What Krasneker was seeing made his mouth go dry.
Systemwide, green lines were flipping to red and flashing ominously—from the fat lines representing the main data trunks right on down to the thin lines of FTTx last-mile connections—as if the entire data network were experiencing a rolling blackout. Even the labeled sections of the backbone that had recently been upgraded to provide network redundancy were failing to do precisely what they’d been engineered to do. Everything Krasneker was seeing pointed to a catastrophic meltdown. Russia was having a nervous breakdown. His hands began to tremble. Impossible.
Nervous chatter broke out throughout the room.
“Yegor, what’s happening?” asked the lead technician in a quavering voice.
“I don’t know.”
“Was there an explosion somewhere?”
The chatter volume increased.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he replied loudly. “For this to happen, it would have to be…Armageddon.” Yet an all-out nuclear strike just might explain it, he thought.
“You don’t think—”
“Shut up! Everyone SHUT UP!” he screamed.
The chatter subsided to a murmur.
“I need to think.”
For the sake of efficiency, during the backbone’s initial construction, in 2005, much of the Russian Internet—or Runet—fiber lines had been snaked alongside ground-wire cables owned by power companies. It had been a mutually beneficial alliance, with more than one hundred utilities and power plants gaining digital connectivity between their substations and power grids, while ISPs avoided costly outlays for easements and infrastructure associated with a standard network build-out. A catastrophic failure in the backbone would take power plants offline and would strand the financial markets. Even the Russian government itself—Rostelecom’s de facto majority shareholder—would be cut off.
How can this be happening?
Then a handset on his desk began ringing—the red phone dedicated to emergencies of the highest order. It was a real ringtone, the metal-on-metal chime of a tiny bell concealed inside this old-fashioned device, with its curlicue cord that connected to copper lines strung along roadside poles. He’d picked it up only during drills. It connected directly to Rostelecom’s majority shareholder.
The control room went silent.
Krasneker answered the call tentatively, barely hearing the gruff voice on the other end of the line, because his heart was pounding so loudly in his eardrums.
“What in God’s name is going on?” asked the caller.
“We’re not sure, sir,” he replied. “I need to run tests.”
“Do it. Now. I will wait.”
“Yes, sir.”
Krasneker cradled the clunky handset on his shoulder, like he used to do as a teenager, when he talked to his girlfriend in whispers and stretched the phone cord into the bathroom and closed the door so his parents wouldn’t listen in on the conversation. Oh, what he’d give to transport himself back to that simpler time.
He worked his keyboard and mouse to bring up the diagnostic utilities dashboard on his screen, and its mirrored image was displayed on the big monitor for everyone else in the control room to follow along. He started with the most basic test—the top-of-the-trees perspective—by clicking on a button that pinged the hundreds of data center servers spread regionally throughout the vast network. The command sent out a simple signal that sought an echo reply. The sonar of digital networks.
Nothing came back. Absolutely nothing.
Dread poured over him like ice water.
Murmurs again swirled throughout the control room.
Krasneker threw up his hand like a conductor cuing his orchestra, and the room fell into tense silence once more.
Next, he pinged the backbone’s enterprise routers and core routers—the critical hardware that performed the traffic-cop functions of the network by moving parsed data packets to and from assigned destination addresses.
That’s when really bad things started to happen.
The screens flickered, then blacked out for a split second. Another blip in the power supply? No, Krasneker immediately determined. If that had been the case, the lights in the ceiling would also have blinked. But they hadn’t.
The screens came back to life, but they looked completely different. The utilities dashboard had been replaced by an empty blue pane. Once again, his sense of reality was being upended. He’d entered a living nightmare.
Then a message box popped up on the screen. A warning. More precisely, a threat. In English.
You are receiving this message because you have attempted to block Internet access to the following domain:
www.bounty4justice.com
RESTORE ACCESS IMMEDIATELY
You will be given one hour to comply.
