t really care to use or exploit the information they stole. They simply enjoyed the process of stealing it. But there were other Dark Web users, ones who didn’t love the painstakingly exacting work of discovering website vulnerabilities and exploiting them. Many of those users preferred just to use the stolen information to perpetrate other kinds of thefts, especially ones involving pilfered credit card information.
So The Pirate’s Chest was created to serve both communities – hackers and thieves – and it contained millions of email addresses, along with their associated IP addresses, and a surprisingly large number of passwords, as well.
Sabot pasted the first IP address into the Pirate’s Chest browser interface, clicked on the button helpfully marked “Aaaaaaarrghh!” and waited for the results.
He wasn’t disappointed. Thorvald Jenssen’s name appeared, along with a remarkably offensive email address and an even more offensive password.
Sabot navigated to the BitChange website, typed Thorvald Jenssen’s email address and password into the login pane, and held his breath while he waited. He figured his odds were fifty-fifty. Even smart people were lazy, and tended to use the same password for multiple accounts. Perhaps Thorvald Jenssen would be one of the lazy ones.
“Welcome, Thorvald!” the BitChange site announced.
Sabot smiled. Dumbass.
He rummaged around the site for a while before stumbling across what he was looking for: the list of subscribers’ account information. Six thousand accounts worth. User names, passwords, account balances, activity dates, and even their normal bank account numbers.
Sabot whistled. Jackpot. He saved the database onto his hard drive.
It took him another fifteen minutes to write and test another simple computer script. With a deep breath, Sabot set it loose on BitChange’s six thousand unsuspecting users
. The script logged into a user’s BitChange account, then initiated a small, near-random payment from the user’s account into one of Sabot’s new Bitcoin accounts, created by his earlier script. And like the earlier script, Sabot made use of the IP masking technique to disassociate his computer from each individual theft, and point the virtual finger at another unsuspecting user somewhere out there in the wired universe.
Sabot kept the theft amounts small, always less than one Bitcoin. And he’d even thought to make the amounts “Benford-compliant,” which was a concept he’d learned while working with a forensic accountant on a recent FBI case. Benford’s Law – which was really just an observation that the digits one through nine didn’t occur with equal frequency in natural, non-fraudulent numbers – had been used to catch and convict an impressive number thieves and embezzlers. So he made sure that the computer chose the nearly-random theft amounts in such a way that the transaction amounts wouldn’t scream “fraud.”
The script also initiated the transactions at random intervals. Site administrators would undoubtedly catch on if they saw regular, sequential activity in what was otherwise a messy and random world.
Sabot sat back and smiled, watching the Bitcoin transactions trickle in. Pretty damn clean hack, he decided. Not bad for a high school dropout. Watching the stolen bounty grow, he began thinking of the ways his life would change with his newfound affluence.
Maybe Angie could get that Subaru she’d been wanting.
Oh no. Angie. He suddenly looked at his watch. Noon. He hadn’t spoken with her in over a day. He picked up the old phone from the wall receptacle and dialed her number. It went straight to voicemail. Hope she’s okay. He thought of the chaos and looting Adkins had spoken about earlier, and of the shattered glass door at their apartment, and was suddenly very concerned about Angie’s safety.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 153