Brain Jack

by Brian Falkner

  The lights were back on by the time Dodge and Sam entered the apartment. Faded wallpaper peeled back from the walls. There might have been carpet once, but it was long gone, and grimy floorboards were covered only by a hard-knotted but threadbare rug.

  Some jackets, and other indeterminate clothing, hung from a row of wooden pegs inside the door, and a faded photograph of a sailing ship hung lopsidedly in front of the door.

  The two dark figures they had seen were stretched out on the ground, receiving medical attention from the soldiers. Their computers were in pieces on the table.

  “Any explosives?” Dodge asked the first soldier he saw.

  “None,” the man said.

  “I thought we sniffed out ammonia?” Dodge said.

  “We did, but it wasn’t explosives,” the man said, and didn’t elaborate.

  As per his instructions, Sam cloned the drive before starting the computer up and analyzing the hard drive.

  It took him just a minute to confirm the extent of the disaster. The computer was wiped clean. The operating system was there, and some basic programs, but nothing else. It was as if it had just been taken out of the box. There was a scattering of code fragments near the boot sector of the disk, but it was garbage.

  “This has been wiped,” Dodge said.

  “Same here,” Sam murmured.

  “Bleedin’ hell, what’re we going to tell Jaggard?” Dodge asked in a loud voice, then leaned over, talking quietly for Sam’s ears only. “Who else knew the location of the terrorists, do you think?” he asked.

  “The insider!” Sam realized with shock.

  “And who knew we were on our way here?” Dodge pursed his lips and answered his own question. “Same person.”

  “You think the insider did this?”

  “If it is an insider, then it all adds up,” Dodge said. “They would have done this to clean up any traces that might have led us back to them.”

  “Then it’s not just one person,” Sam said. “They must have had people on the ground here in Chicago.”

  “Not only that,” Dodge said, “but they were able to get in here right under the noses of the Chicago PD and get out again without being seen.”

  26 | SWAMP WITCH

  The octagonal office in the middle of the CDD control center had been known as the swamp ever since the center was established, and nobody really knew why.

  The first inhabitant, a college professor, balding on top but with long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, had been known as The Thing from the Swamp by the CDD team. He had been followed by Swamp Creature, Swampy, and most recently by Swamp Witch.

  Small, rotund, and with a shock of bright orange hair, the name seemed to suit, and although Isabel Donald knew full well of her nickname, the current on-site representative of the Congressional Oversight Committee never complained.

  Her references were impeccable, her rise through the ranks of the CIA’s IT department remarkable, and her abilities quite unique.

  All in all, there was no reason to suspect that she could be actively working against the CDD from the inside.

  No reason at all, Sam thought.

  “Here,” Dodge said, tapping the screen of his laptop.

  Dodge’s room at the Crowne Plaza was identical to Sam’s in every luxurious way, although a lot less tidy. Sam yawned and tried to focus his eyes. He had slept very little on the Airbus on the way to Chicago and not at all on the way back.

  “Here’s Swamp Witch,” Dodge said, “appearing behind you and telling Vienna to pull her head in.”

  “That’s not quite what she said,” Sam said.

  Dodge ignored him. “Right, switch to the overhead camera and we should see where she appeared from.”

  The data from six different video cameras had been copied onto a memory stick and plugged into the USB3 slot of Sam’s laptop. All of the CDD team could be easily identified, intensely working away at their workstations until one by one they threw their hands in the air, giving up as their computers died with the horrible blue screen of death. They congregated behind Dodge and Sam or behind Socks and Zombie.

  “And we find out about the plane … here,” Dodge said.

  The sudden movement and look of panic was unmistakable. Sam felt his palms begin to sweat just watching the video.

  But as far as Sam could see, none of them left the room. No one accessed a computer. No one had the opportunity to hit any kind of Self-Destruct button on the intruder code.

  Except for Swamp Witch. The keeper of the gates. The watcher of the watchers. The guardian of the truth. She was nowhere in sight.

