by Steven James
“Thanks.” I was eyeing the other bottle.
“Oh, this is for Tessa,” Amber explained. “She left her meds at the dorm.”
“Her meds?”
“She asked if I might be able to fill her prescription for her, but obviously I wasn’t able to get to the pharmacy today.” Amber handed me the bottle. “Anyway, these are mine. Over the counter. But they should help her sleep.”
Sleeping pills?
I looked at her curiously.
“Oh.” She realized what I was thinking. “You didn’t know she was taking anything.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I’m sorry, I wouldn’t have . . . She didn’t tell me.”
I accepted the bottle. “It’s okay.”
Tessa had never claimed that she wasn’t taking prescription meds, so she hadn’t technically lied to me, but still, in a way, I felt deceived.
“I’ll make sure she gets them.” I didn’t really know what else to say. “Thanks.”
Amber didn’t leave immediately. “I’m really sorry about last night. The note. Everything.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s all in the past.” There was obviously a lot more we could talk about, but I just offered her the words that were foremost on my mind: “Maybe you could reconsider with Sean, though? Try working things out? Give it one more chance?”
She looked as if she were going to object, then said softly, “We’ll have to see.” Quietly, she stepped away.
It wasn’t much, but maybe it was a start.
Before sitting down at my computer, I took some Advil to deal with the sharp pain returning to my ankle, then wrapped it tightly with the athletic tape.
I decided to deliver the sleeping pills to Tessa later, when it was a little closer to bedtime—and after I’d had a chance to process the fact that she was taking prescription medication that she hadn’t told me about.
Over the last few months I’d thought we were becoming closer, beginning to confide in each other more. I wondered if I’d done or said something that had betrayed her trust.
She’s old enough. It’s legal.
Yes, but that wasn’t exactly the issue.
Putting personal matters aside for the time being, I directed my attention back to the case.
There was a lot to cover:
(1) Follow up with Margaret about the ELF station, specifically get those base schematics or details on how to access the facility.
(2) Narrow down the search parameters and try to deduce where Alexei might have left Kayla Tatum.
(3) Touch base with Angela about her team’s progress in identifying Valkyrie and deciphering the “Queen 27:21:9” sequence.
(4) Evaluate the newspaper clippings and news footage, and watch the videos that the ERT had found in Reiser’s trailer.
First I tried contacting Margaret, but, unable to reach her by phone, I left a vm and then, to cover my bases, also sent an email requesting the ELF schematics.
I moved on to the search for Kayla.
Even though I’d analyzed Chekov’s travel patterns earlier, I decided to start over and take a fresh look at the data, hoping to do so as quickly and yet as thoroughly as I could.
After pulling up the geoprofile that I’d started at the motel, I went online and overlaid the findings against a satellite view of the area from two days ago, before the storm clouds had covered the sky.
And I began to study the map.
Donnie’s eyes were bloodshot, his voice barely audible. “So what about Lizzie?”
“I have no intention of harming her,” Solstice said truthfully.
“How can I know you’re not going to . . .”
She tapped at the computer screen. “Just verify the deactivation codes and everything will be fine.”
Leaving him under Cane’s supervision, she found Cyclone and had her acquire a voice sample from one of their captives, Chief Warrant Officer Dickinson. It took a little convincing, but at last he unwittingly gave her enough of an audio sample for a voiceprint by answering a few harmless questions about the base’s fitness room and the food prep area.
Utilizing the same software they’d employed yesterday to persuade Donnie Pickron that his wife was still alive, Solstice had Tempest call the Pentagon through the web-based router, and, pretending to be Chief Warrant Officer Dickinson, he assured the Navy that the sat comm lines had simply gone down in the storm and not to worry. “I came to the surface to let you know,” he said, and then told them a reference number Donnie had looked up to verify his identity as that of the chief warrant officer.
It wouldn’t hold off the Defense Department’s suspicions forever, but at least it would help buy the team a little more time.
Then, Solstice returned to Donnie’s side.
“When do you want to send the signal?” he asked her falteringly.
She looked at her watch. 5:44 p.m.
Three hours and sixteen minutes.
“It’s going to be a little while. Just get everything set.”
For now, sit low, monitor the JWICS, and wait for the USS Louisiana to sail into position in the Gulf of Oman for the 9:00 p.m. ELF transmission.
From the very start, Valkyrie had been aware that things could go either way.
After all, $100,000,000 is a lot of money, and when that kind of dollar figure gets put into play, people’s allegiances have a tendency to become malleable.
So far, Valkyrie had been careful to remain invisible, undetectable while playing people’s loyalties, their agendas against them.
Everything was a distraction layered inside a distraction.
Yes.
Wednesday night, Valkyrie, not Kirk Tyler’s partner, had been the one to film Erin Collet leaving the mall in San Antonio while her father, Dashiell Collet, was being interrogated by Tyler.
Valkyrie had been the one to kill Tyler’s cohort even before Erin Collet exited the back of the mall. Then Valkyrie was the one who’d taken the fresh corpse’s button camera and worn it while following Erin to the car.
