“Mr. Prakash said you used to work for the CIA, but then you got in trouble. And he said you were reliable.”
“He’s right, on all three counts. The FBI can explain who I am, if you have questions.”
“What would you need from us, if we were interested?”
Harris, the boyfriend, raised his hand.
“Honey, I’m not sure you should do this. This guy is a nobody.”
Zimmerman ignored him. “What would you need?” she repeated.
“A retainer of fifty thousand dollars, and another hundred thousand if I’m successful. That’s the easy part. I also need access to all your computers, at home and at work. And your passwords.”
“But they’ll make even more things up. They’ll publish everything. People will believe them.”
“That’s already happened,” Dunne said quietly. “The attackers have taken everything they want. You’re already completely vulnerable. You just need to start pushing back.”
“You’re not listening to me. They made things up. Some of the sex pictures are real, but a lot are phony. My head giving a blow job to an actor I don’t even know. They’re disgusting, all mixed together. I kept saying at first that they were fake, but nobody believed me. They look like me. But they’re not.”
“Say that again, please,” said Dunne.
“They’re fake. They’ve put my face on someone else’s body. But it’s done so well, you can’t tell. They’ll make more pictures like that. This won’t end.”
“Yes, it will,” said Dunne calmly. “I want you to show me the fakes, if you hire me, so I can understand them. They will help me expose the people who have done this to you. You won’t be hurt anymore. I promise.”
She nodded. Despite herself, she was beginning to trust him.
“Let me talk to Shawn about this. Why don’t you come back this afternoon?”
Dunne stepped toward her. In his face was determination, need, commitment, and the hint of a shared sense of vulnerability. He lowered his voice almost to a whisper, so that he was speaking to her, not her boyfriend.
“How about if I wait in the living room?” Dunne said. “If you decide yes, then I can get started right away, while the trail is still fresh. If you decide no, then we won’t waste any more time. How does that sound?”
She returned his gaze. In the intelligence business, the mysterious process of establishing trust is called “rapport.” Zimmerman had lived by a similar code through her career in the entertainment business. In an unlikely way, they understood each other.
“Shawn, you go upstairs and check your email. Mr. Paladin and I are going to talk here for a few minutes. Paul, get Mr. Paladin a cup of coffee.”
“There’s one more thing I didn’t tell you before,” Zimmerman said when they were alone. “Whoever is doing this is a crackpot. A zealot, like. He scares me, and not just because of all the pictures and emails he hacked and posted, which everyone in Hollywood is enjoying so much.”
“Why does the attacker scare you?” Dunne asked.
“Because he hates Israel. He leaves horrible anti-Semitic messages. ‘The Jews Run America.’ ‘Hollywood Is Kike City.’ Vile things. Sick things. I called the Anti-Defamation League, but they say they can’t help. America is full of crazy people who are anti-Semites. This president has made it worse.”
“Don’t blame the president,” said Dunne gently. “He didn’t send the messages. Let me find the person who did and stop him. Does that make sense?”
Zimmerman nodded.
“I hope you will hire me,” said Dunne. “I know how to stop this person.”
12 Los Angeles, California – May 2018
When Pia Zimmerman retained Paladin LLC, she turned over her computers, peripherals, and passwords, as Dunne had requested. She gave him a key to her house and an access card to enter the offices of Padaro Pictures. Dunne rented a cheap hotel room in Carpenteria, a few miles south of Zimmerman’s grand, besieged home, where he began doing his initial forensic work. A few days later, he moved to West Hollywood, near the Padaro lot, where he began working on the servers and access points for the studio’s accounts.
The hardest part was asking Zimmerman to show him which were the real sex pictures and which were the fakes. Her boyfriend had been in the habit of shooting videos of them having sex, so there was a trove of personal pornography that displayed every inch of this prominent producer’s anatomy. She sat stoically as they searched the hacked archive for the fakes.
