Kill Switch

by William Hertling

  “Tell me something about our mutual friend.”

  “I was working a child pornography case,” Forrest wrote. “We were stuck trying to track down the origination point of the content. Somehow Angie found out what I was doing and sent me some IP addresses totally out of the blue. I checked them out, and it was the raw, naked server hosting the original files…unprotected, no VPN. After that, she fed me information on roadblocked cases several more times, and she never told me who she was, never asked for anything. Just unsolicited tips that always gave me exactly what I needed to take the next step in whatever case I was working on.”

  “What changed?” Igloo asked.

  “Let’s go to voice.”

  Igloo’s phone chimed, and a notification popped up to establish a voice channel. She accepted and plugged in an ear bud. A couple of seconds later, Forrest came on, her voice full and rich. Igloo crossed to the other side of the basement so she could talk without disturbing the others. She sat on the floor, leaning against the cold concrete wall.

  “One day she asked for information. It was the medical records for a government employee, and I wouldn’t do it. I didn’t think it worked that way. She sent me information, not the other way around. She asked me a few days later and made clear her request was urgent. I still didn’t give her the information. I didn’t know…”

  There was a long pause, and Igloo sat in the dark, staring at the glowing screen, waiting for Forrest to continue.

  “A few weeks passed. Then Angie sent me a link to the arrest report. He’d beaten his girlfriend, hospitalized her. What Angie wanted was his confidential mental fitness report. The report indicated a risk for violence. If she had that data, maybe things would have turned out differently. I’ll never know for certain, but the next time she asked for data, I sent it. And every time after that, too. Somewhere along the line we started to talk about why we did what we did.”

  Igloo marveled that Angie had somehow managed to have this secret life, another confidante and collaborator that she’d worked with. Why hadn’t she ever told Igloo?

  “When did you learn who Angie really was?” She kept her voice low, so she wouldn’t wake the others.

  “A lot of her requests started to be about the government investigation into Tapestry. It didn’t take much to guess. Ex-computer security guru and domestic abuse survivor turned data analyst and startup founder at odds with the government over privacy concerns and data ownership? Of course it had to be her. I asked, and she said no of course, but then how could she admit to that? But I understood.”

  “What do you know about T2?”

  “Angie was concerned…very concerned…that the government was going to compromise Tapestry. We explored hypotheticals about a tech company relocating overseas. But she didn’t think solving a political problem with a legal loophole would work over the long term. It was clear a technical solution was needed. She asked me about government oversight abilities. At some point I realized I was spying against the government, turning over secrets, but it always seemed like the morally correct thing to do. Angie has that way about her.”

  “Had,” Igloo said, “She’s dead now.” Igloo was suddenly angry at this woman who had all these insights about Angie, who’d shared parts of Angie’s life that Igloo knew nothing about. Igloo always assumed that even if she hadn’t been Angie’s top pick for management at Tapestry, that they had shared an exclusive relationship when it came to hacking. Now she realized she hadn’t even had that. She wondered whether she’d been anything special at all to Angie, or if she was just another tool.

  Fuck. Downward spiraling about this now wasn’t going to get her anywhere.

  “I’d love to hear all about your relationship with Angie another time,” Igloo said, not bothering to hide her bitterness. “Right now, I need to know who the mole is.”

  There was a long pause, and for a moment Igloo wondered if they’d lost the encrypted connection.

  “They’ve had a woman in place for less than a year. The first reports I saw showed up about ten months ago.”

  “You have a name?”

  “I have a codename, but that’s not going to do you any good.”

  “What is it?” Igloo said. Maybe it would somehow connect the dots.

  “No way. The name is globally unique. That’s how they do it these days. They monitor searches, mentions, so they can detect counter-surveillance. If I tell you the name, and you do anything with it, they’ll know you know and that the identity is partially compromised. You’ve played this game, too.”

  Igloo assumed Angie had invented the counter-surveillance poison pill in the form of an identifier. But maybe she’d gotten the idea from the government.

  “What about the name she’s operating under? Her job? Who she is associated with?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “Is it someone on the T2 team?”

  “Maybe. They’re still getting data on your location, so it’s either a person or a tracking device or something else…”

  Igloo could hear the hesitation in Forrest’s voice, and something more, too. Fear?

  “What’s the something else?”

  “They’ve got new tracking AIs trained on massive data sets. Everything from check-ins to surveillance cameras to license plate trackers to cell phone tower connections and photo meta-data. Doesn’t even need to know that you’re driving a friend’s car. All the data goes into the neural net, comes out the other side, tells us where you are.”

  It was fear she heard in Forrest’s voice.

  “Why does that scare you?”

  “Because the same big AI can detect collaborators. Even if we don’t have a direct evidence trail linking the two of us, second-order effects in the data, stuff that’ll make a probabilistic determination that I’m helping you.”

  “Did Angie know about this?”

  “We talked about the project while it was still conjecture. Nobody was using the AI for actual investigations yet. But Angie’s worries about the AI was part of the reason for T2. If enough data is encrypted, then the signal to noise ratio drops massively, makes the user-contributed data portion drop to almost zero, and forces the government to rely only on mass surveillance data.”

