Misled

by Anderson Harp

  It was a pitch-black night. Lampposts lit up the computer company’s campus; instinctively, Frank Caldwell kept to the shadows as much as possible. Given his work history, he’d developed a paranoia about security cameras. He wore a black baseball cap and sunglasses, even in the low light, over an everyday black rain jacket and jeans. His clothes and hat bore no logos.

  If he met a man on the street, it would have been difficult for the man to later recall a description. Caldwell knew enough tradecraft to blend in with the background and people around him.

  There was a side entrance to the second building. A man waited there, also staying in the shadows.

  “Thanks for coming.” The man held the door open and handed Caldwell a clip-on pass marked with the word Visitor. Unlike a normal visitor’s pass, though, this card would enable access to every corner of the facility.

  Caldwell nodded back.

  The contract that Paul had was with the firm Baker, Alexander and Hamilton, which had its own agreement with ITD. The bill-processing company used Baker for security, as did many others. In fact, Baker nearly dominated the field of cybersecurity contracting in government-related industries. In turn, Baker sometimes subcontracted Alexander Paul’s firm to carry out its work. Hundred-million-dollar contracts were typical for both companies, as were “black agreements” that ensured complete secrecy regarding exactly who was doing work for whom. Similarly, the dollars for those black projects typically came from unmarked or mismarked funds buried deep in the budgets of corporations and governments.

  Caldwell and his escort walked down a narrow hall to another set of locked and secured doors. After several passes and inspections, he walked into a small computer room insulated with brown, foam-like soundproof walls.

  “You know the team.” The ITD guide pointed to the two sitting at computers. They looked like they were on break from a twelfth-grade AP computer science class. A young woman with a shaggy bob haircut dyed with ombré green highlights and thick Tom Ford glasses glanced up from her computer. A guy in a bright yellow shirt with the word Geek stenciled across it and wearing black Converse high-tops also acknowledged Caldwell by lifting his Red Bull can in a salute.

  “No names,” Caldwell reminded his guide. The ITD manager didn’t know Caldwell. Caldwell, however, did know the team and their backgrounds.

  “This is the latest spear-phishing. Just came across today.” The host stood behind the woman’s chair.

  “Right.” Caldwell looked at the screen. Paul had recruited him because of his background at West Point in information technology. It had helped during his Ranger tour as well. He knew the basics of writing code, but this stuff went well beyond his limits.

  The young woman was the designated Russian expert. She had been born Russian, spoke Russian, and thought Russian, but outwardly she was pure Boston and had been a quick study at MIT. Her move to America from Russia had come while she was in diapers, so she only had as much Russian in her as she cared to display.

  “It’s good,” she said, as if saluting a talented adversary.

  “We run the credit cards for most of America and several other countries,” the ITD guide said. He looked like the big brother of the pair in the room. Caldwell knew him to be their manager, their boss and, more importantly, their biggest cheerleader.

  “How much in all, approximately?”

  “Well over a trillion a year.”

  “If Russia or China breaks into this vault,” the guide said, “the free world’s in deep trouble. God forbid if Bureau One-twenty-one does it.”

  “One-twenty-one?” Caldwell should have known the reference.

  “Our buddies in Pyongyang,” the woman told him.

  Caldwell noticed that they had all chewed their fingernails to the quick. They seemed on edge, but energized. No surprise. Their desks were littered with Red Bull cans. Like good chess players, they were tasked with trying to anticipate not only their opponent’s next move, but one or two more moves after that.

  “We have zero tolerance here,” said the host. ITD handled everyone’s Visa bill, so their work was scrutinized daily by millions of eyes when the cardholder opened his statement. And it was the highest level of scrutiny. An overcharge for that dinner at the pizza place of even a dollar set off alarms. So, there was no tolerance for mistakes.

  “Not anymore,” she said.

  The man gave her a frosty glare.

  Caldwell knew what she was referring to and why he was there.

  “Who?” That’s what he had to report back. “That’s what I want to know.”

  He didn’t realize that his boss already had the answer.

  Chapter 10

  The Frozen Triangle of the Yukon

  “Today we get out of here.”

  “Okay.” Karen lifted her head from deep inside the sleeping bag, so close to him that her skin scraped against the two days of stubble on his cheeks.

  “It’s finally warming up.” Will pulled himself out of the bag, quickly dressed in his clothes, parka, pulled on his mucks, and did it all much quicker than the last time so that his hands would still function when he put on his gloves. He knelt at the edge of the sleeping bags. The log fire was down again to smoldering embers. Its smoky smell gave the sense of warmth despite the fact that it had stopped putting out any heat some time ago.

  The smoke reminded both of food and the lack of it. Hunger was starting to set in.

  “To what?” She had shivered throughout the night and only gotten sleep in short bursts. The cold crept through the bottom of the two sleeping bags. The hips and the shoulders would compress the bag where the body weight would push down. And it was in those spots where the cold would attack first. They would turn over, trying to protect what little warmth there was and then fall asleep again. The cycle of movement did not happen in unison, which meant that a bout of cold or the other’s movement might wake both parties up at any time.

