by John Conroe
“No Such Agency?” I guessed. “No Snacks Allowed?” Declan asked.
“Close. No Signal Allowed,” Donlon said. “We don’t allow personal devices to operate in this building or its vicinity.”
“Look, I said he wouldn’t do it again,” Declan said.
“I think Mr. Donlon is referring to the fact that it worked at all,” I said.
“Exactly, Mr. Gordon. You should not be able to send or receive a thing. Yet you did. And I’m going to climb out on a limb and guess that we couldn’t intercept it, correct?” he asked Viori, who shook her head.
“Within the last several days, signal traffic from the Demidova Corp has increased while simultaneously becoming opaque to our systems. We have the most advanced technology, software, and programmers on the planet and we can’t get a thing from your web traffic. How is that possible?” Donlon asked.
“Ah, I see. Your asset almost destroyed our corporation and when we blocked it, you got worried. What you’re really worried about is a new technology that you can’t hack,” I said.
He leaned back. “A moment ago, you said you hoped to convince us that you weren’t a threat to national security, and yet you apparently possess technology that every terrorist group in the world would kill for.” He turned to Viori and nodded. She immediately fiddled with her tablet, and the wall monitor lit up. A news clip started and I recognized myself from the night before.
“Let me ask you this—what would you pay for unhackable software? Computer security software that not only defends but counter attacks?”
“And it seems you plan to sell it to the highest bidders. You understand that your country feels that this is a threat to national security?” Donlon asked.
“It was a rhetorical question. We haven’t made any decisions on selling it, if, in fact, it can be sold. My statement, which you nicely pulled out of context, was designed to address the business world’s concern’s about our viability, which for the first time in weeks, is back on track, thanks to our proprietary software,” I said. Declan was frowning at me, but he smoothed out his expression as I waited for Donlon’s response.
“This is exactly why you and Demidova are on our threat list and will remain so,” Donlon said.
“So you want us to give up the only advantage we have on Anvil? That’s not going to happen,” I said.
“You understand that my boss will brief the President about this development first thing tomorrow morning? That Demidova Corp will come under the scrutiny of all facets of the US government in that case. Where will your viability be then?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe our viability is more international. Maybe we’ll take our technology to other countries, like we have our drugs. See how that goes,” I suggested.
“We’ll freeze your assets, seize your hardware, and reverse engineer it,” he said with a smile.
“You’re certainly welcome to try. How will you deal with the mumbo jumbo part of it?” I asked.
“Anvil’s here,” Declan suddenly said, looking at the monitor. “I think it’s about to do something.”
Viori and Donlon looked at him, confused. Interestingly, the chubby programmer who had to be Thomas Nagle looked fascinated. He had been nervous and sweaty right up until now. His eyes were wide and excited.
“You can sense it?” he asked.
Declan looked surprised by the question, or maybe the source of it. He looked at me and I gave him a tiny nod.
“I can. And your program is as loud as a boy band concert. Never felt anything like it.”
“You can feel Anvil?” Nagle asked, glancing nervously at Donlon, who remained quiet.
“I don’t know how everyone else can’t,” Declan said. “It’s a beast,” he said, then lifted his gaze to the monitor. “I mean beast in the complimentary sense, Anvil.”
“You think it can hear you?” Nagle asked, half incredulous and half nervous.
“Of course it can hear us. We’re sitting in its living room. Shit, it listens anywhere there’s a microphone, camera, telephone—” Declan said, pointing to the black phone on the wall by the agent hitman’s shoulder, “—or cell phone. Come on; you designed it? What did you think it would do?”
Nagle looked at Donlon again, who just looked back at him calmly, his face a much cooler shade of pink.
“We designed it to penetrate the Dark Web,” he said. “To follow trails through the Tor system.”
I looked at Declan for translation. “The Dark Web is a term for the system of cloaked IP sites and access points that people who want to roam the web anonymously or communicate through it secretly use. It overlays the regular web, but you need special software, Tor, and site addresses to get into it. Used for criminal and terrorist activity. Guns, child porn, and drug deals are all available on it. Ironically, it was designed by the military,” he said. “Now the terrorists use it. So, let me guess: Anvil was programmed to infect any computer that downloaded Tor software, right?”
Nagle was nodding. “Yes, exactly. We first started to track which computer users obtained the Tor software, but couldn’t see what sites they visited unless we had hacked their computers. Anvil hacks every computer that visits the Tor site.”
“Correction: Anvil hacks every computer it comes across,” Declan said. “It’s everywhere.”
“Essentially correct, as that was the only way we could see to penetrate the Tor system,” Nagle said. “It started with our own systems here, where it came across some of our decryption software and learned to rip through security measures. Although this new coding your company is using has resisted all of Anvil’s attempts to decode it.”
