by Leslie Jones
All right. Time to work.
True to his word, Doug had given her complete access to the field office’s networks. She set up a search string using the code Elliott had provided.
“Go forth and find my nemesis,” she said to the screen.
Since the search could take hours, she turned her attention to her original assignment, figuring out what the malware program had been designed to do. Within moments, she became absorbed in examining the various windows popping up all over the monitor, some of which continuously scrolled data. She poked and prodded at the data, parsing it out in different ways, following where it led until she found what she sought.
“Hmm.” She traced the lines of code with a finger on the screen. It looked like a VPN tunnel, a secure link between two computers. But the infected server managed a slew of virtual machines. Why would someone bury a virtual private network on a server designed to run virtual private networks?
The government and businesses used VPNs all the time. It allowed employees to connect securely to their work computers as though they sat at their desks. Employees who worked remotely or traveled a lot relied on them for continued productivity while away from the office. Creating a separate tunnel within the server, though, hid its existence entirely.
The twenty-four-thousand-dollar question was, where did the VPN tunnel into?
Lark moved her finger down the code and stopped a few lines later. Her brows knitted as she studied the unique string of characters identifying the piece of hardware at the other end of the tunnel. It took her only moments to check the network diagram and find the information she needed.
She sat back, swiveled her chair, and looked at the locked and barred gate to the secure server room that ran the network for the SCIF. Her brain fuzzed gray as her body chilled and numbed, her limbs suddenly as heavy as cement. Her mind grappled unsuccessfully to process what she’d just learned. No way. Absolutely no way.
She needed to find Mace.
No, Doug first. As loathe as she was to add to his troubles, this could not wait. She headed for the front of the SCIF and grabbed one of the secure telephones.
“Huckabee.”
She unstuck her tongue from the roof of her dry mouth. “Sir, it’s Lark. I, uh, need you to come to the SCIF.”
“Can’t it wait? I’m up to my ass in alligators.”
She swallowed hard. “I don’t think so. It’s pretty important.”
His sigh echoed down the line. “All right. Give me ten minutes.”
Lark spent the time pacing back and forth in the enclosed space, earning her covert glances from the other employees working there. When he finally appeared, Mace walked at his side, and tears sprang to her eyes with relief at seeing him. She pounced on them and very nearly dragged Doug back to her workstation.
“Okay, okay,” Doug said, disengaging his arm. He looked worn out. “I’m here. What’s the latest emergency?”
“I know it’s not the nuke, sir, but I found what seems to be an intentional data leak inside the SCIF.” She spoke so fast her words ran together.
Huckabee stared at her blankly. “Excuse me?”
She shifted from foot to foot, hating her unwelcome news. “I think someone is transmitting classified information out of the SCIF,” she clarified. “Using a piece of unauthorized equipment.”
Mace’s gaze snapped around to her face, staring hard at her.
“The hell you say.” Doug sat down hard. “The hits just keep coming. What the hell is going on? Is Saturn in retrograde and no one told me?”
“I thought you should know right away.”
“I’ll have a heart attack before this is all over. Bring me up to speed.”
Lark clasped her hands together. “Remember you assigned me to deconstruct a piece of malware that a security scan detected? The infected server wasn’t located here in the SCIF. It was just a regular, average server running virtual machines. No big deal.”
“Virtual machines?”
“Like, when you log onto your desktop computer. You put in your user ID and password, right? But when you do that and your desktop appears, it’s not actually in your office. It’s on one of these servers in the datacenter. It’s set up that way so the systems administrators don’t have to physically install hardware or software on each and every computer in this building, which would require like a hundred more SysAds and cost a bazillion more dollars. But to you, it looks and acts exactly like your own desktop.”
“Got it.”
“So the malware program opened up a portal linking the virtual server to a second server. That second server is behind that door.” She nodded to the locked room.
Huckabee stared at the gate across the door. “No data can leave here via computer. The SCIF has a standalone network.”
“I know.” Lark took a deep, fortifying breath. “SCIF servers don’t have any way to connect to any computer outside of this room.” Lark couldn’t stop her head from shaking from side to side, denying what she was about to say, as though not speaking the words made the whole shebang untrue. “What I’m saying is that someone physically accessed this server room and installed an illegal router.”
“Terrific.” Huckabee grimaced. “Son of a bitch.”
“Maybe Saturn has a big brother that’s also in retrograde,” she said. Her joke fell flat. Looking at the floor, she said, “I’m sorry, Doug. Based on the evidence I uncovered by deconstructing this piece of malware, I think someone—or maybe more than one person—is stealing classified information from our top secret facility.”
“Are you sure—and I mean, absolutely certain—that what you’re saying is accurate? Is there a way it could be anything else? Anything else?”
“No, sir. I know what I’m saying. I’m talking about espionage.”
Chapter 30
Monday, February 20. 3:00 p.m.
Otis Fitch’s Property. Ducard, Massachusetts.
Fatianova hurled her whiskey glass across the room. It hit the wall and shattered, shards of glass splintering in all directions. Liquid trickled down the fake paneling.
“Goddamned Americans,” she hissed. “You can’t trust a one of them. How did these cheating bastards ever manage to win the Cold War?”