  “Well,” he said. “Still subzero. Let me see your nose.” He held her head like a doctor examining a patient. He took his glove off and felt it with his warm hand. “Frostbite can move quick. Where’s your backpack?”

  “Here.” She had moved it during the night to serve as a brace between herself, the sleeping bags, and the outcropping.

  Will opened it up and looked through it.

  “Aha,” he said. “I thought you might have it.” He pulled out a banana and taped it on a nearby rock. It was frozen solid despite being in the pack. He pulled the peel from it and cut off a square with a knife. He held the piece of skin close to the smoldering embers until it regained some warmth.

  “Hold this on your nose.”

  The peel started to warm her skin gradually. It served as an extra layer of heated skin.

  “It smells like a banana.”

  He laughed. “That’s because it is.”

  It reminded her again, however, that they hadn’t eaten now for more than forty-eight hours except for the Snickers bar.

  “I’m hungry.”

  The banana was of no help. It was as solid as a brick. He tried to heat it up and it fell apart in the process.

  “Here.” He pulled another candy bar from his pack. It was as solid as the last one. “It’s all I got.”

  She clumsily pulled the wrapper off with her gloved hand. Finally, in frustration, she used her teeth to pull back the plastic.

  “Just let it melt in your mouth.” The sugar would be slowly absorbed as the ninety-eight-degree temperature of her body broke it down. Will smiled. “It reminds me of Fentanyl.”

  The opioid medication used by medics came in lollipop form so it could be absorbed directly into the membrane of the mouth and the bloodstream. Will recalled the pain of his wounds fading quickly away in a sleepy haze. He hadn’t liked it. Neither did the medic. Another man with his leg shattered by an explosive device and screaming in pain would
crush the lollipop in his mouth. More than one man had to be pulled back from the rush of the powerful narcotic, which was more than eighty times stronger than an injection of morphine.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  He could feel the bitter cold air as he inhaled it through his nose. It still caused a burning sensation. As he exhaled through his mouth, fog projected again into the air.

  The sun had started to climb over the hill mass to the east. He didn’t need to see a clock to know that it had to be well into the morning for the light to start to break through the forest canopy. The air remained clear, cold, and painful.

  “The wolves got close last night.” He stood and kicked the fire with his boot. “The pack doesn’t seem to be infected yet.” In fact, their behavior seemed perfectly normal. The pack acted with patient and deliberate hesitation, much like a good Marine Raider patrol studying a target and plotting their point of attack.

  “If they eat the flesh of something infected it won’t be long.” She looked out over the lake.

  “Think your fox made it?” He remembered the direction it had taken from the lake—back toward Snag.

  “Not likely, especially given the—”

  Her voice stopped as they heard the deep bass sound of a radial engine. It was unmistakable. Each piston, in a circle, firing with a combined force of energy moving to the center, turning the propeller. It sounded like the bass track of a classic rock song.

  An Otter came low across the lake. Like his, the bold, bright yellow stood out in sharp contrast to the white, green, and blue above.

  Will ran out to the center and fired his rifle.

  The search was over.

  It turned, waggled its wings, then lined up against what little wind there was. The Otter lumbered across the small ice lake and extended its flight path before turning back to land. With his flaps down, the pilot gently guided the aircraft just above the tops of the trees on the far end and floated down until its skids struck the surface.

  Will carried Karen to the airplane, as the relentless cold and lack of food had made it difficult for her to walk. He lifted her up into a seat in the cargo hold and felt the warmth of the cabin as he sat her down. It was probably no more than a few degrees above freezing inside, but it felt like a heated sauna. He shook the pilot’s hand, ran back up to the lean-to, and grabbed their gear while the Otter’s engine kept running. His legs were stiff and he hobbled as he moved back toward the airplane. They had survived the worst that the Yukon could throw at them.

  Will took one last glance at the shelter that they had made. It was solid and would probably last for several more winters. It had, however, served its purpose for them. The wolf pack would pass through it shortly after man’s machine left and silence returned to the woods. The leader would sniff the candy wrapper, taste it with his tongue, and then head off into the forest, perhaps following the trail of a lost, sick arctic fox.

  By the time they found it, Karen and he would be back in Anchorage.

  Chapter 11

  Near Dulles, Virginia

  “So, what am I doing here, sir?” Caldwell was on a secure line at ITD. On the other end was his employer, Alexander Paul. The encrypted phone served to keep the conversation only between the two.

  Caldwell had a general base of knowledge about the information technology world, but only the basics compared to the operators at ITD. He had graduated from the Point with the special major of electronic and IT systems, training in web development and, more importantly, network security. But two years in the Rangers had pulled him completely out of the fast-moving IT field. Technology didn’t wait for Caldwell’s private career to begin.

  At this point, he was still trying to get a handle on what was going on at ITD.

  “We have an idea as to who’s behind the hack,” said A.P. Then, lowering his voice, “The first wave hit just after ITD announced its contract with me.”

