Bounty

by Michael Byrnes

Walter emerged from the subway at Seventh Avenue and passed a pack of hyperactive teenage boys in face paint and monster masks. Given the general threat level in the city, however, he could see the beat cops out and about, minding the shop.

  Around the corner from his apartment building, he ducked into the local wine store and took the resident vintner’s suggestion about a bottle of mid-priced cabernet sauvignon. He also dropped by the adjacent cheese shop and picked up some Havarti and cheddar cheese and a package of crackers, too, since his “dinner” had consisted of an apple, Cheetos, and Gatorade.

  Half a block from his building’s main entrance, a group of hooligans ran across the street, directly at him, hooting and yowling. When he saw that they were all wearing white volto masks, he froze and scanned the area. He was alone on the sidewalk, and the cops were nowhere in sight.

  “Shit.”

  Sure enough, the pack slowed and encircled him menacingly. Five of them. None was imposing in stature, but they had numbers on their side. One of them—the leader, it appeared—had his hand buried inside his bulging coat pocket. Walter’s heart began galloping wildly. Fuck.

  “Yeah, this is the guy, right?” one of them said.

  “Sure looks like him,” the leader replied. When he tilted his head, he reminded Walter of a possessed porcelain doll.

  “Hey, fellas,” Walter said, feeling vulnerable as hell with a wine bottle as the only semblance of a weapon at his disposal. “You don’t know me. So back off. Okay?”

  Three of the others started making bizarre clucking sounds, while the fifth one pulled out a cellphone, pointed it at Walter, and started taking a video.

  “You’re not going to get anything,” Walter said. “I’m not guilty. And it won’t pay you if I’m not listed as guilty. Look it up on your phone, there,” he told the cameraman. “See for yourself. Be smart. Don’t waste your time.” He figured he’d go directly at the leader and swing away. By Walter’s estimation, it was the best chance he had. Otherwise, if he tried to run, he’d get shot in the back or, at best, maybe pounced on by the posse and stabbed to death. God, the thought of it—how it would devastate his family—made him sick. Where the fuck are those cops?

  The leader tipped his head, like a confused dog. He slowly pulled his hand out of his pocket, and Walter prepared for the worst.

  The leader cocked his arm…high and back like a pitcher. Which confused Walter.

  “Hey!” a gruff voice screamed.

  The kid froze with his hand up in the air.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Ruben warned, all six-foot-two and three hundred pounds of him storming over. He went right up to the assailant and stabbed a meaty finger between the eyes of his mask. “You throw that egg, and I’ll rip your arm right off your goddamn body and beat your idiot ass with it. And don’t think I won’t do it.”

  The pitcher slowly lowered his arm and dropped the egg onto the sidewalk. “Relax, big man. It’s all good. Just havin’ some fun.”

  “That’s a twisted way to get your jollies, scarin’ people like that. You all need some better manners. Get outta here. Scram.”

  As they ran off, the leader yelled back at him, “Fuck you, you fat fuck!” But the beat cops were just rounding the corner, and he barreled right into them.

  Ruben chuckled. “Yeah, fuck you, too, jackass.”

  “Thanks, Ruben,” Walter said.

  “Don’t mention it. Like I told you, I’ve got it covered.”

  Only Walter couldn’t help but think that if it hadn’t been an egg in that kid’s pocket, things might not have turned out so well. It made him feel sick all over again. He walked to the building with Ruben, his hands trembling. By God, he was going to do whatever it took to bring down Bounty4Justice.

  ATLAS-5 SECURE MESSAGE BOARD

  Session: 11.­06.­2017.­16:­08:32UTC.­TLPSYMM.­71252­53334-­12-­47

  › PIKE: Firewolf is not happy about paying out $350M with nothing to show for it. And he’s nervous. Very. The FBI has been looking into the accounts, especially the ones that point to Bounty4Justice.

  › JAM: He’s just being dramatic. He’ll handle it.

  › PIKE: Do you think? He’s also concerned that he’ll be linked to a terrorist plot. Says he refuses to take the fall. If he’s called out, he’s going to take us down right along with him.

  › JAM: That’s both unfortunate and unwise. He forgets that as far as anyone is concerned, you and I don’t exist. If he pushes this too far, we’ll simply need to consider more aggressive containment measures.

