by D L Young
If you wanted to destroy a person, setting them up on a terrorism charge was about the best way to do it. And as soon as one of the Anarchy Boyz broke and confessed, things would start churning in that direction. Gideon would make sure all the dots connected, building a watertight investigation that led inexorably to the datajacker Blackburn Maddox.
For the moment things had stalled, thanks to the Anarchy Boyz’s ability to hold out under torture. But Gideon was undeterred and patient, knowing he held all the cards, knowing the confession would come in time. He had to ensure the preplanned fake investigation behaved the same way a real one did, moving forward in logical stages, expanding into new branches of inquiry as new information was discovered. Once the punks confessed, he’d then search for any known contacts with data security expertise. After filtering down to a short list of names, he’d zero in on Maddox, the only one capable of penetrating the state-of-the-art security inside T-Chen’s datasphere. The last piece of the puzzle, the icing on the cake, would be when one of the Anarchy Boyz flipped (and one of them inevitably would), cutting a deal for reduced jail time in exchange for naming Maddox as the ringleader.
It hadn’t been a bad plan. Genius in its own devious way, Deke had thought at one time. But now, with fourteen dead, he felt entirely different about it. The whole thing was a huge mistake, a monumental lapse of judgment unlike any he’d ever made before. He couldn’t see it any other way. It was time to abort, to walk away from the scene of the bloody accident they’d caused. To run away from it, in fact.
“We chase down false leads all the time,” Deke pointed out. “We question people for hours over a hit-and-run, only to find out later there was street cam footage of them thirty blocks away. If we let those kids go now, who would question it? Just another bad lead that went nowhere. Then we can put this whole thing behind us.”
Bombings, even headline-grabbing ones with massive fatalities, went unsolved more often than not in the City. Gideon knew that as well as Deke did. Like they both also knew that if they cut those punks loose now, before they confessed, they could be done with the whole stinking business. They could chase their tails for a few weeks, running down empty leads until the press coverage died down, then file the case away with the rest of the City’s unsolved ugliness.
“I can’t do that,” Gideon said.
“Can’t or won’t?” Deke asked.
The lieutenant finished his drink, placed the glass down firmly. He spoke in an even, measured tone, staring at Deke without blinking. “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to take a pill or smoke a joint or do whatever you need to do to get yourself through this thing, you understand? We’re not stopping now.”
Beneath the lieutenant’s quiet resolve and icy stare, Deke sensed a barely contained explosion, a volcano ready to erupt. He flinched as the lieutenant rose from his chair, then came around and stood in front of him. Gideon placed his hands on Deke’s chair arms and leaned down, his face uncomfortably close to the detective’s.
“You’ll do what I tell you to do. Nothing more, and nothing less. You got me?”
Deke smelled the whiskey on the lieutenant’s breath. He turned his head, looked away.
“There’s no walking away from this,” the lieutenant added. “And there’s no walking away from me.”
Deke felt his resolve wilting under the weight of Gideon’s gaze. A knock on the door broke the tension, and the detective was immediately thankful for the interruption.
Gideon released his grip on the chair and straightened his back. “What is it?” he barked at the door, which opened to reveal Flagler, a pale, pimply-faced security analyst who’d just completed his second year on the job. Flagler was one of Gideon’s plants in the data security department.
The analyst removed his specs and took a tentative step into the room. He looked anxiously between Deke and the lieutenant, seemingly aware he’d intruded on some heavy conversation.
“You’ve got something for me?” Gideon said impatiently.
“We’ve got a breach,” the analyst said. “Someone just pinged your personnel history, and it doesn’t look authorized.”
A wry smile touched Gideon’s mouth. “Does he know you saw him?” he asked, quickly sliding open a large desk drawer. The lieutenant was suddenly animated, energized by the analyst’s news.
“I don’t think so,” Flagler answered. “He’s still in there.”
“Somebody’s pulling your personnel history?” Deke said, curious but mostly alarmed.
Gideon waved him quiet and asked the analyst, “You didn’t log it, did you?”
“No, sir. You told me to contact you first if somebody pinged your file.”
“Good boy,” the lieutenant said, nodding. “Do me a favor and keep it quiet. I’m going to take care of it.”
Gideon removed his custom Hasegawa deck and a set of trodes from a drawer and placed them on top of the desk. “Anyone else know?” he asked.
Flagler shook his head. “No, sir. I put the auto alerts on standby and routed all unusual traffic to my desk, just like you asked.”
“Perfect,” he said, a hunter’s thrill in his eyes as he powered up the deck.
9 - Hello, Old Friend
Breaking into the Greater New York City Police Department’s datasphere wasn’t generally a good idea. It was, in fact, an excellent way to get yourself put away for life, should you be caught in the act. It wasn’t like carving out and reselling a bit of proprietary R&D from some consulting company out of Lithuania nobody ever heard of. That would only get you tossed in the can for five to ten, maybe a tad less if you had a good lawyer or you lucked out and got a judge who took donations under the table. Datajacking Johnny Law was another level of criminality altogether, punishable by the same kind of sentences they slapped on serial killers and narco kingpins.
