Black SUVs were one of the vehicles of choice for a lot of government agencies and organized crime. Lots of room for a crew, cargo space, easily armored, and they have smoked windows. Plus, there are a zillion of them on the street.
“Have you checked your phones to see if they have you bugged?”
“I did. The radio in the car is clean, but I’m pretty sure my home phone is tapped. Maybe Dad’s, too. There’s an odd clicking on the line every now and then, though. And, don’t think I’m crazy, but it feels like someone’s listening, you know?”
“Yeah. Shit. What about your cell?”
“I think it’s clean.”
“You think it’s clean?”
“I opened it up and didn’t find a bug.”
I wasn’t worried about someone tapping our call, because we had that covered. Anyone making a call to a DMS phone gets included in a kind of scrambled loop. Anyone listening in on an unauthorized second line or via an electronic bug hears nothing but very loud white noise. Funny thing was, the technology was actually developed by Hugo Vox, the late and unlamented former head of the Seven Kings. It was part of the surveillance and jamming tech he used against us. We borrowed it. Everyone else who had access to the tech is dead. Finders keepers.
Even so, I said, “Listen, Sean, go buy a burner and use that from now on.”
A burner is a disposable cell phone. It’s nearly impossible to trace and can be discarded after use. Great for tourists on vacation, but the primary market seems to be criminals and terrorists. And there’s no way to regulate these phones. In this case, at least, a burner could keep Sean safe.
“Okay,” he said, though he didn’t sound happy about it. He was in that zone between pissed off and scared. “When I found the bugs at the house, I had Ali take the kids to Uncle Jack’s farm for a couple of days. She fought me on that, so I had to tell her a little of what was going on.”
I wished he hadn’t, but I understood why he did. I made a mental note to have one of my guys from the Warehouse swing by Sean’s place to do another sweep, but with the equipment we have. Our new Anteater surveillance-detection system is absolute state of the art, and it was a lot more sensitive than anything the Baltimore PD could ever hope to afford. Again, thanks to Hugo Vox. Oh, yeah, rot in hell.
I decided that I’d also see if someone from the Warehouse wanted to spend a few days in the country watchdogging Sean’s family.
“Joe,” said Sean, “after Doc showed me those nanobots on the microscope I asked him to go through the records to see if there are any other cases similar to Holly, and, there may be as many as four.”
“Jesus.”
He laid it out for me. In the past eleven months there had been four deaths with unusual brain damage. Three girls and a boy, all under the age of sixteen. The deaths happened in different parts of the city and, in the case of the boy, in another town. In each case, there had been some extreme violence but no murders. The cases involved self-mutilation, a savage rape of another teen by one of the victims, stabbings, general mayhem. All very nasty and all very sad. Even though all the victims survived, all the teenage perpetrators died. Heart attacks in two cases, a blood clot in one, and a suicide by leaping out a window.
“Is there a task force on this?” I asked.
“I wish. I pitched that and was shot down by my captain,” Sean complained. “Look … until now, no one has ever really tried to connect the cases and put the pieces together. From any distance they look like isolated instances of junkies freaking out, and there are a lot of cases like that. It wasn’t until Doc looked for incidents involving bites and factors like age and prostitution that he started getting hits. Distant hits, though. I mean, he thinks they’re related and so do I, but we don’t have enough to build a solid case yet. I’m trying to determine disposition of bodies right now, but my guess is they’ve been sent back to families, and that means different jurisdictions and a lot of ‘I don’t give a shit’ on the part of local law, local hospitals, and the families of the kids. You know how it is with the fringe dwellers.”
“Sean,” I said, “you said that Kya was a prostitute. What do you know about her pimp?”
“Not much. There’s a thin lead I’ve been following that seems to be tied to maybe the Russians. They run a lot of girls in this part of Maryland. So far I’ve hit a lot of dead ends.”
“Who all have you told about this?” I asked.
“Just my captain, Dad, and Ali.”
“Keep it that way.”
