On his center screen, Josh copied the whole damn random mess of characters from the FBI’s email, along with the strange cryptonym contained within it, then pasted it into the blank input field on his XKeyscore Deep Dive query window. He clicked the SUBMIT button to feed it to a different beast. Somewhere on the campus of Maryland’s largest employer, a nest of Turmoil servers got just a little busier and went about farming out queries to Camp Williams, Utah, to the queen bee: the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative data center. The big name was justified, because the CNCI’s central brain for signal intelligence (SIGINT) was so big that it had to be measured in acres and exabytes. And with one exabyte equal to one quintillion bytes, that was one fucking mother lode of data that had been transferred into this most giant-ass repository—over fifteen years’ worth of emails and phone data, Web search history and receipts, deeds and documents, airplane tickets and hotel bookings, porn preferences and social media posts of every kind—every tweet, text, Instagram, and Snapchat (and, yes, even those messages were captured long before they’d supposedly self-destruct). And so much more.
Josh couldn’t help smiling. The privacy nuts’ paranoia about government tyranny was absolutely justified. Edward Snowden barely did it justice with his half-assed revelations about Prism. The truth was, it was all at the Utah data center—personal information, medical and legal records, résumés…everything that could possibly be encoded into ones and zeros—just waiting to be mined to reconstruct or deconstruct any crime or motive or threat or conspiracy, past, present, or future. It was the DNA of the Internet. The notion of privacy in the Digital Age was as delusional as chastity in a whorehouse.
“That’s it, my precious,” Josh said, leaning forward. “Talk to me. Tell me everything about it. That’s it…”
Randall cast a curious glance at him.
Josh looked back and raised his eyebrows haughtily.
Randall shook his head and returned to his work.
Within seconds, the first hits started popping up, and Josh scrolled through the clutter. There were lots of partial matches associated with anonymous chat rooms and online postings, and as best as Josh could tell, this odd patchwork of cipher had done the rounds for the last couple months, passed back and forth, up, down, sideways. All this buzz suggested that it meant something. Something big.
Things got interesting as the search algorithm skimmed deeper and deeper through the exabytes—far deeper than the bullshit metadata—to where the real messages people relayed back and forth to one another remained tucked away. The really, really private content.
Within thirty seconds, an exact 100 percent match came up.
“Hell, yeah. Now we’re talking.”
It was a very simple Gmail message, dated nearly a year and a half earlier, originating from the United Kingdom. The email user name was some weird alphanumeric mix, like something Gmail itself would assign to a latecomer whose desired name preference had already been registered in every imaginable permutation. In the body of the email, there was no salutation, or preamble, or message, or valediction—nothing except the block of ciphertext that had triggered the 100 percent match. In the subject line, there was one word, all in caps: RAZORWIRE.
When Josh saw the recipient of the email, colors began swirling in his mind. A smile broke across his face. Oh, yeah. Happy Halloween. He could practically smell those Cayman palm trees and feel that hot, sugary sand between his toes.
Huffington Post @HuffingtonPost • 2h
@Bounty4Justice: Gallup opinion poll points to reversal in public sentiment as collateral damage mounts.
huff.to/1Ch3dlr551
CNN @CNN • 45m
Munich, Germany: Three pedestrians gunned down as assassin kills @Bounty4Justice target in drive-by shooting.
cnn.it/1SkvOT83t
# 57.01
@ Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Tuesday, 11/07/2017
06:11:08 EST
The Canadian authorities had begrudgingly granted the FBI’s request for Special Agents Novak and Michaels to observe the raid on SingLao North American Shipping, conditional on the agents remaining under the aegis of DEA Special Agent Robert Romeyn—a thirtyish corn-fed Nebraskan of medium height and build with a buzz cut who wore jeans and cowboy boots and took orders through the American embassy in Ottawa. Similarly, Walter and four techs from the FBI’s Cyber Action Team were now parked on a side street a half mile away, in an innocuous panel van, standing by to play second fiddle to six cyber agents from the Communications Security Establishment Canada.