  › PIKE: Let’s not go there just yet.

  › JAM: Fine. Did you tell him we need more time?

  › PIKE: Of course. And he knows that’s bullshit. Time isn’t going to do a damn thing to help us. Razorwire is out of our control. No measures we’ve undertaken have done anything to change that.

  › JAM: And I thought YOU were the optimist. Let’s not be too hasty about this. We might still be able to salvage the project. We can reconstruct the code.

  › PIKE: We simply do not have time for that. It could take a year or two. Nor do I have any confidence that it would be successful. Need I remind you that the programmers were prohibited from keeping backup copies on their local computers?

  › JAM: That doesn’t mean they actually complied with our directives. I say we give it a shot. We start over. Rebuild.

  › PIKE: No. We have no assurances that it wasn’t one of these programmers who may have compromised the project to begin with. Maybe built a back door into his code. This whole damn mess could repeat itself all over again. We need to cut our losses.

  › JAM: So you’re giving up?

  › PIKE: I’m facing reality. And it’s not pretty. I suggest you also consider taking ownership of this colossal fuckup. We’ve got a lot of explaining to do. This has gone on long enough. Better to start explaining things now, before they get any worse.

  › JAM: Are you serious? How are we going to explain that our technology has been used to kill dozens of people and take down the fucking Kremlin? There will be no explaining. Don’t you get that?

  › PIKE: How do you propose we proceed?

  › JAM: We need to meet in person to discuss our future together.

  › PIKE: I agree.

  › JAM: Seadog Pub at noon?

  › PIKE: Yes. Can you be there in two days?

  › JAM: Of course.

  › PIKE: Then it’s settled. I look forward to seeing you.

  BREAK INTO BOUNTY4JUSTICE

  & WIN $50K + 1 WEEK IN

  GRAND CAYMAN ISLAND

  ALL EXPENSES PAID 4 U+1 !

  # 56.01

  @ Fort Meade, Maryland

  Monday, 11/6/2017

  16:17:33 EST

  When it came to solving puzzles, Josh Tierney had always been a natural. The Rubik’s Cube? Please. A relic from a bygone era. (Yet he did keep one handy, next to his keyboard.) Sudoku? Busywork for simple minds. (Though he did have a Sudoku app on his iPhone, and he revisited it every now and again when he got bored on the can.) When he was a young boy, his parents would try to stump him with all sorts of ring puzzles and brain teasers and number games, until they finally came to terms with what they were dealing with. Truth be told, it scared the shit out of Mary and Albert Tierney. He’d tried to explain it to them—and the doctors and shrinks, too—how numbers and advanced mathematics played like songs in his mind or, in the case of calculus and trigonometry, flowed in wondrous colors. Apparently, that made him different. Very different indeed.

  When he’d first ventured into the games of the digital realm, around age four, his parents’ anxiety had deepened. By the time he’d entered puberty, they were on red alert, because his “games” had evolved into outwitting top secret computer networks inside the Defense Department. (By then, hacking eBay, Amazon, Bank of America, and Facebook had simply become passé for him.) But he meant no harm. Typically, he’d just stroll through the machines’ vast architecture, like a night elf exploring the
mystical lands of Azeroth. Oftentimes he’d poke and prod at the coding when he thought it needed fixing, and more often than not, it did. It was what any good watchman might do.

  Then came that Saturday in May 2009, when he was once again being harangued by his parents to fill out college applications and got caught snooping through CAD blueprints for some mean-ass stealth fighter that was being developed for the navy (long before the Chinese and Russians ever had a peek). Fucking thing was a blade of an aircraft with the impossible profile of a guitar pick. Sunday came, and so did an NSA recruiter, who knocked on his door and told him, “Son, there’s two ways this can go…”

  Josh wasn’t a complete idiot. He’d made the sensible choice, because unlike some hackers, he’d been bequeathed the gift of a moral compass, which somehow blended well with the NSA’s core vision of “global cryptologic dominance through responsive presence and network advantage.” Moreover, prison didn’t sound all that pleasant. So he’d emerged from the primordial ooze of the darknet and joined the official ranks of the world’s white-hat cyberspies.