“But—”
“Dad was right,” I said. “This does sound like my kind of thing. Or, maybe it is. I’ll have to look at it and then make a judgment call. Sean, can you get your hands on samples of the blood and brain tissue with the nanites in them? I mean can you do it without it showing up on the chain of evidence log?”
“I … uh, well, sure. I’d have to tell Doc Jakobs why, though.”
“Don’t call him. No more phones. Assume his place is bugged, too. Go and hand him a note explaining the basics. Burn the note afterward and flush the ashes. Someone will be in touch to collect the samples.”
“Who?”
“No one you know, but he’ll have a message from me. It’ll be the name of the guy who got me to read that book. You know what I mean?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Sure.”
When I was in ninth grade, I was starting to log a lot of hours in detention because of fighting with other kids and making smart-ass comments to teachers. I know, you’re shocked. Joe Ledger fighting and being a smart-ass? Who’d have thought? Anyway, the teacher running detention was big on reading. He made a deal with whoever was on the bench: we could read one of the books he had in his office and then take a quiz based on the chapters we swore we’d read. If we scored well, proving that we’d actually done the reading, we could get out early. While I was there, I grabbed a book called Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. It was a little young for my reading level, but it had a good story. Kid lost in the woods who was fighting for survival and all he had was a hatchet. I ripped through that in five detention sessions. It was my favorite book for a long time, and it engendered within me a love of books. Plus, it was a kick-ass story. I read a lot of other books while polishing that bench with my teenage ass, but I read Hatchet three times. And I gave a new copy to Sean for Christmas that year.
“Don’t ask the pickup guy too many questions, because he’ll stonewall you. Rules of the game,” I said.
“What do I do after that?”
“Sit tight and keep your eyes open. I’ll be there by tomorrow morning.”
“Thanks, Joe.” There was a heartbreaking amount of relief in his voice. He really was scared. So was I.
I was also really fucking pissed off. Five dead kids, someone playing with nanotech, the possibility of some kind of rabies outbreak, and now someone ghosting my brother? Yeah, I was planning on having a meaningful conversation with someone. It would be a chat I’d enjoy more than they would.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SENATE SUBCOMMITTEES ON CYBER TERRORISM
CAPITOL BUILDING
WASHINGTON, D.C.
ONE WEEK AGO
Sarah Schoeffel didn’t like being grilled by Congress. Not even by a small closed-door panel. She felt very much like a witness giving testimony while already strapped to the electric chair. The subcommittee’s control over funding for her department was the hand on the switch, and the longer these hearings went on the more that hand seemed to twitch.
“You’re telling us,” said Senator Diaz from Florida, “that the cybersecurity of this nation’s largest banks is not secure?”
“That is correct,” said Schoeffel.
“And you’re saying that the banks might not recover the money that has so far been taken from all those accounts?”
“I would say that there is a very small chance any of those funds can be recovered, Senator. The thefts were done quietly by highly skilled computer hackers who were able to disable the alert
systems written into the software. The money was gone days before anyone knew about it, and it’s likely that it has since been rerouted to a great many accounts in the Caymans, Panama, and elsewhere. Possibly even laundered electronically and funneled back into domestic banks through falsified income and profit reports of shell companies.”
Schoeffel felt the heat of nine sets of eyes. She knew that she didn’t have a friend in the room. Not the seven members of the cyberterrorism panel and not the two congressmen who were guests from the Banking and the Finance Committee. No one wanted to hear the truth, although they kept asking pointed questions like that one. It was clear that they wanted to be mollified, comforted, maybe even lied to, but Schoeffel was here to tell the truth. Painful and dangerous truths, but truths nonetheless.
“How is this even possible?” asked Albertson, the representative from Ohio.
Schoeffel spread her hands. “Cybersecurity is only as good as the latest upgrade. Once the new security software is in place, it’s only a matter of time before a hacker assesses it and cracks it. It’s like a game, and there are a lot of black hats out there who—”
Goines raised a hand. “I’m a little fuzzy on that. You keep using terms like ‘black hat’ and ‘gray hat.’ What, exactly, does that mean?”
