by Reece Hirsch
“I didn’t ask you to assess the degree of difficulty. Rajiv.”
Gupta’s head snapped to attention. “Yes?”
“Pull up a map of the streets around the Civic Center and identify every street where there’s a CCTV camera that came up negative.”
“What good does that do?”
“If we can eliminate the streets that they didn’t take, then maybe we can narrow down their possible escape routes. Which should considerably cut down on the list of hotels that we need to check.”
“The new boss is good,” Epstein said.
Gupta scowled. “Suck-up.”
Sam couldn’t help but be excited by the thrill of the hunt, but he also had misgivings. He wondered what would happen to Bruen and Ayres when he succeeded in tracking them down. Analysts like him rarely had a complete picture of the assignment that they were working on. He would probably never know his quarry’s fate.
Five years ago Sam had led the rundown of Sheila Capaldi, an NSA office manager who had been turned by Russia’s SVR. Sheila had been a slightly pudgy, jovial woman who liked to talk about Survivor and her fixation with the actor Colin Firth. She baked cookies for the office every other Friday. Sam could tell that her friendly demeanor was not an act. He had worked among spooks long enough to believe that he could spot them. Even when they were wearing the mask of an ordinary person, there was usually a bit of the performer to them, a quick, self-congratulatory shift of the eyes that revealed how much they enjoyed the game. It wasn’t much, but Sam had come to know it when he saw it. And he had learned that lesson the hard way.
A week after Sam located Sheila, which had been all too easy, he ran an Internet search from his home computer to see if he could find out what had happened to her. He found an obituary that said she’d committed suicide. Sam knew that he wasn’t supposed to take his work home and that the NSA was probably monitoring the Internet searches of its data analysts, but his curiosity had grown overpowering.
After learning of Sheila’s death, Sam had become much more disciplined about keeping his curiosity in check. Knowing the outcome didn’t help him do his job.
Losing sleep rarely did.
11
Chris and Ian hurried through the open plaza of the Civic Center, an expansive square with ornate City Hall on one end and the California Supreme Court building and the Asian Art Museum on the other. Rows of pollarded sycamores stretched across the plaza, offering little cover. Chris felt exposed, but there was nothing to do but keep going.
“We shouldn’t be out in the open like this,” Ian said.
“I know. Just keep walking. Don’t run.” From the nervous glances in the rearview mirror and whispered conversations with his dispatcher, Chris had decided that their taxi driver was suspicious of them and maybe even knew they were fugitives. Chris had insisted that the cabbie drop them off immediately, even though the location was not optimal.
They were heading toward the broad thoroughfare of Van Ness Avenue, which cut across the city from the Mission District to the Marina. Ian was right. This had been a miscalculation on his part. He had failed to realize how little cover this route would provide.
When they reached Van Ness, there were more places to hide—shops, restaurants, and a few hotels. But there were also four crowded lanes of passing cars, including a couple of SFPD cruisers. Would the agency that was pursuing them coordinate with the police, put out an APB on them? It was possible.
Chris was tempted to check into the first hotel that they came across, but he realized that they needed to be selective. They were looking for an older, more down-market hotel that did not have a sophisticated security camera system.
They approached the Guthrie Hotel, a narrow five-story building that looked like it hadn’t had a makeover since Willie McCovey was holding down first base for the Giants. Still, it had a CCTV camera mounted over the entrance.
“You ever play baseball?” Chris asked.
“Do I look like I played baseball?” Ian shot back.
“Okay, I’ll give this a shot.”
Chris entered a nearby alley and searched among the dumpsters. Eventually, he found a fragment of a brick that was about the right size and heft. He told Ian to stay in the alley so that they wouldn’t be associated with each other if a passerby or a cop saw what he was about to do.
Chris stood about ten yards down the sidewalk from the hotel entrance, the piece of brick held close at his side so it wasn’t too noticeable. He waited for a time when no one was walking nearby on the sidewalk and few cars were passing, which took several minutes because Van Ness was a busy street.
When the moment finally arrived, Chris wound up and hurled the brick fragment at the security camera. He scored a direct hit, smashing the lens and knocking the CCTV camera out of alignment.
Chris and Ian took a walk around the block. They had to make sure the front-desk clerk didn’t immediately notice the disabled camera and emerge to examine it. When they came back around to the hotel, the broken camera did not seem to have drawn any attention.
“Now you take a look through the window at the lobby,” Chris said. “See if there’s another camera in there.”
“And what if there is?”
“Then we probably need to move on and try another hotel.”
Ian nonchalantly approached the front of the hotel and peered through the glass revolving door, as if trying to judge the quality of the lodgings from the lobby. There was no doorman.
“How’s it look?” Chris asked.
“It’s a dump. But I don’t see a camera.”
“Then they probably don’t have them in the hallways either,” Chris said. “This should do.”
They paid cash in advance and checked in. Once inside the worn room, Chris immediately went to the window and parted the curtains to observe the streaming traffic of Van Ness—and to confirm that government-issue vehicles weren’t pulling up downstairs.
“You think we’re safe here?” Ian asked.
