by Hugo Huesca
Now, John turned to David. “Get to it.” Was all he said.
David looked at him like he had gone mad. “Just like that?”
“Yes. We were always ready to end your ban if it came to it. Like you said, we didn’t get you out from prison to stand around and look dumb.”
“Mind giving me a signed contract with that?” whispered David. He dropped that line of argument when the agent gave him a scornful glare. Of course, if the CIA wanted to set him up, they would just set him up. Asking for a contract was bad form at this point. “Alright, alright. But I never said I was standing around looking like an idiot, I just want that on record.”
There was one computer free in the room. Vicente’s. David walked over to it. “Mind if I help you, guys? Turns out, I’m out of retirement.”
Jean sighed. “No, you aren’t. But sure, give us a hand.”
She unlocked Vicente’s computer, but she didn’t have the password for his side of the network, so Rufus added David as a guest.
The keyboard was a mechanical one —just what you need when you want to make sure everyone in a room knows you are typing something— and the commands his hands wrote felt true in his fingertips.
He wasn’t sure how he’d even explain it. It was like a musician finding a long-lost instrument. The physical sensation may be different, but his mind hadn’t forgotten a single thing.
Oh yes, it was good to be back.
“First, let’s help little Orville with his registry,” he said.
The kid looked at him like he had sprouted three arms. “You know I’m a genius, right? A little respect would be nice.”
“Respect is earned, kid. No matter how good you’re, experience is earned, too. Watch my screen for a minute.”
He showed him the list of connections to their internal network. “Everything seem normal to you? Because I know for a fact someone is trying hard to ping us.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, there isn’t any strange IP… Oh, c’mon.”
There were two IP addresses connected to the server. First was Orville’s, masked by a series of proxies. Second one…
“ISPs can do that, you know. They’re trying to find out where you’re connecting from right now.” There was only so much protection a proxy could offer. With a flurry of commands, David severed their connection. “There. All done. You may want to avoid that ISP for a while, they’ll most likely be looking for you.”
Orville crossed his arms and tried to mask the fact that he had gone pale. Rufus smirked, but he made sure the little annoying genius didn’t see him. David smiled, too.
“Don’t worry about it. Like I said, you can’t know everything.”
“Someday, I will,” Orville promised him. “I’ll be the best. Even better than you.”
“I said that same thing to like three different people when I was young. Doesn’t matter. If you’re the best, someone will come along and beat you eventually. Fame is ephemeral.”
“They can try.”
“Well, you can try, too.”
That got the kid to smile. Thanks to some strange process in Orville’s mind, David and the young hacker were friends now.
For the next ten minutes, only the sound of several keys being struck could be heard at any given time. John was like a statue, fixated to the arcane commands and software running on the different screens. A constant in the sea of information where David swam.
Contrary to what Hollywood made people think, David’s time was mostly spent watching random strings of data like a hawk, searching for any irregularities: Dates, logs, connection times, archives opened or deleted. The other part was spent trying to figure out any way Vicente’s impersonator could’ve hidden his prancing through K-Sec’s servers.
That’s where his experience counted. The kids were good, but they were trying to catch their prey by brute force. That could take a while, and he was in a hurry. After all, his PKD bottle was running out.
Instead of looking at yesterday’s logs, David dove into the days before. Occam’s Razor. Starting by searching for any files the impersonator hadn’t deleted, was the easiest way to begin looking.
A couple logs here and there. Mostly activity from Orville and Jean. Before that, Vicente —when he was alive— had worked on the same project over and over again. David couldn’t see the project, since he lacked access to Vicente’s files. But, he could see the connections. Those were to the same place.
Three minutes later, he had an IP address. “Look at this,” he called over to John. Then, to the K-Sec guys:
“Anyone know what Vicente was working on the last few days?”
Rufus shrugged. “Same shit as always man, searching for dough to pay the bills.”
“What?” asked John as he examined the address, no doubt giving his invisible team a non-verbal command: get looking into this.
“It’s archaic lingo for making money.” David wasn’t finished. That address wasn’t even hidden behind a proxy, it was a local direction inside this very same city. “You guys sell intel, right? Was he selling to this person or trying to steal from him?”
“Selling. I don’t think that’s your suspect,” explained Rufus. “Because he’s a long-term partner of us. We get him info on politicians and the like. He publishes it.”
“Publishes it? Like a journalist?”
“Yeah. He owns a local e-zine in town. Gets a couple thousand views a month, he’s kind of a big-shot.”
David and John exchanged a look. “A journalist.” There was one in their suspect list. Second or third spot, actually.
What was his name again? Thought David.
“Dugall Tull,” said John.
It took David a second to realize the agent wasn’t answering his line of thought, but instead, saying the name of the owner of the IP address.
“Oh shit,” he said. “That’s too much of a coincidence.”
“What’s going on?” asked Jean.
“That’s another suspect,” explained David. Behind him, John walked out of the room with a strut, speaking in whispers all the while. “We have a connection. What intel was Vicente trying to sell this guy?”