“It’s pretty straightforward,” said Schoeffel. “Black-hat hackers are criminals who violate computer security for personal gain, such as stealing credit-card information, personal-data harvesting, identity theft, corporate espionage, and international espionage. The Chinese Ghost-Net is a black hat because they’re trying to crack the security on our banks as well as the power grids. These black hats run the gamut from simple criminals to terrorists. And their holy grail is what we call a ‘zero day’ vulnerability, which is where they take advantage of a security vulnerability on the same day that the vulnerability becomes generally known. There are zero days between the time the vulnerability is discovered and the first attack, hence the name.”
The congressmen and women nodded.
“White-hat hackers are the good guys,” continued Schoeffel. “Call them ‘ethical hackers,’ if you will. They’re the ones who build our defenses against the black hats and wage a very serious war with them, and it is equal parts attack and defense. We employ many of them to try and hack our own systems so that vulnerabilities can be identified and addressed. Many businesses employ them, too. White-hat hackers use their understanding of complex computer-security programs to compromise the organization’s systems, just as a black-hat hacker would. However, instead of using this access to steal or vandalize these systems the white hats report back to the organization and inform it of how they gained access, allowing the organization to improve its defenses. This is called ‘penetration testing,’ and it’s an extremely valuable tool. Homeland and the Department of Defense employ hundreds of white hats.”
“And the gray hats?” asked Goines.
“Well, let’s face it,” said Schoeffel. “How much of the world is black or white? An argument can be made that in business, as in politics, most of what happens falls into some kind of gray area. And so a gray-hat hacker falls somewhere between a black hat and a white hat. These hackers don’t necessarily work for their own personal gain or to wreak anarchistic damage, and though technically they may commit crimes, arguably they do so for ethical reasons.”
“‘Ethical’?” echoed Albertson.
“From their perspective, sure. We’ve had gray hats hack their way into government systems, including NORAD and other highly sensitive and supposedly closed systems, in order to raise awareness of possible vulnerabilities. Sometimes they’ll hack into a piece of expensive commercial software, or work their way into something like an online pay service like PayPal and then contact the companies in order to alert them before a black hat can do real damage. Some of them consider themselves watchdogs, or cybervigilantes, or superheroes. And there are a few gray hats who hack into databases in order to act as whistle-blowers for perceived crimes. We saw that with the Panama Papers a few years ago, and with Snowden before that.” Schoeffel paused and assessed the panel, pleased to see that no one’s eyes had glazed over, and that they were all following her. “The simple truth is that there is no such thing as a perfect system. There are always flaws and code errors and bugs. These exist because computer code is written by human beings and perfection of function, while a goal, is probably not attainable. People will always make mistakes. Knowing this, hackers look for those errors and exploit them. The more attractive the target—or the benefits of hacking that target, such as with banks—the more aggressive and determined the attacks are.”
“What can we do to stop it?” asked Albertson.
Schoeffel had to resist the impulse to shrug. She took a sip of water instead and wished there were something stronger in the glass. A tall vodka and tonic with cherries and lime would smooth the edges of her eroded nerves.
“Well, one thing we can do is up the funding for the WhiteHat counterintrusion program being developed by DARPA,” she said.
“That’s one of Major Schellinger’s programs?” mused Goines. “It’s very expensive.”
“It’s a lot less expensive than the alternative,” said Schoeffel. “We need to seriously up our game, because hackers are constantly upping theirs. Think of it as a guerrilla war. The hackers are the mobile resistance and—”
“They’re terrorists,” snapped Albertson, emphasizing his point by slapping his palm down on the table. It was one of his signature gestures, and Schoeffel suspected that he grooved on seeing people flinch. Probably equated a natural reaction to a sudden noise with his listeners reacting to him.
