Dark Days of the After (Book 1): Dark Days of the After

by Schow, Ryan

  “I’m not hasty,” she said, looking at her computer, arranging a pencil, straightening a stack of papers.

  “With all due respect,” he said, pushing it, “you’re not being hasty enough.”

  Now she leveled him with narrowed eyes, her chin lifting ever so slightly as she studied his features for signs of deception.

  “You want to go to the server room?” she said.

  “I don’t have clearance,” he told her. “That’s why you need to accompany me.”

  “I give you lots of other privileges,” she said. “I tell you that you can surveil their house, their block, you can track their cars, their cell phones…”

  “And I may still need to do this,” he said, gently, “but first I must be sure that what we’re looking at is not an anomaly. Can you imagine the embarrassment?”

  She seemed to think about this the way someone who was scared of being wrong thought about things. If she was wrong, if he did what he was planning to do while she was in charge, and that proved treasonous, they’d both be executed.

  Knowing she’d need another nudge, he lowered his voice a touch, softened his eyes and said, “You trusted me to do this job. I need you to trust me now.”

  “I trusted you not to make my life complicated,” she said.

  “No, you trusted me to do my job.”

  “Fine, okay.”

  “This is my job. This is what I need from you. If I get this wrong because you didn’t want to help me do my job, then an innocent watcher could die.”

  “We get another,” she said in poor English.

  “No,” he replied, firm. “Watchers are hard to come by. Harder than finding a software engineer. These people are not replaceable.”

  He couldn’t help thinking how incredibly ugly she was when she made tough decisions. She looked like someone trapped in a room filled with smoke who was both constipated and ready to give birth at the same time.

  “I have to get clearance, it could take days,” she said.

  “We don’t have that,” he told her. “Besides, Ms. Yeung…you’re powerful, in charge of so much around here. If you stopped someone like this, if you saved the company from irreparable harm, this would put you in the favor of your bosses, would it not?”

  “I suppose,” she said.

  “It would.”

  “Okay, yes, it would,” she relented.

  “Good, then get your keys, I’m ready now.”

  “What about the entrance log?”

  “For the server room?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He didn’t know there was one, but it made perfect sense. It was a secure room. Not just someplace anyone could enter.

  “If it needed to be erased, and someone did it for you without anyone’s authorization but yours, would that be a problem?”

  He was now tap dancing on thin ice. He was telling her she could be a hero, but she had to trust him and that meant breaking the rules not once but twice.

  “You can do that?” she asked.

  “I am an overseer because I have keys to all the doors in all the digital rooms this company has. When you gave me an updated security clearance, you also authorized me to go where the trail leads.”

  “It lead you here,” she said.

  “Physically,” he replied. “Get your keys, Ms. Yeung. We need to go right now.”

  Reluctantly, she did just that.

  They walked to the elevator bank. He was cool under pressure, but she was sweating bullets. None of this would be necessary if there were a real hack on the servers, but this was for dramatic effect. To see what Skylar needed him to see, Logan had to get access to the server room. This was what Skylar might have died getting to him. The elevator arrived. He let her go inside first.

  “Are you alright?” he asked.

  “Fine,” she said.

  They traveled down to the second floor where she accessed the server room, then made a motion for him to enter first. He walked into what looked like some future tech dream land. The sparsely lit room was cool in temperature, and all the servers were putting off a glowing, electric blue hue.

  “This is incredible,” he said in awe.

  “Hurry up.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. Having memorized the message under the 9s, the one Skylar left for him under the wallpaper, he went to the server hall’s monitor, accessed the location Skylar provided him and tried to gain entry.

  It asked for a Username.

  From memory, he typed in the one Skylar provided: 27F3Chiquita_272.

  But then it asked for a Password.

  He had not been provided with one. He searched his memory banks trying to remember if there was one on the wall.

  There wasn’t. He typed in Chiquita, but was denied access. After that he used a variation of different passwords. Finally he gave a little laugh and said, “Of course.”

  He typed in Banana, but was then told he had two tries left. His smile became a frown real fast. Wiping sweat from the back of his neck, and from his brow, he started to worry.

  If he failed to get around the ten entry lock down, he would trigger an alarm that the actual IT administrator would need to unlock.

  The next entry, he typed Cheshire.

  That failed, too.

  This had to have been orchestrated by Tristan, otherwise Chiquita wouldn’t be in the password. Tristan was nearly synonymous with banana.

  He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. If this didn’t work, if he had to run, he could knock out Ms. Yeung then exit the building fast. If he needed to kill the two guards, he wouldn’t hesitate. He’d been wanting to do that from day one anyway.

  He typed in DickShapedFruit, and suddenly he gained entry. He blew out his breath, then said, “Okay, I’m in.”

  “What are you looking for?” she said, her arms crossed, that ugly, squinted look on her face again.

  This is where he chose to bowl her over with tech jargon. Knowing this was an area of weakness for her made it easy. “I started out running a sniffer on the network traffic to this server. I was looking for certain, common factors that might provide evidence of TOR traffic on our network.”

