Proportionate Response

by Dave Buschi

  Lip checked all five Inboxes. He had plenty of emails since yesterday, but nothing from Johnny Two-cakes. Emails. He checked through all of them, just to make sure, but it was definite. Johnny Two-cakes hadn’t sent him anything.

  No password. No entry. Lip stared at the blue screen and jump drive. He considered the possibility that Johnny Two-cakes would have resorted to snail mail again to send a password. Instead of using their business P.O. Box, perhaps he used their actual office address? They never received mail there, as it wasn’t registered with the Postal Service. But a courier could drop something off. Lip pulled out his Blackberry and called their office line. Their new secretary, Lisa, answered. Her voice was cute and sweet. “M and L Solutions.”

  M and L. Marks and Lip. Real original.

  “Lisa, it’s me.”

  “Oh hi, Mr. Lipkin.”

  “Please, call me Tom. You make me sound old. Lisa, quick question, have there been any deliveries today?”

  “No, are you expecting one?”

  “No. Just checking. Everything cool there?”

  “Oh, everything is fine. Just like every day.”

  Girl was bored stiff. Hopefully this one would last longer than the others. Marks wondered why they had one, but you had to have a receptionist. Those automated answering machines were just too impersonal, and you couldn’t tell jokes to them.

  “Thanks, Lisa.” He was about to hang up.

  “Will you be in today?” Lisa said.

  “I don’t think so, but we might.” If he said no, he realized she’d probably leave and go shopping, and considering the state of her credit cards, she really shouldn’t be doing that.

  “Okay. Is there anything you’d like me to work on?”

  Lip’s forehead knit. “Have you labeled all the files?”

  “Yes. I finished all those last week.”

  Hmmm. Had to think of something here. “Would you mind doing some research then?”

  “Oh absolutely.”

  Girl sounded excited. Poor girl, he needed to have more stuff for her to do. But that was so much work. “Okay great. Then… ah… try to pull up everything you can on a company for me. Name is Diebold.” He spelled it for her, recalling the name from one of those articles clipped up on Johnny Two-cakes’s walls.

  “Thank you, Mr… thank you, Tom! I’ll get right on it.”

  “Great. I’ll call back in an hour.”

  “Perfect. I’ll give you what I have then.”

  He clicked off. Just having her do research should be okay. Might be useful putting her to work. Novel idea for one’s employee. One of these days he was going to have to get over keeping everything close to his chest. Yeah, like that was going to happen anytime soon.

  Normal M.O.: they didn’t keep anything at the office. The files in the cabinets were all bogus. They were all old files that had been tossed out by a real estate company in their building. Name of the game. Trust no one. Misinformation was the only information Marks and he put out there.

  Lip clicked a few screens. Some info was coming up on the guys they’d taken out. He skimmed the contents. He shouldn’t have been surprised, particularly since he’d already called it, but he still was. Wow. All the guys were as clean as Vlad had been. Shiny clean. No records. Model citizens.

  This was not good.

  He checked out what the prints pulled up. Two of them had already finished running. Incredible. Same thing, no criminal records. To purge records on all these guys, or fabricate these bogus identities—it spoke of a sophistication that was almost hard to fathom. What type of outfit could do this?

  A sinking part of him was thinking this had to be from their side; a government agency sanitizing operatives. Given enough juice, if the order came from the very top, they might be able to get the other agencies to comply? Or perhaps it was some outfit, working on the inside, not officially sanctioned? But neither of those scenarios fit. Not with the way the Starbucks deal went down. Why use Ruskies for that? That didn’t make sense. There were so many other ways that could have been played. The way it was done was too messy, doing it in public like that. Too many variables that could, and did go wrong.

  If this was a CoveOps deal, CIA, NSA, DIA or some other agency, they would have done it differently—a stealth snatch and grab—and they definitely wouldn’t spread it around. They’d keep it contained. That’s how the SCS always did it. Paranoia was inherent within every intelligence-gathering agency. Trust no one. Compartmentalize. You don’t use outside help. You use your own people. Always.

