Darknet

by Matthew Mather

  Why hadn’t Bluebridge tried to pin the President spoof on them? It seemed a direct way of applying more pressure. Bluebridge’s choices didn’t seem to make any sense sometimes, but then, as Sheldon kept insisting, it didn’t think like a human.

  So Kahnawake was under siege.

  But they were Mohawks.

  Their ancestors had taught them a thing or two about living off the land.

  The thing Dean worried about was the data pipe that connected them to the rest of the world. It hadn’t been cut off yet because the fiber optic cables that ran under Kahnawake supplied about half of the data throughput to Montreal, and a good chunk of what came through New York and the East Coast to Europe. Sheldon’s ‘Group of Eight’ was doing their best to deflect incoming attacks and attempts to cut off Kahnawake. Time would tell if they’d continue to be successful. And a lot of what Dean was doing was being replicated through their data centers in Gibraltar, Paris, London and Singapore.

  No, cutting off those fiber optic links would take some time, and shutting down their entire operation wouldn’t be easy. The telecoms weren’t as easily bought off as the politicians. That said, it was only a matter of time until Bluebridge managed the impossible.

  But Dean was sure they could hang on for a day or two.

  The moment this thought crossed his mind, he was cast into blackness.

  He thought he’d lost his vision at first, but the tip of his cigarette glowed in front of his eyes. All the lights had gone out, the hum of the machines gone. Crickets chirped in the silence. He glanced to his left, where Montreal lit up the clouds with a pink glow a second before. But the sky—everything—was pitch black.

  AUGUST 31st

  Wednesday

  43

  Raleigh

  North Carolina

  Seven a.m. and it was already ninety-four degrees.

  Senator Russ pulled a handkerchief from his suit jacket and wiped his forehead, then tossed it onto the breakfast table and waved to one of the assistants for another. He stared at the side of his tour bus, ‘Take Back America’ stenciled on it in italicized red letters over a wind-blown American flag.

  A cross-country bus tour before the final leg of the election had sounded good on paper last April when they were planning it in New Hampshire. But down here in North Carolina, on a sweltering August morning after sleeping in this coffin on wheels for six days? Not so much.

  Russ stood and walked around the front to see how many people showed up for his speech. “Tomorrow, breakfast in the bus, it’s too hot outside,” he growled at another assistant.

  “But you said you wanted—”

  “Do I need to repeat myself?” Russ glared at the young kid who withered and shrank away, shaking his head.

  The crowd outside wasn’t a crowd.

  Judging from the suits and clean haircuts, most of them were from the local staffing office. The few stragglers were probably wondering if the tour bus was for a famous band. Then again, this was the Research Triangle Park. A lot of eggheads. Russ was realistic enough to know he couldn’t expect a lot of intellectuals to show up for one of his speeches.

  “Senator!” One of his aides, Roxanne, stuck her head out of the bus door. “I need you inside.”

  “Let me get this speech done, then we can talk in twenty minutes.”

  Roxanne shook her head. “It’s Henry Montrose, from Bluebridge, and he says he needs to speak with you.” She paused. “Right away.”

  Russ gritted his teeth. He preferred it when the old man was subtler. Making him look like he was jumping through hoops in front of his staff grated on Russ. Then again, the old man had been the main strategist behind Russ’s surprise nomination and campaign, and he was footing most of the bills, too.

  Fear struck Russ like a thunderbolt—Montrose better still be footing the bill.

  Given the way the market crashed over the past two days, the old man might be broke. Russ didn’t have much of an understanding of the intricacies of the world of finance. That’s what he depended on Henry Montrose for.

  That, plus his money.

  Russ needed the spigot to remain open.

  They had a good lead in the polls, but they were still fighting in a lot of states. A big problem was that the financial crash had shifted the campaign away from foreign protectionism toward the economy and the market. Not Russ’s strong suits, and the opposition had jumped on it. Was the old man calling to cancel his support?