Romeyn brought Novak and Michaels inside the office building across the way, up to a third-floor office space leased under the name of a fictitious commodities trading company. They sat in the early morning darkness in swivel chairs, sipping coffee from foam cups, facing a big plate glass window that overlooked SingLao.
“Once that sun comes up, all hell’s gonna break loose,” Romeyn said in a gruff midwestern drawl.
Novak used his binoculars to scan the grounds of the facility, which were secured by chain-link fencing and barbed wire and lit by sodium lights. The main building was an expansive single-story rectangle of cinder blocks and sheet metal, optimal for stockpiling inventory. He zoomed in on six white minivans parked near the loading bays, then clicked on the night vision to read their tags. The second one from the right was the one that had been driven to Massena. Panning the grounds, he studied the dozens of marine cargo containers with Asian markings stacked in the lot. “Robbie”—the DEA agent insisted on being called by his nickname—“what’s being shipped in those containers?”
“Acetic anhydride and potassium permanganate,” he said. “Precursor chemicals. The magic sauce of the drug trade. Turns raw opium into heroin, and’s used to cook up coke and meth. Without chems, the cartels would have no finished product to sell.” He leaned back in his chair, plopped his shitkickers up on the windowsill, and took a big gulp of coffee.
“How do they not catch that at the ports?” Michaels asked.
“Four million of them cans come into Canada each year. On a good day, two percent might get inspected. Some get X-rayed for guns, others go through radiation portals that sniff out nukes, and some get an ion scan, if the inspectors suspect drugs. That’s the official estimate, mind you, and it might hold water for small ports, like St. John’s, but then you’ve got Halifax and the like, with these huge volumes of shit pushing through ’em.” He snickered. “Unofficially, I’d say that skews the overall number of inspections to damn near zero.”
“Pretty good odds for the smugglers,” Michaels said.
“You bet it is,” he said. “Ain’t much different down in the States, just bigger numbers, is all. And where you find drugs or chems, you find cash. Lots and lots of cash. Like toast and jam. Contraband is contraband no matter how you dress it up.”
That’s why the Massena lead routed directly to Romeyn’s desk, thought Novak. Rounding up drugs and cash outside U.S. borders required a unique skill set, which Romeyn possessed in spades.
“No surprise to me that this outfit cut a deal with Bounty4Justice,” the DEA agent went on. “With all the volume the big boss is producing down there”—Romeyn tipped his head at the facility—“converting dollars to NcryptoCash lets him send all his loot back home to his buddies in China right over the Internet.”
Romeyn explained how the DEA and various branches of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Ottawa Provincial Police had been methodically charting the syndicate’s intricate worldwide network. “You can always count on a few bigmouths in any operation,” he said. “Some folks are just plain yappy. Can’t help themselves. Especially on the Internet. I’ve been using this screen name, PonyXprez, to troll the darknet chat rooms. Basically got them telling me all their secrets. And I’ve pretty much finagled my way into becoming SingLao’s best customer, buying up huge batches of sauce on behalf of a Mexican cartel that doesn’t even exist. Took nearly a year to get to this
point. That’s why our Canadian friends are none too pleased that your website is forcing things into hyperdrive. Hell, at sunup, six dozen known associates, middlemen, and mules throughout Canada and the U.S. will need to be rounded up, all at once. Because when the lights go on, these roaches will all be scuttling for cover. Got six hundred of our men waiting to pounce. All thanks to that package mailed to your buddy in Dallas.”
They watched the morning shift arrive like clockwork—the same ragtag collection of Asian males Romeyn claimed to have seen most mornings for the past year. He predicted the arrival of the coffee truck within ten seconds of it rolling up and tooting its air horn; then he ticked off the names and beverage preferences of the cast of characters who came scurrying outside seeking sustenance.
“You really know your stuff,” Michaels said.