He suspected the answer. There was only one thread connecting Morrow, K-Sec, and Tull. A mutual enemy.
“Corporate bullshit,” Jean shrugged. “Same as always. A company called Odin Industries is trying to backdoor the same old Privileged Software they have been trying to get lately. They’re calling it the Acc—”
“The Accountability Act, yeah, heard of it.”
Jean nodded. “Sure. All over the newspapers. Well, we’ve been trying to find info on Odin’s CEO, Florian Dervaux. We hadn’t had much success; at that level of fortune, you can pay a lot of money to have your shit pruned from the Internet. We’re getting near, though…”
Realization hit K-Sec like a sack of bricks. Even Orville turned around. “Odin killed Vicente?”
It would make sense, thought David. But…
“The man whose death we’re investigating is Senator Morrow. That’s a friend of Odin, right? Why would they kill Vicente to reach their ally?”
Excitement left the hackers like a deflating balloon; Jean’s hands were closed so tightly her knuckles were white. “I’ll keep looking. When I find the asshole who did this—”
“Don’t bother,” called John, as he walked back into the room. “We need to move, Terrance.”
“What?”
“I had my people check up on Dugall Tull. His home is empty.”
“He disappeared, too?” If Tull had gone missing…
“No. Not disappeared. He went on the run, minutes before they arrived at his door. He just reached the highway.”
David got up. “You have a lead on him?”
“We’re tracing his car. Whoever stole Vicente’s identity is running interference, though.” When he saw that Jean and the others were standing up, too, John cut them off. “You are staying. You’re criminals, remember?”
“So is he,” pointed
out the fat guy, gesturing at David.
“If Tull stole my boyfriend’s identity… He may have killed him, too,” began Jean.
John was in no mood for explanations, instead, he turned around to leave.
David glanced at K-Sec apologetically. “Don’t worry,” he told them, “we’ll get him. Promise.”
To his surprise, Orville jumped out of his chair and rushed at a nearby drawer. In a second, he had gotten out a dusty laptop (last year’s model) and handed it to David. “You’ll need your tools, won’t you, homeboy?”
He smiled fiercely. David took the small laptop and pocketed it. He returned the smile before turning around to run after John Derry.
“Damn right.”
Chapter 5
The interior of the van was just as they’d left it. This time, he felt the powerful engine roar and shake the entire vehicle as it gained speed. All the while, John Derry kept his eyes fixated on nothing, while whispering furiously under his breath.
Whatever device he was using to communicate with the rest of his team, it was sensitive. Definitely expensive.
David wondered if he could convince the agent to lend him one of those. It wasn’t a toy if the CIA used it, right? They were spy gear.
Under the noise of the engine and the road underneath the van, David caught notice of another sound. More persistent.
“Oh, so that’s how we’re catching up with Tull,” he whispered under his breath.
Anyone who hadn’t spent the last decade sleeping under a rock could recognize that sound. Those were the blades of an Urban Pacification quadcopter-drone getting closer and closer.
Now, this is exiting. I’ve never been in one of those, thought David. They were mostly unmanned, the first of a generation of pacification vehicles capable of moving autonomously through a city, keeping its inhabitants safe.
Over social media, half the population was utterly terrified of the evil ways those drones could be used. The other half had seen the videos of the things in action and weren’t able to deny… the things were just plain badass.
David had been in the first camp until a few seconds ago, when he realized he was about to hop into a quadcopter.
Keep your cool, you don’t want the secret CIA intel guys to see you fangirling on Derry’s feed.
The van stopped and the doors opened on their own. They were in the side of the highway and now the sound of the blades was more intense than before.
John did not need to tell David to get out, he did so with a jump. Outside, a bulky helicopter approached them. Its shadow (and the shadow of its four different blades) covered both John and David. A brown rope-ladder descended from the quadcopter, swaying lazily in the wind.
The agent climbed first, practically flying upwards until he disappeared into the interior of the quadcopter. David was next and he had more trouble with the attempt. Circles of sweat formed under his armpits and his arms were telling him —in the language of pain— that they refused to move, even if his life depended on it. That’s what a year of little to no exercise at all will do to a body.
“Uh… A little help?” he panted towards the quadcopter’s interior. Downward, he could see the van, small on the side of the highway.
Slowly, someone inside the drone raised the ladder, with David hanging on for dear life.
A strong pair of gloved hands got a hold of David by the sleeves of his t-shirt and tossed him unceremoniously towards the drone interior. David wiped the streams of sweat running down his forehead with his hand and looked around.
Two CIA agents, dressed like bulky Men-In-Black, were seated in front of him. The pilot seat was empty and had been switched with tracking equipment, parachutes, and computers. John Derry was at his side, exchanging orders with the other agents, screaming under the noise of the quadcopter’s four motors: Thankfully, no one appeared to pay much attention to the fact that David had needed rescuing from a rope ladder.
Probably, they didn’t think that highly of him beforehand.