  In two steps Russ bounded over to the bus, pushing Roxanne aside. He jumped inside, grabbing the offered phone. “Hello?” he said.

  Roxanne stared wide-eyed at Senator Russ.

  “Are you serious?” Senator Russ whispered into the phone. “Is this confirmed?”

  He listened, clenching his jaw. After another few seconds, he hung the phone up and waved his hand in the air.

  “Change of plan.” He looked at Roxanne. “Get Mike in here, we need to rewrite my speech.”

  ▲▼▲

  “Research is the cornerstone of the future,” Senator Russ thundered from behind the podium, his fist in the air.

  Jake shifted in his seat. He was sitting with Wutang, Jin, and Sheldon in the Two Bridges apartment, the four of them gathered around the large screen TV near the window to watch Senator Russ on CNN. They wouldn’t be wasting their time watching him on some obscure campaign stop in Raleigh, except an automated alert Sheldon had running had flagged something. An AP newswire about a breaking story.

  “We have done our research,” continued Russ, pausing to emphasize his new favorite word, “and found out conclusively that the recent Fakegate attack, the spoofing of our President’s images and words on national television, a terrorist attack that has taken billions of dollars from the pockets of our citizens—”

  Jake held his breath. Was the hammer about to come down?

  “—was perpetrated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the IRGC. This heinous cyberattack against the citizens of the United States cannot be—”

  “Are you freakin’ serious?” Sheldon jumped up out of his chair and knocked it clattering onto the floor.

  Jake stared at the screen, not moving, but feeling the temperature in the room rising. Like a jiu-jitsu move, he didn’t see it coming until after it happened, the shifting of the momentum of his attack to the advantage of his opponent.

  But now it was obvious.

  Bluebridge was doubling down.

  Senator Russ had always been the hawk, making protectionism and demonstrating America’s strength to the world central to his platform. Letting the election swing into a debate over the economy would pull some wind out of his sails. Now, though, this election would be about war, about a deliberate attack by one of America’s enemies. This was exactly the sort of thing that Senator Russ had been warning about. The war machine had started up, and if Senator Russ hadn’t been on track to win, he was now.

  And Jake provided the final push.

  “My God,” Jake whispered, “what have I done?”

  “—technical countermeasures can be employed to make sure this never happens again,” Senator Russ said on the big screen, “bio-authentication tools to make remote communication safe again—”

  “And I bet Bluebridge will be supplying the specs for that.” Sheldon paced back and forth behind Jake and Jin.

  He was right. They were trying to limit Bluebridge’s freedom to operate, but this was its way of defusing the situation. Standards could be quickly implemented that would allow Bluebridge to keep operating. Jake swore under his breath. Had he miscalculated? He clenched his fists. I need to find Anna. This isn’t working.

  “Breathe, Jake,” Jin said, standing behind him. “This was going there anyway, we just put our foot on the accelerator.”

  “We might have started World War Three,” Jake murmured.

  “Bluebridge is doing this,” Sheldon pointed out, “not us. And it doesn’t matter. Jin is right. Bluebridge has stepped up its game, so we need to do the same. We nee
d you in this fight. MOHAWK is still operating.”

  Jake nodded, trying to focus. Dean had called the night before in a panic. A massive power failure had swept Quebec the evening before, but the back-up generators at MIT kicked in as they were designed to do.

  “And my guys have a hundred million computers wired into botnets, attacking Bluebridge as we speak. This thing has to be getting desperate, no matter how well it’s set up for DDOS protection.”

  If a war in physical space was imminent, the war in cyberspace was already raging, the entire internet lit up from end to end as Bluebridge and MOHAWK grappled with each other. DDOS—distributed denial of service—was a new term to Jake. It meant flooding a target’s networks with millions of service requests a second, overwhelming its capabilities. Sheldon’s Group of Eight had bought up every illegal botnet they could get their hands on and turned them loose on Bluebridge and its core group of companies.