“What can we say? We add our special sauce to every order,” Declan said. Nagle eyed him intently as if to decipher his real meaning.
“As I said before, the asset is under our direction and control. Where do you think the assessment came from to not surround you with troops?” Donlon asked.
“Anvil likely considers NSA personnel its own assets. Putting them at risk in a no-win situation would be very illogical,” Declan said. “I think it’s curious, although I’m not clear on why it would actually invite us into its lair. Seems like a giant risk to itself, doesn’t it?”
“You are anthropomorphizing it,” Nagle said. “It’s not alive or human or emotional.”
“Yet it acts with logic?” Declan questioned.
“We, ah, taught it chess,” Nagle said.
The lights flickered and then went out. Simultaneously, an alarm sounded, shrieking at a decibel level that threatened to make my ears bleed. A sharp strobe light began flashing.
“Ah, fire alarm,” Declan said, nodding to himself as Agent Baldy turned to open the door. “That would get personnel to evacuate the building, right?”
Donlon ignored the comment, turning to Baldy, who had failed to open the door and was now listening to his coiled wire earpiece even as he entered a code into the door panel over and over. “What the hell is going on, Agent Gellan?”
“Security shows a fire in this section sir. Building’s being evacuated. Code won’t take on this door, sir,” Baldy-slash-Gellan said, his voice mostly calm, yet with a faint undertone of concern.
Grim expanded our senses, pushing out of the room, out of the building. An object shot through the air outside, headed straight at the building. >Kirby< I called.
The God Hawk was suddenly between the missile and us. Only the object wasn’t that fast, nowhere near missile speed. Small and torpedo-shaped but with wings and really… noisy. It flew through Kirby’s smoky form and the engine instantly died, causing it to nosedive into the parking lot below, striking the top of a black Toyota Prius and exploding in a cloud of gas.
“Drone attack, maybe chemical weapons,” I said to Declan, then moved to the door and punched it out of its reinforced frame. Gellan absorbed my sudden appearance and destruction of the reinforced door with just a slight widening of his eyes, moving aside to let first me, and then Declan, out the door. We headed into the h
all and down to the window at the end. Outside, a white cloud rose over the damaged car, the top of the puffy mass beginning to drift our way as the light winds caught it.
“Nerve gas?” Declan asked, looking around at the milling people outside the building. “They need to get those people out of there. You need to get your employees away from the path of that gas,” he said turning to Donlon, Viori, and
Agent Gellan.
“They all have assigned rally points in the case of evacuation. We spent a lot of time hammering home the need to get there and stay. Kari, get someone on moving them outta there,” Donlon said, joining us at the window.
“Sir, Operations reports that the 32nd Civil Support Team on Huber Road was working on a mockup of a Raad 85 drone when it suddenly activated and launched itself,” Agent Gellan said, holding his earpiece with one finger.
“What the hell kind of chemical agent did it have in it?” Donlon asked.
Declan had moved further into the window space and was focused on the cloud, his face concentrating like when he was about to unleash something. The leading edge of the deadly vapor fluttered, as if another wind was cutting in front of it. A drop of sweat formed on my intern’s forehead and I could see his fists were clenched tightly.
The cloud started to veer at an angle, more of the cross-air current visibly spinning the white gas as it moved off its former path.
“Tear gas, sir. They had the drone armed with CS tear gas for training,” Gellan reported.
“Tear gas?” Declan asked, turning and frowning at the agent as his posture visibly relaxed.
“Correct,” Gellan replied, looking at the eighteen year old curiously.
“Shit,” Declan said softly. A moment later, his eyes widened and he turned to me. “It’s studying us,” he said. “This whole place, this base, is its lab.”
“Yeah, I kinda came to that conclusion myself. Donlon, we’re leaving, now,” I said firmly. “That’s the first time your asset has launched a weapon against you but it’s getting old for me.” I gestured to Declan to follow me, turning to the stairway sign next to the window. No elevators for us.
Donlon turned from the window. “We’re not done with our conversation, Mr. Gordon. You will give us access to your technology.”
Viori and Agent Gellan followed us down the stairs, but neither said a word or attempted to impede our exit.
Outside, I found our rental right where we left it, the two agents guarding it moving away at Gellan’s gesture. Declan headed for the passenger’s side, but I stopped to turn back to Viori. “This is an example of what you’ve created. You really need to rein it in.”
“As you say, no one was hurt and it was only tear gas,” she replied.
I pointed at the destroyed Prius. “That drone’s impact could easily have killed someone, and tear gas isn’t a hundred percent safe. Any of your people have asthma or allergies? We—” I pointed at Declan in the car and back at myself, “—were the ones who were most likely to survive. The rest of your staff… well, apparently you are all expendable,” I said, turning and heading to the driver’s seat, leaving her to stare at me with an unreadable expression.
