by Dave Buschi
“What’s the Nikkei 300?” Marks said.
“An index of companies… like the DOW or S&P 500 for us.” Lip cracked his water and took a sip. He clicked three more PDFs. “Hang Seng, that’d be Hong Kong. Here we have the Stoxx Europe 600 and this is the Shanghai Composite.”
“What was the one earlier—the DAX?” Marks said.
“That was Germany.”
“And what is this telling us?” Marks pointed at some of the numbers.
Lip scrolled down. “They’re all short positions, called puts. And they were all done in the last six weeks.”
“On every stock?”
“Yep. Every exchange, same thing.”
“Someone thinks all the global exchanges are gonna tank?” Marks said.
“Yep. Or some outfit. The buyers differ each time, but they’re linked. These were in emails that originated from Shanghai. But it gets more complicated. I want to show you these. We got to be careful here—they’re not exactly PG rated.”
Lip clicked on another PDF. It was the one showing the woman strapped into the gurney with the rat on the floor. Marks waited till the video was over.
“That contraption… table thing… I saw that.”
“Down in the bomb shelter, right?” Lip said. “I thought so—the way you described it.”
Lip clicked on another. It was a boy this time. Asian. Just a teenager. He was strapped onto the same gurney. Same sequence; he was naked; the camera panned over him and then went to the rat in the cage.
Lip clicked on three others. All showed the same thing, but different people each time. An older man in one; hairy as a silverback gorilla. The last two were women, probably in their late thirties. All were naked. All ended with the rat in the cage; a close up on the eye.
Marks reserved his comments till Lip was done. “I recognize three of them.”
Lip nodded. “From the newspaper clippings. I just recognized one. Who are the three?”
“The first woman, the older guy, and the last one you showed.”
“I don’t remember the first two, but you’re better at that than I am. All I remember is the last one,” Lip said. “I was hoping you’d remember more, something from the articles?”
Marks took his eyes from the screen and looked at the molded bulkhead above them, as if searching for something.
HE could see it clearly. Marks was visualizing the walls again in Johnny Two-cakes’s office. The newspaper clippings and everything else that was taped up and written. The faces in the videos were definitely different. The fear on their faces. Not like the smiling photographs shown in the clippings that had been on the wall.
For the first woman, she’d been shown with her husband. Both were dressed in formal wear. He in a tux, her in an expensive gown. It was a picture taken at some high-society fundraiser at The Kennedy Center.
Marks remembered the text. He hadn’t read the whole article, but his eyes had glossed over it. He could recall the text almost like it was imprinted on a floating screen. Sometimes how his mind took mental snapshots surprised even himself. PSYOPs called it eidetic memory. According to them, 5% of people naturally had it to some degree. Marks’s ability, though, was off the charts. He had almost perfect photographic recall. A skill, which had come in handy at school. He’d hardly needed to study for tests, could ace them not breaking a sweat, which was a good thing, because he was sweating plenty hitting the gym and playing ball. But his skill had a big drawback. After reading or watching anything for a protracted period of time, he usually got headaches. Newspapers or magazines were particularly bad. His mind, even if he wanted it to or not, just soaked up the text and images like a sponge.
“The first woman is married to Gregory Lars III, a lobbyist. Heads up The Freedom Group. They’re funneling millions to the GOP for the upcoming election. Bankrolling some major candidates, at least a dozen senators. There was some big scandal about it. Hidden funds… undisclosed donors.”
Marks visualized the other article. The one with the older guy. “The hairy guy is a hedge fund mogul. Heads up some group that specializes in…” he paused, having to see it in his head, “distressed foreign debt. Article said they were instrumental in the ’08 election, funding a bunch of candidates in the Tea Party. They’re big players this time too. Funding across the board… lots of candidates; all GOP.”
“What do you remember about the other woman?” Lip said.
Marks frowned and closed his eyes. Like usual, the tight feeling was starting to come. His head already complaining from the exercise. “I just remember the face and name.” He gave the name to Lip.
“That was her name?”
“Yeah.”
Lip opened up MSN and typed her name into Bing. Several hits came up with the name. He clicked on one that was for a Times Herald article. It took a moment. A screen finally opened, but no article. Just an error message:
[No such link found]
Lip clicked on another link that Bing had pulled up. Same result:
[No such link found]
Lip tried some others.
“Internet not working?” Marks said.
“No, we’ve got coverage, satellite,” Lip said. “These are all dead links.” Lip’s eyes went to The New York Times that he’d retrieved from their office; the one Lisa had handed him. Lip typed ‘Diebold’ into Bing. A lot more links were pulled up this time. There was one for a Wall Street Journal article. Lip clicked on it.
[No results. Article not found.]
Lip clicked on three more links, but none pulled up. “Interesting,” Lip said.
“What are you thinking?”
“I think I know why Johnny Two-cakes had all those newspapers,” Lip said. He moved his mouse and the cursor scrolled over the arrow to the left of one of the results. It pulled up a small screen, like a thumbnail view, only bigger. “See this.”
The small screen showed the date of the article, name of the paper, and a short excerpt. The text was truncated, however. Marks couldn’t really tell what the article was about; not unless they clicked on the link and read it.