Choose to comply,
and your system functions will be fully restored.
Choose not to comply,
and your network will be disabled indefinitely.
Censorship will not be tolerated.
Thank you.
Technical.Support@bounty4justice.com
Beside the text box, a digital clock appeared, displaying “60:00:00.”
The countdown commenced.
This time, Krasneker could not suppress the eruption of chatter.
“What’s going on over there?” growled the caller.
“I found the problem,” Krasneker replied tremulously.
ATLAS-5 SECURE MESSAGE BOARD
Session: 10.28.2017.12:26:11UTC.TLPANH.3409559872-11-45
› JAM: Razorwire took down the Internet in Russia.
› PIKE: Impressive.
› JAM: SCARY. What if the Russians locate the central command module? They may have the capability to crack the decryption algorithm.
› PIKE: They’ll have to find it first. If we can’t trace its location, there’s no way they will.
› JAM: What if Razorwire is used to attack other countries, like yours or mine?
› PIKE: That would be extremely unfortunate. Let’s focus on the current reality. Tell me the results of your communications with the project’s assets.
› JAM: We’re still waiting for some to respond to our queries. Thus far, the programmers that have responded claim to know nothing, as expected.
› PIKE: Any one of them could have stolen the code. That’s a few dozen possibilities. Are you saying that not one of them is a suspect and that there’s no audit trail?
› JAM: The software silos were walled off from one another. No single coder could have gained access to all the silos simultaneously, I assure you. We built multiple redundancies into the system’s security layers. Nevertheless, the entire protocol was compromised, globally, all at once. Only an administrator could have done that. As you know, there are only two administrator accounts with clearance at that level. That same clearance would allow access to the bank accounts.
› PIKE: What are you suggesting?
› JAM: I’m simply stating the facts. The evidence suggests that the decryption keys were stolen from one of us. Same with the account passwords and clearances. Someone was watching us. Someone tricked us into revealing the decryption keys and the storage addresses for the entire series of silos. That same someone has locked us out of half of our accounts, which means we should assume that the money has been stolen, as well.
› PIKE: How much money was in the affected accounts?
› JAM: Eighty or ninety million, give or take.
› PIKE: And how am I to know that YOU are not the hacker?
› JAM: I could ask you the same question.
CNN @CNN • 14h
@FBI intercepts cash bounty paid by @Bounty4Justice to Rep. Kenneth Krosby’s assassin.
# 41.01
@ Brooklyn
Saturday, 10/28/2017
07:29:09 EDT
After returning from a brisk five-mile run, Novak showered, brewed a pot of coffee, and tuned the television to MSNB
C’s Cyber Assassins Roundup news special, so he could listen in while he got dressed.
The program began with Chase Lombardi’s murder at the heart of world finance on Monday, which had led to yesterday’s takedown of David Furlong in what had turned out to be an elaborate case of mistaken identity. Next, a recap of Tuesday’s doubleheader: Alan Bateman’s staged escape by sea in the Hamptons, and Paul Garrison’s “halving” in Doha. Wednesday featured Jacob Feldstein’s cliff jump, compliments of yet another ace sniper who remained at large, only to be topped by the late-evening torching of Congressman Kenneth Krosby in Dallas. Thursday had been relatively subdued, with no confirmed hits and Bounty4Justice’s acquittal of Kerri-Anne Thompson, who’d been indisputably wrongfully accused of killing her twins. Friday brought news of the FBI’s raid in Jersey City that shut down the website’s novelty pin distributor. By midafternoon, however, things took a turn for the worse when a local news station in Dallas was tipped about the FBI’s cash seizure. As Novak knotted his tie, the show’s host recapped the story:
Yesterday, FBI agents in Dallas confiscated a package mailed to Manuel Tejada only two days after he’d been arrested for the gruesome murder of Congressman Kenneth Krosby. Officials have yet to confirm or deny that the seizure was prize money awarded by Bounty4Justice, but here’s what one eyewitness had to say…
In the kitchen, Novak prepared a bowl of instant oatmeal as MSNBC cut to an interview that had already gone viral on YouTube, in which a tenacious reporter from an NBC affiliate in Dallas had cornered one of the mechanics Michaels had confronted:
“What exactly is the FBI looking for in there?” the reporter asked the burly man whose name patch read “Stu.” “Can you tell us what you saw?”