“This one,” she said, pointing a thin, rigid finger at an image that showed her astride one of Hollywood’s most famous actors. “And that one,” she said with a shudder, pointing toward an image of fellatio. “And that one, too.”
As they surveyed the fake images, Dunne was astonished by the clarity and detail. Somehow, a computer had created an image in which Zimmerman’s face had been grafted to the lips and mouth of another woman. The famous faces had been melded with the bodies so artfully and seamlessly that they appeared to be entirely real.
“I’m so sorry,” Dunne said.
Zimmerman was quivering. She put her hand over her face to hide her embarrassment.
“I’ve seen something like this before,” ventured Dunne. “Not this good. But this same idea.”
“When and where?” she asked.
“I can’t talk about it,” he said. “But we’ll get these people.”
* * *
The job took just over two weeks. Dunne got lucky. He also had some technical assistance from a computer security company in Laguna Beach. The founder was a former colleague from the agency who owed Dunne a favor from long ago. He helped Dunne set up a command post in his hotel suite near the Padaro headquarters.
Dunne reconstructed the cyber assault step by step. The attacker had stealthily gathered his hacked information and then chosen a grand cover name, “Partisans of Freedom,” to shield himself. The fictitious organization sent messages to Zimmerman and other Padaro employees, demanding a billion dollars as the price for not releasing intimate personal and corporate files of the company and its executives. The absurd size of the ransom made clear this wasn’t a commercial hack, but something else.
Padaro had immediately called the FBI and hired a fancy cybersecurity firm, but by then it was too late. The attacker had been exfiltrating data for weeks and began messaging it to entertainment industry websites, directing the curious to torrent files that were cached online. The files’ names were too tantalizing to resist: “Sex Tapes,” “Zimmerman Feuds,” “Nude Movie Pix,” “Hollywood Whore,” “Hooker of the Rich and Famous.” Someone with system access had combed through Zimmerman’s personal and corporate files and vacuumed up the most damaging information.
From the day he arrived in Santa Barbara, Dunne had suspected this was an inside job, and now he assembled the evidence that confirmed it.
His team found the malware quickly, with a standard hashing algorithm. The tool had the same signature as a file-extraction program that had been used in a half dozen other hacks. The raider had obtained system-administrator privileges by targeting a phishing scam on a careless member of the Padaro IT department. Then the hacker went to work, using his stolen root access to get into Zimmerman’s personal files and pick and choose the most damaging material.
* * *
Dunne’s luck was that the attacker had beaconed back to a command server that could itself be hacked. A scan of the server’s ports revealed an unpatched vulnerability, which Dunne used to invade the server. He found that one of the emails sent to the entertainment industry media disclosing the hack could be linked to an alias account used by a former producer at Padaro named Anwar Malek, who had been fired two years before.
Malek, the disgruntled employee, was born in Saudi Arabia, the son of a wealthy businessman who had helped finance Padaro’s films years before. The son had gotten his first job at Padaro as a favor to the father. He had money and connections, but not enough talent. He was convinced that Jewish execu
tives at Padaro and other studios were conspiring against him because he was a Muslim Arab.
Malek had filed a nuisance lawsuit the previous year claiming that Zimmerman had retaliated against him because he refused to have sex with her. The lawsuit was quickly dismissed, and everyone forgot about the case, except Malek.
The angry anti-Semitic messages were like watermarks. On Malek’s computer, Dunne found reams of propaganda attacking Israel and Jews. Malek was a special devotee of an Israeli-Arab poet whose verses were included in messages Malek sent to his Arab friends: “The Creator sentenced you to be loser monkeys, / Victory belongs to Muslims, from the Nile to the Euphrates.”
Dunne had promised Zimmerman that he would destroy the attacker’s ability ever to harm her again. And after dismissing his helpers from Laguna Beach, he set about doing so. Hiding his tracks through proxy servers, Dunne inserted his own malware into Malek’s computer accounts and froze them so that they couldn’t be used to send or receive messages. He didn’t wipe the data; he wanted it preserved, in case Zimmerman decided later that she wanted to prosecute.