“Don’t be too impressed,” he responded with a wily grin. He flipped a switch on a parabolic antenna set on a tripod beside his chair. The voices came through loud and clear—the laughter and the banter, much of it in Mandarin. “Little bird here tells me everything I need to know. The rest is simple observation. I can even predict how many cigarettes they’ll burn through at break time and who stands the best odds of winning at mah-jongg.”
A fingernail sliver of the rising sun winked over the glowing horizon.
Romeyn checked his watch. “Six forty-five. Showtime.”
# 57.02
Michaels used her binoculars to observe the armored vehicles and unmarked SUVs creeping along the streets leading to the facility. “Feels like I’m back in Afghanistan,” she muttered to Novak.
Only a handful of men remained out in the yard. They dashed inside when one of them, spotting a behemoth Coyote LAV eight-wheeler along the northwest quadrant, out beyond the perimeter fence and accelerating toward the facility, shouted, alerting the others.
Two more light armored vehicles sped out of the shadows from the east and west, their bright floodlights snapping on as they effortlessly rolled over the barbed-wire fencing. Simultaneously, on the southern perimeter, a Humvee smashed through the front gate. Another Humvee bounded in right behind it, steamrolling toward two submachine-toting guards, who scrambled out of the security booth.
From all sides, black-clad ground assault units swept in on foot, equipped with snub-nosed machine guns.
SingLao’s morning shift wasn’t going down without a fight; the workers came streaming out of the warehouse wearing body armor and wielding submachine guns, too.
“Will you look at that,” said Romeyn, tightening his binoculars’ zoom. “Those uppity fuckers have Kriss Super V’s. Best damn weapon on the market.”
Novak zoomed in on one of the carbines; it looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. So much for surprise, stabilize, and seize. This was going to get nasty.
“Gonna be one helluva gunfight,” Romeyn said. “Good thing we’re up here.”
In no time, the entire facility turned into a free-for-all Tin Can Alley, with muzzles flashing back and forth and bullets sparking and ricocheting. A pair of Bell choppers rumbled overhead and swooped in to circle the facility like birds of prey, the sharpshooters prone in their open fuselages, expertly picking off the SingLao militiamen.
The ringtone on Romeyn’s phone clanged like a Chinese gong each time an update streamed in from another city in North America, each blong-sssh! confirming yet another arrest in the massive roundup. “So far so good,” he reported. “We’re rustling ’em up now.”
Novak turned to Michaels. She didn’t seem to realize that she was massaging a spot just below her right clavicle—a likely remnant of Afghanistan, he figured. “Rosemary, are you all right? Your shoulder?”
She looked over at him, startled.
“Your shoulder. Is it okay?”
She smiled ruefully. “Sorry. I do that sometimes. I’m okay. Just brings back some memories.”
“Do you want to take a break?”
“I’m fine. But thanks.”
The battle raged on for a few more minutes, until the few remaining fighters of the SingLao militia finally threw down their high-tech weapons and surrendered. They were quickly rounded up and corralled.
Meanwhile, the commandos unloaded a dual-track tactical PackBot equipped with a camera head, an articulating arm, and a rotary firing mechanism loaded up with tear gas canisters. The robot was remotely guided into the building to scout the interior; a few minutes later, the unit commander ordered three tactical assault units into the building. Shortly thereafter, they called Romeyn with the all-clear.
# 57.03
By the time Romeyn, Novak, and Michaels had made their way on foot over to the aftermath of the battlefield, news vans were already jockeying for strategic positions outside the flattened perimeter fences, the choppers were grounded in the stockyard out near the cargo containers, and an armada of emergency response vehicles had descended upon the scene. The commandos were busy loading able-bodied captives onto a prison bus, while teams of paramedics tended to the wounded and bagged the dead.
They entered the building through the loading dock and emerged into a vast, brightly lit industrial space occupied by tall rows of shelving brimming with magic sauce—from keg-sized plastic drums to pourable twist-top canisters—ready to fulfill any darknet order, big or small. Clusters of Canadian authorities milled about the aisles.