“All I’m sayin’ is it was a box full of cash. I could see the money clear as day: stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Lots of ’em.”
In the same shot, the cameraman caught an FBI forensic tech wheeling the box out to his van on a hand truck, flanked by two other techs wearing navy windbreakers.
“And that’s the box there?” the reporter asked Stu.
“Yeah. That’s the one,” he confirmed.
The reporter and cameraman scrambled over to the van. As the FBI tech hefted the box into the cargo hold, the reporter asked the question she knew wouldn’t be answered: “Can you tell us what’s in the box, Agent? Is it true that you found money that Bounty4Justice mailed to Manny Tejada?”
The agent ignored the news crew and hopped into the van along with the other techs. The cameraman tracked the vehicle as it drove off.
It was exactly the free publicity Bounty4Justice needed to tip the balance of speculation and take things to the next level. Within hours of the clip hitting the airwaves, four more targets had been taken out in the United States.
The killing spree started around 3:15 P.M., when Ralph Demaris, the crooked ex–mortgage broker from Jacksonville, was gunned down in the parking lot of his local Publix grocery store by some novice nutjob in camo fatigues. The undercover police who’d been shadowing Demaris took down the assailant, permanently, in a Wild West–style shootout.
Around the same time, in Seattle, the battered body of a crooked councilman who’d enriched himself with municipal pension funds was hanged naked from a tree in Volunteer Park with a sign strung around his neck that read, I WAS A GREEDY ASSHOLE WHO HELPED RUIN AMERICA. No suspect had yet been identified, and his bounty remained pending on the Bounty4Justice website, awaiting a video claim.
By 8:00 P.M., a university professor in Cleveland known for his liberal defense of radical Islam—whose phone and bank records posted on Bounty4Justice proved that his support for known terror organizations went far beyond his provocative lectures—had been found stabbed to death in his home, after the authorities had received a tip from an anonymous caller. The gruesome video showed up before midnight on Bounty4Justice, for the purchase price of $495,432.
Finally, by 9:00 P.M., the chief executive officer of a chemical company in Duluth, who’d been outed on Bounty4Justice for bribing a dirty EPA inspector to ignore his company’s decades-long illegal dumping activities, had been found drifting facedown in the same filthy river he’d helped contaminate. He was wearing a necklace of glow sticks, which facilitated the body’s speedy recovery…as well as the assassin’s claim submission to Bounty4Justice, which had been validated while Novak had been out on his morning run, to the tune of $523,111. For an added bonus, the EPA inspector was up on Bounty4Justice, too, his own handsome bounty as yet unclaimed.
Until Novak had fallen asleep, at midnight, he’d been bombarded by texts and emails from the various field offices assigned to those targets, and he’d done the phone rounds with Knight and Michaels. Walter had also called to report that his team was still coming up empty-handed on every search permutation for the term “iArchos,” even after two days of intense analysis. “Sorry, but there’s nothing even remotely close out there that we can find, Novak. We even passed it through the NCFTA. Nothing doing. Once we have the proper warrants, I can have the NSA run a more in-depth analysis.”
Captain Agner also joined the party along the way to report that during the course of the evening, his officers had thwarted three attempts on targets in Manhattan. “Something’s got to get done here, Novak,” Agner had said. “My men are getting overrun. We were lucky tonight. But our luck ain’t gonna last forever.”
