The Paladin

by David Ignatius

  “If this is for real, someone has intercepted a hit man talking to his boss. Who posted this?”

  “It’s a new site, called DeadlyIran. It just popped up today, but it has the Fallen Empire tags. People are going nuts about this online, as you might expect. The site claims this shows its sources are everywhere. They have whistleblowers even in Iran.”

  “Cocky little bastards,” muttered Dunne. “How did they manufacture this one?”

  “Who knows? I checked the Ops Center a few minutes ago. They confirm that the recording is a fake. A very, very good one, simulating the voice of a real MOIS officer. But they don’t think there’s any such plan.”

  “How can they be so sure it’s bogus?”

  “Because they have HUMINT coverage in Tehran, and their source tells them it’s bullshit. The DDO cleared the Ops Center to tell us. He thought we should know.”

  Dunne smiled. Fallen Empire and its digital wizards had gotten too confident. They were overreaching.

  20 Urbino, Italy – October 2016

  Dunne’s trip to the hill town in the Marche took nine hours. A train from Geneva to Milan, another to Bologna, and then south to the coastal town of Pesaro, and finally by bus inland for an hour to Urbino, which sat atop Italy’s mountainous eastern spine. History is capricious: A city-state that had once dominated a whole region of Italy was now so insignificant it didn’t even have a railway station.

  The brick walls and turrets of the Ducal Palace were pale pink in the late afternoon light when Dunne arrived. It was nearly a mile walk uphill from the bus station to the city center. Dunne tramped up as the day-tourists flowed downhill, back to the parking lots and buses, in a polyglot stream.

  Dunne found his hotel; it was a simple three-story brick building, centuries old, on a street barely wide enough for a single car. Dunne checked in with his alias name, unpacked and showered, and slept for a few hours. He awoke at nine p.m., put on a black T-shirt and a suede leather jacket, and headed off to the pub where he planned to meet Jacob Rosenberg.

  The Morgana was noisy with students carousing over beer and pizza. Dunne searched for a man with a shaved head and thick goatee, which was how Rosenberg looked in recent pictures gathered by European Special Collection. On a quick tour of the bar he didn’t see anyone who resembled the photos, so he took a seat alone and waited. The waitress flirted with him. Dunne smiled and shook his head. Not now; not anymore.

  After thirty minutes, Rosenberg appeared; he scanned the crowd, looking for the person who had introduced himself electronically as Edward Spitz. He looked eager and wary at the same time. Dunne approached him and extended his hand.

  “Hey, man, I’m Edward.”

  “Jake,” answered the bald, goateed man. He was shorter than Dunne had expected. There were deep circles under his eyes. Dunne waited for him to say more, but he was silent.

  “Pretty town. I’ve never been here before.”

  “Nobody has. That’s one of its attractions. How’d you find us?”

  “Everybody on 4chan knows Fallen Empire, dude. I’ve been communicating with your guys on message boards for a long time. You just didn’t know it was me.”

  “What’s your 4chan handle?”

  “Coredump76,” answered Dunne. His anonymous message-board life had been carefully backstopped, too.

  “We’ll check you out.”

  “Game on,” said Dunne.

  * * *

  They talked until midnight that first night. Dunne was good at building rapport. He didn’t push, he teased. He let out a little about his purported work at Microsoft, and then a little more, and soon Rosenberg had dropped his reserve and was pulling for information. When Rosenberg asked him about the zero-day exploits, Dunne took a flash drive from his pocket, gave it a kiss, and then put it back in his trousers.

  “I’m too drunk to talk serious coding shit,” said Dunne. “Tomorrow.”

  “Is this for real?” asked Rosenberg.

  “Most definitely,” answered Dunne. “Hack the planet.”

  * * *

  They met the next morning at the office of Digito Urbino, near the university. Upstairs a small welcoming committee had gathered in a conference room. There were whiteboards on two walls, but no other decorations. Dunne had imagined a messy office decked with left-wing posters, but this space was clean and almost antiseptic.