“Try clicking on the other links,” Marks said.
Same thing resulted. None of them were pulling up.
“Links have been corrupted,” Lip said. “Someone doesn’t want us reading this.”
“That explains the newspapers,” Marks said.
Lip nodded. “I wouldn’t have thought twice about this either—links are severed all the time. They couldn’t get all of it, though. The search tag gives you just enough info that you can score down the article. Unbelievable. For them to go to such an extent, covering up… doing this.”
Lip bit his lip. “Alright, one more video, and then I’ll tell you my theory.”
Lip clicked on a PDF and converted it to an AVI file. Marks watched the short video clip. It showed another guy on the gurney. Naked, scared, rat eye. The video faded out.
“Don’t recognize him,” Marks said.
“He wasn’t up on the wall. If he had been, I’d have recognized him,” Lip said. “I know that guy. Marcus Larsen. He’s the CEO for a security group. They do a lot of work in the financial and government sector. When that guy speaks, it’s like he’s speaking Greek, but every CIO in the country tunes in when he opens his mouth.”
“Speaks geek, huh?” Marks said.
“Like a champ. Guy did a nickel for hacking into Goldman Sachs, about twenty years ago. Came out reformed and wanted to work for the good guys. Started his own company. Guy is an expert in cyber crime. Made some big news about a year ago, when he said companies should disconnect from the Web if they wanted to be secure. Proposed we all just go off the grid. It was critical for our infrastructure and national security. Power companies, utilities, anything too important where it can’t go down, he was calling for a complete separation. Silo systems. It even got some traction for a while with DHS. That was a year ago. Then he just dropped off the radar.”
“What do you mean dropped off?”
Lip shrugged. “Used to be I couldn’t read an article without seeing a quote from him. I saw him speak at Macworld Expo down in Raleigh. Guy was doing the whole talking circuit.”
“And now?” Marks said.
“Haven’t heard a peep from him,” Lip said. “There was a time, though, he was really bashing China. His company had attributed a whole slew of attacks to Chinese hackers. You remember the eCard deal in 2010, the Kneber botnet thing?”
Marks gave him a blank look.
Lip added more details. “The eCard? Christmas card that purportedly came from The President and went to employees in dozens of government agencies?”
Marks kept with the blank look.
Lip smirked. “It was a cyber attack. Made the news for a while—but you’d have to read the paper for that. I don’t think it made the Fox news circuit; they couldn’t fit it in ten words or less.”
Marks’s brow clouded. “Get on with on it. What about the card?”
“eCard. Thing looked harmless when you got it. Christmas greeting. Folks thought it was coming from the White House. It was only sent to government employees. It was a double-pronged attack. First bit was duping the employees to click on the email. Once they did, it duped them into installing some malware. They thought they were just clicking on a link to see the card. And there was a card. Christmas tree and everything. Wishing them Happy Holidays and thanking them for all their hard work. But once that malware was on their computer, it was quickly followed up with a second smaller payload, a Perl script; executable file. Thing called Perl2Exe. That Perl-malware vacuumed up documents. It was pretty slick. It searched for Word, Excel and PDF documents on the compromised computer and then uploaded them to a server in Belarus.”
“Belarus? As in Russia?” Marks said.
“Yep, that’s what was first thought,” Lip said. “Till Larsen and his company discovered a link between Belarus and China. The thing about that eCard was it was pretty successful, particularly with harvesting sensitive documents. It targeted folks that were in cybersecurity functions. There was a cache of documents that was taken from the DHS. Pretty much our entire response plan if a cyber war was ever waged between the US and China.”
“That’s not good.”
Lip shrugged. “We’re so behind the eight ball, you don’t want to know. I won’t bore you with another thousand or so major cyber attacks that China has done to us in the last couple years. They’re killing us. For a while, though, Larsen was all over it. Speaking on the rooftops, letting everyone know of the seriousness of these intercepts and cyber attacks.”
“Then he fell off the grid?” Marks said.
“Yep.”
“You know where he is?” Marks said.
“No idea. I tried doing some searches, and pulled up a ton of stuff, but nothing recent. It’s like he’s not in the business anymore, or on a long vacation, if you know what I’m talkin’ about.”
“You see any foul play?” Marks said.
“Nope. And I think I would have heard something. He’s a big enough player that if something public happened—early demise, whatever—there’d be some news. But there hasn’t been. I’d forgotten all about the guy to tell you the truth, and then I saw his face on that video.”
“Okay,” Marks said. “So what’s this theory of yours?”
105
LIP closed his laptop and his voice dropped even lower. “What could cause stocks to crash around the world? Cause every exchange to tank? And I’m not talking about the roller coaster ride we’ve had lately. I’m talking something bigger. Like a forty or fifty percent drop—in one day.”
Marks shrugged. “Don’t know. Have to be catastrophic. Something like 9/11?”
“Nope, that didn’t do it. I double-checked. After 9/11 they dipped, but recovered almost instantly.” Lip wiped his nose and sniffled. “The timing of this got me thinking. What’s happening in six weeks?”
“You mean the election?”