At that point, however, there was little Novak could do, except work on his spreadsheet and feed Sentinel yet another update to keep the Operation CLICKKILL task force apprised of the situation. Meanwhile, once again—partly thanks to that mechanic’s convincing YouTube interview—Bounty4Justice’s target list was on the rise, with nominations galore.
Novak finished his oatmeal just as the MSNBC host began tallying up the week’s twenty-two confirmed kills throughout Europe. His BlackBerry chimed, and caller ID displayed a really long number he didn’t recognize. At first, he hesitated to answer it, thinking maybe Bounty4Justice was upping its game by attempting to transmit malicious code via the airwaves to hijack his phone. But on the fourth ring, he pushed aside his paranoia and took the call. “This is Novak,” he said tentatively.
“Aaaah, thank God,” a frantic male voice replied. “I’ve been calling all—”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Fred. Sorry. Fred Shrayer. In Moscow.”
“Oh. Didn’t recognize the number.”
“Our phone systems at the embassy are offline. I had to borrow a satellite phone from a CIA agent just to get a call out to you. And that’s exactly why I’m calling. We’ve got quite the panic going on over here. All over Russia. I mean bad.”
“What are you talking about?” Novak glanced back to the television. The ticker on the bottom of the screen wasn’t flashing any headlines related to Russia.
“Yesterday, Voronov finally gave in and added Bounty4Justice to his blacklist, just like we asked him to. All good. Then this afternoon, when the Internet companies started blocking access to the website, it triggered some massive cyberattacks that took down huge swaths of the communications grid, including the Kremlin.”
“Are you serious?” Novak started pacing the apartment.
“Serious as a heart attack.”
“Why am I not seeing anything on the news?” He grabbed the TV remote and started flipping through other stations. Still nothing.
“It’s all going down right now, as we speak. Give it a few minutes. You’ll see.”
“But how—?”
“All they’re telling us is that some crazy software took over the system and scrambled up all the routers that control the network data flow…and it spat out some prompt stating that if further attempts were made to block access to Bounty4Justice, the attacks would only get worse. Like a ransom note or something. Can you believe this? As far as I know, Voronov is having the telecoms remove the block and—”
Shrayer went silent. Novak could hear someone in the background on his end, presumably givi
ng the legat an update. A few seconds went by.
In a much more subdued tone, Shrayer said, “Looks like everything’s coming back online now. They’re telling me our phones are working again. Thank God.” He sighed. “But just wait and see what a mess this creates. It’ll be a huge embarrassment for Voronov and his people. These guys don’t take kindly to looking weak, and this blunder just exposed some serious vulnerabilities within Russia’s infrastructure. Expect this to be a diplomatic time bomb, is all I’m saying.”
Novak didn’t know how to respond.
“I understand that you have a job to do,” Shrayer added. “But you’ve got to figure out another way to shut down this damn website. And for the love of God, leave me out of it.”
“I understand,” Novak replied.
“I’ve gotta go,” Shrayer said. “Good luck.”
The satellite feed chirped, and the line went silent.
Novak set down the BlackBerry and glanced at the television. The crawler on the bottom of CNN had finally caught up, flashing:
MASSIVE CYBERATTACK CRIPPLES RUSSIA’S COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
The New York Times @nytimes • Oct 28
Kremlin accuses U.S. of initiating vicious cyberattack against Runet.
nyti.ms/3eJMP635p
CBS This Morning @CBSThisMorning • 42m
Can #crime-bots like @Bounty4Justice dismantle terror networks? This former @CIA agent thinks so.
cbsn.ws/1eJYT120
# 42.01
@ Salina Cruz, Mexico
Sunday, 10/29/2017
05:24:23 CST
Deputy Marshal Miguel Castillo peered through his binoculars at the motel room window. The shades were drawn, but a frame of light shone around their edges. He could only guess that the fugitive was preparing for a predawn start. But he had yet to catch a glimpse of the face plastered on the front pages of The News and El Universal and labeled “Most Wanted” by the FBI.
Bounty Page 20