  Dunne recognized many faces from the surveillance cameras that Adrian had installed. A young man with a bushy beard, whose name traced as Manuel Sepulveda, guarded the door; Rosenberg sat in the center of the room; next to him was a black man with a tight Afro, who was identified in the traces as Marcus Cliff. Leaning against the back wall was Jean-Marc Silwan, pencil-thin, dressed in a gray cashmere sweater. At the table beside Dunne was Antonia Lucca; with Silwan, she was one of the three founders of the Fallen Empire news site. The chair on the other side of Dunne was empty.

  “Tell the group about yourself, Edward,” said Rosenberg. “They’re curious.”

  Dunne extended his hands toward those gathered around the table. His body language said that he was a man who had nothing to hide. With his clear, taut face and carrot-top hair, he looked younger than he was.

  “I’m a software engineer,” he said. “I work for Microsoft in Redmond. Or did. I quit two weeks ago.”

  The room was silent. People stared at Dunne.

  “Why did you leave?” asked Silwan from the back of the room. He spoke with the roll of a French accent.

  “And why are you here?” added Lucca. She had bright eyes and prominent cheekbones. Her black hair was long and lustrous on one side and shaved close on the other.

  Dunne didn’t answer for a good ten seconds. His face was motionless; his eyes were closed. His was utterly still, while he considered their questions.

  “There’s an operating system that runs the world,” he said. “I was part of it. I don’t just mean Microsoft, it’s all the companies and governments. I couldn’t continue. I wanted to break the machine. It’s like when you’re sick. You don’t decide to vomit. It just happens.”

  “But why us?” said Lucca. “We didn’t invite you. You found us. Why?”

  “Because you’re serious. It’s not an ego trip for you, the way it is with WikiLeaks or Anonymous and the other groups. I’ve been watching you for more than a year. You know what you’re doing. You can break the machine. I can help, if you’ll let me.”

  “How can you help us?” asked Silwan from the back. “You told Jacob you brought something to show your good faith. What is it?”

  Dunne took the flash drive from his pocket and laid it on the conference room table.

  “I have a zero-day exploit for Microsoft Office. Microsoft sent out a patch, but there’s still a hole in the code.”

  “Why would we want a zero-day?” asked Lucca. “We are journalists, not hackers. We spread truth, not malware. I think you came to the wrong place.”

  Dunne nodded. He understood. They didn’t trust him yet.

  “I brought other exploits,” he said. “They’re not public. But they’ll help you.”

  “Like what?” asked Rosenberg.

  “Microsoft has a personal security product. It’s called MS Security Essentials. I brought something that can get around it.”

  “Interesting,” said Silwan.

  “I also brought a beaconing tool. It works with all Microsoft Office documents. It’s like a watermark. When the document is opened, it generates an HTTP request that you can see on your server.”

  “Nice, if you’re a hacker. Or an intelligence service,” said Lucca. “But like I said, we’re journalists.”

  “I can help you,” Dunne repeated.

  There was a sound of footsteps in the hall, behind where Dunne was sitting. The door opened, and into the conference room walked a tall young man, baby-blond hair, even thinner than Silwan, dressed in skinny jeans that bagged around his legs and a charcoal-gray hoodie. He wore glasses with thick black frames and lenses that were ti
nted pastel-blue. He took the empty seat next to Dunne.

  “I’m Jason,” he said, extending his hand toward Dunne. “I was listening. I like what you had to say. Thanks for coming.”

  Heads around the room nodded. The leader of Fallen Empire had spoken.

  “Hey,” said Dunne, shaking Jason Howe’s hand. “Glad to be here.”

  * * *

  They talked for forty-five minutes. Howe asked Dunne more questions about himself and his work at Microsoft. He probed Dunne’s technical background: where he had studied; what he had built; which programming environments and frameworks he preferred. Dunne was fluent, relaxed, believable. His legend tracked his own studies in college and his technical work over the last dozen years.