  So what the hell was this? Who could access all those protected databases and do this kind of wide-sweeping NOC job? If this was some foreign power, like the Russians, this was way beyond their known capabilities. The A-player cyber powers out there, of which there weren’t many, had never attempted anything of this scope. China was the top dog in that arena, but their cyber attacks and infiltrations for the most part had been detected. Usually after the fact, but still… they were detected.

  Of course, they were doing some heavy shit, of late. Lip recalled just one of the doozies. Last July, they’d managed to route 80% of all Internet traffic through their own servers for over thirty minutes. That high-level hijacking job included all bits and bytes that should have gone directly to the CIA, NASA, Army, Navy, the secretary of defense, and every other government agency there was. Not to mention every US company, like Microsoft, Boeing, Dell, Google… that all had their email correspondence rerouted for that same interim. And the US wasn’t alone; every other country had their Web traffic hijacked, as well. For over thirty minutes.

  It was pretty impressive. Scratch that, it was kick ass. The scary thing was—hardly anyone noticed it at the time. Service was unaffected. It was a seamless operation. Eighty percent of Web traffic went through China Telecom for thirty-two minutes and ten seconds.

  Eighty percent. China Telecom’s massive array of servers absorbed that type of traffic with no hiccups, no failures, no crashes. Mind boggling. It spoke of a capacity that rivaled anything the NSA had. The NSA couldn’t have absorbed that type of traffic. No way. But China Telecom had.

  The hijacking was detected, of course, by certain outfits within the military, the NSA, some other government agencies, and other folks like Google and Microsoft. You can’t pull that type of job without it being noticed by the big boys.

  Still… it was quite a job. Damn impressive. Wasn’t that difficult to pull off either, which was perhaps the scariest part. China Telecom just exploited a flaw in how the Internet converted websites into their IP addresses. Google.com and all the others, which were really just numbers when they got converted, 128.206.13.2, or something similar, were all hijacked. Domain Name Servers were at the root of it. China Telecom used “route announcements” to reroute traffic. They sent out a flurry of them to all the telecom providers.

  It was a sophomoric trick, but it worked. Those telecom providers didn’t think twice and just complied, even though the route announcements were bogus. Emails intended for the White House and others all went through China before reaching their destination. And for thirty-two minutes and ten seconds China was in a position to eavesdrop on 80% of the Web traffic out there.

  China denied it, as usual. Wasn’t us. The dog did it. You guys are picking on us—stop that.

  Lip smirked. Humor aside, it wasn’t funny. The Chinese. Cats would steal from you right in front of your eyes and deny it till the end. They were a wily, impressive adversary, and lately they’d been taking more than just our lunch money. In the last few years they’d pretty much swiped enough intellectual property to last them a lifetime.

  Like Operation Aurora. Just last year that had come to light—almost two years after they carried out the attack. Thing had started in 2009. Chinese hackers infiltrated several major financial institutions, like Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Wells Fargo. Not to mention certain other companies that did contract work for the Department of Defense. Heck, we were still figuring out everything
that was stolen. But it was a lost cause; we’d never know for sure what exactly was taken.

  Then there was Operation Night Dragon. Almost as bad, maybe even worse. Another Chinese hack. That time they hit all the oil companies. Stole all sorts of information, where they were bidding, where they were about to drill, how their operations worked, what their reserves were, everything that had any intrinsic value. Once the Chinese were busted they just closed shop, denied everything. Pretty obvious though that it was done by “company men” inside China, not rogue hackers. The extraction of information all occurred from 9 AM to 5 PM Beijing time on weekdays. Like it was a regular job, no doubt fully sanctioned by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party). Meaning: State sanctioned.

  The amount of online infiltrations originating from China lately was becoming ridiculous. It had gotten so that every time a network was attacked it was being found it was penetrated by an “advanced persistent threat”, ACP, which basically meant “Came From China”. The Online Blue Army, China’s elite cyberwarfare unit of the PLA was hitting everybody, least that was the theory. Unproven, of course.