Fyodor paced, wringing his hands. “How could you be so stupid? That skinhead played you. I knew we couldn’t count on him.”
She whirled on him, fury pouring from her like a living force. He took a step back. “Me? You found him in the first place. You negotiated with him, remember?”
She’d transferred twenty-five thousand dollars into his bank account, as agreed. But Otis Fitch hadn’t brought her the package.
Instead, he’d been conveniently unavailable all morning, out hunting with his men. She’d arranged for the auction to take place in three days, aboard a yacht she’d chartered back in Boston. If she had nothing to sell, all her plans would come to naught.
She stomped across the driveway to the main house, bursting in without knocking. The pregnant woman jerked back, startled, and dropped her broom and dustpan. Fatianova brushed past her, stalking to the office door and jerking it open, her fingers shaking with anger. As expected, Otis had not gone hunting. He looked up from a ledger and set down his pen, leaning back to gaze at them.
“Oh, it’s you.” He sounded anything but welcoming. “What do you want?”
“Mr. Fitch, we’re ready to drive back to Boston,” she said through gritted teeth. “Please load my crate onto the truck so we can leave.”
Otis shrugged. “Ain’t no one here to carry it. My men are out hunting—”
“Cut the bullshit,” she interrupted. “We had a bargain. I paid you; now you bring me what you promised.”
Otis’s eyes turned glacial. “All right. No bullshit. Seems you lied to me, honey. And I don’t take well to being clowned.”
Fatianova flashed hot, then cold. He couldn’t have opened the crate. Could he? “I didn’t lie. The device is very sensitive.”
“
Well, then,” he drawled, “that would be the only thing you told the truth about. See, you met my price way too easy. Got me thinking. I’m figuring that thing—which ain’t any medical equipment—is worth a whole lot more greenbacks than I first thought.”
She rubbed her temples, feeling a raging headache starting. “I’m willing to renegotiate your fee.”
“Ain’t no need. I got my own science guy. He took a peek under the hood, and guess what he found? An itty-bitty nuclear bomb. How about that?”
“Look, Mr. Fitch. Otis. That device is useless to you. How about if I cut you in on the profit when I sell it? Ten percent, perhaps?”
He smiled, though to Fatianova it looked more like baring his teeth. “Yeah, that’s a fuckton of bills. I bet that thing would go for ten, fifteen mil easy.”
More like thirty million, but she didn’t correct him. “So your cut would be a million dollars, at a minimum. With that kind of capital, you could go anywhere, be anything you want. Buy a yacht and go fishing every day. Travel the world. Retire.”
He twitched a shoulder, as though ridding himself of a fly. “See, that ain’t in the cards. ’Cause I got me another idea. We got land here, ’bout sixty acres. Belonged to my pappy, and to his before that. And as more folks see the light, my crew’s gettin’ bigger. The kind of money you’re talking about could buy me more land, and all the guns and ammo I need to defend it. No one would fuck with us.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
He cracked his neck, then exposed his teeth again. “No one would fuck with us even more if we was a nuclear power.”
She stared at him, shocked. “You can’t be serious.”
“As a heart attack, honey. Keep the government wolves from my door. Might even secede. Be our own autonomous country.”
Fatianova couldn’t wrap her head around his revelation. “Why on earth would you want that? You live in a democratic republic. Your rights come from your Constitution. You’re already free.”
“I said autonomous. We could run our own damned lives. We could stop the corrupt government from stealing our money through taxes, from trying to take our guns away, from so many regulations nothing ever gets done. The nation going to hell.”
She pressed her fingertips to her forehead and massaged there. “You’ve got to be kidding me. This is about your reckless political agenda? You’re stealing my property because you hate your government?”
“Seems you stole it first, honey.”
Arguing with him about his radical ideology would waste time she didn’t have. So would begging him. Otis Fitch had somehow deluded himself into believing the government wouldn’t storm his walls en masse to retrieve a stolen nuclear weapon.
“When you come to your senses and realize you’ll destroy everything you’ve built if you go down this path, call me,” she said. “Your government will never let you to keep it. They’ll crush you.”
“Buh-bye.”
She had no choice but to depart, fuming, the tires spinning in the snow as she stomped on the accelerator. As she and Fyodor drove back to civilization, she searched desperately for a way to salvage the situation. Get her money so she could retire in luxury. Proceed with the auction, and take her bidders for all she could.
For a product she no longer had.
Chapter 31
Monday, February 20. 2:35 p.m.
FBI Field Office. Boston, Massachusetts.
“Espionage,” Lark said again. “That’s what I’m talking about. The Big E. The do-not-pass-Go, go-directly-to-jail Big E.”
What the hell? Mace folded his arms across his chest, listening with the same intensity as Doug Huckabee.
Lark jabbed a finger at one of the open windows on the monitor. “Think of a server as just a computer that can do complicated stuff. The malware connects the two servers, so you can look at information on either one just like opening up any old window. And this bit here tells the connection to shut down and erase itself from the logs after three minutes. So whatever information or documents are being stolen, when the log gets erased, there’s no record of the transfer ever happening.”
