by Ryan Schow
“Who would do something like this?” Agent Young asked.
“I told you,” Brayden said, getting everyone’s attention, “kids my age or younger.”
“Bullshit,” Agent Charles barked, still hot under the collar.
“Someone who goes by the handle @DotGovs hacked the names, titles, email addresses and phone numbers of nine-thousand DHS employees, twenty-thousand FBI agents and a ton of DOJ staffers as some political message about Pakistan. Whomever this was, he later claimed he’d hacked two hundred megabytes of the one terabyte of information available to him.”
“How’d he get in?” Agent Pope asked. Pope looked like a Ken doll and the cologne he wore was so strong it seemed to have settled into the chairs and cubicles around them. At least it smelled good, not obnoxious like some guys might wear.
“He hacked a DOJ email account,” Brayden said. “Wormed his way into the agency’s intranet, then took whatever he wanted because he could. That happened this year, and he did it because it was that easy.”
“This is the same idiot who claimed he got military emails and credit card numbers he may or may not disclose, right?” Agent Romanov asked, like it was a conspiracy theory.
“If he’s not bluffing, how will you know it?” Brayden challenged.
“When it’s too late,” Kessler said.
No one said anything. Agent Clark, Whitney, her face was not only flush with color, it glistened with concern. Soon the perspiration would turn to sweat. It would run down her temples, into the creases of her underarms, along the back of her neck, in the burrows of her crotch. The woman might not be a total wreck after all. Perhaps she was just seeing all the things that could go wrong, working out all the little puzzles behind those restless eyes.
“Around the same time,” Brayden continued, “a fifteen year old and a sixteen year old out of the UK who are two thirds of the notorious hacking group, Cracka with Attitude, or CWA, hacked the FBI, stealing the sensitive information of tens of thousands of both FBI and DHS employees, including hacked emails from the top brass. We’re talking about the big swinging dicks. We’re talking FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano.”
He let that sink in.
“These kids who are younger than me, probably haven’t even got their peckers wet, pardon the expression, Whitney—”
“It’s Agent Clark,” she hissed.
“—but they managed to crack one of the world’s finest intelligence agency’s intranet and steal an absolute buttload of personal data.”
“To what end?” Kessler asked.
“That’s what you guys aren’t grasping. You’re not from my generation. You don’t listen. And truthfully you’re all too blockheaded to understand. These clowns, they don’t care about you. You’re the representation of authority. You’re not fair. You’re invasive. You police the nation and they don’t like you. So they hack you. They expose you. And they all do it because it wasn’t exciting enough playing Dungeons and Dragons, or now Call of Duty or Battlefield. In some cases, they’re hacktivists, but in other cases, they’re just bored and want to flex their digital dicks just to prove theirs are bigger than yours.”
“Is that how your little shitty generation of millennials speaks?” Agent Charles sneered.
“It’s how I speak, Bart.”
“Can you root them out? Close all the holes?” Agent Clark asked. “Because if you know all the ways in, then you know all the ways to keep them out.”
“I need to use a phone,” he said.
“Is he joking right now?” Agent Charles asked, making a big production of me putting him out.
“Shut up, Bart,” Agent Young said.
Agent Clark nodded for Brayden to go. At a private phone, he dialed the number in his pocket—his FBI jailer and informal probation officer from before the group of cyber nannies.
“This is a restricted number,” the voice said.
“I missed you,” Brayden replied.
The man on the other end of the line sighed and said, “What do you want?”
“You have a problem with your intranet I can patch up on this end, but we’ve just been hacked and shut down.”
“So fix it.”
“That’s not my job. See, here’s the thing…until this group, or this person is caught, your entire network is likely compromised. They won’t stop at us. Ever since you buttholes joined the agencies together to better share information, you just made it a one-stop shopping spree for black hat hackers and hacktivists.”
“I don’t need a child’s lecture on cyber security.”
