The Shadow File (An Alex Vane Media Thriller, Book 4)

by A. C. Fuller

  The drinks arrived, and I took a long sip of the cognac, which burned my throat in a way that made me feel more alert. I pointed up at a TV over the bar. "Anything weird on the news?" I asked.

  "Nothing I noticed. But I wouldn't know what to look for. What the hell was that thing anyway?"

  I told Lance the short version of Innerva's plan, avoiding his eyes because I figured that, when he knew the extent of it, he'd be pissed that I'd gotten him involved.

  Instead, when I'd finished he just downed the rest of his drink and stood up. "You two oughtta get home," he said. "And I'm going to do the same. I have no idea whether what I just did will topple the asshole-industrial complex, or do nothing at all. I figure you can fill me in some other time. But I have to get home."

  Greta stood and hugged him, but I was surprised he didn't want to hear more. "What do you have to do?" I asked.

  Lance smiled. "I was reading the sports section when you texted me. Gotta get back to that."

  38

  From the sports bar, it took us another twelve hours to get home. We'd missed our flight, and since there were no more until five in the morning, we slept in chairs near the gate. Greta slept so soundly that I had to double check that she was still breathing, but I was awake every hour or two, checking for updates about the hack. Nothing.

  All night, nothing.

  I called Bird around three in the morning, midnight in Seattle. Beyond what we'd published in the Tech Triune, he hadn't heard anything about the hack either. He had no idea what I'd been through, and I wasn't ready to tell him yet, so he spent most of the call urging me to return to the office so we could get back to swamping the internet with dubious content. I told him I'd be at The Barker in the morning, and asked him to set up a call with the women from the Tech Triune.

  Greta and I spent the first half of the flight talking through every explanation we could think of for the odd way we'd been detained by Ruffalo and the two guys from airport security. Most likely, we'd never know exactly what happened, but we settled on a theory.

  We'd been right that Innerva told Amand that she'd given us the USB drive. I didn't blame her for that. And unless you've been shoved feet-first into a wood-burning stove, neither should you.

  Amand would have known that we couldn't plug in the drive in Cuba without Innerva's network, and we figured he'd gotten her to tell him that we were headed back to the U.S. If not, he'd probably assumed it. Either way, it would have been easy enough for him to figure out which plane we'd be on, assuming he had contacts within the Cuban Police Department.

  He would have known that it was possible for us to plug in the USB drive on the airplane, and to run the program through the airplane Wi-Fi. But he probably also knew that we didn't have laptops with us. We figured that the photos of the wood stove and Innerva had actually been a desperation play on Amand's part. An attempt to silence us long enough for his men to grab us when we came off the plane at JFK.

  And it had worked. We'd been grabbed.

  After that, he'd had to work through the port authority and airport security to get us, using his network within the NYPD. That's where Ruffalo had come in.

  But what had happened from there on was a total mystery to us. After ensuring that we didn't have the USB drive anymore, why hadn't they either killed us or just let us go? I figured it had something to do with the phone calls Ruffalo had received, but I could take it no further.

  We both drifted off in the second half of the flight. I rested my head against the gentle vibration of the cabin wall, Greta stretched her seatbelt far enough to nestle her head on my shoulder, and we slept.

  Until the next morning, we didn't know that, while we slept, an empire collapsed.

  Having decided to check in at The Barker on the way home, we walked into the office around ten in the morning. I wanted to talk to the women at the Tech Triune, and Greta wanted to be with me.

  I saw Bird as I got off the elevator, and I knew right away that something was up. He was full of nervous energy and his face wore that mischievous look he got every time we broke a major story. As it turned out, not only was the story of Innerva's attack breaking, but we were the ones breaking it.

  After leading me and Greta back to his office, he waved at the couch in the corner and sat behind his desk. Greta and I flopped down next to each other, and I studied the look on his face.

  "Good to see you," I said at last. "I can tell something is up."

  "You, too," Bird said. "Something is way up."

  He swiveled his laptop around so we could read the screen. It was an article from the Tech Triune, plastered three columns high across the homepage of The Barker in a font size that would have been appropriate for announcing the beginning of World War III.

  American Networks Under Attack

  Millions of Servers Destroyed

  Ransomware Attack Threatens U.S. Security

  I swallowed hard and looked at Greta, who just closed her eyes. I figured that, like me, she was feeling something between vindicated and terrified. "When did this break?" I managed to ask Bird.

  "Half an hour ago. I tried your cell and Greta's but...I mean...I didn't even know about this until an hour ago. They sent it to me for approval and said we needed to get it up fast before the networks got it. You told me once that it's better to publish first, ask questions later, so I did."

  Greta and I were silent, and now Bird was reading me. "Any chance you were involved in this?" he asked.

  I didn't say anything, but that didn't mean I wasn't answering. Greta likes to say that I'm easily readable, no good at deception. And Bird had me cold. "Holy hell!" he said. "We gotta get your story up on the site. Was Innerva involved? What does it actually all mean? Does this have something to do with James? Alex, what the hell is going on?"