“Man, even the goon squad showed up,” Romeyn said, waving to a pair of Secret Service agents who’d arrived to inspect the scene, along with three agents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Proceeding to the rear of the building, Romeyn, Novak, and Michaels passed through the administrative offices, where Walter, fluid and laser-focused, was busily cloning computer drives alongside the North American cyber coalition—a blitzkrieg against SingLao’s digital ramparts. Sometime last week, a quiet intensity had fallen over the cyber squad leader, and Novak was pretty sure it wasn’t solely attributable to the mad dash of planning that preceded their hasty departure for Canada the previous afternoon. On the plane, Walter had been withdrawn and irritable—kept his headphones on for the whole flight. Novak knew not to ask too many questions. Sometimes Walter tended to get wound up tight and simply needed space to decompress. Lack of sleep, bad eating habits, and caffeine binges typically accompanied those episodes. Nonetheless, this time seemed different, and Novak sensed that something more had happened to set him on a warpath against Bounty4Justice.
Bounty4Justice had cranked up lots of people, in fact. Case in point: even Piotr at Novak’s deli. When Novak had seen him yesterday morning, the old man had been all worked up about a shady Russian guy who’d stopped by a half hour earlier for a pack of batteries. “I know his type, Roman,” Piotr said. “The way he looks at a simple Pole like me…like I’m a dog. There’s something not right about him, I’m telling you. He’s SVR. On the news, I see what’s going on with you and your work friends…how this website is trying to come after you because of what happened in Russia. Who’s to say the Kremlin didn’t send him here to find you…to set the record straight?”
Piotr had even provided pictures of the Russian—a sturdily built man of medium height with dark features and acne scars pitting his angular cheekbones, as well as a jagged scar on his forehead—which had been captured by the HD security camera above the meat slicer. Thanks to the vivid picture quality, Novak had gotten a fast match when he’d run the images through the facial recognition software at the office. Turned out, the “Russian” was actually Ukrainian, a longtime neighborhood resident. And the Ukrainian didn’t hold a valid passport, which meant he’d have an awfully tough time trying to shadow Novak into Canada. Though Novak had assigned him a threat level of zero, he’d worn his Glock all day yesterday, even in the apartment, so as not to completely ignore karma. After all, Russia did play dirty.
A burly commando with a ponytail and a goatee appeared in a doorway at the rear of the room. “Hey, Robbie, back this way!”
“That there’s the meanest da
mn Canadian I’ve ever met,” Romeyn said. “Name’s Holt. He’s the one who put this whole thing together.”
Out in the hallway, Holt gave Romeyn a big bear hug, saying, “Can you believe this? Whoooh! And don’t you go trying to take all the credit, you shit-shovelin’ hick.”
“I wouldn’t think of it, you scraggly moosefucker,” Romeyn said. “These here are my friends from the FBI.” He introduced Novak and Michaels.
“Pardon the obscenities, beautiful,” Holt said to Michaels. “I think you folks will be mighty glad you made the trip when you see what we found back here.”
Holt led them down a sterile corridor into a workroom outfitted with stainless steel prep stations. Along its side walls were rolling racks stocked neatly with silver foil pouches, folded cardboard boxes, rolls of packing tape, and stacks of used paperback books.
Centered in the rear wall was what looked to Novak like the door to a meat locker. Its heavy handle was mangled and covered in black grime, which explained the acrid redolence of blasting chemicals, as well as the thin veil of smoke that hung along the ceiling tiles. Holt opened the door and motioned them into the space beyond—a roomy, temperature-controlled cubicle, its walls, ceiling, and floor lined with riveted metal panels, enclosing pallets upon pallets of neatly bundled cash.
They had stepped inside Bounty4Justice’s cash vault.
CTV Ottawa @ctvottawa • 12m
Vicious firefight erupts in #Ottawa industrial park as authorities raid smuggling facility.
ottawa.ctvnews.ca/video?clipld=X
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