“He’s headed for the mountains!” Derry was screaming. Like it was following orders, the quadcopter rose several meters in the air, until the highway below looked like a set of expensive kids toys. At the same time, it inclined forwards and set course towards the mountains. “But he’s running interference, my guys can’t pinpoint him!”
David glanced down, holding tightly to the edge of his seat. He put his seatbelt on. In his life, he had never been so high before. Technically, on an airplane… but you can’t feel the air pushing you around on an airplane.
The scenery changed from the placid, rural landscape of the highway into the rocky and untamed vegetation of the mountain roads, as they rose higher and higher.
In one of those roads, Dugall Tull was trying to outmaneuver the CIA and the police. The only way he’d accomplish that was if someone managed to jam their tracking systems long enough for him to escape into next county, or into the wilderness. Yes, the police had dogs and manpower enough to comb the woods. But, Dugall had already given them the slip once.
“I’m going to connect to the drone’s computers!” David screeched over the background noise of the quadcopter. “See if I can take out the interference!”
“That’s why you’re here!” John Derry exclaimed back.
The drone was flying in ample circles now, unsure of what direction to take. The roads were too jagged, too diverse to comb.
David took out his recently-acquired laptop and plugged it into the wireless system of the drone. John saved him five minutes of fighting against its security by just granting him access from his tablet.
“No funny business, Terrance.”
“Christ-sake…”
He was unfamiliar with the drone’s operating system. The States had developed its own Linux variant in the last year, perhaps. Or it was a gift from military R&D. To David, it was ugly, redundant, and had spent too many moving images in response to simple commands.
At least it made his job easier. Radar and navigation were under the convenient video of a drone following a road.
There you go. A map with coordinates and gigabytes of topographical data were displayed in David’s laptop screen. Along came real-time databases of traffic, road hazards, meteorological conditions, and possible escape routes used by all the criminal highway-chases of the last decade.
The software that made the drone translate the information into a chase pattern was inaccessible, hidden under a heavier layer of security than David could access. He wouldn’t need it. He saw the attack pattern instantly.
“He’s jamming you,” he yelled, as he pinpointed the sources of the attack on the map. Several red dots were moving across the different roads all throughout the mountains.
“He’d need military hardware to do that!” exclaimed John, shaking his head.
David pointed at the dots. “Not at all. Your drone’s radar has an oversight. He’s masking Tull’s car with other vehicles on the highway, he’s not hacking you, he’s hacking them! The quadcopter can’t find the real one, so it’s trying to follow them all!”
John cursed under his breath. “The police are using the same systems, they can’t help us either. Fix this, fast.”
No shit, Derry. No shit I want to fix this. He turned back to his laptop.
He could try and force his way into those cars, check manually with them for anything weird. That would take too long, there were too many false leads.
But, there was only one hacker, right?
David traced one of the false lead signals at random and got its IP. It was masked, of course, and he suspected the invisible Intel team under John’s command was currently stumped trying to find the real one.
Over the course of his career, David had learned a very simple fact of life: Attacking is always easier than defending. By only reacting to the hacker’s plans, the Intel team was wasting valuable time. Sure, eventually they’d reach him —they had better equipment, perhaps better training, and definitely more resources— but by
then, it could be too late.
There was one way to stop an attack, one that worked much better than just defending against it. It was attacking back, harder.
A wise man once said: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
David punched the mysterious hacker in the mouth, metaphorically speaking. He closed the drone’s network and went straight into the proxy’s IP address. It was a small server farm somewhere in Zimbabwe.
Cheap and disposable, would be its description to any buyers. The equivalent of renting a locker in the subway.
Cheap things break easily. David found the local Internet Service Provider account where the server farm was registered.
Then he wrote an email of a few dozen words. He sent it to John. “Tell your team to forward this to the address I added. Make it look like it’s from the fucking president or something. Get it read fast.”
“This is a Zimbabwean company,” John pointed out.
“Do it!”
John didn’t wait for David to repeat himself. His fingers flew over the touchscreen of his tablet and then he froze, probably trying to listen under the screaming of the drone.
Less than two minutes later, he yelled: “Done!”
“Now, we wait.”
John gave David a look that said “if you’re wasting our time,” but David was sure of himself. This would work.
Hopefully.
Otherwise he’d go back to the plastic coffin.
Minutes passed by and the quadcopter continued its circle strafe of the mountains. Every second let Tull put more distance between them.
The MIB agents looked worried under their black glasses. John’s eyebrow raised progressively higher and higher.
Perhaps they’ll let me code a better VR jail before they put me under, again. Thought David. He could feel the adrenaline accumulate like electricity flowing through his veins. Melting the PKD pill in his system. He forced himself to focus on his laptop.
Just as he was considering going manual and trying to check every red dot on the map, every single one of them, but one, disappeared.
David turned towards John with a triumphant expression on his face. Before he could yell: “I told you so!” (which would have felt like rocks passing through his sore throat), the quadcopter lurched forward, making him lose hold of his laptop. It fell to the floor and slipped straight to MIB in front of him, who caught it with his shoe.