“Presidential election,” Lip said with a nod. “Stocks go and up down depending on who gets elected.”
Marks’s brow creased. “Right, but that’s not catastrophic. Every stock doesn’t crash.”
“True,” Lip said. “Dem or Red? Different stocks swing different ways, depending on who gets elected. But I’m not talking about that scenario.” Lip pulled out the paper tucked in his seat and tapped the Diebold article. “Johnny Two-cakes was onto something. Now I haven’t validated this, but I’m going to toss it out.” Lip’s finger settled on two words.
“Voting machines?” Marks said. “What are you talking… hack the election?”
Lip smiled. “That was quick. You’re pretty good.”
“Is that your theory?” Marks said. “They’re going to hack the election?”
“Not so loud,” Lip whispered. “Humor me. I’ve got seven thousand PDFs I haven’t opened, yet. I may be totally off, but for now, with what I’ve got—it’s just a theory. I think there was a reason that Johnny Two-cakes put those twenty different PDFs in that one folder. He separated those out specifically. Add that with what was on his wall. Some of the articles? The Diebold article? The articles on the thousand point drop? And then there was Senator Reed. Guy was the chair for the Homeland Security committee. Least he was till the scandal and kickback thing took him out of the picture. He was a big advocate on spending more for cyber security. Wanted to quadruple our spending. Whatever happened to that initiative? I’ll tell you. Nothing. He went away and the focus went away. The House and Senate are talking about everything but cyber security nowadays. Jobs, housing crisis, ballooning debt, there’s no room for anything else.”
Marks nodded. “Not that they’re doing a damn thing about those problems, by the way.”
“Amen, but we won’t go there.” Lip took a sip of his water. “So, rigging the election either way, what does that get us? Nothing. Like you said, it’s not catastrophic. Stocks won’t crash just because a Dem or Red gets elected. But what if another outcome happened?”
“Like what?”
“Maybe something along the lines of Gore/Bush.”
“A tie?”
“Even Steven,” Lip said. “Close enough that they have to do a recount.”
“How does that change things? Already happened. We survived. I don’t remember Wall Street going screwy.”
“No?” Lip said. “Think back. There was a period where it got a little hairy. If Gore hadn’t taken the high road and conceded things.”
Marks scoffed. “And your point?”
“I’m getting there. With a recount there is added scrutiny. It’s all put under the microscope. What if during that process it was discovered that our voting systems were compromised, such that it was impossible to validate who won? What would happen then?”
“Hard to say, I don’t know, be messed up. We’d probably have to do it all over again.”
“If we could. But how would we know we could trust the next results? Our confidence in the system would be shot. We’d be second guessing any and all results. But put that aside for a second, and just think about the accountability piece. If we found out who did it, who compromised the election to begin with. If we found that info out, we’d go after them. Right?”
“I suppose,” Marks said. “Yeah, of course. Proportionate Response.”
“Proportionate Response.” Lip nodded. “That’s what we do. You hit us, we hit you back.”
“Name of the game,” Marks said.
“Right. And everyone knows it. So put the links together—we got a disputed election. Gore/Bush all over again. And no way to trust the results. It was hacked and we determine it came from Russia? Maybe Belarus? Maybe somewhere else? A State sanctioned deal?” Lip paused. “You seeing the picture?”
“Yeah.”
Lip placed his hands flat on his closed laptop. “Cyber attack, deliberate, targeting us. Coming from another country.”
Marks finished it for him, “What you’re describing is an act of war.”
106
“SO you’re saying Russia? Not China?” Marks said.
“It doesn’t matter. But think about it? Hacked election. How long till that impacts the stock market?”
“That would be the least of our problems,” Marks said. “We’re talking war. You don’t fuck with someone’s government like that—least not ours.”
“Kind of a double standard, isn’t it?” Lip said. “With what we’ve been doing lately? Last year? Helping take out Gaddafi and Mubarak.”
“Those were oppressive regimes. This is democracy we’re talking about.”
“I know,” Lip said. “And it’s in a fine state, isn’t it? The US, a shiny example of democracy in action. Look at us. We’re at each other’s throats. This recession has amplified everything. Unemployment, our debt crisis, anger at the banks and the bailout, the demonstrations we’re seeing in almost every city, everyday… you’d almost think we were third world if you were watching some of the mess on TV. Everything is polarized. Congress is paralyzed, doing nothing to address the big issues. And this election cycle has been nothing short of all-out war. You think either side is going to step aside this time, if the results are disputed? Now add that with the mess on Wall Street. They’ve been like a yo-yo lately.”
Lip took off his glasses and began to clean them with a hanky. “So imagine another Gore/Bush, where it’s not hanging chads, but a hack? And no end in sight on fixing things.”
Marks cracked his water. “I’m listening.”
“Even with the polls where they are now, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.” Lip put his glasses back on. “It’s all about the electoral college. Heck, Gore had over half a million more votes than Bush did, and he still lost. We know the popular vote doesn’t matter. The guy who gets the lesser number of votes can win. Bush proved it.”
Marks frowned. “It’s a good thing too.”
Lip smirked. “I’m not gonna bash your man, I liked GW.”
“Say that again.”