  Great. More to worry about. “Let’s go back to the mole. What else do you know?”

  “Nothing,” Forrest said. “I know they exist, that’s all.”

  “They have to be leaking information. What information?”

  “It’s being kept very quiet. If it’s like other deep leads, she’s got a handler, and the handler is responsible for obfuscating what she uncovers and mixing it in with other signals intelligence to disguise the source.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve got to have something. Is she technical or non-technical? An executive, admin, developer? What hours does she work? Who is she close to?”

  Is she close to me? is what Igloo wanted to ask but was afraid to.

  “We have technical and non-technical SIGINT, so I don’t know.”

  “Do some digging, because if we don’t plug this hole, then we’re going to get captured before we can get T2 out.”

  Igloo disconnected and squeezed her phone in her hand. She felt the tears come, and she resisted smashing her phone on the floor. Why was the universe so unfair? She had worked so hard, for so long. All the time, they’d been on top of things, and then, from out of nowhere, comes this potential for Essie to be the mole, unbelievable as that seemed. Now, when she needed to be at the top of her game, confident and kicking ass, she was cowering in a ball in a basement, licking her wounds. How could she function under this much pressure?

  The bundle of coat on the couch across the room moved, and Essie peeked out to look at Igloo. She climbed down wordlessly and crawled across the floor to curl up at Igloo’s feet and rested her head on Igloo’s thigh. She traced patterns with one finger on her leg.

  “It’s going to be okay. You can do whatever it is you need to do. I love you.”

 
; Igloo leaned her head back against the wall. Maybe. Maybe Essie loved her. But maybe that was a cold, calculating lie.

  Chapter 42

  “I think she buys it.”

  “Did she ask about Essie?” Nathan9 said.

  “You were listening, weren’t you?” Forrest asked. “Why ask me what you already know?”

  “I want you to tell me what you heard,” Nathan said.

  Forrest noticed that was neither confirmation nor a denial. Maybe Nathan was listening, maybe he wasn’t. The bastard played his cards close to his chest. The feeling of manipulation was always present.

  “She didn’t ask specifically about Essie. But she probed three times about who the mole is, so it’s important to her.”

  “She’s scared and in the dark,” Nathan said. “That’s the best place to keep her. Anything her mind can invent is worse than any real, concrete terror. We’ll tell her who the mole is later.”

  “You know?” Forrest couldn’t really believe that. She was on the inside, and she couldn’t figure it out. How had Nathan done it?

  “Of course I know. My job is to know things. Igloo took the information about Angie?”

  “Yes. She believes me.”

  “Good,” Nathan said. “Then she’ll trust you. When you give her the mole, that’ll complete your trust relationship. It’ll break loose her moorings. Then she’ll belong to us.”

  Forrest wished she could doubt that. She wanted to scream “Run, Igloo. Run while you still can, while you have your freedom and your mind and your free will!” But then she belonged to Nathan, and so she wouldn’t, couldn’t do that. Igloo didn’t stand a chance. After all, Forrest had been smart, talented, and had all the right connections and skills. And Nathan had broken her. What chance did Igloo have?

  “Maybe there’s another way,” she found herself saying, even though Nathan would never buy it. “If we keep the charade going, she’ll give us what you want, the private encryption keys to Tapestry. The odds are better that she’ll do the job right. If you break her, you risk losing her completely. Maybe Tapestry falls apart.”

  There was a faint pop and crack on the line in the silence, Nathan’s counter-surveillance noise generator running, creating unique acoustic watermarks he’d use to track down the records of this conversation later if it was ever leaked.

  When Nathan resumed speaking, his voice was a cold whisper that sent chills down her spine. “I see what you’re trying to do. We’ll do it my way. Remember, I’m watching you. Stay focused on what I want and don’t get any ideas.”

  Any good lie was mostly truth, and for Forrest, that lie had started two years ago…

  She had been working a child pornography case. That part was true, as were the anonymous tips that had helped her close the case. The tips had kept on coming. Working logins for private web forms. Endpoints for darknet sites. Credentials that had allowed her to masquerade as a sex trafficking buyer. She gave the anonymous benefactor a nickname at first, and it wasn’t until much later that she’d learned his hacker name, Nathan9.

  Each case she closed led to new accolades. She’d made the FBI director look good, and in a bureaucracy there are few things more important than making your boss look good. Soon she was leading a team in the cybercrimes division, and she was feeding them all secrets from the always-invisible ghost in her life.

  She was hooked on a stream of data she had to keep secret from everyone. The depths of that dependency only became obvious after the fact.

  Six months ago, Forrest couldn’t have known what she was walking into when she entered the Director’s office for her weekly briefing. Few things were more sought after than the Director’s time, and her standing twenty-minute briefing bypassed two layers of management. Her own manager berated her more than once for end-running the hierarchy until she saw the extra resources Forrest secured on an ongoing basis. Funding for undercover missions, extra training, new staff. The whole department almost doubled in size in six months thanks to Forrest, and the complaints about Forrest’s weekly sessions with the Director slowly subsided.

