Maybe it was the urging of Addy and Jack; maybe it was knowing that the course of his life had also diverged too far in the wrong direction—in any case, he pressed the gas pedal to the floor, crashed the Maserati through a flimsy wooden guardrail, and launched himself out toward the distant horizon.
# 21.02
Shooting live video from two different angles in the sky, the cameramen in the dueling news choppers immortalized the audacious manned car jump, one no Hollywood stuntman would ever attempt, fully catching the grinning driver, who gave one last fuck-you flip of the bird before crashing onto the rocks far below. Unlike in the movies, there was no big special-effects explosion. Just the raw crunch of metal, glass, and plastic and a body thrown like a rag doll into the rough surf (sure to be censored on delay back in the production studio).
Meanwhile, the video captured through the high-powered cross-haired lens of the third “cameraman” was already on its way to Bounty4Justice’s submissions in-box, as the unmarked chopper banked hard along the cliffs and shot north along the California coastline.
TARGET STATUS NOTIFICATION
TARGET: JACOB FELDSTEIN, murderer, USA
STATUS: Pending
PENDING BOUNTY: $482,610
«AWAITING VIDEO CLAIM SUBMISSION»
http://www.bounty4justice.com/JACOB.FELDSTEIN
The Star-Ledger @starledger • 1h
@Bounty4Justice targets former district attorney for falsifying #DNAevidence used to prosecute dozens of convicts.
nj-ne.ws/37YerTg
# 22.01
@ Manhattan
Novak and Knight were on foot, heading back to Federal Plaza, when Bounty4Justice’s ominous text blast simultaneously pinged their BlackBerrys. They’d already spent a good part of the morning at One Police Plaza in a closed-door meeting with Captain Agner and Commissioner Robert Kemper, where they’d heard nothing encouraging about the hunt for Chase Lombardi’s sniper. Now this, thought Novak.
“Jesus. You’ve got to be kidding me,” Knight grumbled, glaring at his phone.
Before Novak could comment on the development, Knight received a call. “It’s Agent Fass from the L.A. office. This should be interesting.” He tapped the phone and pressed it to his ear. “This is Knight. What happened out there, Fass?”
Novak could see his boss’s cheeks flush as he listened to her reply. Once again, Bounty4Justice was one step ahead—taunting them.
“No, I can’t say I’ve been watching the news,” Knight replied, scowling. “I’ve been in meetings all morning. Enlighten me.”
By the time Knight ended the call, they’d made it into the lobby back at home base.
“What’s the story?” Novak asked.
Knight pointed to a flat-screen mounted above the security desk—the guards were huddled around it, captivated by a video broadcasting on CNN, showing Feldstein’s cliff jump off the Pacific Coast Highway. “That’s the story.”
# 22.02
“Man, those paparazzi are ruthless,” Walter said, bouncing nervously on the ball chair in front of his jumbo monitor. He replayed YouTube’s slow-motion version of Feldstein’s video for the umpteenth time, deconstructing every detail for Novak. “That’s one helluva way to off yourself,” he said, shaking his head and closing out the video window.
“How many active targets does that leave in the U.S.?” asked Novak.
“Without Feldstein…”—Walter referenced the Bounty4Justice home page, streaming live in the upper corner of his screen—“sixty-two. Another two hundred and twelve spread throughout Europe and Asia, and a few elsewhere in the world. New targets keep popping up, but not nearly as fast as the initial rush.” He shook his head in exasperation. “I keep thinking of that line from Jaws: ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat.’ ”
“We’ll be getting a bigger boat, all right,” Novak said. “Tim told me that it looks as if headquarters will be swooping in to save the day.” He could practically feel the pull of the mother ship’s tractor beam.
“Shocker,” Walter said sarcastically. “I’m sure they’re just going to want to get an emergency court order and shut it down, lock, stock, and barrel.”
“If we have any hope of finding who’s behind all this, we’ll need to convince them to delay that,” he said.
