by Tom Clancy
“Me, too.”
“Come see us as soon as you can.”
“I will.”
It was a promise Jack made more often than he fulfilled, but he told himself he’d try to do better.
He hung up the phone and lay there, and within a few seconds he told himself he was going to talk to John, talk to Gerry, and see if he could be of some help in finding out who the fuck was at fault for the leak.
He’d find the son of a bitch responsible for Jen Kincaid’s death by working as an analyst, and then, if he could, he’d revert to direct-action operator, and he’d kill that son of a bitch himself.
21
Although he could not know it yet, the man Jack Ryan, Jr., very much wanted to kill was a twenty-nine-year-old Romanian named Alexandru Dalca.
People had described Dalca as a con man since long before he was even a man. When he was a very young boy he’d been a thief, a swindler, like a character out of Oliver Twist, and now, still in his twenties, he drove a Porsche and lived in a million-dollar condo in Bucharest’s posh Sector 1 neighborhood.
A year earlier, Dalca stepped out through the gates of Jilava Prison and into the rain, a free yet completely soulless man. He’d entered the prison’s walls six years before that, and though he’d gone in with deep psychological issues and significant abilities that he used for the benefit of himself and the detriment of others, the person who departed prison that wet morning last year was incalculably more dangerous than the one who went in, because prison had given him the last of the tools he needed to become a true criminal mastermind.
At the prison’s gates a car had waited for him, as had been promised, and he shook off the rain and climbed into the back, not even taking time to breathe in the fresh air or look at the green fields to the east.
No, his mind was on his future, his plan.
His retribution. Retribution in the form of personal gain earned via injury to America.
Dalca was born in the city of Râmnicu Vâlcea in 1989, the same year Romanian strongman President Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife and deputy prime minister, Elena, were ousted from power, then seconds later pushed in front of a brick wall and eviscerated with 120 bullets.
Alexandru grew up in the years after the revolution, and it would be a mischaracterization to describe anything that happened to him in his formative years as a real childhood. His father was unknown to him—his mother never even acknowledged the man’s existence, and she herself died in a factory fire when Alex was just five. He was put into a horrific orphanage with little food and zero nurturing, so soon enough he found his way onto the streets of his town. Fortunately for him, Râmnicu Vâlcea had a decent amount of tourism, because it was just a few hours from Bucharest by train and in the foothills of the beautiful Southern Carpathian Mountains. Dirt-cheap Westerners looking for a dirt-cheap vacation flocked to Romania in the nineties, and young Alexandru learned a smattering of English begging from Western tourists, offering to shine shoes for a few coins, or selling items he and his street-urchin friends stole from market stalls and gift shops.
A group of British girls all but adopted the handsome boy during their week in his town, and they brought him back to their youth hostel to give him food and his own bed to sleep in.
He was seven years old, and when the girls went back home to England, Alexandru stayed behind at the hostel. The building had a popular Internet café, the only one in Romania outside Bucharest in those early days of the World Wide Web, and young Alexandru had never before seen a computer. He spent hours every day peering over people’s shoulders, sat next to them and talked in his bad English, watched them playing games and communicating with loved ones around the world, asking them a million questions about the amazing device. Often he would swipe bills out of their purses and backpacks while he did all this, but just a few, because he did not want to be banished from the establishment.
Dalca became a fixture of the place, working odd jobs at the hostel and café, but while doing so he became adept at conning travelers of their excess food and change. He improved his English talking to the travelers, as well as by watching the movies that played all day long on a VCR in the great room.
After a few years Dalca expanded on his crimes. In his off time he formed up with some older Romanian teens who had started a scam using the new website eBay to post ads for items that Americans would pay for in advance. The Romanian guys would never ship the items; they would pocket the money and then simply open up new accounts and do it again as soon as their old eBay ID took a hit for the rip-offs.
Good English was the most important skill for these types of scammers, and Dalca’s was good enough. As soon as Alexandru’s voice changed with puberty, he became the telephone man on dozens and dozens of scams at a time. He spent twelve hours a day in a phone room set up next door to the café making deals, then responding to questions from ever more frantic and angry customers wondering why they hadn’t yet received their purchases.
He could adopt a chill, relaxed demeanor to convince his marks that everything was all right, because, in fact, everything was all right.
For Alexandru and the boys he worked with, everything was great. They just got paid to do nothing more than make empty promises.
By now he was fourteen years old.
After a while eBay purchasers learned to be suspicious of items sold in some Central European countries where this scam was prevalent, so the gang had to adapt. Alex became an “arrow,” a money mule. The eBay cons were tweaked so that they went through money-transfer offices and PO boxes all around Western Europe, and Alexandru and other kids like him would spend their days on buses or trains, traveling from one country to another, accepting money at wire transfer offices, picking up checks at PO boxes, and immediately sending them back home to his cohorts.