  “TOR,” she said. “That’s what they use to surf the dark web, right?”

  “Yes it is. Anyway, I set up a dozen or so customized snort rules, but all that gave me was a bunch of false positives. I started to set up more, but then the search stopped altogether.”

  “Why?”

  “The TOR client generated new, unsigned security certificates. I was able to seize these certificates from the packet payload. From there, I had two choices: Keep the TOR traffic from reaching the exit nodes, or do what I’m doing now.”

  “Which is?”

  “Making sure the TOR traffic is legit.”

  “Can you just block it?” she asked. “We can take care of the problem at the source.”

  “If you block it, you lose the identity of the user and this was all for nothing.”

  “No, we’d have the traitor.”

  “Yes, but he’s one person. A single spoke in a very large wheel. There is a network of these traitors, of the Resistance. If we get to them, perhaps I can do a physical hack, take out his entire network. We can either hit his workstation, his house or his hidden properties.”

  “How do you know about hidden properties?”

  “They all have them. That’s where the gold is, Ms. Yeung. Do you want to make an example out of these people? Or do you want to sweep this under the rug because it’s hard.”

  “Of course I want to fix it right,” she said, as if it was preposterous not to.

  “Then we don’t take down an ant,” he said with that look in his eye, “we step on the entire ant hill. Then we flood it with gas and set it on fire.”

  Now she started to smile.

  “We’ll say we happened upon it,” he suggested, “then you can take the credit.”

  “This is my operation,” she snorted.

  “Naturally.�
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  “So how did you find this out?” she asked.

  “I have a packet which jumps from port to port, called port hopping. This is how I make the initial connection with a TOR exit node. Once I make a connection, and this is how I found this particular server, I identify the traffic. It’s TCP/443 and the traffic payload is encrypted. The TOR client then creates a self-signed SSL certificate via a random domain name. It does this every thirty minutes.”

  “How do you know all this?” she asked.

  “With all due respect, Ming,” he said, using her first name, “that would be like me asking you how you’re so smart. You’d simply shrug your shoulders and tell me you just are. So to answer your question”—he said, shrugging his shoulders—“this is what I do.”

  “Are you done?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  He sifted through a host of files until he saw the one named Chiquita. He opened the file and filling the screen was a computer countdown. It gave the days, the minutes, the seconds. And at the bottom of the counter, it said, “Time until TED.”

  Chapter Twenty

  What the hell was a TED? For a long second, his brain was blank, but then it kicked in. This was not a Resistance transmission, this was a Chicom transmission!

  Had he not known about the Chinese ships heading toward Long Beach, California, or the troop movements up through the southern border by South American forces, he might not have put two and two together so quickly.

  The countdown to a TED was now clear. TED stood for Transient Electromagnetic Disturbance, or electromagnetic pulse.

  The Chinese were going to detonate a high altitude EMP, crippling the entire western half of the United States. All they needed was for the South American troops to get within striking range. The pulse would effectively take out all of their hardware, and anything else that ran on solid state electronics. In a nutshell, the Chicoms would turn a mobile army of power hungry Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans and El Salvadorians into a pack of foot soldiers.

  But would that stop them? Probably not. It would certainly slow them down.

  As he committed the looming date to memory, he considered the ramifications. If the Chinese set off an EMP, it would power down the nuclear reactors, forcing the backup systems to come online.

  Those would run out of fuel though, without trucks to transport the fuel they needed to operate in a grid down scenario.

  Within a month, the generators would quit and the rods would melt. Half of America would be a nuclear wasteland. One giant Chernobyl. That’s before the radioactive elements got into the jet stream, crippling, mutating and eventually killing everything in its path.

  Good God, he thought, the blood draining from his face.

  Now he was thinking about those Chinese ships lumbering across the North Pacific Ocean. Where before they brought in trucks, transport vehicles and tanks, now they had to bring in something else. New systems for the remaining generators? Probably. He couldn’t be sure, not without hacking into the shipping companies mainframe and scanning shipping manifests, but an educated guess was warranted. For him to hack the shipping company under the watchful eye of one duck eating Cambodian named Ming Freaking Yeung seemed impossible.

  Plus, if he had to rush—which he would due to time constraints—he ran the risk of leaving a trail. One that wouldn’t be hard to trace back to him.

  “What are you waiting for?” Ms. Yeung asked, extra jumpy.

  “Be quiet for a second.”

  In his head, he tried to think of how many nuclear reactors were still online. The last of the California reactors were closed years ago. Others in nearby states were powering down as newer reactors were coming online in the northwest.

  Off the top of his head, he was pretty sure there were five of these older reactors left in neighboring states, only one of them near California. What did it really matter, though? If one of the reactors lost permanent power, if the rods melted, there was enough radioactive decay to turn California into meat soup. Whoever didn’t die right away would become cancerous mutants, forced to die slow, horrible, painful deaths.

  That meant Chinese casualties, too. With that thought alone, Logan was sure the Chicoms had some sort of plan. They’d be absolute fools not to!