When he’d fired up his deck minutes earlier, Maddox had considered such dire consequences for exactly three seconds before shrugging them off. At some point you were in so much trouble that a bit more didn’t make a difference. The needle on his how-screwed-you-are gauge had already moved well into the red zone.
After plugging in, Maddox hit a black market app vendor where he still had a credit balance and loaded up on apps. Then he went to check out his newly formed suspicions about Sanchez, the turncoat corporati who’d hired him to break into T-Chen’s datasphere. It took about a half an hour to piece together that the man had never existed, that his identity and background were manufactured. Maddox kicked himself for not checking thoroughly enough the first time around, for failing to crosscheck Social Security records and educational history and captures from cam feeds. It was tedious work and Maddox had been lazy, verifying the man’s identity by only the most superficial—and in hindsight, easily spoofed—digital records available to him. He could almost hear Rooney chiding him about being sloppy. Sloppy gets you arrested. Sloppy gets you killed. You have to do your homework. Rikers Island is filled with data thieves who took shortcuts.
The mystery of Sanchez’s identity solved—or partially solved, anyway—Maddox now hovered in virtual space, readying himself for his second, far more difficult, task. A short distance away, the pulsing glow of the police department’s DS dominated his field of vision, a luminous city of geometric data structures. He breathed, feeling a deep rush of air fill his lungs back in the room at the Electric Kitty as he let himself slide into a trancelike concentration. Every breath took him farther away from the awareness of his body, from his sack of meat and bones and blood, from the limits of the physical. He floated motionlessly, an invisible ghost in the digital ether, occupying the last grid vector of free space beyond the department’s security boundary. A thief peering through a barbed-wire fence.
Cops didn’t like strangers poking around in their data. Understandable, of course, when you considered how much they had to hide. Bribes, evidence tampering, setups, cover-ups, forged warrants, tortured confessions, abuses of power from the lowliest beat cop’s weekly
payoff all the way up to the chief of police’s insider trading. It was all there, if you looked hard enough. Buried inside interdepartmental communications or archived spec feeds or surveillance footage. Cops were better than most at covering their tracks, but in the end they were people. And people always slipped up. It was human nature. And in a world where every millisecond of your life existed in two states, physical and digital, it was the rare human folly that wasn’t captured and filed away in an archive somewhere. Secret sins were things of a bygone era, like tube television sets and gas-powered cars. The cybernetic gods were omnipresent and omniscient. They recorded everything and forgot nothing.
He dispatched half a dozen looksee bots around the datasphere. Like him, they were hidden from detection by a cloaking algorithm. As long as he and the bots remained cloaked and outside the security perimeter, it was unlikely they’d be seen by the DS’s automated scans. Once inside, though, things would be different. Cloaks, even the best ones, eventually broke down under the passive countermeasures usually found inside a DS, melting away like an ice cube on a hot sidewalk. The shitty thing about it was you never knew quite how long you had before the cloak disappeared entirely. It depended on how resistant your cloak’s algorithm was to begin with, but it also depended on the robustness of the DS’s security. A large, dense block of ice survived longer under the tepid heat of a November sun than it did in the scorching heat of July, using the same analogy. How much attention you attracted to yourself also came into play. If you rushed in, knocking holes through archive barriers, not taking care to cover your tracks and clumsily calling attention to yourself, odds were you’d get noticed. Intelligent sentries roamed the DS on the lookout for digital anomalies, and they were adept at detecting the bull-in-a-china-shop types, even when those bulls were fully cloaked.
Datajacking was like any other kind of thievery in that it favored practitioners who took a careful, deliberate, cool-headed approach. The smash-and-grab cowboys who didn’t do their homework, who burst headlong into a DS without studying its structure, never lasted very long.
The bots’ feeds appeared, six small text boxes winking to life in front of him. Data scrolled upward: authentication parameters of the department’s razorwalls, build versions of its intelligent sentries, the manufacturing specs of its passive countermeasures. A mother lode of intelligence gathered by digital spies. The data was cross-referenced with known design flaws, summarizing them for Maddox in a separate window, while predictive models offered up a list of potential vulnerabilities. Green for very likely, yellow for probable, red for you probably shouldn’t try this unless you want to go to jail. The bots also gave him a detailed map of the entire DS, complete with labels pairing each of the myriad structures with their real-world analogs. Human resources, payroll, public relations, and so on.
Maddox studied the details, absorbing the information as much by intuition as conscious scrutiny. Eventually a kind of map formed in his mind. The safest path through the minefield. A route that was still dangerous, still risky, and by no means a sure thing, but one that at least lessened his chance of detection. Lessened, but far from eliminated, he thought grimly. Under normal circumstances, he’d take hours, even days, studying a DS’s infrastructure, obsessively poring over every security app’s soft spots and setting up sandbox environments to test different intrusion approaches. But here and now, he didn’t have the luxury of time.
Back in the room, his hands gestured, and in virtual space he moved slowly forward, past the unseen line marking the edge of the department’s outermost security boundary. Here at the periphery, he didn’t worry too much about being detected. His cloaking app was state-of-the-art, more than a match for the department’s relatively weak first line of defense, which was something akin to an unguarded fence. Easy enough to climb up and over. Deeper inside, where better, more effective tech lurked, things wouldn’t be so easy.