From behind an impenetrable wall, Dunne sent Malek a final message before he froze the system, written in hacker jargon:
Hi Anwar. You have been pwned. If you ever touch PZ again, your system will be Eternal Blue. It was signed, Partisans of Internet Security and Safety Offensive Forensic Force, with a glowing acronym.
* * *
The fake photographs were a harder problem. They were masterful. They were like the false images Dunne had come across during his ill-fated pursuit of the Quark Team and Fallen Empire. But this version was two years better. It wasn’t a head spliced onto a body, but a new image that was seamless.
Dunne took extra time on the fakes, even after he had neutralized Malek. He analyzed the images digitally over and over, deconstructing the electronic signature and the technique. The imperfections were subtle, but they could be found with the right tools. Dunne recognized the technology too well. How had Anwar Malek obtained access to it?
Dunne and his helpers posted some questions on cybersecurity forums, and they tested pieces of code against tools that had been used in other hacks.
They got a break after several days of quiet exchanges with master computer sleuths, including Vijay Prakash and Rick Bogdanovich. It emerged that some of the code was part of a hacking suite called Bariq that was sold by a firm in the United Arab Emirates, through a partner firm in Saudi Arabia. Bariq meant “lightning” in Arabic.
Dunne dug a little further. A thread on a hacking forum said that Bariq’s suite of tools had been adapted from an Italian hacking group that had mastered deepfakes and then disappeared. The Italian software engineers, whoever they were, were the common ancestor of a dozen hacking packages that were being sold around the world by different vendors. Cyber consultants were so busy monitoring the outcroppings that nobody had bothered to go back and look for the original seed.
The Italian software engineers had insisted on encrypted messages, so it was hard to follow their tracks. The only readable message Dunne could find was in the very beginning: Anwar, contact me on Viber. Ciao. Lorenzo.
Dunne had planned to leave Anwar Malek alone and let Pia Zimmerman decide what she wanted to do. But as he gathered the forensic details, he wanted to meet Malek. Ask him where he made his contacts. Look him in the eye. He had been taught in the agency, years before, that asking a person stressful questions and then gauging his reactions was nearly as reliable as hooking him up to a polygraph.
Malek lived in Studio City in a small detached house. Dunne pressed the buzzer, but there was no answer. A week’s mail was stuffed inside the screen door. Malek had evidently been away for a while. Dunne rang the doorbell at the next house down the block; an old man answered the door; he was unshaven in the late afternoon. Dunne said he had a message for Anwar Malek next door.
“He’s gone, nearly a week. He’s sick. An ambulance came. They took him out on a stretcher.”
“Shit,” muttered Dunne.
“Say what?” asked the man, offended that someone would ring his bell and then utter a curse.
“Nothing,” said Dunne. “Nothing at all. Sorry to bother you.” He wrapped his coat tight around his shoulders and pulled a cap over his red hair, so that it would be harder to identify him if he was photographed as he walked away.
* * *
Dunne returned to Montecito with a folder and a disk drive for Pia Zimmerman that contained all the information her lawyers would need if they wanted to pursue the matter in court. He explained that he had done what he promised. He had identified her tormentor and destroyed his ability ever to hurt her again. She had closure.
When he gave her the packet, she looked bewildered at first, and then she began to cry. That’s the strange thing about revenge. Once people have cornered their enemies and gained the opportunity to take an eye for the one that was lost, they aren’t sure what to do. She didn’t want to take the packet, at first, so Dunne left it resting on the table.
“The name of your attacker was Anwar Malek,” Dunne said quietly. “He used to work for you. He was an angry, sick man. He had help from others. But he won’t bother you anymore. It’s over.”