Walter gaped at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Not a chance. The stakes have gotten much too high. Did you look at some of those targets? Some of them are inside the D.C. Beltway. We’re way beyond con artists and pedophiles now.”
Novak shrugged. “By the way, I’ve got something for you.” He held up a thumb drive, and Walter eyed it curiously. “Check this out.”
Walter put the thumb drive in a PC tower that was quarantined from the agency’s network, scanned it for bugs, then opened the lone text file it contained. The screen filled with a mishmash of alphanumeric characters with no spacing whatsoever.
“I can’t do anything with this, Novak,” Walter said, deflated. “This is just plaintext from an encrypted file or something. It’s absolutely useless.”
“Humor me. Scroll down to the bottom.”
Walter groaned and complied.
“Okay. Now what?”
“Look at the last few lines of text and tell me if you see something unusual.”
Walter scrunched his eyes and leaned forward on his ball chair. There was a lot to look at, so it took him a little while. Then he said, “Wait a second. What is that?” He pointed to a string of characters mixed into the cipher block:
“That’s weird. What is this ‘iArchos6I6’? It’s like someone just typed it in there.”
“I’m told that’s hacker graffiti,” Novak said. “And it’s supposed to be linked to Bounty4Justice.”
“In what way?”
“Not sure.”
“Who gave this to you?”
“Sorry, can’t say.”
Sometimes, in the interest of maintaining trust, sources needed to remain nameless. And Borg was precisely the edge that every FBI cyberinvestigation needed: an insider—a cooperative insider. Yesterday, in Digital Vault’s operations room, she’d used her personal laptop to give him a guided tour of the unpoliced digital underground, like Virgil guiding Dante into the depths of the underworld. She’d shown him the Internet Relay Chat message boards most actively engaged by the anonymous hackers and trolls who fervently supported Bounty4Justice. “This is where you can see them brainstorming,” she’d told him. “You can see the actual coding they’re developing to patch potential vulnerabilities. And you can see all the cool algos they run to try and sniff out servers.” Then she’d shown him the odd text block. “And I printed this off a hacker message board. It may look random, but everyone seems to think it’s some kind of clue or something. So you might want to take a crack at it.”
Walter glanced up at Novak now, his lower eyelid twitching from caffeine overload. “I’m assuming you already ran this through Sentinel?”
Sentinel was the Bureau-wide intelligence data pool of every agent case file on record, from conception to completion, and included every subject’s name, Social Security number, license information, biographical profile, banking info, current and past addresses, email accounts, known aliases, online screen names, criminal records, known associates, and much, much more. Though it could be accessed securely through a Web browser, Novak figured it needed quite a few additional upgrades to catch up to Bounty4Justice. “I ran full and partial searches on Sentinel. No matches.”
“Hmm. That’s not very encouraging. Do you have any idea what iArchos6I6 means?”
“Not particularly.”
“Jeez, I mean you’re not giving me much to go on here, Novak.” Walter rubbed his eyes, then studied the tag more closely. “I suppose it could be a hacker’s handle or something like that. With all the agents we’ve got trolling chat rooms, though, you’d think something would have come up by now. Especially if it relates to a hacker with chops on the level of Bounty4Justice. Could also be a decoy or
just a bunch of gibberish. It’s hard to smell smoke without a fire, is all I’m saying.” But he could tell that Novak wasn’t budging. “You really think this means something?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Walter sighed. “I’ll have my team run some additional queries and make some calls, see if we get any hits. Just be patient, ’cause we’ve already got a full plate, okay? Give me a few days, and I’ll see what we come up with.”
“Understood. Thanks, buddy. And,” Novak said, “we need to talk with Tim about any aggressive actions headquarters is considering. According to my informant, trying to shut down Bounty4Justice could be a very bad idea.”
# 22.03
Knight made it to Walter’s office in under five minutes. With four dead U.S. targets in less than forty-eight hours and the crosshairs now aimed at figures in Washington, he was clearly anxious to hear about anything that could loosen the claws of the Bureau’s top brass. “All right, Novak, give me some good news, please, because there isn’t much of my ass left for D.C. to chew off.”
