Vertigo

by Wesley Cross

  Yet there she was—up, and without a trace of sleep. She looked at him—his hands were thrown about as if he were a bird, ready to take flight, his chest rising and falling with each breath slowly and steadily. She smiled—Andrew Hunt always slept like there was not a worry in the entire world.

  It was still dark, but the sky was already taking on the lighter hues of blue, and she could see the outlines of the buildings outside of their bedroom floor-to-ceiling windows.

  Quietly, so not to wake him, she pulled on a bathrobe and went to the kitchen to make some coffee. Then, fresh brew in hand, she climbed the stairs, stepped outside to the terrace and settled at the small table by the pool.

  It was even brighter now, the first rays of sunlight hitting the green dome of the Police Building Apartments to her left—the imposing Beaux-Arts building that once served as the police headquarters. It reminded her of the Dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican that she’d seen on a European trip many years ago and the view was one of the reasons she liked the penthouse so much.

  They’d been calling it their home for almost twenty years now. She first saw it in some ostentatious magazine when they were sitting in the waiting room at her gynecologist’s, ready to see the ghostly image of their son for the first time. She loved the layout, but chuckled at the astronomical price and showed it to Andrew, who only glanced at it and smiled. They could barely pay the rent of their tiny studio at the time.

  But a few years later, he pretended to be invited to a party at that very place, and when they got to the door, instead of ringing the bell, he produced the key.

  “You’re up early.” She heard his voice, and a second later he joined her, settling his cup with a steaming liquid on the table next to hers.

  “Oh no, did I wake you? I was trying to be quiet. You looked like you needed some sleep.”

  “No, I didn’t even hear you getting up,” he said and took a sip of coffee, squinting at her. “Quite a week, huh?”

  “Yeah.” She stifled a yawn. “It was intense.”

  “Regrets?” he asked.

  “I have a few,” she said, and smiled. “No, I want to do this. And if things go south, at least you’ll have a roommate at Gitmo.”

  “I’m pretty sure you can’t have roommates there.” He smiled back.

  When he first suggested that she should join him at the Unit as his deputy, it surprised her. Nothing in her not-for-profit resume screamed black ops. The only remotely relevant experience that she had was from her corporate past working for a logistics company. She told him as much, but Andrew was relentless.

  “First off,” he said to her at the time, pacing back and forth across the room at the army base, “you don’t give yourself enough credit. The work that you’ve done—all over the world—that takes a lot of savvy. Negotiating with local governments, figuring out logistics for something that is happening thousands of miles away. These are precisely the skills that you would need.”

  “But I have no military experience,” she protested.

  “Me neither,” he shrugged, “and that’s exactly why Rovinsky wanted me to run this in the first place. Military men are trained for war, and there’s a reason why the president, although possessing the ultimate authority over the armed forces, remains a civilian. If the framers of the US Constitution wanted the military to be under civilian control, then who am I to argue?”

  She considered it for a moment. There were many times since she’d realized that Andrew had been working for the CIA that she wished they could discuss things openly. But now, presented with such opportunity, she was overwhelmed.

  “Listen,” he said as he kneeled next to her and took her hands in his, “I need you there, and not just for your experience. Perhaps it’s selfish of me to ask you such a thing, but I need you because I want to be able to tell you what decisions I must make. To ask your opinions, to bounce ideas. I would’ve never been able to build the company the way we did had you not been by my side the entire time, you know that.”

  She took the job, and the fact that Rovinsky, instead of fighting Andrew’s suggestion tooth and nail, embraced it from the beginning, certainly made her feel more confident.

  They sat in silence, drinking their coffee and watching the sun rising over Manhattan. The tops of the high-rises were colored in rose and gold and the air shimmered above the rooftops, making the buildings appear phantasmal, illusory.

  “It’s still warm,” she said, pulling the lapels of her bathrobe higher, “but you can already smell fall in the air.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “Do we need bodyguards?” she said, changing the subject. “I feel awful thinking about them sitting by our building all night in that van.”

  “Jim wanted to do it, and I don’t want to argue with him over it.”

  “So, what’s next?”

  “Well, we need to establish the infrastructure first. Jim and I will be going to Southern California next week to look at some sites for the training facility.”

  “That makes sense,” she said. “There’s already a naval base in Coronado. If we are geographically close, we wouldn’t have to reinvent the logistics for a lot of things.”

  “You see,” he smiled at her, “that’s why I wanted you there.”

  “Here’s the thing, though.” She put her cup on the table and fixed her eyes on him. “I’ve thought about this for a while, and it just makes sense to me.”

  “What is it?”

  “We need to tell the president.” She put up her hand, silencing his objection before he had a chance to respond. “We can’t be hiding from everybody. Congress, sure, that makes perfect sense—they’ve been incapable of working together for God knows how many years. But we can’t run a truly efficient organization if there’s literally nobody in the government who we can turn to. The secrecy is great for a venture like this, but at some point, more secrecy stops translating into more efficiency. It’s a classic case of diminishing returns.”