“Okay,” Doug said in a resigned tone. “How was it done?”
Lark’s shoulders drooped, eyes closing in misery. “There’s only one way. Bypass the SCIF’s firewall. And the only way to do that is to physically install a router inside the SCIF’s server room.”
He followed her gaze to the server room. “Who has the combination? We need to get in there.”
She tugged at an earlobe, shoulders tensing as she rose. “It’ll say on the door.”
The three of them trooped over to the cypher-locked gate. Sure enough, a small frame mounted beside the entrance held a printed piece of paper with several names and phone numbers.
“I’ll call IT and tell them to send down whoever has that goddamned combination.” Doug headed toward the front of the room and the telephones.
“Who has both the knowledge and the access to do something like this?” Mace asked.
Lark looked doubtfully at the server room. “A network architect could do it. Servers need love, same as any computer.”
“Who else?”
Lark’s eyes lit up. “I have an idea. I retrieved some text from the binary file . . . oh, forget it. Come with me.”
She led the way back to the infected server, and sat down in the driver’s seat. The cleaned-up text still showed on the monitor.
“The malware program only ran when told to,” she said, fingers flying over the keyboard as she typed in commands, “and then erased all records of having established the link between the two servers. What I’m doing is looking to see who was logged onto the infected server during the times the malware ran, so I can cross-reference the two.”
Mace sat down close to her and put a steadying hand on her knee. “How long will it take to do that?”
“Zero-point-zero seconds. I have it.”
He chuckled. “Damn, you’re good.”
The compliment warmed her. “I found a bogus account. Leonard Rose.”
“What did poor Leonard ever do to you?”
She grinned. “I’ll bet you a million dollars there’s no employee by that name.”
“Why not?” Mace asked.
“Because Leonard Rose is a famous hacker from the ’80s, the Einstein behind a group called the Legion of Doom,” Lark said. “I mean, I could be wrong. But I’m not.”
“So someone created a false identity?”
“Yes. And that answers another question. When I first looked at the malware, I noticed a clocking anomaly; the server’s clock was off by thirty minutes. It was a deliberate time-sync error.”
“English, please?” Mace said.
Lark craned her neck around to peer at him. “Every computer, every server, every router on a network pings a centralized spot to get the right time. Like back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, you could call a number and it would tell you, ‘the time is now four o’clock. Beep.’ This server, this infected server, thinks the time is thirty minutes into the future. When he steals the classified documents, the server logs an incorrect time of access, giving him an alibi. Clever. I have the bogus account, but not who’s really behind the thefts.”
“Okay. Deliberate time-sync error. Got it.”
Doug and a young man she didn’t recognize walked back to the gated server room, so she and Mace joined them.
“Go ahead and open the room up, son,” Doug said. The man entered a code on the cypher pad, and the gate swung open. As he made to step inside, Huckabee raised two fingers. “That’s all we needed. You can head on back upstairs now. Thanks a bunch.”
The three of them trooped inside the server room, dwarfing the small space. Four metal shelves in the middle of the floor housed eight stacked servers each. Dozens of blue cables had been plugged into the backs of the servers.
“We’re looking for a small rectangle with flashing lights,” Lark said.
Without further ado, they spread o
ut, searching.
“Got it,” Mace said, his height giving him a perspective she lacked.
“Careful,” Doug barked. “We’ll need any fingerprints intact.”
Mace carefully disentangled the black Cisco router, holding it by the corners. Doug came over, shaking out a handkerchief and using it as he unplugged the power cord and disconnected the Ethernet cable.
“I’m officially taking possession of this device,” he said. “I’ll store it in my safe until the investigative team arrives. Good work, guys.”
Lark blew out a relieved breath as they left the server room. Even though they didn’t know who the spy was, they had at least stopped him cold.
Mace followed Lark as she logged off the workstation and headed to the other end of the building to grab her purse. She couldn’t remember a time she’d been so glad to leave work. The whole day had been one big roller coaster ride, and her brain had turned to mush.
“We’re calling it a day,” he said into his phone. “Be down in five. Meet us in front, all right?” He wrapped an arm around Lark’s shoulders as they entered the elevator. “Rough day at the office, huh?”
Laughter bubbled up from her throat and spilled forth. “You could say that, yeah. It was a shitfest filled to the brim with endless puddles of shit.”
They pushed through the revolving doors, both scanning the area around them. Lark didn’t see anything unusual. The team’s rental idled at the curb, Alex behind the wheel.
“Everything’s been quiet,” Tag said, opening the back door for Lark.
A dark green Ford Explorer pulled in beside the rental, effectively pinning Alex inside. Mace whipped his handgun out and aimed across the roof before Lark became aware he’d moved.
“Get down,” Tag snapped, shoving Lark hard between the shoulder blades. She sprawled across the backseat, fear spiking through her system. He placed himself between her and the threat as Alex scrambled over the center console and out the passenger door, crouching behind the engine block as they, too, drew guns.
Iggy and the other man who’d taken her to see Viktor Sokolov jumped out of the SUV. Iggy lifted the muzzle of a shotgun, pumping it and leveling it at Tag. The other slapped a formidable-looking rifle against his shoulder, finger on the trigger.