by Mike Maden
“Funny you should ask that. There is one senator and one CEO that are very closely connected. Both go by the surname Fiero.”
“As in, Senator Barbara Fiero?”
“Précisément. Her husband’s name is Anthony. These are very rich people, by the way.”
“I’ve met Senator Fiero. She is many things, including extremely intelligent, ambitious, and beautiful, but the one thing she is not is a computer programmer. She isn’t our super hacker.”
“Maybe she has her own private Edward Snowden in the NSA,” Ian joked.
“Edward Snowden wasn’t in the NSA. He worked as a private contractor for the NSA. That’s a big difference. What do you know about the senator’s husband?”
“A little mysterious, that one. He’s a private hedge fund manager with many international connections.”
“Is he a computer guy? Or does he have access to one?”
“He’s not a computer guy, but he appears to be connected to a very savvy data outfit known as CIOS. It’s a first-rate shop. The best, really, run by the best software engineer in the business. Answers to the name of Jasmine Bath.”
“Better than you? That’s hard to believe, given what I’ve seen you do and what Troy has told me about you.”
“I’m no slacker, but I don’t have the background and experience she’s had in the TAO. She is to computer spying what Peyton Manning is to your American football.”
“So CIOS and this Jasmine Bath computer genius could mount an operation like the kind we’re talking about?”
“With the kind of cash the Fieros have? Absolutely. And if they really are using her to turn the kinds of decisions we’ve talked about, then they’re even richer than what we think, I’m sure.”
“How so?”
“This isn’t about blackmailing individuals. They’re extorting whole industries. Imagine how much money they could solicit from the entire banking industry, or the entire oil industry, if they could deliver legislation that would save those industries tens of billions of dollars in taxes and regulatory expenses. And then imagine the stock picking they could do, knowing months in advance that these sectors were about to benefit from huge changes in favorable legislation or court rulings.”
“I’m still not buying it. You’re talking about the next Democratic nominee for the presidency. The senator is already quite wealthy thanks to her husband, and she’s already one of the most powerful politicians in Washington. Why would she play these kinds of games?”
“When is anyone ever satisfied with the money and power they already have?”
Myers didn’t have an answer for that. Time wasn’t their friend and they had limited resources. They could start digging into the six other candidates they had generated as well, but that would only put them further behind. She’d gotten as far as she had in life by learning to trust the people around her, and Ian clearly thought the Fieros were the two best suspects to pursue.
“Okay, then. Those are our targets. The Fieros and CIOS.”
“Targets? Are we talking wet work?”
“No, but they’ll wish it was wet work when we’re through with them.”
“Best be careful with CIOS. Bath will have every security precaution in place, as well as the means to retaliate against us if she thinks we’re coming after her in any way, wet work included.”
“Agreed.” Myers frowned.
“Problem?”
“It’s hard to imagine Barbara Fiero would be caught up in something like this. But as I think about it, maybe it’s not so far-fetched. She has a reputation for being the luckiest woman on the Hill. She always seemed to know exactly the right place to be or the right vote to cast or the right person to meet at just the right time. If she has the kind of extreme insider information we’re talking about, that would explain a lot.”
“Knowledge is power, Margaret. You of all people should know that.”
“They say genius is seeing the obvious. Clearly, I’m no genius or I would have seen through her earlier.”
Myers remembered Fiero during the NSA hearings held by her committee in the Senate. She was one of the few Democrats on that committee adamantly in favor of the NSA’s domestic spying program. One of the Democrats asked the NSA straight up, “Are you spying on Congress?” Fiero interrupted the question and said, “That’s a national security question that shouldn’t be asked in a public forum. But I, for one, support the NSA’s security programs both here and abroad, and I for one wouldn’t care if they were listening in on my telephone conversations, because I have nothing to hide.”
The gall of the woman, especially if what they now believed about her actually turned out to be true. She should have seen it.
“Ian, now we have to go on the offense. Are you still with me?”
“To the bloody end.”
“Thank you.”
Myers hoped that Ian’s words weren’t prophetic. They divided up tasks and went back to work.
44
Maersk Oil Pumping Station
Tamanghasset Province, Southern Algeria
10 May
The sobbing Algerian was twenty-three years old, clean-shaven and close-cropped. The knees of his Maersk oil coveralls were soaking up the Danish engineer’s blood on the cement floor, seeping from the headless corpse a few feet away.
“Are you a woman? Quit crying!” Al Rus shouted in Arabic. He slapped the young man’s face.
The Algerian fought back his desperate tears, gasping for breath, trying to stem the tide.
Al Rus hit him again.
“Are you a Muslim?”
The boy’s eyes sparked with hope. “Yes! Yes!”
“Then why are you helping these Crusader dogs rape your country?”
“My father. He is not well. We needed the money—”
“Thieves steal because they need money.”
“I am no thief. I was only an apprentice to that man.”
“You are no Muslim.”
“I am of the faithful!”
“You swear it?”
“I swear it!”
“Why should I believe you?”
“I repent!” The young man turned his head and spit on the corpse of his dead Danish friend.
“You will stop helping the Crusaders?”
“Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes! Mercy. In the name of Allah,” the boy whimpered.
Finally, Al Rus nodded. “Yes, I believe you have repented of your thievery. But I think you are weak in your faith. You are no Salafi. I think you will turn back to your thievery and burn in the fires of hell in the next life.”
“No! I am strong in my faith. You will see.”
Al Rus nodded again. “Yes, we will see.”
He stepped over to an interior door and pushed it open. On the floor, a woman. Naked, bruised, bloodied. But still very much alive.
Al Rus held out the knife handle. The Algerian glanced at the woman, a friend, and then at the knife.
Salvation.
The young Algerian stood up unsteadily on trembling legs and took the knife. It shook in his hand. He glanced back up into the Norwegian’s merciless face.
Al Rus’s satellite phone rang. He pulled it from his belt. Saw the number. Nodded to the Algerian, then to his men, and stepped outside into the burning sun to take the call.
It was already hot, and not yet noon.
“Yes, of course. I have been waiting for your call,” Al Rus said in English. It was Guo.
The woman’s screams echoed from the pump room. He ignored them, focusing on Guo’s instructions. Didn’t notice her screaming suddenly choking off, like a needle lifted from a record.
“I understand.” He snapped off the phone. One of his fighters, a Chechen, approached him. “Here’s your knife.”
Al Rus took it, wiped the bloody blade on his
pant leg.
“Did you take a video?”
“Yes. Of course,” the Chechen said. “It will be posted shortly.”
“Good. There is still one more lesson for the others. No one is fooled. ‘A dog always returns to its own vomit.’” Al Rus hated secularized Muslims worse than devout Jews, or even Christians.
The Chechen glanced back at the pump house, nodding in agreement.
Al Rus smiled. “And then we have a new mission.”
45
Pearce Systems Headquarters
Dearborn, Michigan
10 May
Ian’s task was clear: spy on Jasmine Bath and Senator Fiero. The risks were equally clear: decades in a federal penitentiary—or worse. The trick was coming up with a strategy that would accomplish the former and avoid the latter.
Jasmine Bath was the best in the business. Period. Her cyberdefenses were impeccable, but her ability to counterattack was fearsome indeed. On the other hand, Senator Fiero and her husband would be more vulnerable and less able to retaliate in the digital realm, so they were the better targets to pursue. Undoubtedly, there would be some sort of exploitable link between Bath and the Fieros. Ian knew if he could break through the Fieros’ defenses, he might have a good shot at breaching Bath’s.
The problem with that strategy, though, was that Bath and CIOS would undoubtedly be keeping a watchful eye on the Fieros. Ian had to find a way to disable CIOS without being detected so that he could exploit any breaches in the Fiero firewalls. But how?
Ian wasn’t confident he had the resources to deal with Bath. It reminded him of an exam he was once given in computational semiotics at Oxford. The tutor came into the lecture hall and demanded that each student come up with a question too difficult to answer—and then answer it. The entire room groaned with frustration and anger. It took Ian a few moments to realize the purpose of the exercise. People prefer the path of least resistance. People tend to work on problems they already know they can solve, thereby limiting intellectual growth. But avoiding problems that seemingly can’t be solved also limits intellectual growth because it means that people become increasingly unaware of what it is they don’t know. Science, in the end, is about knowing, and the beginning of “knowing” is finding out what you don’t know. Only by becoming aware of the impossibility of a problem—insufficient knowledge or skill—would possibilities for solutions begin to suggest themselves. And that’s when the first solution to Ian’s insoluble problem suggested itself.
Ian knew he wasn’t smart enough to overcome Bath, so he needed to draw on others for help. The international hacktivist community had been under assault by the national security agencies of Western governments throughout the world in the last two years. Whether through DDOS attacks, counterhacking, or just old-fashioned spycraft—honey traps, bribes, break-ins—agencies like the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ had crushed the backbone of many autonomous hacker groups. The surviving members were both afraid and eager for payback. Ian knew how to tap into their collective talent and rage.
Ian reached out to an old contact in the GCHQ who provided him with the necessary info. Carefully hidden behind a series of hijacked computers, Ian faked a new Edward Snowden leak, distributing the explosive “secret” that CIOS corporation and Bath had been the primary architects of the most recent antihacktivist campaign, along with a few IP addresses. This tiny nick put enough blood in the water to draw in the hacktivist sharks, and within hours a digital feeding frenzy had begun.
Within twenty-four hours of Ian’s launch, CIOS was fighting for its digital life, with Jasmine Bath leading the defenses. If Ian couldn’t disable CIOS and Bath, he could at least distract them long enough so that he could accomplish his second strategic objective—going after the Fieros.
Ian attacked the Fieros on two fronts with Myers’s help. First, he deployed one of Pearce Systems’ most reliable human assets, a redheaded Kiwi named Fiona York. As a former JTRIG operative specializing in physical operations, she was perfectly suited for what he had in mind.
York and an assistant picked up sixteen specially fitted miniature air and ground vehicles from Rao’s lab. Some of the MAVs deployed the same high-speed miniature cameras swallowed in pill form to photograph colons.