“Your network is too large to segregate and tie off and there’s been too much wiener tugging by the powers that be to wake the hell up and realize that by joining forces, you left this nation at risk in a monumental way, so I’ll spare you the lecture and tell you that I’ll do my job here for the next six months, dutifully, as I promised, or I can find the people behind this attack and hand them to you with a freaking red bow around their little chicken necks—”
“Good,” he interrupted, “do it.”
“There are conditions,” Brayden said.
“Such as?”
He took a deep breath, calmed himself and let it out. “I do this, and then I’m out.”
“Piss off.”
“I look like a hero and you commute my community service to time served.”
“Who do you think you are?”
“Okay,” Brayden said. “Good luck then.”
Brayden hung up.
The next day, networks in five other field offices were hit in debilitating attacks that crippled their operations and left the bureau’s most guarded information at risk. Brayden’s contact called back just before ten A.M.
“Yes?” Brayden answered, trying not to sound smug.
“I drew up the contract. I expect you’ll sign it and take care of this.”
“I will.”
The line went dead.
Minutes later, he was on 4Chan using a program he designed to hunt down the original hacker’s handles from the thread he found yesterday.
As for hitting the other five FBI field offices, he simply took the attack on the Vegas office, mirrored it by piecing together code already written and stored in untraceable email accounts he’d set up years ago, then used a computer at a cyber café last night to drop into the deep web and surface under the five designated offices he was attacking.
After a furious twenty-five minutes of pounding the keyboard and a big ass can of Monster energy drink, he was in.
He dropped his bombs, then ghosted out, leaving devastation in his wake. After logging off TOR, he uploaded a virus that would basically self-wipe the hard drive over the next four internet sessions. As busy as the internet café was, he imagined it would be eight, nine hours tops before his digital footprints were wiped away completely. When he was done, he stood, popped his knuckles and stretched, then left, no one the wiser.
He found the hackers on 4Chan six hours later. He left messages for them on each thread, coded messages hackers of their stature would understand. Basically he told them, you hit one branch and I hit five…now what?
It wasn’t long before they made contact.
3
Looking at Agent Bartholomew Charles, just staring at his stupid ears, that dumb haircut, his gym muscles and his ugly suit and sneaker combo, Brayden seethed.
There was a knot on the back of Brayden’s head for about four hours after the agent hit him. Looking at the size of the ring on Agent Charles’ right ring finger, he understood why it hurt so badly. He was plotting the man’s demise when the hackers reached out to him.
WHO R U?
YOUR FAIRY GODMOTHER BITCH, Brayden replied, looking over his shoulder to make sure no one could see what he was doing.
The reply came quick: UR IN OVR UR HEAD.
Brayden typed in the response the second this juvenile warning came in.
I COULD HAVE HACKED THIS OFFICE WITH MY LEFT NUT. YOU TOOK THE LONG WAY AROUND,
LEFT TOO MANY CRUMBS BEHIND.
WHAT DO U WANT?
A PATSY. PICK YOUR VICTIM.
Brayden waited an intense half hour without a reply. He sort of expected that. The thing about criminals is they’re a shifty bunch. Always terrified of being caught. Always trying not to be paranoid when really they’re the most paranoid bunch ever.
DEEPBALLIN’.
That was the message.
NEED MORE INFO.
An email address appeared, a digital drop box of sorts, followed by the word PRETENDERS.
He cut and pasted the email address into the browser bar, used the password, pretenders, to get it, then saw the dossier drawn up on the group DeepBallin’.
GOT IT, he typed.
WHY?
They wanted to know why he was helping them.
INSIDE FRIEND.
SAME HACK ON 5 OFFICES, THAT WAS REALLY U?
After a minute, Brayden typed: WHO ELSE?
HAHA. U NEED A NEW HOME.
SERVING TIME, he typed.
AH. WHEN UR DONE.
They were inviting him into their fold. Interesting. No, unexpected.
I’LL CONSIDER IT. THX.