“For now,” Chris said, closing the curtains. “But we need to come up with a strategy to buy us some real time.”
“You think we need to get out of San Francisco?”
“Out of the US is more like it.”
They didn’t want to go back out on the street to find dinner, so they ordered in pizza, paying with cash. They ate in silence and watched the local news to see if they had been named as fugitives. Nothing came up, so they could only assume that their pursuers meant to keep their hunt as secret as the murders at Bruen & Associates that they’d covered up.
Chris worried about Zoey and wondered where she was. He wished that she were with him, but he also knew that would only put her in greater danger. As the director of a computer forensic lab, Zoey knew how to track and parse the electronic flotsam that people drag in their wake. By the same token she knew how to avoid leaving a digital footprint. Thank God for that at least.
He used a web-enabled burner phone, his third of the original six, to send a simple email to Zoey through their secure website: “Are you there? Are you safe?”
No reply.
Chris studied Ian as his fellow fugitive watched the news. When you were on the run with someone, you had to decide early on if he was someone who was going to save your life or someone who was going to get you killed. Chris wasn’t sure which category Ian fell into, but he was afraid it might be the latter. Ian lay on the bed and stared intently at the TV screen like he wanted to disappear into it. His arms were crossed and his hands gripped his biceps, as if he were forcibly trying to steady himself.
“How are you holding up?” he asked Ian.
“Okay.” Ian rolled onto his back, sat up, and took the last slice. “How are you holding up?”
“Not bad I guess, all things considered.”
“Of course. Because you’re one of those rise-to-the-occasion types, aren’t you?”
Chris stared at him for a long moment. “Is there a problem?”
“Nah. I don’t kn
ow.” He dropped the half-eaten slice back in the pizza box. “Sorry about that, man. I guess I still can’t get over how I almost got us killed when that guy was shooting at us in your office.”
Chris waved it off. “Forget about it.”
“I can’t, though. You’d never guess this, I’m sure, but I was kind of a nerd growing up.”
“No.”
Ian smiled ruefully. “Yes, it’s true. And you know what every nerd who’s ever been wedgied on the playground tells himself?”
“What’s that?”
“You tell yourself that even though you may be physically small and weak, you’re braver, more mentally strong, than they could ever be.” He paused. “You have to be, right? Because that would be fair. That would put things in balance. So what happens when you figure out that you’re not brave, that you do not have grace under pressure? That you really are a weak, gutless spaz?”
“Anyone would be petrified in a situation like that. Everyone’s brain shuts down.”
“Not you, though,” Ian said. “You did what you had to do. Got us out the door and into that Uber before he could kill us.”
“That was just blind instinct—and panic.”
“Yeah, well, it was something I wasn’t able to do.”
“Next time,” Chris said. “Because I think there will be a next time.”
“Look at us.” Ian let out a half laugh that sounded painful. “Both of us start new businesses and have them completely obliterated because the NSA, or whatever they’re calling themselves these days, doesn’t want their new game revealed.”
“I’m not concerned about losing the business anymore,” Chris said. “A week ago it seemed really important, but now? Not so much.”
“So what is important?”
“Staying alive.”
Ian nodded soberly.
“And getting even. I want to make them pay for killing my employees. My friends. I know we’re probably dealing with a huge, faceless agency and that there’s no way I can bring them all down. But I’m going to hurt them somehow, and hurt them as badly as I can.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Ian said with forced enthusiasm. “And that Zoey chick. You two seemed close. You’re probably worried about her.”
“Yes.”
“Look, if you’re getting even, I want in on that.”
“If we manage to escape from the immediate threat, you should probably go your own way. What I have in mind isn’t likely to end well.”
“I don’t care.”
“Think of the people in your life.”
“What people?”
“I don’t know—family?”
“They’re gone.”
“Wife?”
“Do I look like a married guy?”
“A woman?”
“Well, sort of. Maybe.”
“There you go.”
“It’s not that kind of relationship.”
“So what is your story, anyway?” Chris asked. “When you walked in the door of my office, you already knew all about me. You can look up the articles online. But I really don’t know much about you.”
“Is this the part where I share that revealing anecdote about my childhood that’s the key to my personality? Sorry, I got nothing. Normal, boring childhood. Grew up in Calabasas.”
“Sounds very well adjusted.”
“Not really, but no worse than most.”
“How did you become a black hat?”
“The same way most of us do. I loved coding and computers, and it was something I was good at. At first it’s all such a rush. It feels like the world’s opening up before you and everything is right—there.” Ian touched a finger in the air in front of him.
“So what changed for you?”
“Same progression that a lot of my friends went through. In the beginning you’re just an adolescent, and so it’s all about you. What you can do. Showing off. Thrill seeking. Then you start to learn that your actions have consequences.”
“That’s something I definitely understand,” Chris said, thinking of the Department of Defense database that he and some friends had cracked when he was sixteen, an offense that had nearly landed him in a juvenile detention center. “It’s too bad that so many kids like us have to learn that in the course of committing felonies.”