Zimmerman tearfully said she would wire the $150,000 that afternoon, and tried to offer a bonus, which Dunne refused. His only request was that he be able to keep his own copy of the forensic materials he had compiled, for use in future cases.
“There’s one more thing I should tell you about Anwar Malek,” said Dunne. “He’s disappeared. I don’t think he’ll be back.”
* * *
As Dunne left her beautiful mansion in Montecito and headed south on the 101, he thought once more, as he had over the last several days, about the anomalies he had discovered in the Partisans of Freedom operation.
Malek had used a particular piece of malware hidden in a graphics driver. Dunne had seen that code before. And the attacker’s messages had been masked by proxy servers from three disparate sites: a Polish import-export company; a university in Thailand; and a virtual private network exit point in Italy. All three were familiar IP addresses. And then there were the masterful fakes, and the anti-Semitic screeds.
Anwar Malek had accessed a market, operated by far cleverer people than he, where he purchased his tools of character assassination. On Dunne’s first case, he had encountered traces of a network whose provenance he thought he knew. These were devils for hire. Dunne could see their shadows, but not yet their faces. He thought he knew, but that wasn’t the same as knowing.
In this flush of his first success as a private businessman, Dunne had a powerful urge to contact his ex-wife, Alicia. Maybe she would be proud of him for protecting this woman, he imagined for a moment, but the thought darkened.
13 Paris – August 2017
The young man had begun calling himself “Eric” after he left his friends in Italy. He told them he needed a break, but it was more than that. Doubt had intruded where before there was certainty. He had imagined himself as a digital bandit in Italy, but perhaps he was simply part of a business that had investors and clients. His mission had been to deconstruct “truth,” to dismember it for the bourgeois lie that it was. But now he wandered amid the rubble of deconstruction wanting something that he could call fact.
From the window of Eric’s apartment on the Rue de Valmy, he could see the Canal Saint-Martin, the poor man’s River Seine, and the dense green of the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont beyond. The apartment was in the far northeast of Paris, the Cité Rouge, where the streets were named after socialist heroes like Jean Jaurès and Henri Bergson, and there was a Métro stop called Stalingrad. Rebels and outcasts had fled here for two centuries: The local cemetery Père Lachaise was a roll call of the defiant: Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Jim Morrison. Eric had fantasized a spot for himself among the forest of gray tombstones.
He had started reading newspapers for the first time in years, real ones that were printed on paper. Hi
s favorite French manifestos of post-structuralist philosophy and critical theory were still stacked next to his bed for reassurance. But he wasn’t sure he believed the arguments anymore.
The French philosophers insisted that “truth” was an ambiguous word. Descriptions of reality were culturally determined; they were logocentric. “Universal” values were delusions; worse, they were instruments of oppression. There were not “facts,” but narratives. The author was dead; the reader was king. Eric knew all the arguments. He’d been making them himself since he was an adolescent prodigy. But now, he wondered.
Eric wanted to take a solitary walk along the canal, or row himself across the pond in Buttes-Chaumont, or make any other escape from the “colleague” who had followed him from Italy and taken a bunk in the concierge’s apartment. The colleague was there to “protect” Eric, that was what he said. He warned Eric that their movement had many enemies. If someone struggled for freedom, as Eric had, it was hard to be free.
Eric was tall and thin, with a frizz of blond curls atop his head and the thinnest sprouts of hair on his body. His trousers hung low from his hips like pants on a store rack; from the back he looked almost like a runway model, thin and androgynous and barely there in the material world but moving his thin legs like chopsticks. He lived like a recluse, forgetting to eat much of the time, but he was a glutton in one respect: the books he read, and the old movies he watched in the dark of his garret apartment.
“Eric” wasn’t his real name. He’d used so many aliases the last few years that he couldn’t always remember what was printed on his papers. But “Eric” was the name he gave himself now in his mind: Wake up, Eric! Stop being a prisoner in your head, Eric! Live and breathe, Eric!
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