  I wasn't sure whether to read the story, flip on the news networks to see if they were covering it yet, or head home to check the Collude app on my laptop on the off chance that Innerva had made it out alive, and had written to me.

  "I guess you need some time," Bird said.

  I read the headline again and started to click on the link. "It's fine if you want to take a minute to read it," Bird said, "but there's no need. Angela at the Tech Triune is waiting on your call."

  39

  "Alex, good to hear your voice," Angela said. "I hear you've been on a bit of an adventure. I've got Mahir here as well. You're on speakerphone."

  Angela was the head of the Tech Triune and, under normal circumstances, she spoke quickly in a high voice, like someone in a perpetual rush. But now she sounded like she'd added six espressos to her daily dose.

  "And I've got Greta and Bird here," I said, not even close to matching her energy. "You're on speakerphone, too."

  I paused, thinking about what to ask, but couldn't get my thoughts together. Instead, I said, "Tell me everything. Wait, before you tell me everything, are you willing to tell me who your source was for that initial story?"

  I expected her to tell me to go to hell. Even though I was technically her boss, Angela and the women at the Tech Triune ran their shop with total editorial independence. I'd never asked her for a source, and I didn't expect her to give it to me.

  "Innerva Shah," she said.

  Greta and I exchanged a look. I sat on Bird's desk and ran a hand through my hair. "I—"

  "You didn't expect me to tell you, I know. And I wouldn't have if—"

  "If Innerva hadn't released you from your confidentiality agreement."

  "Exactly," she said, and she sounded excited. Like a lot of journalists, she'd never betray a source. But once a source released her from the pledge of confidentiality, she was anxious to tell the story.

  "We got a tip a couple weeks ago that something was coming," she said. "The first word came from a kid in Cuba, who'd been authorized to contact us to get the ball rolling. He told us how it would go down, and we promised to hold it until the hack was initiated."

  "Any chance the kid's name was Delfin
o?"

  "I can't tell you that, but I can say that it took him a while to convince us he was working with Innerva Shah who, as you know, is a living legend."

  "Delfino is dead," I said. "I'm sorry to tell you like this, but—"

  "Alex, we know," Mahir said. Her voice was an octave lower and much calmer.

  It occurred to me to ask how they knew, but, after a respectful silence, Angela continued. "Anyway, we posted the story when it ran, the first one about Greyson Systems and then we waited. We don't know all the details of how the attack finally went down, but we know that it happened. Our source—"

  "You can say Delfino," I interrupted. "I don't think he'll mind."

  "Death doesn't release me from confidentiality," Angela said. "Like I was saying, our source had informed us that something big was happening, that Greyson was just the beginning. We hadn't heard from the source for a few days. Then, last night it started. We began hearing rumblings of strange server outages. Google's servers were suddenly processing seven percent less traffic than normal, nothing online was working as usual."

  "A power grid in San Diego went down as well," Mahir added. "Backup kicked on, but all night no one knew what had happened."

  "Basically," Angela said. "A hundred different things started going wrong, all unconnected at first. We were about to go to sleep and continue looking into it the next morning when we got the message."

  "What message?" Greta asked.

  That's when it hit me. If Innerva had released Angela from her confidentiality agreement, and if Angela and Mahir knew I'd been through "an adventure," that meant Innerva was alive and free.

  "Collude," Angela said. "It was Innerva."

  Greta and I exchanged huge grins.

  "She's okay," Angela said, "and she gave us the whole story. But Alex, if you're willing, we'd like you to fill in some details. This is going to go down as bigger than...well, there's nothing to compare it with. Bigger than everything, anything. At least in our field. We want to get your take."

  I'd been preparing myself for this internally. "No," I said. "Not for now, at least. We need to figure out what all this means first."

  "I can tell you what it means," Angela said.

  And she did.

  I'd been standing, pacing the room, with Greta following on my heels and Bird watching from behind his desk. But now I sat on the couch, almost unable to speak. I could barely process everything they were saying.

  As Mahir took calls from sources, Angela told us what was happening, interrupting herself occasionally to talk to Mahir, yell at a source, or talk through the implications of something they were hearing.

  The entire U.S. security system was in turmoil. As Innerva promised, the attack did three things.

  First, it destroyed the servers of companies, permanently erasing millions of gigabytes of data and stripping the companies of their primary assets.

  Second, it leaked millions of pages of documents to the web, including information on hundreds of extra-legal operations of the sort most Americans think only happen under strict military authorization.

  Third, she leaked damaging personal information about hundreds of executives, all of whom worked for the companies in question. Though none of that information had been included in her initial story, it was out on the web, just waiting for hungry reporters to comb through.

  "There's more information than we'll be able to digest in years," she concluded. "Whole computer networks are destroyed, payroll data erased, phone systems fried, secret programs revealed. Right now it looks like thirty percent of the private security firms in the country are affected. Not affected. Ended. Like, there's nothing left except offices with dead machines and coffee makers. This is going to change everything."

  For the rest of the afternoon, I watched the TVs in the office with Greta and much of the rest of our staff, stopping every so often to read Twitter or scan a new blog post that was breaking online.