  The problem was, they weren’t the only cowboys in town. Bluebridge had its own network of sophisticated security technicians and hackers, human opponents who launched their own attacks against the MOHAWK facilities. They knew where Dean was, and even if MOHAWK was still up and running, it was getting harder to keep outgoing communications.

  Soon enough Bluebridge would track down where Sheldon and Jake and Jin operated from. It probably already had a pretty good idea of the general area.

  Only a matter of time.

  Jin turned off the display and sat in front of Jake, leaning on the desk overflowing with computer equipment. “We have to push forward.”

  Her part of the game plan was in play now. The markets had opened again yesterday, tentatively, and swung into positive territory behind a rally. Jin wasn’t concerned with the indices, though; she didn’t care if the markets went up or down. She needed a good swing each day, so she could use the seed capital from Joey Barbara and the Yakuza to rack up enormous profits in future options as they pushed the market back and forth.

  “I’ve got this, Jake,” Jin said. “Time to paint this white swan black.”

  Jake looked into her eyes. “You make them bleed.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “And after that, you guys need to get out of here.”

  ▲▼▲

  The rain finally stopped. Chase Rockwell stared out of the window of his office, admiring the view. Six p.m. Time for a drink. The finish of another beautiful day.

  The old Albanian gangster hadn’t deposited any funds yet, but even that couldn’t spoil Chase’s mood. He took a long drink from the tumbler of whiskey in his hand, sucking the last drops from between the ice cubes. He couldn’t blame the Mafioso—nobody had ever seen a market like this.

  In turbulence, there were always winners and losers, but each back-and-forth swing of the market had only pushed his profits higher. He was giddy. He didn’t even need the liquor; he was already high. Chase imagined himself on the cover of Fortune Magazine next month—a stern-looking picture of him in his office staring out over New York, with a cigar, maybe.

  The king reigns once more.

  A knock on his office door pulled him out of his daydreams.

  “Come in.”

  Chase turned to watch his door open. His intern, his favorite new person, peered out from behind it.

  “Come in,” Chase repeated.

  The kid stepped into his office, a fresh sheaf of reports in his hands. At least he was wearing a decent suit now. Chase had sent him to his personal tailor yesterday. The cost be damned.

  “You need to look at this,” the kid said in an unsteady voice.

  Chase smiled. “Why? Did we make another billion?”

  The kid stared at Chase. Dropped the sheaf of paper on the side table. Turned and closed the door behind himself.

  44

  Kahnawake Indian Reserve

  Quebec

  “Scorpion One, this is Black Team leader,” a garbled voice said on top of static.

  Dean hadn’t been on night operations in a long time. Perched atop the water tower in the center of the Kahnawake village, he fumbled with his night vision goggles, trying to focus on the green dots moving through the underbrush. “Is that them?” he whispered.

  “Yeah,” Daniels replied. After the blackout yesterday, Officer Daniels had put away his Peace Keeper uniform and taken up with the Mohawk Warriors. He was an invaluable addition to the team, a special-ops Marine drilled in guerilla tactics. He was running this operation—Dean was along as an observer. “That’s them.”

  “Center on target,” said the garbled voice.

  Daniels turned down the volume. “We picked up their transmissions using some comm gear we brought over the border. That’s definitely a special-ops unit, but I think they’re irregular, maybe contractors.”

  Dean stared at the green figures running between the bushes in the darkness. So they’d sent in mercenaries. This could erupt into full-blown warfare. “Where are they going?”

  “Looks like they’re heading for the administrative buildings,” Daniels replied.

  According to media reports, the blackout the day before had been the result of blown equipment up at the James Bay hydroelectric plant seven hundred miles north, the massive LG1 and LG2 generators that supplied nearly all of the electricity to Montreal.