  “She stays in her office right up till the last minute,” Sam said, running the video forward and backward as Swamp Witch emerged and scampered down the slight slope toward their workstations. “Maybe she was just fighting them, the same as we were. Came out when her machine got wiped, like the rest.”

  “Or maybe not,” Dodge said.

  “You can’t really think that she is our insider,” Sam said. “She has security clearance that goes beyond the moon.”

  “Don’t mean nothing,” Dodge said. “Maybe she’s just pulled the wool over a lot of people’s eyes for a long time.”

  “It still doesn’t feel right to me,” Sam said.

  “Give me a better option,” Dodge said.

  Sam couldn’t. He shrugged. “Now what?”

  “We need some proof,” Dodge said. “We can’t just go accusing the Oversight rep of treason without something a bit stronger than this. I think we need to get into her computer.”

  “You mean hack in?”

  “Nah, ya muppet, you think she wouldn’t notice that? We need to get into the swamp when she’s not around and clone her hard drive. Then we can analyze it at our leisure back here.”

  “Security cams would see us,” Sam said cautiously.

  “Yeah, but nobody reviews the footage unless there’s a problem,” Dodge said. “So let’s not cause a problem.”

  “I think we should let Jaggard know,” Sam said. “That way, if we’re caught, at least one person will know what we were doing.”

  “If we ask Jaggard, he’ll say no. If we then go and do it, we’ll be out on our arses,” Dodge said.

  “Probably be out on our ‘arses’ anyway,” Sam said.

  “Maybe,” Dodge said. “But it’s always easier to apologize later than to ask for permission up front.”

  “When?” Sam asked.

  “Sooner the better,” Dodge said. “How about tomorrow? If you can cover me, I’ll try and slip into her office when she’s not there.”

  “Won’t it be locked?” Sam asked.

  “That will be the least of our worries,” Dodge said.

  • • •

  “Any progress?” Jaggard asked, and his tone was not chirpy. He leaned forward on his elbows, staring across the desk at Sam and Dodge. He had called them into his office the moment they arrived at work.

  “Nothing yet,” Dodge answered for them. “We put the terrorists’ hard drives through every kind of test, including spectromagnetic analysis, and we got nothing. They’re as clean as the day they were manufactured.”

  “Is it possible that someone replaced the drives?”

  Dodge shook his head. “Forensic examination of the screws and the cable ends says no. These are the original drives. They have just been zeroed.”

  Jaggard nodded. “That pretty much describes their owners as well. Zeroed.”

  “What do you mean?” Sam asked. “What’s wrong with them?”

  “We’re not yet sure,” Jaggard answered. “They are both in a deep coma. Looks like a massive brain aneurysm. The problem is that the CAT scans don’t show any evidence of it. Whoever did this to them has access to drugs or some kind of radiation equipment that we can’t begin to imagine.”

  “Would the CIA have that kind of stuff?” Dodge asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jaggard said. “You want to run over there and ask them?”

&nb
sp; “What about the neuro-headsets?” Sam asked. “Any chance you could induce some kind of brain wave that could cause this kind of damage?”

  “First thing we thought of,” Jaggard said. “Had experts running tests on them all day. Worst they’ve come up with so far is to induce a mild headache by overloading the audio channels.”

  “So they’re safe?” Dodge asked.

  “Better be,” Jaggard said, “considering the Oversight Committee has taken Swamp Witch’s advice and is insisting that we start training on neuro, effective immediately.”

  “Cool!” Sam couldn’t help blurting it out.

  “You won’t be so happy when your brain explodes,” Dodge said.

  “We’ll all be on them,” Jaggard said. “Here and at Cheyenne. We’re not going to get caught out again.”

  Jaggard pushed a copy of the local paper, the San Jose Mercury News, across the desk to Sam.

  “You heard about this spam thing?”

  Dodge nodded, but Sam shook his head. “Happened while you were in Chicago.”