Valkyrie was the one who’d drugged her and left her in the vehicle before detonating the cell phone that took off Kirk Tyler’s head.
And of course, Valkyrie was the one who’d sent Alexei Chekov to dispose of Tyler’s body, and arranged for him to speak with Rear Admiral Colberg in Virginia.
And now, Valkyrie was the one making sure everything was going to come together at 9:00.
Tonight, the queen would go up in flames, the Eco-Tech ideologues would be out of the picture, and Valkyrie’s future would be wide open and bold with possibilities.
With $100,000,000 to fund them.
69
6:02 p.m.
2 hours 58 minutes until the transmission
The geoprofile pointed me toward the region east of Woodborough, and I sent word to Tait, who’d since left the sheriff’s department and was now on patrol, to have his men begin searching homes as well as outbuildings and barns in the area. “Start with the ones that are heated. I don’t think Alexei wants Kayla to die.”
I checked my email and voicemail but still hadn’t received any word from Margaret. I tried her number again, and it went directly to voicemail. Annoyed, I left another message for her to call me and to send those schematics as soon as possible.
Earlier in the day, Alexei had hacked into Lien-hua’s cell phone and received, and then interpreted, the signal from somewhere. I knew a few hacking tricks myself, but I didn’t know how to back trace a closed-route wireless loop to find where its receiver might have been.
I wasn’t even sure there was a way to do it, but if there was, Angela Knight at Cybercrime would know how.
I tried her office and was thankful to catch her just as she was about to leave for the day. After a short greeting, she somewhat wearily agreed to a video chat. A quick tap of my mouse brought up the chat window. I hung up my cell and faced my laptop’s camera.
Angela was seated at her workstation, two of Lacey’s monitors to her ri
ght. Curly-haired and kindhearted, Angela wore conspicuous glasses and was no longer in the shape she’d been in eight years ago when she first became an agent. She’d been trying to address that issue lately, and instead of her typical can of Diet Coke and stash of Kit Kat bars, she had a bottle of Vitamin Water and a half-finished bowl of miniature carrots positioned prominently on her desk. As she situated herself in front of the camera, she gave me a smile, but it was marked with her typical look of irrepressible concern.
“The DoD sub route analysis didn’t bring up anything,” she began. “That looks like a dead end. Oh, it appears someone using the code name Valkyrie was present in Moscow when Tatiana Chekov was killed. As far as Alexei goes, we’ve learned that the GRU is very interested in finding him.”
“I’m sure they are.”
“The best Lacey could come up with for the ‘Queen 27:21:9’ cipher was Revelation 21:9.”
“How is that Queen 27?”
“Revelation is the twenty-seventh book in the New Testament.”
“But what does it have to do with a queen?”
“I’m not sure, but what troubles me is the reference to the last seven plagues. Here, look.”
She tapped her keyboard, and the verse popped up in a text window at the bottom of my screen. I read: “And there came unto me one of the seven angels which had the seven vials full of the seven last plagues, and talked with me, saying, Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the Lamb’s wife.”
I’d gone to Sunday school as a kid and knew enough to realize that the Lamb here referred to Jesus Christ.
“The King of kings,” I whispered.
“What?”
“The Lamb is a reference to Christ, but somewhere else he’s referred to as the King of kings, so—”
“The Lamb’s bride would be a queen.”
“Yes.”
“And who is that?” she asked. “Who’s the bride?” I couldn’t tell if she was asking her question rhetorically or not; if she already knew the answer.
“Well, metaphorically, the church, I think, but . . .” I was no theologian by any stretch of the imagination. “We’ll have to follow up on that.”
Get to the cell phone call. Nail down that location. It’s your best bet at finding Kayla.
“Listen, here’s why I called. Let’s say I wanted to hack into someone’s cell phone, turn on their speaker or camera, and then send that feed back to another computer. What do you know about that?”
“Sure. We do it all the time.” Then she added somewhat hastily, “Whenever we have a warrant.”
“Of course. Well, someone did it with Lien-hua’s phone. I need to back trace the signal, find out where the feed was sent to.”
“A physical location or a device?”
“Physical location, if at all possible.” I relayed Lien-hua’s cell number to Angela, and she tapped it in, then glanced at one of her other computer screens, where a scrolling stream of computer code appeared.
She let her fingers dance across the keys, then gave the screen a fierce look and bit violently through a carrot. “Whoever did this is good. I can locate it, but it’s going to take me some time.”
It didn’t surprise me that Alexei had done a thorough job of covering his tracks. “All right, while you work on that, let me ask you another question. Hypothetically, if I were going to hack into a nuclear submarine, what would I have to do?”
She stopped chewing the carrot, stared directly into her video chat camera at me. “A nuclear submarine?”
“Hypothetically.”
“Whenever someone says ‘hypothetically,’ he’s never talking about something hypothetical.”
“Theoretically, then.”
She looked rebukingly at me over the top of her glasses.
“Same difference, huh?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Can you walk me through it?”