“Wish I could, but the buzz in the hacker chat rooms suggests that if we try to block Bounty4Justice the conventional way, it may retaliate. Big-time.”
“How?” Knight asked incredulously.
“Honestly, that’s still unclear.”
“This source of yours is credible?”
“Very.”
“Headquarters will want to block it,” Knight said bluntly. “Unless we propose a very compelling Plan B, there won’t be much you or I or anyone else can do about that. Even Homeland Security is throwing its hat in the ring. This investigation’s turning into alphabet soup. So I’m all ears.”
Novak had thought about various strategies during the whole drive back from New Jersey. “I propose we lean harder on our international contacts to see if Bounty4Justice can be taken offline safely. As in, we let another country pull the plug, then we watch and see how it plays out. A country that has no qualms about civil rights. Where one of our legats can work some magic and get the domain blacklisted on someone else’s turf.”
Knight nibbled at his fingernail. “I take it you have a country in mind?”
“I do. Have you seen Bounty4Justice’s most watched video?”
Knight’s brow rumpled. “No.”
“Then let’s start there.”
# 22.04
Walter brought up the Web page that ranked Bounty4Justice’s most-viewed videos. In the top slot was the kill confirmation for a thirty-four-year-old man named Andrei Komaroff.
“Russia?” Knight said.
Novak nodded. “Russia.” He’d considered asking China to put its Great Firewall to a more productive use, but he’d figured that would prove a much bigger hill to climb.
“You’re kidding, right?” Knight said. “Don’t you watch the news, Novak? What makes you think they’ll cooperate?”
“Watch and I’ll explain.” He nodded to Walter.
Walter clicked PLAY, then got up to put himself in a time-out near the door, saying, “Let me know when it’s done.”
On the screen, the Russian, who had the steroid-bloated physique of a professional wrestler, was strapped tightly to a gurney under the harsh glare of an overhead light. A team of men dressed in fatigues and masked in balaclavas stood in a row in the background, holding Kalashnikovs. A hooded grandmaster loomed over Komaroff, clasping a big red-rubber-gripped jumper cable clamp in his left hand and a big black-rubber-gripped jumper cable clamp in his right, each attached to its own thick black wire running down to the floor.
“Komaroff’s criminal record was quite extensive,” Novak explained. “He made a small fortune selling subscriptions to his online cache of snuff videos. Really vile stuff, according to his profile.”
The grandmaster tapped the metal pincer ends of the clamps together, and bright sparks sprayed and crackled. He squeezed the red one like a pair of pliers, its toothy copper ends hinging open like an alligator’s jaw, then let it bite down on the prisoner’s left hand. Turbo-fueled with adrenaline, Komaroff put up quite the fuss, screaming and thrashing against the tight bindings.
“Komaroff claimed to merely provide an online repository for his subscribers’ content and denied participating in any videos,” Novak went on. “The evidence presented against him during trial in the Russian court had been weak. No surprise, since he’d been well connected to dirty politicians and was the son-in-law of a famous Russian Mafia boss. The judge who’d presided over the trial deemed the videos inadmissible and subjected him to fines, threw out the murder charges.”
The grandmaster squeezed open the black clamp over Komaroff’s right foot, then let the copper teeth bite down on the big toe to complete the circuit. Komaroff screamed like a banshee, his body instantly arching up, rigid, his eyes bulging—
“I’ll stop it here,” Novak said, reaching over to tap Walter’s mouse. “This is just the beginning. It gets pretty graphic. Let’s just say it’ll add new meaning to ‘set it and forget it.’ Hence the big viewership.”
“Unbelievable,” Knight said, grimacing.
“Someone uploaded the discarded evidence to Bounty4Justice—damning videos that never surfaced during the trial,” Novak explained. “In one of those videos, Andrei Komaroff himself can be seen brutally raping a young woman before killing her with a hatchet. When word got out about it, Russians began taking to the streets in protest.”