The luminous cityscape before him grew larger. Towers of dazzling whites and yellows and crimsons, all connected by the weblike latticework of communication spindles, pulsing with the flow of information. A faint golden phosphorescent path appeared before him, leading into the depths of the datasphere and disappearing somewhere inside the dense cluster of structures. His personal yellow brick road, pointing him to the wizard’s castle just like in the ancient film. The path’s unseen endpoint, which he’d tagged moments earlier on the map, was the human resources department, inside of which he’d find the personnel archives, where he was sure he’d uncover the answers to his questions.
Could it possibly be Gideon? The same Gideon he’d known years ago?
He glided forward, close enough now to spot several intelligent sentries patrolling their routes. Some skittered across the faces of the departmental partitions, visualizing as mechanical insects scurrying across panes of glass. Others darted throughout the empty spaces between the structures, these visualizing as propellerless drones with pellet-shaped robotic bodies and blinking lights. Maddox checked his cloak’s status bar. Five percent degradation. Not bad, considering how close he was to the DS’s core. Still, though, any degradation at all meant that the ice had begun to melt.
Ten minutes, he guesstimated. That was how long he had, give or take a minute, before active security measures would be able to spot him, setting off every alarm in the DS.
He cautiously moved along his premarked route, entering the datasphere’s central cluster of building-like partitions. Moving slowly, he glanced back and forth between his readouts and his surroundings, taking care not to get too close to any of the partition’s outer boundaries. He was still cloaked, still functionally invisible, but you never knew what new tech might be embedded in a partition’s protective razorwall, lying like a coiled snake hidden in the grass, waiting to strike at any prey passing by. Security analysts loved to tweak razorwall code, modding its capabilities to keep one step ahead of datajackers.
The human resources partition loomed ahead of him, visualizing as a pale blue building with ornate carvings running up and down the corners. Cherubs and angels blowing trumpets, gargoyles perched atop the corners. Maddox stopped a couple clicks from the department’s shimmering, opaque razorwall barrier, beyond which information streamed, radiant pulses surging in every direction. Somewhere inside was his target, the archive where the personnel files were stored. He checked the status bar. Ten percent degradation. He was good on time.
Back in the room, a place that now felt a universe away, hands belonging to his meat sack gestured, and in virtual space a modded corkscrew executable appeared before him, visualizing true to its name as a simple magenta spiral.
He took a moment to recheck its settings in a config window, then set it loose on the razorwall. The screw snaked toward the HR partition, a digital viper twisting through virtual space. Maddox watched as it made contact with the razorwall’s outer surface, ready to unplug if he caught any signs of detection. The executable paused, its forward tip flush against the razorwall but not penetrating. For a moment Maddox thought something had gone wrong, but then its sidewinding motion began again, and it slowly disappeared inside the partition.
No countermeasures rushed after him. No systemwide lockdown lights flashed, no sirens blared. He checked the cloak’s status: eighty-five percent. No increase in its degradation rate. So far so good. Neither he nor the penetrating executable had been detected. Now he simply had to wait for the screw to find personnel archive and, assuming the data leech he’d attached to it worked as planned, retrieve the files he needed.
The waiting was the hardest part. It was a line from some ancient pop song, and Maddox had always thought it apt for moments like these when he found himself deep inside some DS, waiting for an app to complete its instructed task, hoping he’d thought of everything in the code blocks he’d assembled, knowing he probably hadn’t. It was impossible to think of everything, to cover every contingency. That was one reason why datajacking wasn’t generally a long-term career. Sooner or later, the odds caught up w
ith you, no matter how careful you were. Rooney had been the apparent exception to the rule, the only datajacker Maddox had ever heard of who’d practiced his craft for over twenty years, well into his forties. But then the odds had eventually caught up with him, too, hadn’t they?
“Hello, old friend,” a voice behind him said.
Maddox whirled his viewpoint around, finding a police badge icon floating half a click in front of him. Back in the room, his hands began to gesture.
“Don’t unplug,” the voice said quickly.
Maddox paused. He recognized the voice. Gideon.
“Time we had a chat,” the badge said, “don’t you think?”
Maddox stared at the avatar in disbelief. “Christ, you really are a cop. How did they ever let you become a cop?”
Gideon ignored the question. “We can’t talk here. Meet me in the cave in ten minutes.”
“The cave? You can’t be ser—”
“See you there.” The badge blinked out and was gone. Maddox gazed at the empty space where it had been a moment before, still stunned by the visitation. Gideon. It was really him. And he was really a cop.
A second later, a warning light flashed red near the bottom of his vision, snapping him out of his funk. The status bar had dropped to ten percent. He quickly began to unplug himself but then stopped.
Gideon. Still cagey as ever. He’d hit Maddox with something that ate away at his cloak like mineral acid through soft rock. Bad, sure, but he could have done much more. He could have frozen Maddox, could have set off systemwide alarms, but he hadn’t. Instead, Gideon had hit him with something that would force Maddox out of the DS quickly, while leaving just enough of his cloak intact to do so safely and still undetected.