“Which do you want?” She glanced at the screen beside her. “The cell trace or the hacking seminar?”
“Well . . .”
“Let me guess. Both.”
“And she’s a mind reader too.”
“Mm-hmm.”
She took another carrot, rolled it between her fingers, then crunched into it. “Okay, go to the toolbar, scroll down the View menu, then click on Split Screen/Chalkboard.”
I did as she instructed, and the video chat image on my computer folded in half and fluttered into two windows. The one on the left held Angela’s picture, the one on the right did indeed look like a chalkboard. She picked up a stylus, and as she drew on a data pad beside her, a cloud appeared on the chalkboard window on my screen.
“Here’s the internet.” She added a small arrow pointing to the cloud, then extended a line from it toward the right side of the window and diagramed a series of four boxes separated by short lines. “Here we have external military servers and proxies . . .” She inserted more lines and boxes to represent additional machines. “And also these are your personal computers, workstations, and so on. At each place where they connect to one of the three Department of Defense intranets, they go through a router that’s supposed to catch malware.”
None of this was new to me, but I let her go on rather than interrupt her train of thought, which I thought might only eat up more time.
“At any point, in any one of these layers, it’s possible to hack in, but it gets harder and harder the closer you move toward the top secret communication channels from the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network—”
“NIPRNET.”
“Yes. Then on to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNET, and then to JWICS. Especially if . . .” She swiped her finger across her data pad, erasing the lines that connected the military’s routers and their intranets of computers. “If the military were to find out about a threat, they’d sever the connection between the Cloud and their network.”
“That’s possible? I thought that was one of our biggest vulnerabilities, that our communication infrastructure was too dependent on the web?”
“Well,” she admitted, “it’s not easy, considering the whole purpose of the internet is interconnectivity. The very thing that makes the internet strong—decentralization—is the thing that makes it weak. But USCYBERCOM, the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the Army’s Cyber Command, and the 24th Air Force have been working on ways.”
I already knew that the United States Cyber Command, an attempt within Homeland Security to assess, forestall, and intercept cyber threats to the military and the US infrastructure, was a bureaucratic nightmare and still woefully inefficient, but I wasn’t sure about the military divisions she’d just listed. “Tell me about the 10th Fleet and the 24th.”
“Well, as you know, there are nearly three dozen cyrberwarfare agencies in the US government, but the Air Force’s 24th is probably the best, especially their Computer Emergency Response Team—AFCERT. They’re in another league using algorithms to analyze worldwide trending.”
“Trending?”
“The type and flow of information passing to and from servers worldwide. They work mainly in host-based intrusion prevention systems to locate and block malware or attempts to infiltrate military networks. Then they patch vulnerabilities for pilots and scour all air force networks for forward-facing internet presences.”
That was a mouthful.
“Hackers,” I said.
“Foreign ones. Yes. They also work in space-based comm systems, drones, full-spectrum network defense, and new architectures.”
“So does the 24th track domestic intrusion too?”
“Yes, as does the Navy’s 10th Fleet, USCYBERCOM, but if we’re talking more cybercrime than cyrberwarfare, then it’s me and Lacey. It all depends.”
“On what?”
“Whichever agency happens to stumble onto the threat.”
Her choice of the word stumble was not very reassuring.
“But getting back to your question—even if we cut the connection to the Cloud, we might s
till be in trouble.”
“How?”
“If the hackers had gotten in before, left malware or back doors that would allow them persistent access. Once you inject the bad code in there, you’re good to go.” She thought for a moment. “Also, it’s possible they could bypass the Cloud altogether and access JWICS physically at one of the computer stations around the world that’s already connected to it. Some sophisticated malware can hop file shares in virtual machines. Or you could’ve implanted a physical transmitting device into the computer, say, before it was shipped out to the military.”
“The more complex a system, the more vulnerable it is.”
“Sure. You can gain access through a Trojan, counter-encrypting, port knocking. Use a covert channel. There are a dozen ways.”
Perhaps what struck me the most was how unfazed she seemed by all this.
She downed some Vitamin Water, then her eyes ghosted toward the screen displaying the cell phone analysis. I could tell she didn’t want to drop that project in the middle, and she must have noticed something pertinent because she silently bowed out of our conversation and went back to work completing the cell trace. Thousands of lines of indecipherable code streamed down the screen beside her. She reminded me of a code reader from one of the Matrix movies.
“Let’s back up for a minute,” I said, “and say we’re trying to hack into that submarine, but that we had no access to the computers to physically plant a device before they were shipped out. Who could hack into JWICS?”
“Well, at least forty countries have military cyrberwarfare units.”
“Forty!”
“In the next three years that number is likely to double.”
“Doesn’t that worry you, Angela? Doesn’t any of this get to you?”
“Pat, this is my job. I deal with it every day. China has more honor students than we have students. Russia has four-year college degree programs on hacking. There are tens of millions of hacking attempts against the Department of Defense each week. It’s the reality of the world we live in, and we just have to work with what we have and stop whatever we can.”