Walter returned to his seat in front of his computer, saying, “The Russians have a reputation for being tough when it comes to the Internet. They maintain a list of banned websites that changes every day. Any additions take effect instantly. Which means every ISP has to comply immediately, or they get locked out of the country.”
“We have the Russians do the dirty work,” Novak said.
“It’s risky,” Knight noted.
“No riskier than what might happen if headquarters charges in with a court order.”
From: Angela.Simmons@ic.fbi.gov
Sent: Wednesday, October 25, 2017 at 2:10 PM
To: Roman Novak, Timothy Knight
Cc: Jonas Anderson
Subject: CLICKKILL update—Kenneth Krosby
Good afternoon:
Our office has confirmed that Rep. Kenneth Krosby is returning from San Francisco on his private jet. However, he has refused to provide details as to his arrival time and destination, citing security concerns. Given the highly credible threat made against him, I strongly urged the congressman to accept protection from the Secret Service (I have copied the deputy director on this email). He informed me that he has hired his own bodyguards and has secured a private armored limousine.
I will keep you apprised as the situation progresses.
Thank you.
Supervisory Special Agent Angela Simmons
FBI Dallas
One Justice Way
Dallas, TX 75220
Phone: (972) 555-0008
Fax: (972) 555-4487
@FBIDallas | Email Alerts | FBI.gov/dallas
# 23.01
As the customer hurled insults at him and ranted about the incompetent parking attendant who’d dinged the passenger door of his BMW 750i, Fahran Siddiqi reminded himself that in a faraway land, not long ago, he used to be somebody—somebody who didn’t endure such boorishness, even at the hands of the fanatical Taliban ruffians who’d driven him from Afghanistan to America in search of a better life for his wife and two young daughters. Back home, he’d been a respected civil engineer, and a damn good one. Yet here he found himself three stories beneath Manhattan, a forty-eight-year-old garage manager breathing exhaust fumes and on the receiving end of a tongue lashing for a cosmetic blemish to a spoiled man’s luxury automobile.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” the guy screamed, stabbing a well-manicured finger in Siddiqi’s face. “Do. You. Understand?”
“I do understand”—Siddiqi eyed the man’s Connecticut driver’s license on his clipboard—“Mr. Conway. We have very good insu
rance, and I assure you that your repair will be fully covered at a body shop of your choosing. I do apologize for any inconvenience.” He continued to fill in the incident report form with the man’s New Canaan street address and other details and particulars.
“Damn straight. This is a major fucking hassle for me. Do you know how busy I am? And it’d be nice if someone taught that fucking moron over there to respect people’s property.” He pointed at the pay booth, where the young attendant, Rafiq, watched nervously from behind the bulletproof window.
Once Conway signed the forms, Siddiqi used his smartphone to snap three pictures of the damaged door. “The body shop will have it good as new in no time at all.”
“Whatever.” The man dropped into the BMW’s driver’s seat, slammed his door, and hit the gas. Hard.
The car rocketed up the ramp, and seconds later, Siddiqi heard tires squeal and horns blare as Keith J. Conway disappeared down Barclay Street. He sighed heavily and made his way back inside the pay booth.
“Am I in trouble?” Rafiq said.
“Everything is fine. Just be mindful. Now please get back to work,” Siddiqi replied calmly.
“Thank you,” Rafiq said, slinking out of the booth.
Siddiqi printed the photos from his phone and attached them to the incident report with a paper clip. As he was about to drop the report on the stack of other claims yet to be submitted to the corporate office, he paused. Something about the picture clipped to the report on top of the pile caught his eye. The image was meant to show deep scratches on the roof of a black Lexus coupe. But the angle of the shot also showed the back end of a gray sedan parked directly in front of the Lexus. The sedan’s trunk lid was open, and a man in jeans had been captured in the process of stowing an elongated carrying case in the rear compartment. The man was bent over with his back to the camera, and the shot had cut him off just above the shoulders (the long, bedraggled hair confused Siddiqi for a moment). Only the top edge of the license plate and its rental agency’s plastic frame were visible.
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