  Director Riley ignored Forrest when she entered the room, which was a first. Forrest wasn’t sure if she should sit down or not. Riley had never been particularly formal with her, but she’d always invited Forrest to take a seat, sitting on her own initiative seemed presumptuous.

  Riley was focused on her screen, scanning furiously, her eyebrows scrunched in concentration…or concern.

  “Sit.” Riley didn’t look up.

  “Thank you, Ma’am.” Forrest didn’t know why she was resorting to such formalities. Cued into some hidden stress in Riley, most likely.

  The silence stretched enormously, but Forrest knew that was a common time dilation effect used to great effect in interrogations. She counted off seconds in her head to counter the effect. It was less than a minute before Riley cleared her throat and looked up.

  “You’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Operation Cargo Doll.”

  “Closed three months ago. Wrapped up and turned over to the lawyers. A sex trafficking ring based out of Seattle, selling underage girls.”

  “The lawyers turned up a new name in secondary data analysis, which they turned over to our friends in the NSA. Turned out to be a senator.”

  “What? Who?”

  “You aren’t cleared to know. Exposing a senator is a matter of national security, and it has triggered an auxiliary investigation.”

  Forrest sighed. The real concern was almost never the actual wrongdoing on the part of elected officials. They were all corrupt in some way. The problem was their exposure. Involvement in sex trafficking of underage girls was potentially so destructive that it opened up the officials to blackmail. The higher their position, the greater the impact.

  That Riley had specifically cited national security implications meant this had to be someone of monumental influence.

  “That’s big,” Forrest said.

  “I don’t think you understand the scope of the problem. This senator has the power to make things very difficult for us, for your department, and, in particular, for you.”

  “If they’re guilty…”

  “The senator is well connected. Guilty, not guilty. It doesn’t matter. They shouldn’t have been flagged in your dragnet.”

  “I didn’t flag anyone, only the primaries.”

  “You did. On the three separate occasions you requested foreign citizen level six data collection on their aliases.”

  Forrest tried to think back, but she’d marked so many people for data collection, she couldn’t remember who was who. Fully a quarter of those were actually unconnected to her investigations…they were favors for her benefactor.

  A pit opened in her stomach as old fears of being caught came back to haunt her. She’d made a sort of peace, ethically, with what she did for Nathan9 over the last six months, but she could still go to jail for the rest of her life.

  “What happens now?” She forced the words out through a throat choked tight.

  “We back down from the investigation, and I sacrifice you to appease the senator.”

  Forrest abruptly realized the gamut of her available options might be limited to going to prison for abuse of her powers or her career evaporating overnight. Neither had been on her mind only five minutes ago.

  Riley saw the shock on Forrest’s face. “Trust me, that doesn’t appeal to me either. You’re my star investigator. The hypothetical alternative is that you double-down, dig up every scrap of dirt you can find, see how deep the rabbit hole goes, and nail the senator so hard that none of their allies will touch them with a hundred-foot pole.”

  That was an impossible mission. It would take an army of lawyers to peel away the protective lawyers. Not an FBI investigative team.

  “You’re not even telling me who they are or what they’re guilty of. How am I supposed to figure that out?”

  Riley shook her head. “My hands are tied. A
ll I’m telling you officially is that our involvement is finished. The senator wants your head on a platter. I’ve stalled, said you were deep undercover. If you can discover something to shift the balance of power in the next two weeks…”

  It was the first time Forrest needed something for herself, not just an open investigation. The question was, would Nathan9 help her? They had a message board, where she’d post something when she wanted to hear from him, then he’d contact her.

  As soon as she left the Director’s office, she made the post, then chewed her fingernails down to the bed waiting for a response.

  Of course, she wasn’t without resources. She had an entire team of investigators and years of connections. She made a short list of senators that could be the right one. The overwhelming odds were that it was someone on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was just thirteen people. Of those, seven stood out as being particularly likely.

  She scanned the list of everyone she’d requested level 6 foreign citizen data for. There were almost a thousand names from the last six months. The kicker was they were flagged to have data collected on all known associates, which brought the total to almost a hundred thousand. A great deal of those were ghosts: people they knew existed that had online trails connected through phone calls and web browsing history and a thousand other things, and yet hadn’t been associated to an individual. There were five thousand ghosts in the data, and one of those was a senator on her list.

  She kicked off an investigation as quickly as possible. Her team worked discreetly but turned up nothing concrete over the course of several days. She made her own circumspect inquiries, but she could already feel the lines of power being cut off.

  By the time Nathan9 got back to her, several days later, she was desperate.

  “I understand you want help,” Nathan had said, “but what you’re asking for is difficult. Our quid pro quo arrangement up until this point doesn’t really cover this.”

  “What are you saying?” she asked.

  “You want to identify and neutralize a top government official. I’m saying that leaking occasional information to me doesn’t quite cover my risks.”