  “But the political risk for him would be enormous,” Andrew objected. “And his party is in the minority. If the genie ever gets out of the bottle, he’ll get impeached and convicted in five seconds. He’ll never go for it. And what happens when he’s not the president?”

  “You’re wrong,” she said. “If this secret society’s agenda is what we think it is—which is world domination—doesn’t it pose a direct threat to the president? Think about it. The phrase ‘the leader of the free world’ is one of those corny things that everybody says and nobody cares about, but in this case, it actually matters. If you want to be in charge of something, say a company, and there happened to be a person who is already considered the leader—the company’s CEO—doesn’t it put you at odds with that person?”

  “You might be right,” he conceded, “but think about the ramifications. What if he doesn’t agree with us? That would end the Unit before it ever began. We’ll never have a second go at this.”

  “Well, we’ll have to present a compelling case then. Besides,” she shrugged and patted Andrew’s hand, “whoever said saving the world was going to be easy, eh?”

  17

  September 2007

  New York

  “Hi, Helen.”

  The man was wearing a custom-made beige suit, a white shirt with a European-style spread collar unbuttoned at the top, and no tie. His smooth jet-black hair, dark eyes, and high cheekbones that betrayed his Asian heritage made him look like a famous actor on the set of a Wall Street drama. He sounded like someone who was born in the United States, but the way he articulated his consonants gave away the years he’d spent in the UK—first in a private school, and then as a business major at Oxford University.

  “Hi, Vic.” She smiled and planted a peck on his clean-shaven cheek.

  They looked at each other for some time.

  “Are you planning on coming in or you gonna stay in the doorway?”

  “Sorry.” He kicked off his shoes and followed her to the kitchen. “How
are you? How was the trip? You should’ve called—I would’ve picked you up from the airport. I just flew back myself last night.”

  “Oh yeah? Where from?” She feigned interest. She’d known he was in Hong Kong for the last month.

  “Hong Kong.” He smiled his easy smile. “Had to check on a few things in that office.”

  She studied him for a few seconds. They’d been dating for two years now. Casually at first. She’d met him at her sister’s fundraiser, of all places. She wasn’t a regular at upscale things like that; she found them intimidating. Almost a thousand people crammed into a fancy restaurant leased for the night, tasting expensive wines, eating finger food and bidding on ridiculously overpriced items.

  A cathedral-like ceiling made for horrible acoustics and the place was as loud as a nightclub. She found herself shouting every time somebody tried to have a conversation, and by the time the evening was drawing to a close she was so hoarse, she could barely talk.

  To her annoyance, it also turned out that most people used the event for two reasons—one was to help the cause, but the other to network, to promote themselves and whatever service they provided. She guessed it was fair, getting something out of helping someone else, but it still made her uneasy. It was like taking money off a corpse. The dead didn’t care, but it felt wrong anyway.

  They were lawyers and doctors and business people, and most lost interest when she informed them that yes, she was just a programmer, and no, she didn’t own a company. So, people either moved on or, in case of some single A-type banker bros, tried to score and then moved on as well, when it became painfully obvious that she wasn’t interested.

  She met Vic at the coat check when the fundraiser was nearly over, and she was reasonably sure she wasn’t going to offend anyone by leaving. They arrived at the counter almost at the same time, him ahead of her by a fraction of a second, but he ushered her in front of him with a gesture that was almost old-fashioned and the Go right ahead ma’am with that sexy accent of his was the last nail in her pride’s coffin.

  He was the first serious boyfriend she’d ever had whose Social Security number she didn’t know before he gave it to her of his own volition. In fact, he was the first serious boyfriend who she didn’t research at all and took him at his word.

  Vic was as sharp as they came but not overbearing, and Chen found it easy to be geeky with him. He was estranged from most of his family, but apparently, his biological father saw that his son was taken care of and had set up a trust fund that paid for Vic’s education and then supported him for the first few years after college. The man seemed to be painfully aware of the fact that he had a leg up early on and worked harder than most people.

  But this was going to be a test of their relationship, she decided. Perhaps she was making a crazy mistake by even considering telling Vic about her plan, but Chen needed someone to weigh in on the dangerous journey she was about to undertake. A small part of her wanted him to persuade her not to do anything in the first place.

  “Sit down,” she said in a tone that made him pay attention. His dark eyes watched her pacing the small kitchen back and forth, as if trying to read her mind.

  “Are you breaking up with me?” he finally offered. He sounded calm, but there was an edge to his voice.

  “No, no, no,” Chen said, for the first time realizing that her prelude must have sounded like a clichéd break-up routine. “Not at all. Quite the opposite. When I tell you what I’m about to tell you, you might want to break up with me.”

  His face didn’t betray any emotion, and he sat there, waiting for her to continue.

  “I’ve lied to you,” Chen continued, “about my trip. To be honest, I didn’t really have to, but I was in a weird place. I was here the entire time, taking care of something. My sister’s dead.”

  “What? Mary’s dead?” He stood up and took her shoulders in his hands. “How did that happen? When?”

