The Code Within: A Thriller (Trent Turner Series)

by S. L. Jones

  “You don’t need to be worried about me. I’ll take the lead. You just watch your ass. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.” He looked over at her with a sly smile.

  They both laughed and it broke the tension.

  “Gee, thanks. I guess?”

  “I mean it,” Sanders said.

  “What? The comment about my ass, or worrying about you?”

  He laughed again and this time shot her a wink. “Both.”

  From the satellite image they had brought up on Google, they knew the quarry had a thin border of trees that surrounded it and there was a trailer near the entrance. A gravel driveway ran from the road through the property and continued past the trailer to the back of the quarry, where it snaked through the mining areas. Tractors and heavy equipment were parked near the trailer at the time the image was taken, and there were several large buildings scattered around the site.

  “Okay, are you clear on the plan?” Sanders asked.

  “Definitely.”

  “Okay, run it by me again.”

  “Sure. I’ll douse the lights early and park the car before we get to the driveway, so we have cover from the tree line. As we’re rolling up, I’ll check the woods for a good spot to cut through. You’ll head around by way of the driveway and check the trailer while I backtrack to the cut-through spot and head toward the trailer from there. After that we’ll just have to wing it.”

  “You’ve got it.” He smiled and their eyes met. “Good luck.”

  She sensed he was distracted, that something other than losing his men had him deeply concerned, but she could also see that his words were sincere—it was in his eyes.

  “Thanks, you too,” she said.

  Chapter 64

  SANDERS WATCHED HER disappear into the trees and admired the view while he could. The order from Director Culder weighed heavily on his mind, but this was a business where you did what you were told or you didn’t stay around for long. He realized it would be tough to make her death look like an accident, but he knew he’d figure something out—he always did.

  He crept around the driveway and used the machinery lined up near the trailer for cover. The smell of oil was strong and his footfalls light and silent. His primary weapon, a standard-issue Glock 23, was already drawn as he made his way through the shadows. The weight of the weapon stowed in the small of his back was distracting. It was the gun he planned to use on Agent Moynihan, and feeling its weight prompted him to search for a sign of her across the gravel road.

  A thin beam of light from a passing car sliced through the trees as he neared the trailer. He stood still and listened for movement, the dominant sound being his own heartbeat. Sanders emerged slowly from the shadows and worked his way toward one of the windows in the trailer. He moved to the door and heard the faint shuffling of feet on gravel grow louder just before his world went black.

  Chapter 65

  Kozlov Bratva compound, Chicago, Illinois

  THE BRATVA BOSS gestured to one of the chairs in front of his desk, and his soldier sat down.

  “What do you have for me?”

  The soldier cleared his throat nervously and said, “It’s Dennis Zander. He got away from me in a bar.”

  Kozlov’s face twitched with anger, but he didn’t speak.

  “He was scared,” the soldier continued, “so I think he is the one that you want. There was nothing else I could do in that situation.”

  Kozlov shook his head. “This is not good news.” His anger began to boil, and he raised his voice. “We can’t have any of these hackers running around telling the world what’s been going on here, you idiot!”

  The soldier lowered his head. “It will not happen again.”

  “I should think not,” Kozlov yelled.

  “I didn’t realize he had so much information about our operation. Your orders were not to kill him on sight, or the job would have been done.”

  Kozlov balled his fists and took a deep breath. “He has enough to make things difficult, but not enough to take us down.”

  “I will go back out and find him.”

  “No. I need to send someone who can get the job done.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Leave.”

  He watched the soldier leave his office and was tempted to put a bullet in his head, but decided against it only because of the mess it would make. He picked up his phone and placed a call. Dimitri Sokov answered on the first ring.

  “’Allo?” he said.

  “It’s Zander, one of the Americans,” Kozlov said.

  “I know. I just sent Mikhail to your office to inform you.”

  “How much damage can he do?”

  “We’re examining his code now. I want to make sure he hasn’t left us with any surprises. We review the code changes weekly, so I should know within the hour.”

  “Good.”

  Kozlov considered his conversation with Khrushchev. This was a golden opportunity for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to rise up from the ashes. He visualized the hammer and sickle, a feared symbol of power, and it sent a wave of excitement through his body.

  “We may need to move the operation up,” Kozlov said. “It could be risky to put it off any longer.”

  Zander getting away had been the second dose of bad news this evening. Earlier, Bruce Campbell had informed the Russian that Francis Millar had escaped, and Kozlov was deeply concerned about the individual who had helped him to get away.

  “They lost the hacker in Washington again,” Kozlov explained. “It looks like he is working with our friend from Switzerland. The American.”

  Sokov was silent while he considered the connection. “I will run the selection algorithm on the most recent dataset so we can pull down a new set of targets.”

  “Do whatever you need to do to get it done,” Kozlov demanded. This time his voice was markedly more intense.

  “The most recent encryption keys were sent to Virginia and should be arriving soon, but we’ll need to pull the recent information from the banks and then send an update of the targets. It might be possible to have things ready by Monday. I will try in case you decide to move forward.”