“Okay, sure, then let’s change the metaphor,” said Schoeffel with as much patience as she could shove into her tone. “Hackers are terrorists, which means they’re small, covert, and can blend into ordinary society. They are not an enemy state, and they don’t have a ZIP code. Computers are portable, which means that anywhere a hacker sits—a table at Starbucks, a couch, a seat on the B train—he’s able to turn into his command center. The hackers’ weapons are their computers, Internet access, data, and their own personal skills. When they launch an attack, there is no smoking gun, no explosion to draw the eye. They can sit next to you in a cybercafé, use a portable device to remote-hack your cell phone or the chip in your Visa card and go online to destroy your life. They can use public utilities and free Wi-Fi as tunnels to get into the mainframes owned by big business, banking, credit-card companies, research laboratories, government agencies, and the military. Our current mechanism for countering these attacks is good, but, because of the natural bureaucracy and the size of our government, adaptive change is correspondingly slow. An elephant can defeat a lion in a straight fight, but the lion is faster and more agile and can often inflict damage and escape. When it returns, it targets the young and weak in the elephant’s herd, inflicting a different and perhaps deeper kind of damage.”
“How bad can this get?” asked Goines.
Schoeffel tried not to wince at the naïveté of the question, especially coming from someone on this committee. “We’ve already seen glimpses of how bad it could get. The cyber-terrorist Artemisia Bliss, who called herself Mother Night, created a network of cyberhackers. The Seven Kings organization used computer viruses to compromise the software systems of our entire military. They hacked the GPS on Air Force One and nearly plunged this country into chaos.”
“You’re talking about what?” asked Goines. “A cyberversion of 9/11?”
Schoeffel shook her head very slowly. “No, sir, I am talking about something much, much worse. You see, every time a cyberterrorist does something that draws the eye of the public and gets big media coverage—as with Mother Night, the Seven Kings, and ISIL last year with the attempt to use drones to release smallpox—the fact that they’re stopped isn’t enough. A hacker, a planner, a terrorist, or anyone else gets to look at the nature of the attack, evaluate the successes and defeats, see how the attack
was ultimately stopped, and use all of that as a teachable moment. So much can be learned from those cases. So much can be deduced and induced and inferred. It’s no different from generals studying the accounts of previous campaigns when planning a battle. There is as much to learn about why Napoleon lost at Waterloo as there is about how Wellington won.”
There was utter silence in the room.
Schoeffel said, “I am not afraid of a cyber-9/11, ladies and gentlemen. I am afraid of a cyber-apocalypse.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE PIER
SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 5:47 PM
Before I did anything else, I called Sam Imura at the Warehouse and brought him up to speed.
“I’ll take care of it, Joe,” he said. “But … you’re sure this wasn’t Seif al Din?”
“It’s your town, Sam. Have you had a zombie apocalypse lately?”
“Point taken. I’m just having a hard time processing the thought of a skinny fourteen-year-old girl brutalizing two grown men. Even if she had rabies.”
“Which is why I want our people looking at the tox screens and taking a real damn close look at those nanites.”
“Do you really believe there are nanites in the girl’s blood?”
“Doc Jakobs is old, and he’s a well-known conspiracy theorist,” I said. “He once told me that he believes reptilian aliens are controlling both parties in Congress. So … you tell me.”
Sam snorted. “He may be right about Congress.”
“That’s what I told him. Point is he’s a bit daffy.”
“Does that mean you’re not opening a file on this yet?”
“Nope. It’s weird and nasty, but it doesn’t have DMS painted on the fender. Not until we know for sure that what Doc Jakobs told Sean is accurate. For now, I’m calling it a 70/30 in favor of Doc being too old and crazy.”
“Someone’s bugging your brother’s house, though.”
“Which is why I’m going out there,” I said. “I don’t know that the bugs are part of this case. Sean has worked a lot of homicides tied to organized crime, and he’s done some counter-terrorism task-force stuff, so those bugs could be unconnected to the girl. I don’t want to jump the gun, but no matter what’s happening, this is freaky by Sean’s standards. So until I know for sure that this is anything more than a slightly weirder day on the job for a homicide cop in the big, bad city, I’m not making my visit official.”
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