As e-commerce changed, so did Alexandru Dalca’s con operations on the Internet. The work ethic he learned as a starving orphan, as well as the English he learned growing up in the hostel, made him the brains of his own operation by age sixteen, and by nineteen he drove a used Porsche 911 through the town.
There was no doubt his life’s track would have him running his own major operation by his mid-twenties, if it hadn’t been for the Americans.
The FBI kicked in the door to his Bucharest apartment one night, along with a special unit of Romanian cyberinvestigators. Since Alex Dalca was a well-known arrow for a high-dollar ring that had ripped off thousands of Americans, he was made an example of by the Romanians, and sent to Jilava Prison near Bucharest for a term of six years.
He’d had no love for anyone before this point, but now he had a passionate hatred for Americans.
Jilava Prison had three things that would turn Alexandru Dalca into something powerful and dangerous over the next six years. A library, dozens and dozens of other con men . . . and a spy.
The spy was Luca Gabor, a former case officer for the Romanian Intelligence Service who’d been recruited into an Internet scamming company because of his ability as a social engineer and the myriad “dual purpose” skills that made him both a good case officer when “running” an agent as well as a crook. Gabor was four years into a sixteen-year sentence, and he saw in twenty-one-year-old Dalca a way to pass on his abilities to someone who could go back on the outside and employ them, and in turn give a cut to the convicted spy’s teenage daughter.
Gabor built upon Alexandru Dalca’s already impressive skills, teaching him how to convince anyone of anything, but more important, he taught Dalca how to use open-source intelligence to discover people’s secrets.
At the same time, Dalca read every piece of literature in the prison library about computers, software, applications, and social media.
His intelligence officer mentor gave him a list of books to read and websites to study for the day he left prison, and he promised Dalca he’d set him up with a job at his old company along with a ne
w start.
On that rainy morning Dalca left Jilava and was picked up in a Mercedes sedan and taken to a new apartment in Bucharest’s city center by a new employer arranged by Luca Gabor.
Alex Dalca was a new man, fortified with skills that could have been used for good or evil. He would have been an incredible asset to any intelligence agency in the world, including the United States, if not for one fatal flaw.
Alexandru was in it for the money, and he had no concept of the pain he caused others in acquiring that money.
His childhood made him a person socially disinterested in others, despite his incredible ability to influence them. Prison had just compounded all this, and even though Dalca had the raw materials for survival and even success, he never thought about any other person’s wants or needs.
It wasn’t just that he was not an empathetic or understanding person.
Alexandru Dalca did not even understand that there was something there to understand.
To him, there was no good, and there was no bad. There was only Alexandru Dalca, and everyone else. He was in competition with all other life forms on planet Earth, here to maximize his own gains, unaware of the costs incurred by others.
Dalca was, by any clinical definition, a sociopath.
Success for him was achieving the objective in front of him, and thereby gaining wealth. He was not married, and he was disinterested in sex other than as an occasional biological need.
No, he worked, day in and day out, for the same company his mentor in prison had worked for, a firm called ARTD, Advanced Research Technological Designs.
—
There exist companies that are built like regular aboveboard operations but are wholly in the business of illegal activity. They couch their operations and practices in benign titles and descriptions.
Advanced Research Technological Designs is such a company. One can spend as much time on the boring corporate website as one wants and one will not learn a thing about just what it is the company does, what goods or services it provides. One might find contact info for it in the form of e-mail addresses, or a Royal Mail post office box address in London, but no information about where, exactly, ARTD’s brick-and-mortar building is located.
And though its mail goes to London, there is certainly no photo of ARTD’s glass-and-steel London headquarters on their website, because ARTD’s glass-and-steel London headquarters does not exist.
ARTD has its own building—but it’s a four-story drab gray communist-era poured-concrete structure in Bucharest’s city center on Strada Doctor Paleologu.
The dreary structure was full of some of Romania’s best hackers, but it was also full of men and women called “researchers.” These were the ones who made the scams work, who got strangers on the other side of the globe to give over passwords and bank account info, and other details that helped the hacks along.
And within months of leaving prison, the best researcher in the company was Alexandru Dalca.
He was not a computer hacker himself; he understood computers, but he was no coder—he saw all that technical mumbo jumbo as mind-numbingly boring stuff.
What he was good at was convincing people of things, building trust, smiling with his voice, conveying confidence, and getting what he wanted.
And for a company that trolled the Internet looking for victims, arguably the one thing more important than a good computer hacker was a good con man.
And Alex Dalca was the best.
He’d learned more than swindling people out of their money along the way. His job was to obtain passwords through social engineering, and a key component of this work was developing a connection with his target. He would, for example, find himself tasked with getting into the network of a bank in Cyprus. It wasn’t enough to know the name of the CFO, he had to know where the man played tennis, who he slept with on the side, where the husband of the secretary he slept with worked, and where that man went to lunch so he could be spoken with quietly.