  “You’ve got the chops,” said Howe eventually. “But explain to me why you want to help us so much. We’re anarchists, basically. You seem too sane to do something this crazy.”

  Dunne paused and thought for a long moment. He answered not with a rote script, but a version of what he really thought.

  “I don’t like the way the world is going. We’ve been fighting wars in the Middle East that don’t accomplish anything except make people hate us. The political system in Washington is completely fucked up. When we get a new administration, it just means a new set of Goldman Sachs partners running the economy. I’m sick of it. It’s like you say, America is a fallen empire. Time for something different.”

  Howe shrugged. “Makes sense to me,” he said. “Just one last question. Are you a bandit, Edward?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Dunne. “Never tried.”

  “Because real journalists like us, we’re bandits. We’re not like the ass-kissers who sit in Washington and write columns to make powerful people happy. We steal shit that matters, and then we publish it. Powerful people are our enemies, you understand? Sometimes the only way to serve the people is by being a bandit. Does that make sense to you?”

  “I guess so. I need to think about it.”

  “I’ll give you a book by a British professor. It will explain all about bandits. How’s that sound?”

  “Sounds good, dude,” said Dunne.

  Howe chuckled at the bro-talk. He took from the conference table the flash drive that Dunne had laid there more than an hour before.

  “Okay, dude. Let’s go upstairs to the lab. Show you around.”

  * * *

  The computer lab was on the top floor of the building, up a metal staircase. The windows were shuttered and bolted, and all you could hear in the room was the low hum of the air-conditioning system and the tapping of fingers on computer keyboards. There were more people here, and many of them looked more like Microsoft software engineers than apprentice anarchists. They whispered to each other in Italian and darkened their computer monitors as Dunne entered the room.

  Howe escorted Dunne through the lab. The front of the room had a series of workstations, manned mostly by people Dunne recalled from the surveillance videos. Howe handed the flash drive to the chief of the tech team, an elegant Italian man in a beige suit, whom Dunne recognized as Lorenzo Ricci.

  “Illustrissimo,” said Howe to the Italian, with a flourish.

  “Cut the crap,” answered Ricci. He spoke perfect English, with a slow cadence that was somewhere between Milan and Atlanta. “What do you want?”

  “We have a volunteer. The one I told you about. He offers us tribute. This flash drive, to be exact, which he claims has exploits that he purloined from Microsoft, his former employer. Could we, do you think, perhaps run a scan on a machine that isn’t connected to anything else? Make sure there aren’t any viruses, and then see what’s on it.”

  “I’m very busy,” said Ricci. “Is this worth the time?”

  “I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”

  “Bene.” Ricci took the drive, tossed it in his hand so that it spun a half dozen revolutions, and then gave it to his assistant. “Take this to the back office. Check it out,” ordered the Italian.

  “Slick operation, for a bunch of bandits,” said Dunne.

  “Just wait,” said Howe when they got to the last of the workstations. He pointed to the back of the room. “There’s the sweet spot.”

  Behind a glass partition was a cluster of servers, stacked five high on four black metal racks. Howe opened the glass door so Dunne could see better. The room had high-voltage power lines to feed the computer stack, and its own air-conditioning system to keep it cool.

  “The best,” said Howe. “Twenty blades, each with the latest NVIDIA graphical-processing cards. We can do almost anything. Correct that: Anything.”

  Dunne studied the array and tried to memorize each of the items on display. As he studied the clusters, he saw Ricci walking toward a door at the far end of the server room, which was protected with a cyber lock.

  The Italian punched a code into the lock and the door swung open, and for the briefest moment Dunne saw into the room. He could see two dark-haired men with beards, who appeared to be Arabs, and, oddly, a man standing next to them with what looked like a yarmulke on the back of his head. The door closed as quickly as it had opened.

  Howe tapped him on the shoulder. “Cool, huh?”

  “What are you running here, a server farm?” Dunne laughed. “Are you guys trying to put Amazon Web Services out of business?”