The MGVs were fitted with gecko-inspired microfiber pads that allowed them to climb walls or other vertical objects. Their primary objective was building and car windows. They were equipped with low-powered infrared beams that could “hear” the vibrations on glass caused by people speaking on the other side of them—a surveillance technique invented in the 1940s by the Russian Leon Theremin, inventor of the Theremin music synthesizer.
York deployed the miniatures with the help of a SmartBird drone, dropping them near the Fieros’ personal residences and vehicles in California and D.C.
But Ian’s main attack was cyber. It was only logical that CIOS would have put better security on the senator since she was their primary client and her home was geographically proximate to CIOS headquarters. Ian further surmised that Anthony Fiero didn’t want his vast financial empire exposed to Bath’s probing queries, which was yet another reason Ian decided to focus his efforts on him. That focus paid off quickly.
Ian knew that Fiero’s private company would have its own IT resources, separate from CIOS. A frontal assault on mainframes or hard drives was possible, but time-consuming. Better to attack on the periphery. Fortunately, that kind of attack was easier than ever these days, thanks to the “Internet of Things,” the machine-to-machine communication that facilitated more and more of modern life. Ten billion devices were connected now. By 2020, that number would rise to fifty billion.
Ian began by downloading the latest hacker list of known back doors to the top ten business software apps. Through one of those back doors, he gained access into an older version of Microsoft Outlook on the tablet of Anthony Fiero’s personal assistant. From that infection vector, Ian was able to make the leap into a variety of other Microsoft software programs, which then spread into the assistant’s laptop, then other devices and apps connecting the assistant’s laptop to Fiero’s laptop. Then the infection really spread.
Once inside Fiero’s laptop, Ian’s malware infected Fiero’s tablet, iPod, and even his Xbox One game system. The Xbox One Kinect feature provided Ian with voice and video images inside of Fiero’s home, which activated whenever the motion-activated Kinect system was triggered by his presence, recording everything he did or said in front of the gaming machine.
Automated software and data synching between machines and cell phone then spread the virus to Fiero’s phone, a treasure trove of data unto itself. A side benefit was that the phone infection spread to Fiero’s wireless Bluetooth connection, which, in turn, gave Ian access to Fiero’s car and its “smart” radio and GPS apps. Now Ian could listen in on or record any conversation Fiero had in his car through the radio and speakers, and geo-locate him even if Fiero’s phone wasn’t there.
The other significant penetration Ian achieved through Fiero’s phone was to invade the “smart” thermostat system Fiero deployed to remotely control his utilities when he was away from his home. Unfortunately for Fiero, the apps that controlled the smart thermostat also sent wireless data to the utility company, which in turn had access to Fiero’s bank accounts for automatic bill pay. Once Ian was inside Fiero’s bank account, he downloaded copies of all his financial transactions and acquired the personal data needed to find and penetrate other bank accounts, domestic and offshore, including those of his wife, who was also linked to those accounts. Those financial holdings were so vast, however, that Ian had to bring in a trusted consultant, a former Europol bank examiner who specialized in tracking down illicit Russian mafia drug money around the globe.
Ian also created several botnets exploiting the viral pathways now infecting almost all of the Fieros’ computer and computer-controlled devices, including Anthony’s newly installed “robo-toi
let.” The botnets all went to work copying, downloading, or recording every sliver of data they could get their digital hands on. Like the NSA and its massive data-collection capabilities, however, Ian was overwhelmed with the sheer volume of data pouring in. It would take several days, maybe even weeks, for them to sort through it all and connect the dots. Myers had set about the analysis task immediately, while Ian kept expanding the data-collection nets. She was happy to let him take the lead on this operation. She had always been smart enough to delegate the hardest work to the most talented members of her team.
For all of their success, Ian thought the best news was that they had managed to slip their noses under the tent without Bath even knowing they were there. In a long string of personal achievements in the digital world, Ian couldn’t think of anything to top that.
46
Adrar Province
Southwestern Algeria
10 May
They rode until late evening, arriving at a wadi to rest and feed the camels. The sun had long before dropped below the jagged horizon of the Adrar miles behind them. The flat sands shimmered like a silvery sea beneath a high, blazing moon.
Balla stood watch in the distance over the camp while Moctar prayed the last prayer of the day. The camels stretched their long necks, grunting as they munched on the salty green leaves of the tamarisk trees. There was no water, but the camels had drunk their fill before they’d arrived at the Adrar. The Nigerien camel driver was baking bread in a shallow desert oven he’d dug with a trenching tool. That left Pearce, Mossa, Early, and Cella to sit and relax around the small campfire where the teapot was heating up. It was still near eighty degrees Fahrenheit, but that was thirty degrees less than the hottest part of the day, so the evening felt almost cool.
Mossa had unwrapped the tagelmust from his face and smoked a cigarette. He sat cross-legged, sharpening the takouba resting on his knees with a whetstone. The traditional Tuareg sword was about three feet long and almost two inches wide at the base near the leather-wrapped hilt. The sound of the stone scraping on the ancient steel was the only sound in the air, save for the munching jaws of the camels.