“I know, right? As a teenager I can’t buy an AK-47 that I could use to rob a bank, but I can develop computing skills that will enable me to rob a dozen banks. What’s the saying? With great power comes great responsibility? Something you don’t get when you’re fourteen or fifteen.”
“But the federal government, you’d figure they’d know that,” Chris said.
Ian shrugged, tossed the last scrap of pizza in the wastebasket, and fell silent.
The hacker’s mention of Zoey had Chris thinking about her. How much he missed her already. Who knew when he would see her again? While their relationship was only nine months old, he realized that it had changed him, brought him back to something more closely resembling the person that he had been with his wife, Tana, who had died from breast cancer. During the seven years that he had lived alone after Tana’s death, Chris had grown smaller somehow, invisible, and it was because he was no longer the focus of Tana’s calm, amused, knowing gaze.
That was what a marriage or any good relationship was in its essence—being seen. Being seen for everything that you were, everything that you weren’t, everything that you hoped to be but failed to achieve. During this separation, he realized, that was what he’d miss most: being the object of Zoey’s keen, gently sarcastic, understanding gaze. It was a different form of surveillance, but it was not a bad thing.
12
When Chris sent the encrypted email to Zoey through their secure site, the message was broken up into packets of data and translated into photons. That coded beam of light was then zapped through the glass fibers of fiber-optic cables and bounced all over the world in a matter of minutes as the Internet worked its daily magic, adapting to find the fastest, most efficient means of delivering the packets that collectively made up the message, taking into account varying network capacities and traffic levels.
As it bounced around the Internet, the message passed across the nation’s Internet backbone, traveling between two primary Internet exchange points, or IXPs—Metropolitan Area Ethernet (MAE) East in Vienna, Virginia, outside Washington, DC; and MAE West, which resided on the eleventh floor of 55 Market Street, a gold-mirrored building in downtown San Jose, California.
MAE West in Silicon Valley was the second-busiest IXP in the world, every day processing as much as 40 percent of the nation’s Internet traffic. Chris’s message to Zoey found its way behind the steel cyber-locked doors of MAE West and was routed through the rows and rows of black cabinets housing the routers of most of the major Internet service providers.
From MAE West, the transmission was zapped northward to the offices of NorCal Telecom on Folsom Street in San Francisco, which hosted its WorldNet Internet room full of cables, or “peering links,” from various northern California IXPs. From NorCal’s offices, Chris’s transmission should have just been sent on to its ultimate destination, Zoey’s computer.
But that is not all that happened.
His message was also diverted into a rectangular white box labeled “Splitter Cabinet.” Inside the splitter cabinet, NorCal Telecom technicians had made a cut into the fiber-optic cable, allowing mirrorlike images of the photons passing through the glass fibers to be redirected onto a second cable. The cut had been performed with surgical precision—otherwise, too much light would bleed from the cable, the signal would be interrupted, and millions of emails and other messages would be lost.
The mirror image of Chris’s message was then redirected on the second cable to another tiny electronics-laden room in NorCal Telecom’s offices, which was secretly operated by the NSA. The door to the room was labeled “Study Group 3,” the operation’s code name. Inside the NSA’s outpost a semantic tr
affic analyzer, the NARUS STA 6400, combed through the millions of messages streaming through the fiber-optic cable, applying its search terms and isolating the encrypted email from an IP address associated with the secure website that Chris used to communicate with Zoey. An NSA technician then relayed Chris’s encrypted email to the Working Group’s facility in the backwoods of South Carolina, where the Skeleton Key program could decrypt the message.
And that was how, in a series of transactions traversing thousands of miles in mere seconds, Sam Reston and his Working Group crew saw the message from Chris to Zoey: “Are you there? Are you safe?”
Sam didn’t know yet where Zoey was, but he could answer the question.
No, you are not safe.
13
Damian Hull’s demented travel planning kept Zoey on planes and in airports for more than two days. By the time she reached the last leg of the journey, a stomach-churning Tilt-a-Whirl on an Air Andes sixteen-seater into Quito, Ecuador, Zoey had lost much of her trepidation about what awaited her and simply longed for terra firma.
As the plane banked over Quito, Zoey could see the lights of the city coming up, still scattered in the fog-shrouded dusk like a field of stars. Looming over the city was the active volcano Pichincha, part of the Andes.
Zoey wondered whether this high-altitude city of clouds and fog would merely be a way station in her flight or her new home. At this point it was impossible to predict whether she would ever be permitted to return to the United States again. If that was the case, she was going to miss Chris and the stability of her life with him.
Before she’d met Chris, she’d led a fairly bohemian outlaw life—which was a glamorous way of saying that she had been poor, unsettled, and desperate. She had held at least a dozen different jobs—from comic book artist to math tutor to waitress to IT worker—and the closest that she had gotten to a steady job was working behind the bar at the Bottom of the Hill.
Although she found it hard to admit, especially to Chris, she had loved running the new firm’s computer forensic lab. For about a week she thought she had found something that felt like her proper setting, but now that seemed like a delusional fantasy. As improbable as her current nightmare might be, in some ways it felt like something that Zoey recognized—frantic, improvisational, impoverished. Yeah, that sounds like my life.