  She told him the chain of events, starting from the call she received from the detective and the subsequent search that led her to believe in Mary’s murder. She could see the number of questions Vic wanted to ask was multiplying, but he kept quiet and let her finish the story.

  “This is…” he paused, looking for words, “a lot to process.”

  “Yep.”

  “So, you cannot use the evidence you’ve found because you got it illegally?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And that lady you’ve met was the one who got it for you? How do you know you can trust her?”

  “She didn’t get it for me,” Chen said, tensing up. “I hacked into Guardian’s servers myself. She helped, but I did all the work.”

  “I thought you worked for a data mining company. I never once took you for a black hat. Did you hack me too?”

  His tone was light, but his eyes said otherwise.

  “I’m not a black hat,” she said. “Those are the guys who cause mayhem for fun or to steal. Identities, money. They usually call people like me gray hats, but that’s the term the general public uses, not the actual hackers. Most hackers are driven by the desire to understand how systems work.”

  “And then what?”

  “Some use it for good, some not so much.” She shrugged. “Just like everybody else.”

  “So, what is exactly your plan? You said you cannot take it to the police. Then what? Call the media? Send it to a newspaper?”

  “No,” she said and looked him in the eye. “I want revenge. I want to spoil this guy’s party. Humiliate him. Deny him what he shouldn’t have asked for in the first place.”

  “But how? I don’t understand.”

  “I’m going to hack the New York Stock Exchange, manipulate the prices of both companies, and ruin any chance he has of a takeover. They’ll know it was artificially induced, but it’ll bring so much news and scrutiny they will never be able to accomplish it.”

  “You think you can hack the Exchange?” He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. “I’m not sure if I’m impressed or terrified. The New York Stock Exchange?”

  She pondered the question for a minute.

  “I think I can,” she finally said, “but I will need some help.”

  18

  September 2007

  New York

  “Okay.” Vic grabbed a chair, turned it around and straddled it. “Walk me through it. From a layman’s perspective. Something I can actually understand.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I have no idea,” he said and rested his elbows on the back of the chair. “Call it a simple curiosity for now. You don’t often hear that somebody wants to hack the stock exchange.”

  Chen studied him for a moment.

  “Okay,” she finally said. “Let’s start with the basics. Most corporate infrastructures, if not all of them, are built like medieval castles. A wide moat, tall stone walls, fortified gated entries, archers at every window checking for trespassers and so on. There’s something valuable in the castle and there’re mechanisms in place to protect the goods. To make it even more challenging, inside of some networks, especially as important as the stock exchange, it is common to find other mini castles, called sub-domains, that control access to more critical elements of the infrastructure.”

  “So, in that case, you have to break in more than once?” Vic asked.

  “Not quite, but that’s a good question,” she pointed at him, “and this is why this would never work like you see it in the movies. To get into those sub-domains, you would use what they call a jump box.”

  “Like a shortcut?”

  “Not exactly. It’s an internal hardened system with some form of remote access, also not easy to get a hold of. They would have some tight access-control rules and a limited number of trusted users who can access those systems.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Think of them as messengers who are allowed on the castle’s grounds. These systems have a dual network card—one that is connected to the usu
al corporate network and another to the protected network. To continue our castle analogy—you don’t want to open the main gates every time somebody comes to the castle with a simple question. You want to have a system that allows you to communicate with the inner tower without jeopardizing security.”

  Chen paused for a minute, collecting her thoughts.

  “Of course,” she continued, “in a place like the exchange, there will be multiple secure sub-domains and jump boxes, like onion layers. Whoever is allowed to use them will have to jump and log in a few times before they can even reach the critical core network.”

  “Perhaps it’s me,” Vic said with an expression she couldn’t interpret, “but so far all I’ve heard is why it would be impossible to do the hack.”

  “Difficult,” she said, “but not impossible. The path of least resistance is to identify those trusted individuals, impersonate them and follow their paths. There are many penetration testing tools designed for a task like that.”

  “But how do we find them, though?”

  “Well, surprisingly, I’ve found those users are the worst security offenders. There’s even a term—security fatigue—for people who are dealing with complex security day in and day out. People make mistakes. Sometimes they store passwords in plain-text files. Sometimes they save links that have session tokens to favorites tab in the browser, config files with credentials, SSH private keys without restrictions—you name it. We would just need to find the person who made that mistake.”

  “Hang on,” Vic said, extending his hand out like a stop sign. “Let’s say you’re even able to find such a person, which, by the way, sounds like a long shot. I’m no expert, but I’m sure if this happens and you hack the system, the feds will be all over this. And the feds can afford the best forensic tools. They will eventually find you. Isn’t it easier to use the news cycle? Plant some fake news that would affect both companies?”

  “I thought about it,” she said, “but a fake news campaign would work much better if we were targeting only one company, not two. There’re way too many variables, and the effect might be too fleeting to make a material impact. But as far as hiding tracks—it’s a complicated issue. They could find anything with enough time and effort but whether it becomes a concern for me is another story. If they dig deep enough, they’ll find the files that I planted and the changes that I made, but as long as they can’t trace them to me, I don’t particularly care. It just would mean we might not be able to do that again.”