  Quebec was one of the few places on Earth that got all of its energy from renewables, ninety percent from that one source. A single point of failure. Power was back up in most of Montreal, but Kahnawake remained mysteriously dark. They weren’t going to get power anytime soon.

  The three back-up generators at MIT had started up flawlessly, though, kicking in while the battery back-ups had handled the gap in between. As long as they had diesel, they’d be running.

  And Kahnawake had a couple of gas stations that were still full.

  “Let’s go get ‘em,” Daniels told Dean.

  Standing up, Dean waited for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the moonlit night. Then he walked over to the ladder and jumped down two rungs at a time until he hit the grass. Daniels followed behind, along with five other Warriors.

  On the ground it was like being in a jungle, humid and nearly pitch black. This part of Kahnawake was forested. Candles in the windows of houses twinkled through the trees behind them. Putting their night vision goggles back on, they started off at a jog. Dean hung back, letting the others take the lead. In the darkness they passed underneath the metal trusses of the Mercier Bridge, then stopped at the two-story high concrete pylon that anchored the suspension work of the bridge.

  A long arched corridor ran through the massive pylon. At its other end were the administrative buildings of the Mohawk council.

  “They’re on the other side,” whispered one of the Warriors, running toward them. He had been scouting ahead.

  Daniels held up his hand, indicating that they were to split up. Two flanking each side, while he and Dean and another Warrior came up in the middle through the tunnel. Silently, they nodded and melted away into the night.

  “You ready?” Daniels asked Dean.

  He nodded.

  Weapons forward, they crept along the edge of the stone passage. Dean controlled his breathing, focusing on his footfalls, keeping silent. “First and second in position,” he heard through his earpiece.

  Staying behind Daniels, he left the passageway. Right in front of them crouched a group of four men, the ones they’d seen from the water tower. They weren’t being careful. Sloppy. Standing there in the open.

  “On my mark,” whispered Daniels into his throat mike.

  Then the staccato of gunfire, bursts of flares overhead.

  Kneeling, Dean pulled off his goggles, his heart racing. Daniels sprinted ahead and tackled one of the men. The other three scattered. One of them ran back toward Dean. He waited until the guy was on him, then stood and brought his rifle butt straight into the man’s face. He crumpled to the ground.

  “I got this one,” Dean yelled out.

  “All clear.”


  A single shot rang out.

  “What the hell?” Dean scanned back and forth, straining to see in the darkness. There, on the ground, was the guy Daniels had tackled.

  Only it wasn’t the guy Daniels had tackled.

  It was Daniels, lying inert.

  “Man down!” Dean screamed, running forward ten steps and sliding to a stop.

  Daniels was laid out on his back, his eyes wide. “Sorry Dean, the guy pulled a pistol out.” He pointed toward the back of the administrative building. The trees lit up with bursts of gunfire around the corner.

  Silence.

  “We got him,” Dean heard in his earpiece.

  “Daniels is down!” Dean yelled. “Somebody get an ambulance!”

  To his left, an orange fireball mushroomed into the sky, scorching Dean in a blast of heat. He turned. It had to be the gas station on the main street. Then he was hit by another concussion from an explosion that lit up the night sky to his right. He swiveled to face it, realizing in horror that this one was a fiery cloud roiling into the night sky over the MIT building.

  Dean wanted to get up and start running toward MIT, but he couldn’t leave Daniels. In Dean’s arms, Daniels coughed, then coughed again, this time wetly. In the light of the fireballs flaming into the sky, Dean saw blood oozing from Daniels’s mouth. His eyes glazed over.

  “Help!” Dean screamed, cradling Daniels in his arms. “Somebody help!”

  SEPTEMBER 1st

  Thursday

  45

  Upper East Side

  New York City

  A loud beeping woke Federal Reserve Chairman Gary Reinhold out of a deep sleep. It took him a second to realize what it was.

  An emergency alert.

  Picking up his phone, he fumbled with his glasses. Read the message.