by S. L. Jones
Chapter 6
Friendship Heights Metro, Washington, DC
THE GUNMAN FOLLOWED his target across the street toward the Metro station. He moved as fast as he could without drawing attention from the police gathering en masse fifty meters to his right. He knew it would take the cops a few minutes to piece everything together, so he still had some time. He was still in the game.
He angled his head away from the cameras as he scanned the area and headed down the escalator. Despite the nondescript clothing, his physical presence betrayed him. It was impossible for a man of his size to blend in. His assignments normally took that into consideration, but this was a fuckup. The two hackers had gotten lucky. He knew pursuing his mark in public was an enormous risk, but the personal risk of being identified was outweighed by the damage the hacker would cause should he survive long enough to reach a computer. He looked to the digital signs hanging above the platforms and judged he would have enough time to get a fare card and make it to the platform before the next train arrived.
The plan had been successful thus far. They had been recruiting members of The Collective to systematically infect computers with their malware. Using experienced hackers was a way to reduce the possibility of exposure for his employer. A talented cyberpunk would easily stay under the radar of the commercial antivirus companies.
There could be no connection between the hackers, the malware, and their organization, so phase two of the plan was carried out by an assassin to sever the final tie. If word got out that they eliminated the hackers they contracted, The Collective would turn its ire on them and retaliate, and if they were successful, everything would be lost.
The assassin peeled a fifty-dollar bill off the top of his money clip and fed it into the fare card machine. He watched the bill disappear into the horizontal slit before he noticed the graphic that indicated the highest denomination the machine would accept was a ten. The precious seconds it would take for his money to spit back out were too expensive to waste, so he quickly sidestepped to the next machine and fumbled for a smaller bill. He inserted the money and printed out his fare card. Within seconds he was headed through the turnstile toward the platform for the next incoming train. Its destination was Shady Grove. A slight smile formed on his face when he saw the platforms were almost empty. He had eleven seconds to spare.
Two women were on the platform when the train screeched to a halt. Both boarded through the sliding doors, and nobody stepped off. The gunman surveyed the area and waited for any sudden movements. He kept a door within range as he continued to stalk his prey.
The rank smell of hot trash invaded his nose with each controlled breath. The minimalist design of the Metro station made it easy for him to clear the space. It was a skill that had been deeply ingrained in the assassin after his years of military service. He cut his teeth in special operations but was dishonorably discharged after killing a man in a bar fight. His temper had gotten the best of him then, and it was the same anger that boiled within him now. He hated “the system” in America for what it had done to him, and took great pleasure in doing his part to help unravel it.
A chime sounded as he walked toward the far end of the platform. The doors to the train slid shut as he zeroed in on the concrete trash can. It was the only hiding place that remained. The train pulled away, its sound fading into the background.
The station appeared to be empty, but the assassin knew there was at least one more person present. A rush of hot air passed through the station’s massive expanse and signaled an arrival on the opposite platform. He moved his gun closer to the opening in his jacket and approached his objective. He looked forward to another deadly encounter.
Chapter 7
Inova Fairfax Hospital, Fairfax, Virginia
SHE AWOKE SUDDENLY to commotion.
“Get Dr. Marks!” someone yelled.
The once-steady beeps of the heart monitor had been replaced by a pandemonium of noise. Ryan Turner’s mother was overwhelmed with dread as she watched helplessly. Time seemed to stand still. Seconds felt like minutes and minutes hours.
Cathy Turner secretly hoped Ryan’s tragic injury would somehow bring her broken family back together. She had played it over and over in her head, willing it to happen. Trent could transfer from his government job in New York and move back down to the Washington, DC area. The emptiness she had felt for so long would become a distant memory.
“We’ve lost him,” the doctor said, his voice trailing off.
Turner was stunned. Nobody was supposed to bury their child, she thought bitterly.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Turner. Would you like me to have one of my staff stay here with you until your husband arrives?” the doctor asked in a somber tone.
The silence was excruciating. Her mouth moved as she tried to answer, but no words came out. She collapsed in tears, her head coming to rest on Ryan.
“This is something we weren’t expecting,” the doctor said of her son’s sudden death. He shook his head. “His condition had stabilized.”
Cathy Turner was a realist. Deep inside she knew that, barring a miracle, even if he had woken up, he would have never been able to care for himself. These last moments had been a gift. Most people don’t survive a gunshot wound to the head. She found herself alone, hollow inside, without the strength to call her husband to deliver the painful news. Seeing her son Trent would be even more difficult now. Ryan’s death would taint any joy it may have brought her.
Raw emotion was punctuated by the gentle motion Dr. Marks used to close her son’s eyes. Tears streaked down her face as she wished there was some way she could have taken his place. He had so much life left to live.