  By then the NSA had already grown up and gone full-throttle into the modern age by creating a workplace suitable for the true masters of the digital world. The dress code was whatever you felt you needed it to be—with the exception of half shirts and outright nudity—with tats and piercings and goth attire considered fair game. The break hall was stocked with endless supplies of Red Bull and Cheetos. There was a gaming room and massage chairs and a smoothie kiosk and a Starbucks and a food court that served Thai and burritos and sushi. Everything a computer geek could ever want. What was there not to like?

  Here, he was in good company. He was quirky, and so was everyone around him. All the other hackers were pale and doughy and temperamental, just like him. Many of them also possessed brains that processed numbers in colors and melodies.

  And now Josh Tierney had been formally tasked to solve the mack daddy puzzle worthy of only the most abstract mind. Life couldn’t get much better.

  # 56.02

  Bounty4Justice had gone viral within the labyrinthine halls of the OPS2A building. Even upper management was stoked, because the U.S. intelligence enterprise finally had a quantifiable enemy that promised to change souring opinions about the agency’s role in national security. Fear, however, could also be found in NSA boardrooms, because Bounty4Justice was running technologies thought to be proprietary to the Tailored Access Operations strategic hacking unit. Like its enhanced man-in-the-middle spoofing capabilities that could impersonate legitimate websites—the heady stuff of the QFire exploit. Or its cyber kill-switch technology—once known by the moniker Quantumcopper—that could make an entire domain go dark by corrupting routers systemwide.

  It wasn’t that Josh’s team hadn’t already taken a crack at Bounty4Justice. Hell, his department had tried to hack the beast mere hours after that douche Wall Street banker got his fat head shot off, before the FBI or another agency could identify the website’s operators as foreign or domestic and undermine Fort Meade’s nebulous authority. Right from the get-go they’d pinpointed the website’s trip wires, well before Russia blindly banged it with a hammer. And they’d mapped the code blocks to anonymous authors (how many was still unclear) in Korea and China and Russia and the Baltics and Germany and England and beyond—one big orgy of code—as if the world’s preeminent hackers had gotten together to build the ultimate wiki.

  Yet, to date, no back doors had been identified.

  So management had decided to offer bounties of its own to any staffer who could crack the main spoofing algo that was masking Bounty4Justice’s true IP addresses; some considered this an early warning sign of desperation. Propped on an easel outside Josh’s boss’s office was a whiteboard with his department’s prize written out in red marker: $50,000 in cash and an all-expenses-paid trip for two to Grand Cayman.

  A beach vacation was a strange incentive for this group of misfit night crawlers. But the boss, Dilip Kapoor, was a strange dude—a middle-aged career ass kisser and social retard who was anything but plugged into his staff’s interests, let alone their daily work routines. The man micromanaged his morning shit down to the flush, yet he dealt with his staff from behind closed doors via awkward, oftentimes highly inappropriate emails, so as not to expose the inconvenient truth that he didn’t know jack shit about modern cryptanalysis. Probably, a long time ago—back when Amazon.​com sold only books and spoofing ATMs was considered high crime—he’d had enough chops to weasel his way into the NSA. Though once he’d put on his lipstick and set his sights on the boardroom, the manic mutation of the digital world had quickly left him drowning in its wake. To his credit, the man understood his place in the order of things: he was just a guy who knew a guy, and who’d be replaced in a few months by another guy who would know some other guy who’d replace Kapoor’s guy. At which time Dilip Kapoor, obsolete yet ever cunning, would find another door to hide behind.

  Minutes ago, Kapoor had forwarded an email to Josh, phrased in his typical robo-prose: “handle this.” What a dick. He’d attached a query that was some random ciphertext submitted for analysis by Walter Koslowski from the Manhattan FBI, dated a week earlier. Josh knew from news reports and the agency’s internal intranet postings, as did Kapoor, that this was the same dude who was already in an intimately tight spot with Bounty4Justice. An FBI cyber agent is on this demented website, teetering on the verge of being added back to its motherfucking hit list and you let his query fucking stew in your in-box? Way to go, boss. Way to totally skull-fuck the brotherhood.