  Even though they were speaking on a secure line, it seemed to Caldwell that his boss was holding something back.

  For his part, Caldwell stood in a soundproof room deep within the ITD campus. Thick brown acoustic foam covered the walls, much as it had in the operation center he’d visited earlier. The smothering silence in the room swallowed any spoken word as it left his lips. The space had the silence of a church sanctuary in the middle of the week.

  “Okay….” Caldwell wasn’t sure what to make of A.P.’s remark. His boss seemed to be saying was that the ITD hacking attack was actually subtly directed toward Alexander Paul himself. And A.P. seemed to know who the attacker was.

  Caldwell felt the warmth of the phone against his ear and realized that, unconsciously, he was pressing it hard against his head, as if to let out the stress of receiving insufficient information about his mission.

  “I need you to follow a lead.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There was a team of three working on a project in a cyber school that closely resembles this hack. Two of them were Marines in training for their military cyber specialty. The other was an independent who worked for Baker.”

  “What school?”

  “It’s at the University of Maryland. It is the training ground for high-level computer operations. NSA and CIA use it for all of their entry-level IT training.”

  “What were they working on?”

  “We know that one, for sure, was trying to break the code on the deep web.”

  “I didn’t think it could be done.”

  “Yeah, correct.”

  “Oh, shit.” Caldwell knew that if one could break open darknets or even deep nets, it would be an earth-shattering event. All of the criminals on the globe seemed to agree that the one place the law couldn’t look into was the deep web. The index of a .onion dark web gave one a quick understanding of what the web was used for. Lists included how to purchase illegal automatic guns, drugs, and contact hired killers.

  Only 4 percent of the internet is what the public sees. Ninety-six percent is in the deep web and within the deep web is another world: the dark web. Both forms of the internet are undecipherable and untraceable. But it is in the deep web that everything evil lurks. Heroin bought on the deep web was shipped out of Bulgaria as if it were candy. Tunisia sold sex slaves, some of which were white Europeans who made the mistake of backpacking through North Africa. And the virtual private networks allowed no trace of who sent what or received anything.

  The flow of money for drugs, terrorism, and other sinister activities passed through the deep web. Child pornography worked through the deep web. Heroin could be FedEx’d by an order on the unbreakable network. The director of the FBI had made a pronouncement some time ago that they had cracked the dark web, but no one in the IT community believed him. It remained too complex. It was like a safe that changed its combination every time the dials were turned. No path was repeated.

  The deep web and the dark web were overlay networks that used the internet system, but enabled users to make contact point-to-point, one person to another in a way that made their conversations untraceable.

  “The brains of the group left the country some time ago.” Paul didn’t say the name, but clearly knew it. More was not being said. The man worked for DIA. He was a cyber operator and, seemingly, one of exceptional talent. More than that, he quickly rose to being the IT advisor to the director of DIA. He had direct access to everything—or, at least, what most thought was everything.

  The cyber operator saw things that no one else was supposed to see. And then one night he saw something not meant for even his eyes. Before the offices opened up the next morning, he was gone like smoke blown away by a gust of wind. The disappearance of the cyber operator was more than a breach of national security.

  The FBI wanted to know why he left so abruptly. What did he know? What had he seen? The Senate Committee on Intelligence made an inquiry that seemed
to go nowhere. There were no answers. But the disappearance revealed a sloppy cybersecurity system at the director’s office. And this resulted in the director losing his job. Or at least, that was what the wolves in Washington used as the excuse to fire Alexander Paul. It wasn’t difficult for Paul to have a list of enemies waiting for his head to be on the chopping block.

  And then the cyber technician suddenly showed up in Moscow. A close aide who unexpectedly disappears, and resurfaces in Moscow, coupled with a lax cyber system at the director’s office, caused considerable embarrassment to the director and his boss, the president.

  If Alexander Paul were driven, as some of his critics claimed, by vengeance, then the man who cost him the leadership of DIA would be the number-one name on his list. Losing his DIA post had blocked Paul’s rising star and broken his trust and favor with the president. And the current president was not one to forgive.

  Caldwell listened to the few words said. He immediately knew that he needed to retain a memory of everything that was spoken.

  “What about the other two?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll brief you in more detail when you get back here.” Paul hung up before Caldwell could say good-bye.

  The flight back to Washington was a red-eye that carried him across the country in the dark. He rarely drank, but two scotches with soda helped him nod off for a brief nap. The benefit of Paul and the private sector meant that Caldwell enjoyed all of his flights up front. The billion-dollar client didn’t care or notice the first-class transportation required. For his part, Alexander Paul took it to another level, using a private jet whenever his presence was required.

  And it didn’t matter.

  Caldwell knew that the problem ITD was facing could be catastrophic. If ITD had any hint that their new hacking threat was directed against the man they had hired to be their security consultant, the first-class seats, private jets, and millions of dollars would stop as fast as an unplugged computer. Viewed from that perspective, Caldwell could see why A.P. was holding the secret so closely.