It had been almost two weeks since Ryan had won the Boston Marathon. After a long period of uncertainty, her son was finally motivated again. For a while it looked like the death of Ryan’s second son would destroy him. He had let himself go, losing the competitive drive that had kept him and his brother so popular during their youth.
With his pedigree, he was expected to be successful in sports. Being in the headlines again had felt good. He told her it reminded him of the old days when he and his brother performed head and shoulders above the rest without much effort. It gave her son something he desperately needed: a sense of pride.
Sports had been a healthy distraction, something to help fill the void left by the loss of his son. He donated the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in prize money to charity. Specifically, to the pediatric hospital that tried so desperately to solve his young son’s heart problem. His generosity was championed by all of the major newspapers and sports magazines. Ryan Turner was branded the amateur sensation whose heart was even bigger than his lungs. His race-winning image had been heralded by the press.
She saw how Ryan’s wife, April, was so proud of her husband. The young mother admitted to reporters that the biggest source of his motivation had come from a friend at work. The turn of events was something that brought Cathy Turner a great sense of relief. The couple had their challenges, one of them being the scarce details when it came to what Ryan did for his father’s multibillion-dollar technology company. April knew his work was highly classified, but the late nights and inability to explain wore on the couple. It seemed they had finally developed a mutual understanding, and the feelings of animosity about his job had begun to evaporate.
She knew this because April had told her that even though it wasn’t possible for her to meet the person who had changed Ryan’s life, she was thankful that someone was able to make such a positive impact on their family.
Chapter 8
Friendship Heights Metro, Washington, DC
ETZY MILLAR WAITED anxiously behind the trash can for the right moment. He needed to time his break for the train’s doors perfectly. The Metro station’s cavernous tunnels with their futuristic patterns were surreal to him. The artificial light and the shadows it cast throughout the massive space brought on a childlike fear and a sense of vulnerability.
He was at the farthest end of the platform, so he had a clear view of the train headed in the opposite direction across the tracks. The blinking lights on the floor in front of him signaled an arrival. His heart pounded as noise from the approaching train continued to build. He could see the killer was cautiously nearing the last section of the platform. He knew it was a gamble to take the train to Silver Spring, but with less than a minute separating the arrival times of his two choices, he liked the odds with making the unconventional choice.
He was just a few steps away from freedom. Once he heard the chime that signaled the train’s departure, he bolted from behind his cover and through the closing doors. He made eye contact with the assassin on the platform across from him as the train pulled away. The assassin shot him an icy stare that was paralyzing.
Pain came to him in waves as he sat back and contemplated what had just happened. He replayed the events leading up to this night in his head and was certain he had covered his tracks. Even the payments would have been untraceable.
He made twenty-five bucks for each successful installation of the bot malware from his mystery employer. The college scholarship he had been awarded only went so far, so the new gig had provided Etzy Millar with some financial hope for a change. His friend Max had made the initial contact about the job, so he figured that’s where something must have gone wrong. He knew it only took one slipup for a good hacker to trace the way back to you.
Millar had a lot of experience with botnets and knew how powerful they could be. That was something The Collective had consistently demonstrated with their various operations. He thought it was funny how tech jargon came to life. The word “bot” was simply shorthand for “robot,” and it was a form of malware, a term that combined the words “malicious” and “software.” Simple enough, but most people, he thought, were so intimidated by technology they chose to remain clueless.
As he pondered naming conventions on the train, he thought about how things could have gone so horribly wrong. The Collective, a hacktivist group he and Max had both been involved with, was known for using its technology skills to combat censorship and unjust oppression around the globe—at least that was its mantra. Millar had heard rumors about members of the group being sought out by hard-core criminals. Most members of their ranks brushed the warning off as a scare tactic the Feds put out there to get them to stop. Now he knew the rumors were true.
The more he thought about it, the more obvious it became—brute force and cyberwar would prove to be a potent and profitable combination, a new kind of weapon. The world had become a target-rich environment now that technology had woven its way deep into the fabric of society.
The hum from the train was hypnotic as he traveled farther into the city. Millar thought about how the train was controlled by a central system that was programmed to avoid collisions and keep people safe. He guessed it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to use the trains as weapons, just like botnets.
Etzy Millar had grown up in the midst of the Internet revolution, his interest piqued by those first bots, the ones that would combine computer resources to perform massive scientific calculations. Working together they had the processing power to rival that of supercomputers.
He knew the bots he had deployed were different. They wouldn’t be used for something as simple as a distributed denial-of-service attack, which in his world was called a DDoS. He contemplated the value of directing thousands of infected computers to flood a website and make it inoperable. If the people who hired him planned to carry out a DDoS, it would only be done as a distraction for technology teams, while the real threat slipped in the back door. They wouldn’t use the bots he had deployed. The malware he had been installing was much too sophisticated to expose for something as trivial as that. He knew those systems would be a part of their end game.