  On second thought, maybe Shut-the-Door Kapoor wasn’t fully to blame for the delay, because ever since that abduction attempt on Senator Barbara Ascher’s kids last week, it did seem as if every query related to Bounty4Justice had to be passed through the West Wing and Capitol Hill before any NSA analyst could even view it.

  Fuck legalities and fuck bureaucracy. Time to help out a “brother.”

  At first glance, the ciphertext block Koslowski had submitted didn’t look like much—just your standard encryption mumbo jumbo that would typically require a decryption key to unscramble it into something intelligible. But this “iArchos6I6” plugged into the middle of it all was rather intriguing. Someone had to have typed it in there after the fact, because encryption algorithms simply didn’t generate such rational strings. Why would someone do that?

  He turned to the analyst in the neighboring cubicle, who was pecking at his keyboard. “Hey…dork…dipshit…Randall.”

  No reply. Probably had his earbuds jammed in too tight, zoning out to thrash metal. Josh plucked a paper clip off his desk and flicked it at him. That got his attention.

  Randall unplugged his ears and scrunched his face up. “W-w-what the fuck?”

  “It’s all right, Cinderella.” Josh knew not to ever go after the stammer. It was that damn moral compass. Furthermore, Randall was a fellow veteran of the team—an “old man” in his late twenties with tons of experience. That commanded a modicum of respect. After all, it seemed they were getting ’em younger and younger nowadays, since code breaking and hacking weren’t the typical fare of the university curriculum. Over the years, the agency’s scouting department had gotten really flexible and creative, from its CryptoKids website, which used animated mascots and cutesy online code puzzles to ferret out talented tykes, to its Gifted and Talented Program for high school seniors who excelled in math and engineering, to its college career fairs and annual DEF CON gaming challenges, which pitted junior-level hackers against one another. At times, it seemed the NSA was simply trying to gather up all the prodigies and savants to lock them away in a safe place where they could be monitored. Keep them out of circulation so that some Russian or Chinese intelligence project couldn’t get their grubby hands on them. The irony was that the most serious hackers would never so willingly expose themselves, which was why this “old man” hailed from a more checkered past, in which an NSA recruiter had knocked on his door on a Sunday afternoon, consequent to
some majorly successful security hack that had been anything but a game.

  “Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” Josh said. “You remember you were telling me you read some book about an AI cube thing that instructed the machines to take over the world?”

  “You m-mean Robopocalypse. Hell, yeah. Fuckin’ Skynet, m-move over.”

  “Right, whatever. What was the name of the cube thing?”

  “Archos.”

  “That’s what I thought.” He asked Randall to spell it, and he did. Josh looked at the string in the ciphertext—the clue. Perfect match. Interesting.

  “W-why you askin’?”

  “Can’t tell you. It’s top secret.” After all, they were competing for the grand prize.

  Randall shook his head wearily. “Stop f-fucking hitting me with your m-motherfucking paper clips. I m-mean it. It’s not f-funny.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Randall gave him the finger, then stuffed his earbuds back in and went back to coding.

  Archos, thought Josh, studying the “iArchos6I6” buried in the ciphertext. The sentient machine-god that annihilates humanity in some apocalyptic novel. The lowercase i tagged before it could just be the short version of “I am.” Bounty4Justice certainly was worthy of proclaiming itself a god. Maybe it could be the AI powerhouse that would bring humanity to its knees—the fast track to the singularity, when the machines would become self-aware and need no organic agent to program them, because they’d start programming themselves. Awesome.

  The “6I6” could mean just about anything, though it did look an awful lot like 616, which was the numerical mark of the beast in the Bible’s apocalyptic closing chapter, Revelation. The beast had seven heads, which was a metaphor for almighty Rome, known in antiquity for its prominent seven-hilled topography. And 616 and 666 were the numerical sums of the Hebrew letters that spelled out “Nero Caesar”—the name of the notorious persecutor of the early Christians at the time the text was authored—using an ancient Assyro-Babylonian encoding system called gematria. In Latin translations, gematria yielded the sum 616, and in Greek, the sum came out to 666. Take your pick. Either way, it sure seemed to Josh that 6I6 fit with the theme of world domination and hellfire and retribution, just like the beast it meant to depict: Bounty4Justice.