  SPAM CANNED was the newspaper headline.

  Sam scanned the article quickly. Apparently, a gradual reduction in the amount of spam around the world had turned suddenly into a full-blown collapse.

  “Spam servers around the world have been targeted and shut down,” Jaggard said. “I want you on it. Find out who’s behind the attacks.”

  “Who cares?” Dodge said with a laugh. “They’re spammers. Let ’em burn.”

  “The day before, it was online gaming sites,” Jaggard said.

  “You think the attacks are related?” Sam asked.

  “Possibly, probably, who knows?” Jaggard said. “What I want to know is, what’s next? What are they planning for tomorrow? As long as they’re doing good deeds, then nobody really cares. But what defines ‘good’? As they—whoever ‘they’ are—see it. What if they decided at election time that they didn’t like one particular candidate? Would they crash all the support Web sites? Worse, would they hack the election software and rig the election?”

  “Now you’re giving me ideas,” Dodge said.

  Jaggard ignored him. “And I especially want to know whether it’s related to the Chicago terrorists.”

  “What makes you think that?” Sam said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe just the timing,” Jaggard replied. “We have three separate incidents occurring within three days, and in each case we have no idea how it happened or who did it. Vienna and Kiwi are already looking into the gaming sites. I want you two on the spammers. If there is a link to the terrorists, or that ‘phantom,’ then I want to know ASAP.”

  “On to it, guv,” Dodge said, and they both got up to leave.

  “Stay for a moment, Sam,” Jaggard said.

  Sam sat back down slowly.

  Jaggard waited until Dodge had left, then said, “I need to talk to you.”

  “Is it my probation?” Sam asked.

  Jaggard shook his head. “That’s not going to be a problem. We need you around.”

  Sam said nothing, looking closely at Jaggard. He kept his face emotionless, although inside him a warm surge of pride was competing with a sudden, inexplicable fear.

  “Your mother has been in contact,” Jaggard said. “A message relayed by the authorities in New York.”

  “Is she all right?” Sam asked, the fear growing rapidly.

  “She’s fine,” Jaggard said. “It’s not about her. It concerns a Derek Fargas.”

  “Fargas?” Sam mentally kicked himself. He had meant to get in touch with Fargas but hadn’t yet got around to it. The business with the terrorists and the phantom had simply got in the way. Fargas would understand, though, surely? Once Sam was able to explain.

  “How well did you know him?” Jaggard asked.

  Sam opened his mouth to reply, then shut it again quickly. Jaggard hadn’t said, “How well do you know him?”

  He’d said “did.”

  When Sam arrived at his desk, his new CDD-issue neuro-headset was sitting in a plain cardboard box next to his keyboard. He sat and just stared at it for a while. The headsets were the thin, rubber-coated wire mesh style that they had used in Chicago. Looking closely at it, he saw it was a Neuro-Sensor Pro 3.1. A big step forward from the 1.2-version headset he had scored from Telecomerica. Glancing around, Sam saw that about half of the team was already wearing them.

  Bashful and Gummi Bear, to his left, were staring at nothing with their eyes shut and laughing their heads off over some shared private joke. Socks was wearing his, although Zombie seemed to be having difficulty with the shape of his and kept taking it off, making small adjustments to the wires and putting it back on.

  “Are you all right?” Dodge asked.

  “I’m okay,” Sam said, but he wasn’t okay. The news about Fargas felt like a kick in the chest, a crushing, winding blow. Fargas’s funeral was on Tuesday, and Jaggard had already said he could take time off work. He’d go. But he’d find it hard to look Mr. and Mrs. Fargas in the face. Was he responsible for what had happened?

  “You look pale,” Dodge said.

  “It’s nothing,” Sam said. “Let’s get on with it.”

  They spent most of the shift digging around in the dark alleyways of the Internet, where the gamers, spammers, scammers, and phishers lived.

  Places they expected to find full of seedy little servers and malformed code were empty. The dingy bars and backstreets were deserted.