The thing about black hat hackers, the really dangerous ones, is they all know each other by reputation, except for the coding sociopaths who prefer to reign chaotic in utter anonymity, like Brayden. That’s why, despite his message, he would not consider it.
There is an unspoken code amongst hackers, especially like those more tenured members of 4Chan, and that’s that you stick together no matter what. It’s them, then everyone else.
Simple.
So yeah, Brayden just got one over on his FBI handler and on the local office. Then again, it wasn’t that hard. All he had to do was leave a trail of breadcrumbs on 4Chan leading to this office. The hack actually happened quicker than he’d planned. So yes, when the system went down two days ago, he was surprised.
Delighted, but surprised.
4
The night Brayden met with his potential students, he did so at his upscale venue at Hard Rock. They were an interesting batch. A couple of nerds, some good looking guys, but mostly your run of the mill AFC’s (Average Frustrated Chumps). From this bunch, he’d have the time to find and cultivate a couple of potential pick-up artists that would serve as his PUA bloodline.
Things were escalating at work, though.
The attack on the FBI really did happen too quickly. Everything was happening at light speed now. He could hardly keep his brains unscrambled while in the midst of an A.D.H.D. fit.
His interviewing process started out rough, but after looking a bit like he wasn’t sure what he wanted, he started to find some guys that stood out from the rest. The good looking guys would certainly make things easier, but one was a bit too cocky, maybe a troll, and the other too quiet.
He chose neither.
In the end, he wrote down his top four selections to deliberate on, thanked the entire group for coming, then promised to get into contact with them in the next couple of days.
He drove home, his thoughts shifting from pick-up to his job. Brayden needed to know about these four twenty-something douchebags that made up DeepBallin’, a group of pseudo-hacktivists who had a seedy reputation as serious talent but with egos and too much attitude. They seemed to always be looking for venues they didn’t really care about as ways to shove their talent in everyone else’s face. No one on 4Chan liked them, but they were good.
He’d give them that.
He was pulling up in the driveway when he decided who his two PUA’s-in-training would be: a guy named Martin Gomez from L.A. and Chase Malloy from Indiana of all places (welcome to the big city, son). With that decision made, Brayden’s noggin cleared, which made it a hell of a lot easier to dig into the history of DeepBallin’. The dossier the real hacker provided him with had DeepBallin’s Anonymous handles in 4Chan attached. All four of them. In the course of a couple of hours, he unearthed a number of threads of theirs that started out cocky and ended up turning into screw you sessions between them and their more civilized counterparts. Yeah.
This joyless sack of buttholes were an unpleasant pack to say the least.
Freaking social plebs.
At least, that’s what Brayden thought until two nights later when a group of guys with masks and guns broke into the house just after three A.M. and beat the ever loving shit out of him.
At least they had common sense enough to stuff a sock in his mouth and secure it with a length of duct tape before going to work on him. After it was wrapped around his head three times, that’s when the beatings began. Later, when he was alone, he screamed and sobbed into his gag. After that, he freed himself, drove himself to emergency, got seven stitches above his left eye, six small sutures on his left cheek bone and had an overworked resident reset his broken nose. He declined anesthesia and pain killers. The misery fueled him.
“You have a thing for pain?” the resident asked.
“Don’t want to forget.”
The man in scrubs shrugged his shoulders like it was no big deal, then snapped off his plastic gloves after only needing four adjustments and some contemplative eyeballing to line Brayden’s nose up with where it had been.
In the parking lot of the hospital, Brayden reached out to a friend back home who gave him a number to one of his local contacts. It was seven in the morning, but he didn’t care.
He needed protection.
Brayden dialed the number given to him, told the new source what he wanted, and waited. She called back and asked if a Springfield XP40 would work and Brayden said yes, but only if she threw in two boxes of ammo. The pistol was a solid make with rock solid ratings, at least that’s what she said.