  Except for one thing. It was all tracking back to them.

  Unproven my ass.

  Always the same line: Wasn’t us. We are insulted you would even suspect us. Stop demonizing us.

  That was the Chinese for you. In their culture, lying was an art form. Wasn’t even considered a bad thing. Whatever was needed to outmaneuver one’s foe was considered acceptable to them. Steal secrets? Plunder strategic plans? All that was fair game. Copyright law to them was a joke. They paid lip service to honoring and respecting copyrights, but behind the scenes was another story. Why should they spend billions on R&D when someone else had done all the work for them?

  Lip had to give them credit. They had chutzpa, that’s for sure. And it sure was working for them. Wouldn’t be long till they owned this country. They’d already taken all our jobs. Now they were buying our debt like there was no tomorrow. All those savings on R&D were being put to good use buying T-bills. Let us spend money we don’t have, and then lend us more money. Brilliant. As a stratagem of world domination it wasn’t fancy, but it sure was getting the job done. The Chinese were emasculating us and our politicians weren’t doing a damn thing to stop them. At the rate we were going China was going to own us. Bought and paid for. Just look on any American flag.

  Made in China.

  Which brought up the question, were these database breaches from them—another ACP? Breaching is one thing, but going in and changing everything was quite another. Even if China could do this, why would they do it? What motivation on their parts could they possibly have that would make them want to help out a few bad guy Russians? China and Russia. Where was the link? They were never cozy before. Why now?

  Questions…

  As for those Ruskies? Lip went to the FSB site. He plugged some data in and sent the requests. Spasiba FSB, for being so accommodating.

  That should take some time. Lip hit the other stuff he had. Like running down the email address JT_groska7@hotmail.com. Logic said it was Rudnitsky’s email address. Lip started to type rapidly. Soon he was clicking onto different screens.

  As he dug, he started to think of Johnny Two-cakes’s instructions for them. They’ll know what to do. It didn’t fit this being internal, or a rogue government operation. Johnny Two-cakes would have given them something else. Some sort of hint or sign that the danger was in-house. He wouldn’t take the chance that Marks and he would hit up their contacts at the Shadow Factory. He would have warned them off. Sent a message. Keep it off the reservation. Or something like that.

  And he hadn’t done that. So this had to be something else… something on the outside. Maybe Johnny Two-cakes didn’t know what it was, but was still hunting it down, getting closer to it. Judging by his office, he was definitely on the case of something hot.

  Lip used to give the guy grief with his crazy theories. But Lip had to admit, some of the man’s crazy hunches did have a habit of panning out. And there were the photos of the Ruskies. He was obviously onto their operation. Enough that those guys wanted to get some leverage on him by kidnapping Marion.

  Least that was the way he read it. Marks was not so sure. He was thinking Johnny Two-cakes was dead. But for Lip that didn’t fit. No, Johnny Two-cakes had uncovered something. Something big, and he was still alive. Maybe captured. Lip took his eyes from the screen and looked at the jump drive. What’s on you, little buddy?

  Forty minutes later, he had a break through. Not with JT_groska7@hotmail.com, but with something else. Something he should have done from the beginning.

  Checking visa issuances.

  Duh!

  He did some quick work, checking all the usual suspects. Didn’t take long till he determined which country Johnny Two-cakes had flown into. Of course the guy had done some slippery work, a few evasion measures, buying two tickets, each to a different country, using two different passports, one in his name, one not. Guy had gotten two visas. Lip hacked into another database. Bingo. The flight manifest. Can’t hide from real eyes. You can book it, but you got to show up.

  Well, fuck an A. Shanghai, China. So that’s where you went, Johnny. Why am I not surprised?

  At that moment he heard the door open. He’d left it locked. His hand instinctively went to Cheryl, but he didn’t have her on him.

  “Marks?”