  News was coming from every direction, as the scope of the attack became apparent. Everything Angela told us broke on the major news networks over the next twenty-four hours.

  It was the biggest news story of the year, maybe of the decade, and we spent the whole day and night watching it unfold. As strange as it sounds, I was happy that it was completely out of my control.

  And, as Greta and I fell asleep in my office, I realized that what was even stranger was that my name hadn't come up, and neither had Innerva's.

  40

  "Alex."

  I heard it in a dream at first. I was walking in the Bosque de la Habana, looking for my cell phone, and my name came like a whisper from the trees.

  "Alex."

  I stopped and stared up at the trees, which swayed and rustled in the warm night air.

  "Alex, you're going to want to wake up." It was Greta's voice this time, and for a moment I was stuck in the dream, knowing it was a dream but not wanting to wake up until I found my cell phone.

  Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. Greta's slender fingers pressing gently. "Alex."

  I opened my eyes and the first thing I saw was an iPhone screen. Bird was holding it up and I tried to read the headline, which was blurry and wavy. He'd woken me up this way a few times. Usually to show me the finished product of an all-night work session. In the past, he'd always been holding up our homepage.

  This time, it was the homepage of CNN. It wasn't a regular headline, but one of those top-of-the-page banners that's supposed to tell you just how important the story is.

  Cyber Attack Cripples Private U.S. Security Companies

  Rogue ex-CIA Officer Blamed

  The first line was nothing new, but the second line had me grabbing the phone and leaping off the couch. "'Rogue ex-CIA Officer'? What the hell does that mean?"

  I only needed to read the first line of the story to get my answer:

  According to multiple sources within the intelligence community, former CIA operative Amand Oliveto, who has been managing a data security firm for the last three years, is being blamed for the devastating cyber attack that struck the U.S. security system yesterday.

  "It's everywhere," Bird said.

  "Everywhere," Greta repeated.

  My eyes darted back and forth between the two of them, then landed on Greta. "How long have you—"

  "I woke up an hour ago and ran into Bird."

  "When did this—?"

  "It broke online in the middle of the night. It was too late for the morning papers, but it's the lead story on every homepage in the world, and Fox, CNN, and MSNBC are all talking about it."

  Bird thrust a large cup of coffee into my hand, and I'd never been happier that I'd hired him. I took a huge swig, then followed him and Greta out of the office and into the main room of The Barker. It was only six in the morning, and much of the staff wouldn't arrive for another two hours. But the TVs were already on, watched by about a dozen staffers who'd stayed the night.

  CNN and MSNBC were on commercial, and we unmuted Fox, where a square-jawed anchor was launching into a breaking news segment.

  "Striking revelations to share with you this morning regarding American security interests.

  "Yesterday, details began to emerge of the largest ransomware attack in U.S. history, which crippled thousands of servers and caused chaos across the country. In addition millions of documents and videos have been released to news agencies worldwide, detailing decades of private security operations, including extra-legal wiretappings, detentions, and possibly killings. It's important to note, of course, that this news is breaking quickly and Fox has not yet been able to verify it independently.

  "At this time, complete details are unknown, but the size of the leak suggests that those details, as they unfold, may have far-reaching consequences. Most importantly, in breaking news this morning, Fox has learned that the mastermind of the attack is named Amand Oliveto.

  "According to multiple sources with knowledge of the attack, Oliveto is a senior director of a company called Advanced
Regional Data Security, or ARDS. Details are still coming in, but evidence shows that Mr. Oliveto planned the cyber attack over the last months in an attempt to extort money from the companies he was supposed to be working for. Companies that provided security and intelligence support services to branches of the U.S. military and the State Department. One senior intelligence official called Oliveto's attack 'a failed coup d'etat.'"

  I stared at the TV in disbelief, too stunned even to look at Greta.

  The anchor continued, "Again, according to multiple sources, this attack, which is unprecedented in U.S. history, originated in Cuba, where the FBI is currently seeking Mr. Oliveto. It's unclear at this time whether they are working with the Cuban authorities to try to secure him, and, if so, what kind of deal might be struck to do so."

  I grabbed the remote from Bird and muted the TV.

  "What the hell?" Greta said. "How did Innerva...?"

  My mind had been racing since I first read the headline, and suddenly it all made sense.

  In the end, Innerva chose targeted vengeance. According to all the reports, only thirty percent of the companies offering private security had been affected by the attack. The ones that got no-bid contracts. The ones that killed without answering to anyone. The ones who killed James, or knew about it.

  But there was a piece of the attack she hadn't told me about.

  "She framed him," I said, a huge smile taking over my face. "She framed Amand for the whole thing."

  That reminded me of something.

  I saw Mia walking by with a stack of papers. Apparently she was the only person in the office still trying to put in a regular workday, and I caught her eye. "Please send someone to my apartment. I need my laptop."

  41

  An hour later I was alone in my office. Rationally, I knew it was unlikely that I'd hear from Innerva, but something in me was sure she'd written.