Major Devon called down to a Computer Systems Corporation SIGINT team sent out from DOD, working from the back of a nearby van. “Rigninski! Is the house still emitting ultrawideband?”
An engineer conferred with a technician wearing headphones. He looked up at Devon-even though he couldn’t clearly see him in the darkness. “Yes. It’s still transmitting. Must be running on battery backup.”
Devon looked toward a nearby FBI van, where an array of parabolic microphones was focused on various parts of the Sobol estate. “Agent Gruder, did we take out the generator?”
Gruder held up a finger as she listened in on a pair of headphones. After a good ten seconds she gave the thumbs-up sign. “It’s dead, Major. Good job.”
A somewhat forced cheer went up in the crowd closest to them. It was a small victory.
Major Devon smiled in the darkness. Now it was just a matter of waiting out the battery power backup in the computer room. That gave the Daemon just twelve hours to live.
Chapter 16:// The Key
Gragg hadn’t slept in three days, and he was beginning to hallucinate. At least he hoped he was hallucinating. Maybe he was dreaming. Oberstleutnant Boerner stood over him in the predawn darkness, smoking a cigarette in that faggy long filter holder of his. He morphed into a Colonel Klink-like character, and Gragg finally shook himself back to reality.
Gragg needed sleep, but once his mind was set on a problem, it always ran until physical exhaustion brought it crashing down. He was nearly at that point now.
Sleep. Blessed sleep. Dreamless sleep. No Boerners to trouble him-that 3-D texturized bastard. But there couldn’t be sleep until he solved the problem. The problem of the key.
Gragg looked around. He was lying on his couch beneath a scratchy wool blanket that carried the humid stink of a Houston cellar. The couch was a great big thing he’d picked up at a garage sale. It also carried the stench of too many humid days. The cushions, long since missing, had been replaced by a cot mattress that more or less fit in place. The sofa was his bed, dining room table, and La-Z-Boy chair rolled into one, and it stood like an island in the center of the industrial space that served as his apartment. There was nothing near the sofa for twenty feet in every direction. This was intentional. He had to get away from computer screens sometimes.
The key. What the fuck was the key? It was driving Gragg insane. He had screen-captured the encrypted text on that one Monte Cassino wall, and he hadn’t seen any other writing that might be the key. Could it have been in another room? What was he missing?
Fuck!
What kind of sadistic shithead created a map with an impossible puzzle? More irritating was that Gragg couldn’t reload the map to get more information. Not only was the Houston Monte Cassino server nowhere to be found, no other Monte Cassino maps appeared anywhere. The map was gone, as though the creator pulled the map from the entire Web.
How had they gotten Oberstleutnant Boerner to say those things? Was it some sort of Easter egg created by CyberStorm? Gragg had already checked the chat boards, but his search turned up nothing-no mention of the encrypted message or of Boerner’s little speech, or of the disappearance of the Monte Cassino map. Was he the only one experiencing this? He hadn’t asked a soul, though. This was Gragg’s secret.
Gragg had begun to suspect that the Monte Cassino map made a registry entry on his machine that prevented the map from appearing in the game listings again. To test his hypothesis, he cleared out hard-drive space on another PC and installed Over the Rhine on it in the hope that the clean machine would give him access to the Monte Cassino map, but it still didn’t appear in the Internet listings.
Had the game somehow restricted his IP address? Or his router’s MAC address? Goddamnit, he was grasping at straws now.
Think!
The problem: he had an encrypted string but no key-and no idea what encryption algorithm was used to create the string. Boerner had looked straight at him-or at least his avatar-and said, “…use your key, and ve vill meet again.“If Gragg found the key and decrypted the string, where did he enter the decrypted value? Would entering it somewhere make the Monte Cassino map reappear?
Gragg got up and wrapped the scratchy, smelly blanket around him. He shuffled across the room toward his workbench. Four desktops and two laptops were still powered up there. One was running a dictionary file against the encrypted string using a series of standard decryption algorithms. He stared at the lines spinning past in the debug window and laughed.