These types of investigations became his bread and butter, something he recognized early in his career in Internet fraud as being the most important asset.
He was a master at OSINT techniques, the ever-evolving science and art of open-source intelligence. When he wasn’t perpetrating cons he was reading books on the subject, or he was pressuring the hackers in his company to get him information he could find no other way.
Alex learned quickly that no matter how carefully a person tries to hide his or her identity online, armed with only a small amount of knowledge of close associates, Alexandru could find them and open them up like a wrapped Christmas present.
Everybody had someone in his life on social media who liked to talk. Joe might be in the CIA and a first-rate practitioner of personal security, but his sister’s roommate from college who lived in Reston was all over unencrypted e-mail talking about the cute guy Joe she met through her college roommate and the fact he knew everything about Paris from his time there in the State Department. Looking deeper, Alex could find someone at the embassy in Paris talking about Joe’s arrival party as a consular official, and Alex could back up further, find the moment all Joe’s college social media accounts were scrubbed, something that didn’t happen to State Department employees.
That meant Joe was a spook, and he was now dating a girl in Reston, Virginia, which probably meant he was back at Langley.
In the intelligence field it had a name—IDENTINT, for identity intelligence—and although Dalca wasn’t in the intelligence field, he could develop targeting information on virtually anyone, anywhere, with a computer, a phone, and a little time.
This was Dalca’s job. He could out a guy like Joe in a morning fishing expedition, even though spies weren’t his focus. But everything changed for the young Romanian researcher that day the he was taken in to his director’s boss and told that a company called the Seychelles Group had hired ARTD to do some specific work for them.
—
It would be a gross exaggeration to say that the People’s Republic of China had begun outsourcing its cyberwarfare capabilities, but the case of Advanced Research Technological Designs was not unique. China had been caught in some high-profile hacking operations in the past few years, and the plausible deniability afforded to them by working via corporate cutouts with highly skilled computer experts made sense to them.
They saw these corporations—some based in India, others in Central or Eastern Europe—as wholly financially motivated, and the price paid to them by the People’s Republic of China—again, through intermediaries—was small change for the huge nation when compared to the safety this scheme afforded them.
ARTD had been using its hackers to attempt to break into various American government servers. They targeted civilian firms with access contracts with the U.S. government, to use their data links to try to “swim upstream” into military, intelligence, and other networks.
They’d been at it for more than a year, and it wasn’t something Dalca was working on at all, when he was called into the surprise morning meeting with the director of ARTD himself, Dragomir Vasilescu.
“Dalca,” Vasilescu said, “I am taking you off your other assignments immediately. I have a job for you.”
“Hope it’s something more challenging than that Petrobras account I’m working on. The Brazilians have me digging into the private lives of some of Exxon’s senior staff, the most boring wealthy people on earth. I did it with a phone, a finger, and access to Google. Really, sir, this job is getting too easy.”
Dragomir Vasilescu smiled. Alexandru could build rapport with anyone, even the director of his company, but Vasilescu also knew all about Dalca’s skills, and he was frankly afraid of the younger man. He imagined Dalca was somehow using social engineering to dig into his innermost thoughts right now.
The director said, “This might indeed be more challenging. Our technical staff has gai
ned access to a file from the American government.” He looked down at the paper in front of him. “It’s the complete record on a server at the Office of Personnel Management. Employee records of men and women working for the government who are applying for a security clearance.”
Dalca’s eyebrows rose. “How many records?”
“Over twenty million. All raw data. Application forms and fingerprints.”
“That sounds promising. How did we come across that?”
Vasilescu laughed. “We hacked into an Indian cybersecurity company that had a contract with the U.S. government to do penetration testing on their machines about five years ago. The Indians managed to exfiltrate this data, and apparently they accidentally kept it on one of their servers. They’d never even accessed it. We borrowed it from them to see if it was something we could use in phishing or spoofing operations. The best part is the Americans will never know anything has been accessed and exfiltrated by us, because we took it from a cybersecurity firm that didn’t even know they had it.”
“Beton,” Dalca said. It was the Romanian word for “concrete,” but it was also slang for “cool.” Dalca thought there could, indeed, be some opportunities to make money in these free files. He asked, “What do you want me to do?”
“Our client has asked us to see if there is some way you can use this raw data to run full investigations of men and women currently working in the U.S. embassy in Beijing.”
Dalca said, “So this is for China?”
“Of course not. We work for a company registered in the Seychelles. The Seychelles Group is their rather unimaginative name.” Vasilescu chuckled to himself. “Of course they are obviously a front for Chinese intelligence. So I need you to wade through twenty-some-odd million files and try to associate these records with people working for the U.S. in Beijing. I’m sure the Chinese want to identify spies to throw them out of their country or to use the intel for blackmail purposes. Plus, the data on the U.S. government employees also has records of their foreign contacts. I assume this will help them find their own citizens who are spying against them.”