Anvil made no further attacks on our trip back to the airport and when Declan started to speak, I shook my head and put a finger over my lips. Who knows what the NSA could do to a car parked in its driveway for most of an hour?
Only when we were back on the plane and in the air did we speak.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
“I think it found out more about us than we did about it, although it wasn’t a wasted trip,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it confirmed your ability to sense and stop drone or missile attacks. The Tomahawk in Jersey might have been a fluke, but this one was a controlled experiment. And it may have been able to sense me trying to use my pitiful ability with air,” he said.
“How?”
“The NSA must have a boatload of advanced detection equipment all over that building. We,” he waved his hand back and forth between us, “—would likely trigger a whole bunch of particle sensors and shit. Anvil would own all of them,” he said.
“What did we learn?” I asked, because honestly I hadn’t followed his exchange with Nagle all that clearly.
“We learned Anvil was designed to infiltrate the Dark Web by leaving copies of itself in any computer it comes in contact with. It must know every anonymous user on the planet by now. That explains the Russians and other crime groups.”
“How does that help us?” I asked.
“I’m not fully certain, but I think that with Chet’s help and maybe some of his people, we can leave traps using some of my runic programming codes. Maybe something that backtracks it and attacks its copies. I’ll have to fill him in.” He was still frowning and I knew him well enough by now to tell something was bothering him.
“What else? What’s wrong?” I asked.
He looked reluctant, almost pained, but his expression changed to resolute. “It’s about the coding. I know I’m just your intern, but I created it and it doesn’t work without me. How can you all be talking about selling it or negotiating for it, making profits off it, without me? I know about proprietary information and all that—it was in the orientation papers—but this is different,” he said.
I reined in my immediate impulse to answer and thought about what he was saying.
“Ah. Forgive me, Declan. You are right,” I said. His expression changed from almost defiant to surprised. “In one sense, you are correct in that anything you produced while employed by the company would belong to the company. But as you say, this programming only does what it does because of the magic you put into it. Can it even be sold? I don’t know. I’ve been using its existence as a leveraging tool, first at the board meeting, then with the reporters, and again just now. That’s probably a mistake—no, scratch that—it’s definitely a mistake. Please understand this corporate stuff is really new to me and between you and me, most of the time, I feel too young to be in the position I’m in. So I go with my instincts instead of my brains. Not a good idea.”
Now he looked a little remorseful. “No. Your instincts seem pretty good to me. I just feel like I’ve done a lot in a few days and suddenly you were talking about it like it was all yours. Like there was all this big profit coming to the company and I was left out. Forget it, I was just butthurt.”
“Couple of things, Declan. Anytime you think we’re taking advantage of you, come to me. I’d rather we communicate this stuff instantly than let it fester. Second, we never really discussed your salary, but I think you’ll be rather shocked when you see your first paycheck. We highly value your contributions and will absolutely see you compensated for it.”
“Now I feel like an ass,” he said.
“No, I feel like an ass. We need to keep the lines open between us. In fact, it’s going to become critical, as things will likely get hairier before too long. Whatever you’re feeling, let me know. We’ll fall apart faster from within than from any outside attack. Okay?”
He nodded.
“In a blatant attempt to change the topic, Anvil didn’t seem as protective of NSA people as I would have thought, and since we stepped up, it might use that against us,” he said.
“I had a similar thought. One, would it approve of our stopping the drone and the gas, or two, would it use our regard for human life to set a trap?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, looking thoughtful. “You know… it might not be possible to get ourselves removed from its hit list. We might have to take the fight to it.”
“Well, I’ve always been a fan of that approach,” I said.
“Yeah, but how do you eradicate something that’s essentially a virus? Able to infect almost any computer?” he asked.
I thought about that. “You know, maybe we won’t make a lot of profit on your new programming language,” I said, the tiniest seed of a plan beginning to form. “Maybe we need to give it away
.”
“That asshole Cryor’s gonna love that,” Declan said, leaning his seat as far back as it would go. “He’s already pissy that you’ve got something that threatens his business. In fact, it could completely disrupt the cybersecurity world.” He closed his eyes and laced his fingers behind his head. I thought maybe he was giving it more thought but suddenly his breathing evened out and I could tell he had fallen asleep.
I leaned back, myself, letting my brain run down the different paths my ideas were creating. Where we ended up I wasn’t sure, but things were about to get interesting… more interesting.
Chapter 18 – Declan
I managed almost twenty minutes of nap time before the boss woke me up. He had Chet on Facetime on a secured iPad and was updating him on Anvil. Trying to update him, as Chet kept asking technical questions that Chris couldn’t answer. So I filled the CTO in, which took a solid forty minutes. My phone buzzed near the end of the call and when I looked down, I froze. It was from Caeco.