This was ridiculous. It could take a thousand years with all the permutations of a thirty-two-character string.
He thought about it for a moment. He could harness a few dozen zombie computers and distribute the task among them. He shook his head. He’d have to design the program to distribute the load-and it would still take too long to run. What, a hundred years? And what if the result wasn’t a proper word? How could he programmatically detect a successful decryption? He didn’t even know the encoding algorithm.
He cast off the scratchy blanket and sat down before a keyboard. He’d searched the chat boards, but he hadn’t done the obvious thing and Google-proxied the problem. He launched a Web browser and prepared to type the URL in manually. Perhaps there was a Web page dedicated to this.
Gragg froze just after his home page loaded. It was a popular news portal, and there off to the right were the news stories of the moment. The top headline screamed at him:
Dead Computer Genius Kills Eight
Gragg clicked the link, and the extensive news coverage of the siege at Sobol’s estate unfolded before him. Gragg voraciously read every word and followed every link. An hour later and he was wide-awake again with one ‘factoid’ echoing in his mind: “…Matthew Sobol, game designer and AI architect for Over the Rhine.”
This Sobol guy had been a genius. Beyond a genius. Gragg was rarely impressed by other people’s hacks-but this Sobol was the king. Engineering a daemon that took vengeance on the world once you were safely dead and beyond all punishment. Gragg’s mind ran through the possibilities. They were endless.
How much money had Sobol spent on this? The planning! And the Daemon was still on the loose. The Feds didn’t know how to stop it. You could hear it in the closed-lip pronouncements of the government spokespeople.
Goose bumps swept over Gragg’s skin. It felt like a new world had opened up to him. Was the Monte Cassino map just a coincidence? It had appeared in the last few days-only after Sobol’s death.
He couldn’t say that for sure, though. He’d been otherwise engaged prior to the mess with the Filipinos.
It couldn’t be a coincidence, though, could it?
Gragg knew, now more than ever, that he had to decipher the encrypted text. He felt he could never be sane again unless he knew more about the Monte Cassino map and about Sobol’s Daemon. He might have the inside track on something incredible-a new frontier in a world filled with familiar hacks, police surveillance, and drab suburban vistas. How long had it been since he’d felt a sense of wonder in his jaded soul? He was feeling that now. Was Monte Cassino Sobol’s work?
Gragg did a Web search for Monte Cassino and came up with a slew of hits-all relating to World War II. Instead, he reran the search, adding Over the Rhineas criteria. He still got about seven hundred hits, all of them historical because the Italian campaign, ultimately, was aimed toward Germany.
Gragg looked up from his laptop and stared at a desktop computer’s debug window scrolling the results of his program’s decryption attempts. Output appeared every millisecond or so and varied between gibberish and the words “Bad Data.” He sighed, realizing that encryption could even be something like a proprietary Triple DES, where the designer re-encrypted the message multiple times. Hadn’t the Russians done something like that with their Venona project? Gragg felt quicksand rising up to swallow his efforts. Would he go to his grave never knowing the answer to this riddle?
He knew a little more now, though. Didn’t he? Well, assuming that
Matthew Sobol had designed the Monte Cassino map, he did. He halted the decryption program and brought up the immediate window. Gragg typed the stub of his decryption function:
?DecryptIt(
He had to supply the only argument for the function-the key to use for the encryption. His function was hard-coded to use the encrypted string he got from the Monte Cassino map along with any key he entered here as an argument for the function. It would then cycle through a dozen common decryption algorithms-DES, Triple DES, RSA-feeding the key as the variable. Gragg thought hard. What would Sobol use as a key? Gragg typed: ?DecryptIt(“MatthewSobol”)
And hit ENTER. The output was twelve lines of gibberish or “Bad Data” once again-one line for each algorithm attempted by the function. He tried scores of variations on Sobol’s name, and then variations on CyberStorm Entertainment, then variations of Over the Rhine.He started entering the names of some of the games Sobol had created-or at least ones Gragg could remember. Then the names of notable game characters, like Boerner.