  Kozlov was angered by his response. Everything was riding on this operation. “Try?” he snapped, violence seeping into his voice.

  “We will be ready if you need to launch the attack on Monday,” Sokov confirmed.

  Chapter 66

  Lucky Stone Quarry, Ashburn, VA

  SHE USED A metal chair in the trailer as an anchor for his restraints. Veins protruded unnaturally from his arms and demonstrated that the plastic tying him down wasn’t there for comfort. Agent Cathy Moynihan had strapped the attacker securely when he was unconscious. The job was a difficult one, given the difference in size between the two of them. That didn’t matter much to a woman with her qualities. She was tough and resourceful, and always found a way to get the job done.

  The last fifteen minutes had been difficult. At first she thought Jake Sanders was dead, but it turned out he had been incredibly lucky. He owed his life to the FBI agent. She had the instincts and presence of mind to act under pressure and was able to stop the Russian from delivering a mortal blow.

  Moynihan saw the Russian begin his charge when she was sixty feet away, and what she lacked in size, she more than made up for in speed. The years of passing batons on the track in college had served her well. She snatched up a stray metal pipe in mid-sprint and delivered a devastating blow to the back of the attacker’s head. By that point he had hit Sanders hard but was knocked out cold before he could finish the job.

  Jake started to regain consciousness again, so she filled up a cardboard cup from the water cooler and knelt beside him on the floor.

  The neglected trailer was small, and it was getting hotter by the minute. “Jake?” She poured a little water on his face to help him come around. “Jake?”

  She didn’t know whether he could hear her. He finally managed to open his eyes. They were vacant. His mouth was the f
irst thing to move, but he wasn’t capable of forming words. Sanders tried to speak again, but he could only groan.

  “Jake, wake up.”

  She shook him, and he groaned again.

  “Come on!” she insisted. She dumped the rest of the water on his face, and his eyes snapped wide open.

  He still wasn’t moving, but he was regaining his ability to speak. “What…what the fuck? Uhhh, shit. My fuckin’ head,” he said. He closed his eyes and babbled incoherently.

  “Thank God. I thought you were dead.”

  Sanders opened his eyes again and registered the look of concern on her face. It took him a few seconds to process who she was.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  Moynihan wore half a smile and motioned to the man secured to the chair. “There’s your buddy.”

  The Russian creased his eyebrows in response and barked a muted tirade through the duct tape covering his mouth. Sanders struggled to move his head so he could get a look at his attacker. He could see the man was angry and alert.

  “He wouldn’t stop bitching, so I taped his mouth shut,” Moynihan said with a shoulder shrug. “I think he’s Russian or something.”

  Sanders offered a brief smile that turned into a wince. “Holy shit, this sucks. The fuckin’ pins and needles, man.” His voice was slurred. “My arms and legs feel like lead.”

  She helped him sit up. He was still too disoriented to offer much help.

  He rubbed the back of his head. “Jesus, I think he gave me a concussion. I feel like I’m gonna puke.” Sanders finally processed what she’d told him. “Russian?”

  A series of muted sounds erupted from the man secured to the chair, and Moynihan shot him an angry look.

  “Shut up,” she growled, still annoyed from his earlier taunting. She turned to Sanders and said, “Yeah. He was waiting for you in the trees.”

  The muffled babbling continued in the background, but this time it was more insistent.

  “Just shut up,” she said, without turning to him. “He’s foul. It’s like he learned English from a gangster.”

  Sanders was more coherent now. “I don’t know what to say. Thanks. What did he hit me with? The lights just went out all of a sudden.”

  The Russian’s mumbling started to die down in the background.

  “He hit you hard at full speed. I didn’t see anything on the ground, so I think he hit you with his hand. You fell back toward him, and he was wrapping his arm around your neck when I knocked him out with a metal pipe.” She shrugged. “It was too risky to use my gun, since he was on top of you.”

  She smiled, and he smiled back.

  “Good choice,” he said.

  “I think you hit your head on the metal step on your way down.”

  The trailer was ominously silent now, and they both turned to the prisoner.

  “Oh shit!” they said in unison.

  Chapter 67

  Downtown hotel, Chicago, IL

  THE LATE HOUR meant there weren’t many options for picking up food, but Trent Turner managed to round up the essentials. He grabbed caffeine and sugar products that would help to keep them awake through the night. They needed to work as long and hard as they could to try to reverse engineer the code. In the thirty minutes Turner had been gone, there had already been some new developments with the botnet. It didn’t take long for Etzy Millar to prove his worth to the team at The Shop, and he was beginning to feel like he was back in his element again.

  Turner entered the hotel room with a bag in each hand and kicked the door shut behind him.

  Millar turned around quickly and then relaxed when he saw it was the operative. “Something big is happening within the botnet.”

  Turner’s eyes narrowed. “What’s going on?”

  “Data was pulled from surgeon bots inside at least some of the targets. It passed through a couple of the machines that Max and I had installed. We lost track once it left the bots we had our module installed on.”