  “Let’s go,” he finally said to Ms. Yeung, his face both numb and scorching hot at the same time.

  “What did you find?” she asked, keeping up, glancing at him several times only to see an uncharacteristically vulnerable look of distress.

  “Something bad,” he said, scrambling for an answer.

  “What?” she asked, grabbing the sleeve of his shirt and hauling him around. He turned to face her, but without an explanation. “Tell me!”

  “This kind of traffic…it’s not using our servers by accident. They’re using our network like their own server farm.”

  “Meaning what?” she said, panicked now, too.

  “Meaning their offsite operation is using SocioSphere’s interconnected servers as their main hub,” he lied. “They’re synchronizing our system to use against us.”

  “We need to shut it down,” she said, grabbing his arm and tightening her grip.

  “That can’t be done on site,” he said. “But if it continues, honestly, they’re going to bring everyone down using our system. Imagine nothing working. Nothing.”

  “What do you need?” she asked quickly.

  “I sent some data to my system. It’s encrypted, but our quantum computer can break the encryption relatively easily. The ISP address, however, will be fake, cycled through like the old VPNs. It will take me some time. But if I can come up with an address, we can gain access to the physical address and from there I can smoke their system.”

  “Get me the address,” she said, as serious as he’d ever seen her, “and I can send in teams to wipe them out.”

  “No,” he said, seeing his plan falling apart. “If there’s even a hint that you’ve got Chicom teams on the way, they’ll smoke the server themselves and reroute to a new location. I’m one of them. A tech geek. I can get in, gain their trust, then nuke everything in the house.”

  “How?”

  “Let me worry about that,” he said.

  This caused concern in her. She dealt with it though. “How long will it take to get the address?”

  “Not long, or maybe forever. It all depends on what I find when I’m in. And that all depends on how good these guys are versus how good I am.”

  “How good are you?” she asked.

  “I’m a master at internal penetration,” he said with a wink. She blanched, but before she could respond to yet another crude innuendo, or think too hard about what he’d just said, he followed up with the single most important thing he needed. “It’s the external movements I’m most concerned about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If the address is outside the city, and I’m sure it is, then I’ll need to travel.”

  “We can get you documents,” she said.

  “I just need a sticker,” he told her, following her into her office.

  There was a sticker one of the Chicom patrolmen gave him when he was smuggling Harper out of the city that got them through the various checkpoints. He shouldn’t know about it, but he was hoping that the fear he put in her would somehow help her overlook some of the small details he was giving up.

  “No,” she said.

  “After what we just found out, Ms. Yeung, we cannot risk everything on half-measures.”

  “I’ll send someone with you,” she said. “An escort. You can travel in a diplomatic vehicle.”

  “Let me see what I can find,” he said. “If I can get an address, we need to move quickly. If not, we need to formulate a contingency plan to protect the company. That might mean bringing in your superiors.”

  “Let’s try to avoid that,” she said softly.

  Even Ming Yeung was afraid of Communist scrutiny. The principle of staying out of the light so as not to be seen
carried through to them because that’s the world they grew up in. In America, it was a lesson they learned through a tremendous amount of fighting, losing and death.

  “I agree.”

  When they left, she said, “You can erase our entry, yes?”

  “If it’s necessary, I can.”

  “It’s necessary.”

  From his office, he anonymously accessed the security mainframe using a cloaking program. From there he went into the digital files, found the server room on the second floor and scanned the login registry. He found the moment he and Ms. Yeung made entry, erased two hours before it and shut off monitoring as of that moment. He also erased all traces of entry and exit for the morning. In its place, he patched the previous day’s entries for that exact timeline, crudely spliced them together, then exited the system.

  He stepped out of his office for a moment, walked to Ms. Yeung’s office and said, “Entry, exit and logins and logouts have been cleared.”

  “It’s scary that you can do that so quickly.”

  “I guess it’s a good thing that I’m a company man, isn’t it,” he said casually.

  “If you’re not, you’ll be a dead man.”

  “Where’s the fun in that?” he asked, winking at the woman as he left. For a second—and maybe he mistook this—but for a second, he thought she might have blushed.

  Back in his office, he ran a system scan, a protocol that Ms. Yeung would not understand, but that he could explain as a custom search pattern for tracking TOR clients, should he be pressed on the issue at a later point. After about an hour of it, he shut it down, then went to her office with a restrained smile and said, “I got it. It’s an address in Oregon, just south of Roseburg in a town called Dillard.”

  “Oregon?” she asked, her jaw making an ugly drop.

  “It’s an unincorporated dump with a post office and about five hundred people. It’s a wonder the place is even on the map.”

  “How do they have the bandwidth to run something like this?”

  “It doesn’t take much, that’s the beauty of it,” he said, sitting in the chair in front of her desk. “As for Oregon, ten bucks and some of your soggy, duck feet soup says there will be a group of them there with motion detection for lookout, dogs for intimidating and guns for killing.”