The output was all gibberish.
Gragg just stared at the flat-panel monitor. He might as well curl up and die now because some bastard had placed this virus in his head, and he would never be free of it. If he ever got his hands on the Monte Cassino map designer, he was going to wring that fuck’s scrawny neck. Gragg pounded his head on the desk-not hard enough to hurt himself, but hard enough to inform his brain of the danger.
Clues. He needed to examine what would be important to someone-say, Sobol-who wanted to keep a secret away from the Feds, but who also wanted Generation Y to find it. Those Feds would no doubt be using sniffers, crackers, and decompilers in order to find encrypted strings in Sobol’s work. If not now, then soon. But they couldn’t decrypt it if they didn’t find it. Where to hide data from automated forensics tools?
Gragg had an epiphany: there was no encrypted string in the Monte Cassino map. Gragg had perceived the encrypted text, but it wasn’t really computer text; it was a graphical image-and one done in a Teutonic stone-carved font, no less. The encrypted string, “m0wFG3PRCo JVTs7JcgBwsOXb3U7yPxBB,” was an arrangement of pixels that only a human eye-or a really good optical character-recognition scanner-could interpret. Programmatically scanning the contents of this map wouldn’t uncover any encrypted text-only a human being viewing the map in the context in which it was meant to be seen could see its significance. But even within the game the significance of the coded string wasn’t truly revealed until…
Gragg smiled. Herr Oberstleutnant Boerner pointed out its significance. The combination of the picture file and Boerner’s verbal statement, “…use your key, and ve vill meet again…” — these were the components of the encryption, the data and the key to unlocking it. The more he contemplated it, the more sense it made. The data and the key appeared in proximity to each other only within the context of the game, and then only if the player was dedicated and capable enough to reach the inner sanctum of that difficult map. That probably ruled out anyone over thirty years of age. Certainly it ruled out anyone in a position of responsibility.
Excitement coursed through Gragg’s body. He had forgotten all about his exhaustion. He was hopeful again. Either that or he was headed toward madness.
If the audio file contained the key, then where was it? Was it hidden somewhere as steganographic information in the.wav format? Gragg guessed there must be hundreds of numerically named.wav files in the OTRgame directory. Then he thought once again about Boerner’s words: “…use your key, and ve vill meet again…”
A mischievous smile crept across his face. It fit Boerner’s style; the invisible punctuation that only the human brain could provide:
“…use ‘your key,’ and ve vill meet again…”
Gragg took a deep breath and entered “your key” as the argument for his decryption function. He tapped the ENTER key.
Twelve output strings-all but one gibberish. All but the seventh one: RSA Decryption Result: 29.3935 -95.3933
He leapt up and howled in joy, dancing around his apartment like the sleep-deprived lunatic he was. But then a cocktail of other emotions flowed in: relief, caution, even fear. Did he dare to think this might be Sobol speaking to him? Guiding him from beyond the grave? What was Gragg setting in motion?
Gragg grabbed a remote and powered up the forty-two-inch plasma TV on the other side of the room. As he suspected, the twenty-four-hour news channels had set up live feeds from Sobol’s estate. Their cameras panned the besieging forces with night vision scopes-like a report from some foreign war. Hundreds of local and federal police surrounded the place. Heavy equipment was everywhere. A video segment of a military marksman walking toward a van with a massive sniper rifle played repeatedly in inset. The government was deadly serious about Sobol’s little game. Gragg got suddenly serious, too.
He looked back at his computer screen:
29.3935 -95.3933
These were numbers Gragg knew well. In fact, they were numbers that any Texas geo-caching enthusiast knew well. They were GPS coordinates of a location somewhere in southern Texas. He had been playing the Monte Cassino map on the Houston Monte Cassino server, so this made sense. Gragg picked up his GPS receiver and checked its battery.