His mind drifted, and he smiled to himself when he considered the fact that it was porn that saved him from the violence. Porn was the reason his father always paid their Internet bill on time. The connection to cyberspace was what freed Millar from his hell in West Virginia and gave him a new world to learn and explore. The Internet was a place to escape from an abusive alcoholic.
His mood darkened when he considered how fast things had changed. Botnets were once a tool for nonprofits, operated with the computer owner’s consent, but now their application was being exploited. The power and capability of botnets had evolved into something worth killing for.
He was disgusted with himself. He had been distancing himself from The Collective in recent months. The growing number of random actions being carried out in the group’s name was bullshit, and now this. Millar hadn’t really considered the gravity of what he was doing before. For him, hijacking a computer was like borrowing a car when someone was on vacation. As long as you didn’t crash it, nobody was going to notice the extra miles.
It all seemed harmless until now. What if they used the botnet to do something where someone got killed? He felt a weight come down on him like a ton of bricks. Someone had died. Max was dead. He shook his head and thought about how it would be poetic justice if the people who hired him used the bots to crash this train right now. From what he’d seen, they were clearly good enough.
He questioned whether it was possible for things to get better. There was no way to explain away what had just happened. The police would find his laptop and the rest of his stuff in the car. The information on his laptop was safe. He had made sure of that. What really scared him was the realization that the walls had only just begun to close in.
Soller’s father was an extremely powerful man. He would put resources into play with capabilities well beyond that of the local police. On top of that, Millar had never seen a bot as sophisticated as the one he had been paid to deploy. His fascination with how it worked had become an obsession. Its design had piqued his interest. The way it was coded to proactively cover its tracks was nothing short of genius.
Until now he hadn’t considered what the requirement for surgical installation of the malware had meant. The people who hired him wanted its existence to be kept secret. It was now painfully obvious that he and Max were as good as dead the second they took the job. Killing them was a requirement. Nobody outside their organization could know the bots had been put in place. Whatever he had gotten himself into was big-time. He should have known. Whoever hired them had to have some serious cash. It would have taken a monumental effort to pull off what he had uncovered so far.
The only bright spot in the situation was that his curiosity had gotten the better of him. He had written his own piece of software to deploy alongside the malware and report back details about how it worked.
Millar was fortunate to have a card to play, and with what he was up against he could only see one way of playing it. He realized figuring out what they were doing with those bots was his only chance.
Chapter 9
Island Industries, Brooklyn, New York
IT WAS RAINING. The musty smell in the alley was challenged by wafts of cigarette smoke as he stamped his butt out in the pedestal ashtray. Visually, this was the most depressing area of an otherwise modern complex.
Retired admiral John Simpson stood under the awning, his thoughts accompanied by the hypnotic sound of rain splattering rhythmically on the concrete. Cigarettes were a guilty pleasure but also a nasty habit, so he only smoked them sparingly. His eyes narrowed as he turned toward the metal door opening behind him. The looming conversation wasn’t something he was looking forward to.
“With all due respect, Addy, I think we have to step in here.” Reed let the door close behind him and took a step forward. “You’ve got an operative who’s been compromised,” Dr. Charles Reed argued.
The doctor was second-in-command at Island Industries, a clandestine organization set up by Simpson with the help of some powerful friends. It was funded by the spoils of war from his days as the CIA’s Director of Central Intelligence. The company was a security consul
ting firm on the surface, but the real extent of its power remained hidden below, like the illusion from an iceberg.
Reed, a tall, thin man with a light complexion, pushed his round glasses up from the edge of his nose and persisted. “You have to do something, you know I’m right.” Reed was animated. “You saw him. He had that look in his eyes…he won’t listen to reason here.” The psychologist shook his head back and forth and looked to the ground intently before he continued. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times: their connection is too deep, and there’s no way he’ll let it rest.”
“Not here, Charles,” Simpson replied in a measured tone. “I know you’re upset, but this is not the place to discuss the matter.”
He was annoyed with the break in protocol. Speaking in the relative open about company business could have serious consequences. You never knew when someone might be listening.
There was no denying Simpson saw the rage in Trent Turner’s eyes. His top operative’s state was soon confirmed when he disobeyed the admiral’s direct order to stay in New York. He knew this would require action, but the course of that action was something he needed more time to consider. There was too much at stake.
Simpson had been running Island Industries for the past nine years and, although he would never admit it, his relationship with Trent Turner had developed to a point where he represented the son he never had. Emotion couldn’t be allowed to affect decision making in the world of black ops, and he knew he needed to tread carefully.
It wasn’t only the situation with Trent Turner that had thrown Addy Simpson for a loop. Reed had been working with The Island, as the insiders called it, since its inception, and his unexpected resignation a week ago had put a strain on their relationship. As one of America’s foremost psychologists, he had been an integral part of both the company’s selection process and the ongoing evaluation of its covert operatives.