  It was as if the barnacles on the dark underbelly of the Internet had been scraped off.

  What did it, who did it, how they did it, were questions without answers.

  Fargas intruded constantly on his thoughts, and several times he found himself blinking back tears. Once, he caught Dodge looking at him strangely, but Dodge said nothing, which suited Sam just fine.

  Sam kept an eye on his watch as the afternoon progressed, ever conscious of the time. Dodge was casual about it, but to break into the office of the Oversight rep was no laughing matter. If they were caught, he could end up back in Recton. Or worse.

  He needn’t have worried.

  Just after 3:30, with the shadows from the windows starting to spread long gray fingers across the room, there was a paralyzing scream from the center of the room.

  “What the …?” Dodge began.

  The scream continued on and on, an ancient primordial sound that reeked of every kind of terror and black despair, then just as suddenly cut off.

  “Get Jaggard,” Dodge said. “That came from the swamp.” He was already running up the slope to the central octagonal office.

  Sam pressed the Emergency Alert button on his keyboard and ran after Dodge.

  The door was locked, but before they could even think about finding someone with a keycard who would open it, the door opened by itself and something that used to be Swamp Witch staggered out.

  She made just one tottering step before collapsing to her knees, then slumping over, twisting onto her back as she did so, half in and half out of the door.

  Whatever it was inside her that had made that scream was gone, vanished from her body as if it had never existed. Her face was calm and still. She looked up at Sam and Dodge with the cherubic questioning innocence of a newborn baby.

  27 | THE PHANTOM

  The paramedics took Swamp Witch out on a stretcher, her breathing shallow, her eyes empty. John Jaggard went with them, holding her hand as if she was his child.

  The intense laser-beam stare was now just a soft wash of moonlight. The piercing intelligence had been replaced by the vacuous mind of an infant.

  Sam had hardly known her and certainly wouldn’t have been one to put his hand up and say that he liked her. But there was something about that happening to someone he knew, something about it happening right in front of him, that made it shocking in ways he couldn’t fully comprehend. And coming right on the heels of the news about Fargas, it seemed almost too much to deal with.

  “Well, I guess she wasn’t the insider,�
�� Dodge said in a vague attempt at humor.

  The main doors closed behind the paramedic team, and after a moment or two, people around the room began to turn back to their screens. Getting back to their work, or just discussing what had happened.

  “Come with me,” Dodge said, picking up the silver field kit that was still sitting under his desk.

  Sam started to ask where he was going, but it was unnecessary. Dodge was heading for the swamp.

  He rose on shaky legs and followed. By the time Sam got there, Dodge had already plugged in the kit and was cloning the data from the tall tower workstation beneath Swamp Witch’s desk.

  It smelled a bit dank in the swamp, Sam thought, or was that just his imagination? In the center was an L-shaped desk, where she worked. The big windows gave a perfect view of the entire control center, while a series of screens arranged in a circle on the outer circumference of the office showed what various members of the team were working on.

  The first two screens he looked at showed the contents of his and Dodge’s workstations, and he felt slightly uncomfortable, knowing that someone had been watching his every keystroke throughout the afternoon.

  Swamp Witch was clearly the kind of person who liked to work in a mess. There were scraps of paper in piles everywhere, along with books, pens, and scattered Blu-rays.

  “I’ve got her drive,” Dodge said very slowly. “But it won’t matter.”

  “Why?” asked Sam.

  “Because I can already tell you what’s on it,” Dodge said. “Absolutely bleedin’ nothing. It’s been wiped clean. Just like Chicago.”

  Sam hardly heard. He was too busy looking at what he hadn’t seen on his first glance around the office. On the floor, by her chair, half hanging by a cable from the desk, was a neuro-headset.

  “Who could do this?” Sam asked, shaking his head. “Inside this room. This is supposed to be a heavily guarded, top-secret government facility. But someone just reached inside and squeezed her brain like a grape.”