…ve vill meet again…
Indeed. Gragg opened the drawer of his heavy 1960s-era desk and drew out a Glock 9mm pistol in a nylon belt holster. He pondered it gravely, realizing just how quickly things were getting out of control. This could be a trap. This could be something he couldn’t even imagine. He clipped the holster to the small of his back.
Either way, he wasn’t going to live a long life in the trackless wastes of suburbia-and that was something.
*
The only car Gragg had at the moment was the first one he’d ever owned-a piece-of-shit blue 1989 Ford Tempo whose paint had long ago bleached into Grateful Dead tie-dye patterns. The rear window leaked, and the resulting mildew stench in the car made his sofa smell like a field of heather by comparison.
He kept the Tempo because a guy his age was suspicious without a car. Gragg lived most of his life under stolen identities-such was the life of a carder-but he still had a real name and social security number to maintain. Thus, the Tempo. On paper Gragg was a loser, supposedly working part-time at a computer parts store in Montrose. He officially earned little but didn’t apply for welfare or food stamps. He was just a slacker-an unambitious young punk who spent most of his hours in the alt.binaries.nospam.facialsnewsgroup. His ISP could vouch for that. The official Brian Gragg was a totally uninteresting person.
Gragg always registered his good cars under assumed identities, and unlike his bulk identity thefts, Gragg was more selective about the identities he “wore.” No one too successful or too poor. He found his victims by trading with other carders for the social security numbers, names, and addresses of middle-class folks. Folks who weren’t worth much on the open market except as a mask. Once he picked a name, it was easy to use online skip-tracing services to find the last half-dozen places where the victim worked, where they’d lived, their credit reports, income tax information, relatives, and neighbors. It was all readily available. Gragg had a policy of selecting only Fortune 1000 or government employees for his victims-real solid folks. His Honda Si had been registered under the name of an Oregonian man who worked for TRW. The irony always made Gragg smile. Of course, he made certain to pay his victim’s illicit bills on time-at least as long as he kept the identity.
But the fiasco with the Filipinos left him without a decent ride, and there hadn’t been time to set up a new identity. Certainly Gragg didn’t want to be seen shopping for a new car just now. Too risky.
So here he was getting into his own car-with a laptop full of warez and a 9mm pistol. The pistol wasn’t really a concern-this was Texas, after all-but the laptop made him nervous. He knew the government wasn’t afraid of guns, but it was afraid of laptops-and what the government feared, it punished. Connecting his real
identity with the hacking world would be disastrous. As far as authorities knew, he was a know-nothing high school dropout with no prior arrests, and he wanted to keep it that way. He brought a degausser with him as well as a DC-to-AC adapter for his car’s cigarette lighter socket. In a pinch, he could use it to demagnetize the drive. At worst the police would suspect he’d stolen the laptop. That was no big deal.
Gragg had slept a few hours after cracking Boerner’s code. Although he was eager to get on with his self-appointed quest, there might be difficulties ahead-and he wanted to be sharp. Meth wasn’t the answer. Down that road lay madness and the worst sort of police difficulties. It was important to keep the blood pure.
Standing next to the Ford Tempo in the early night, Gragg glanced around at his light industrial neighborhood. They made screen doors and custom car parts down here. After dark it was generally a ghost town except for the occasional pit bull behind a fence or tractor-trailer backing into a parking lot. Tonight was no exception. Gragg breathed deeply of the night air. It was crisp and refreshing.
He placed his GPS unit on the seat next to him. The coordinates from the encrypted string were somewhere up near Houston International Airport-North Houston, below Beltway 8 between Tomball Parkway and Interstate 45. If he remembered correctly, this was scrubland crisscrossed at half-mile intervals by surface roads, bayous, and occasional subdivisions.
Gragg drove for nearly an hour into the cool autumn night. Between knots of office parks and suburban sprawl, the metal halide streetlights gave way to darkness, and the stars shimmered, unobscured overhead. The pleasant fragrance of dead leaves and chimney smoke sometimes overpowered the fungal stench in his car.
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