  94

  MARKS ditched the car. Around here, with the keys in and doors unlocked, vehicle should be stolen within an hour. It was a gritty neighborhood. Lots of pedestrian activity with plenty of transients.

  It was a twenty-block walk to Metro, and only two blocks to the closest bus stop. The SUV he’d wiped clean at a DIY car wash, outside Bethesda. Between the kids, Lip and himself, he didn’t want to be leaving any prints or DNA material. It had taken him some time to do it right. He sprayed some cleaning solvent he’d gotten from Lip’s garage on the seats and wiped them down. The solvent would take care of any DNA material, like Lip’s blood that might have gotten on the seats. He used the vacuum all over to get the fibers. The pressure nozzle in the washing bay took care of the exterior. Nothing he could do about the scrape, though. There’d be paint imbedded from the landscaping trailer, but that was fine.

  It was the fibers, DNA and prints he wanted to take care of. The car would be picked up at some point. Either they’d find where he’d parked it, or some unlucky sap who stole it would be pulled over. Either way, Marks didn’t want anything coming back to them.

  Afterwards was always the second guessing. Like he was doing now—churning things through his head, looking at their exposure. They did a lot of things loose. Some of their habits were big no nos. Keeping the weapons and adding to them as Lip often did was ill advised. Some would call it plain stupid. Every round fired from a weapon left a telltale signature on the slug. Course, if you knew the right tricks, such as rebarreling, and other special barrel treatment, those risks could be mitigated to acceptable levels.

  Managing risk, baby, as Lip would say. Lip covered most of the angles on the licensing front, doing his Web sleight of hand. He had some nifty ways that he made the weaponry clean again, with brand new owners. Congratulations, Mr. Markston, you have a brand new baby boy. Sig P226, he’s a spunky kid, I can already tell. Said with a big shit-ass grin.

  Lip. Man was one of a kind. Marks usually did the grunt work, and preferred it that way. Working with his hands, such as cleaning and disposing of a car was more his style.

  The two blocks on foot went quickly. He arrived at the bus stop and kept right on walking. Metro was the better way to go here, totally anonymous, millions used it every day. Eighteen blocks, just a walk in a park after what he’d gone through today. He eyed the storefront windows, subconsciously looking for tails. Old habits, they never left you. He was just about one hundred percent sure that there was no way anyone was shadowing him. Not with the route he’d driven, but he wasn’t taking chances.

  They may have take
n nineteen killers off the street, but there was no telling what was still out there. The Gol’yanovskaya was structured a little like the Six Families; there were divisions and lines of territory. Nineteen sounded like a lot of men, but Lip was right, they didn’t know how many guns Rudnitsky had. Till they did, and till they took every last one of them out, this wasn’t over.

  Not yet. Not till they hammered that last nail in the coffin. Twenty hours ago, he’d never even heard of Pavel Rudnitsky. Now the man was forefront in Marks’s mind. He didn’t have a face to go with the name, but that didn’t matter. With Lip on the job they soon would. And then Rudy, I’ll be paying you a visit. You mess with kids, you get the horns.

  Stone-faced, Marks kept walking.

  95

  HAD Rudnitsky been privy to Marks’s thoughts, he might have appreciated the cognitive parallel. Only in Rudnitsky’s case, his internal energies were focused in quite another direction. His world was collapsing. So much, so quickly. All his men. Gone like so much dust.

  Such loss was not foreign to him. He knew its touch. But it was always he who was on the giving end. He as the one who was standing afterwards to see the fallen, the unworthy, the weak, the insipid grovelers. Those that deserved to die. For it was the strong that earned the right to live and Thánatos rewarded them like his children. To them went the spoils. To the weak there was nothing. Only pain and…

  Death.

  “I am sorry,” said the doctor.

  Rudnitsky nodded. There was no expression on his face. It was placid, unmoving like the marbled carapace that obscured the remains of his ear. He looked at the flesh that was once Monster. It was just a carcass now. The blood spilt. He’d made it home, just to die.