  “You haven’t installed your module on all the botnet machines yet?”

  He shook his head and said, “Not enough machines to follow the path, but it did help us identify a few more we can propagate it to. Slowly but surely we’re increasing the footprint and getting more coverage. They’re deliberately zigzagging through the Internet. It makes it next to impossible to trace, and we can only increase our footprint one hop at a time.”

  “Understood.” He tossed a bag of potato chips to Millar. “So what was it that they sent?”

  “We don’t know—the data was encrypted—but it looked like the bot modified the packets as they passed the data between themselves. I guess they just want to eliminate the possibility of finding the needle in a haystack altogether at the ISPs.”

  “They’re trying to disguise the payload?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Even if you had managed to capture all of the traffic, you still wouldn’t be able to match anything up with known data packets.”

  “Smart, especially when they skip over a private wireless network.”

  “No kidding. They put a lot of effort into covering their tracks. The Shop analyzed packet captures from each of the bots we set up and correlated the timing to show when they were sent and received. It was like clockwork. The same stream of packets kept transforming itself. The farthest they could get was seven hops from bot to bot,” Millar confirmed. Each hop represented another member machine of the botnet. “The bot transformed the data before it passed the data packet along so you’d never know it was all connected.”

  “Did you see anything initiate this?”

  “Maybe…we think there was a command set transmitted from the C&C servers less than an hour ago. It was encrypted as well, so we have to assume the bots have some way to decrypt the commands we haven’t found yet.” Miller peeled open the bag of chips and tossed one in his mouth. “The Shop is working on decrypting the data it captured now. Apparently they have some serious supercomputers there.”

  Turner smiled to confirm his suspicions. “I guess the big news is that there’s a lot of activity.”

  “Exactly. Judging by the amount of traffic, I’d say they’re getting ready for something.”

  “How many more compromised systems have you been able to find with all of this traffic?”

  “About a hundred machines that we didn’t know about previously. Maybe more since the last time I spoke with someone at The Shop about it.”

  “Is it possible any of them had communication with a surgeon bot? We could use a solid lead.”

  “They’re going through that now. Maybe. They just told me they’re following up with another lead. It looks like someone contacted you guys the same way I did. Through the boards.”

  The operative raised an eyebrow and said, “Really? Do you know where?”

  “They didn’t say.”

  There was a loud crashing sound outside, and Turner peered through the window shade. “My bet is that all paths lead to the Windy City.”

  “They said they’re going to have someone bring him in.”

  “Good. I imagine Heckler will reach out to me about it soon.”

  Millar’s expression turned serious. “Thanks.”

  Turner looked at him questioningly.

  “You know, for helping me out. This has been a lot to take in. I think I might have had a nervous breakdown if I wasn’t so damn busy trying to help figure this out.”

  Trent smiled and said, “Don’t mention it, Etzy. We’ve got a ways to go before we’re out of the woods, so keep it up.”

  Chapter 68

  Lucky Stone Quarry, Ashburn, VA

  AGENT CATHY MOYNIHAN ran over to the slumped figure in the chair and ripped off the duct tape that covered his mouth. His head leaned lifelessly to the side as vomit spilled from his nostrils and mouth over his pallid skin. She grabbed his hair and pulled his head back, and then plunged her hand into his mouth so she could try to clear his airway.

  “We’re not going to find out much from him if
he stays dead,” she said in a stern but calm tone. “Since I saved your ass, you have mouth duty.”

  Sanders smiled. “I can’t argue with that,” he said. “It might be easier to get that shit out if his mouth if he was facing down.”

  She looked over at him and nodded, so he helped her lower the chair to the ground.

  “Hold on a sec,” she said.

  Moynihan went to the water cooler and quickly filled two cups. The Russian’s head was on its side as she poured the water into his mouth to wash out the vomit, and then she used his shirt to wipe off his mouth.

  “Thanks,” Sanders said with a wink.

  She began counting out the compressions as she pumped the center of his chest. The rate was relatively fast—more than one per second.

  “…twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.”

  He pinched the Russian’s nose and covered his mouth with his own. It looked as though his first breath was met with resistance, but she then heard the air push through and saw the man’s chest begin to rise. Sanders blew another breath into his mouth; both were only for a second.

  Moynihan quickly checked for a pulse and began counting out the compressions again. They continued to perform CPR on the Russian for several minutes. It was sweltering hot in the small trailer. Sweat poured from Moynihan’s face when she checked his pulse one final time.

  “Dammit,” she said. “I can’t believe he drowned in his own vomit.” She looked at Sanders. “Do you think he was the new drummer for Spinal Tap?” She knew the joke was in poor taste, but she couldn’t help herself.

  She doubted he’d seen the movie, but then Sanders replied, “Well, it’s pretty much an open-and-shut case here. Good thing because…”

  “You can’t really dust for vomit!” they said in unison.

  Both of them laughed, and once the laughter subsided it turned uncomfortably silent. She looked down at the dead body and tried to take it all in.

  “Your first?” he asked.