“It’s lightweight and has a bit of a kick to it,” she told him. “It’s hard hitting and accurate, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
She told Brayden the price and he said yes. He didn’t need to ask about the serial numbers because he knew they’d be filed off.
They set the meet for later that night, then Brayden went home, changed without being seen by his roomies, grabbed a breakfast bar and headed off to work. The lady in the van with the two kids, she pulled up to him, but he hid his face and she continued on.
Whatever chance he had with her, whether he wanted or not, he’d just blown it. Not like it mattered. He wasn’t the kind of guy who wanted to ruin a marriage, or pull apart a family. Whatever he could gain from the sex, the price was way too high for it to be worth it.
When he strolled into the office at eight-thirty on the button looking like he’d been kicked in the face by mules, Agent Clark cringed and said, “What the hell happened to you?” to which he said, “I found our hackers. Rather they found me.”
After that, shit escalated.
Führerbunker
1
The last thing I remember was being shot in the chest and the face by some Russian asshole who had no problem killing girls. When I wake up, I expect to be in that building, but I’m laid out on some sheet of metal, or plywood. All hell is happening outside. I blink in the dim, dusty light. Look around. Apparently I’m in some kind of blown to hell building that smells heavy with concrete dust and smoke, but things are still coming back to me. That’s when I see them. The men hovering over my body.
Three of them. Soldiers.
One has his hands on my boob. The first one to see my eyes open startles. Glancing down, I see my exposed breasts, my cut off bra. Without thought, my hands fly up and the men’s eyes literally roast. They just sizzle, burn, and cave in.
Screaming, their hands flying to their faces, I’m so mad I don’t care. The energy I blast them with flings them through the air the same as a tornado might zing you sideways if it roared through hell destroying everything. One soldier crashes through a broken door into the street, another is launched through a dusty glass window and the third collides with a stone wall where his head splats like a busted open cantaloupe on the wall. The guy hitt
ing the wall, he dies where he lands and I don’t feel bad.
Not one bit.
Sitting up now, panting, my cheeks trembling with rage, I seethe. I’m mentally taking inventory of my body, wanting to make sure I’m okay.
Yes, I was shot. And yes, I suppose I was dead. Again.
That’s when my eyes find her: a girl my age standing in the corner of this dark building. She’s shaking. The look on her face…horrified. Is she afraid of me? Or is she afraid because we’re in the middle of the war and strange things are happening?
On her head is this leather beanie with the insulated ear flaps pulled up; her face is smudged with dirt and smoke, a few shades darker because when your city is under siege, finding time to shower takes a back seat to staying alive. I stare at her, trying to read her. A longer look has me thinking she can’t be more than twenty, but with all that fear changing her features, I can’t be sure.
Not that it matters. A girl like this, who’s dressed and alive, her mind’s almost not worth crawling to find the truth.
She’s looking at my face, my exposed chest, seeing not just my body, but the patch of blood and the rapidly healing holes from where I was shot.
“English?” I ask the girl, my voice gravely, rough.
She shakes her head, tears dripping onto her blackish cheeks. She’s really scared, asking me something in broken German, or is she speaking fluent German in a voice that’s small with fear and broken? I can’t be sure. Either way, I don’t understand her words, but I finally decide to just bump off her thoughts and what I read is her not being able to understand how I’m alive. Why the bullet holes that killed me closed on their own. She can’t get past the fact that I was shot and dead, and now I’m not.
Reading her thoughts, I realize those men I killed were trying to save me before they discovered I was dead and got the bright idea that it was okay to cop a feel.
“Perverts,” I grumble, my ragged voice drowned out by the screeching, mechanical noise of heavy machinery approaching.
Outside, a tank rumbles by the hole in the concrete building that was once a window, stops, adjusts its turret, then fires, rocking the huge metal death machine with a thunderous boom! Plumes of dust blast into the air and parts of the building I’m in crumble inward, pieces of concrete raining down around me.