  “We’re running a neural network. The architecture is optimized for reinforcement learning,” said Howe proudly. “Lorenzo put it together, with his Italian friends and some other studs. Sweet, no?”

  “Sweet. But what the hell do you need a neural network for?” asked Dunne. “Back at Microsoft, they’d only use an array like this for big machine learning or graphics projects. What gives?”

  “Imagine playing politics with machines, the way you can teach a computer to play chess.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Dunne.

  “Well, suppose I created one network that was assigned the job ‘Subvert the system,’ and then another one whose task was ‘Detect subversion.’ What do you suppose that would produce?”

  Dunne thought a moment, then answered.

  “You’d have a system that was awesomely good at subversion, because it could beat sophisticated attempts at detection.”

  Howe clapped his hands silently.

  “Clever man,” he said. “Murder and create, as the poet said. Destroy and build.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Dunne, fishing for a little more. “Explain it to me. And what’s in the back office, where your man Lorenzo hangs out?”

  Howe shook his head. Nice try.

  “All in good time, my friend,” he answered. “All in good time.”

  21 Urbino, Italy – October 2016

  Jason Howe invited “Edward,” the Microsoft defector, for dinner that night at a small trattoria near the city center, in the basement of an old town house. The brick of the walls and arched ceiling absorbed the noise, and in the crowded roomful of people they heard only each other. Howe ate ravenously; he ordered an antipasto of salt-cured ham and a soft pork salami, pasta with meat sauce and truffles, and then stuffed pigeons. They drank a bottle of Sangiovese, and then another.

  Dunne imprinted every detail of the encounter. Howe was a finely embroidered self-creation. He was so blond and fair-skinned that he looked like a choirboy, but he could be as pugnacious about his mission as a football lineman. His clothes hung on his thin body as if he were a stick man, but he ate voraciously. He kept talking about himself as a bandit, but before he began eating he said a Buddhist prayer, in Chinese.

  After Howe had eaten the antipasto, pasta, and one of his two stuffed pigeons, he pushed his plate away. In the low light of the cavernous dining room, he took off his blue-tinted glasses and put on another pair, round with simple metal rims. He leaned toward Dunne.

  “I call myself a journalist, but that’s not quite right. I’m a meta-journalist.”

  “What’s that?” asked Dunne. “I’ve never heard that word.”
>
  “It means I don’t care so much about facts, because they’re momentary and malleable. I care about the narrative. It’s like Bob Dylan said in Don’t Look Back: Every word has its big letter and little letter, like ‘truth.’ The little letter is printed in the Washington Post and the New York Times every day and it’s crap, right? It’s not ‘True,’ with the capital letter. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just what some people said happened yesterday. But the big letter, that’s what we’re working on. You follow me?”

  “Mainstream journalism is bullshit,” affirmed Dunne. “I don’t trust reporters. What you’re doing is different.”

  “Precisely. And sometimes the little-letter facts get in the way, so we have to, like, blow them up and create some new ones, right?”

  “I guess so. I’m a software engineer. I write code.”

  “Well, it’s right. Or at least I think it’s right. Like I said today: Murder and create; destroy and build. That’s what we do. Or at least I think that’s what we do.”

  “You sound like you have doubts.”

  Howe laughed. “Me? Never.”

  Howe drained the last of his wine, and Dunne did the same. As they were drinking, Howe’s phone buzzed. He saw that he had a WhatsApp message and read it quickly.

  “Ho-ho!” he said. He called to the waiter.

  “Senta. Bring us some cheese. Casciotta d’Urbino. Local specialty. And a sweet wine with the cheese. The local Vin Santo. And three plates, please, and three glasses.”

  “Another guest?” asked Dunne.

  Before Howe could answer, there was a commotion at the door and in swept Lorenzo Ricci. He was wearing a jacket of black leather, soft as baby’s skin, and a black cashmere turtleneck.

  Howe gave the big boss a salute, and the Italian pulled up a chair.

  * * *

  “I wanted to see our visitor,” Ricci said, sitting down. “People keep telling me about you.”