by Brad Thor
Convinced the answer was staring him in the face and he just wasn’t seeing it, it was well after midnight when he staggered into the kitchen for a third bottle of wine and it hit him.
Rushing back into the master bedroom, he climbed up into the chair at his desk and began clicking away at the keys. Nina, who had lain down on his bed and fallen asleep, was awakened by the flurry of activity.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“How much do you know about what your sister did for a living?”
“She was a programmer for a company in Maryland called ATS. They do a lot of government work. Why?”
“And before that?” asked Nicholas as he continued working.
“She worked at some big Wall Street bank writing trading software or something.”
“How close were you?”
“Caroline’s fifteen years older than me. She was a sophomore in high school when I was born. Same mom, different dads.”
“So you weren’t that close,” stated Nicholas.
“By the time I was two, she’d already left for college. I saw her over the summers a little bit and most of the holidays, but that was it.”
“Did she ever tell you why she left the bank?”
Nina could tell this was headed somewhere, she just didn’t know where. Propping herself up on one elbow she replied, “She said she got sick of all the pressure. She also said she hated living in Manhattan.”
“She told me that too. Then I learned the real story.”
“What do you mean the real story?”
Nicholas turned so he could look at her and replied, “Your sister was fantastic with computers and wrote some amazing software. Like every other programmer in the world, she crafted an insurance policy, a way she could slip back inside the bank’s software if she ever had to. Call it a back door. The only problem was that her back door conflicted with someone else’s on the system. And that someone else used it to screw your sister.”
“How?”
“Another IT person was stealing the bank’s client data and selling it on the black market. He rigged it to make it look like your sister had done it.”
“She never mentioned any of this,” said Nina.
“It gets more interesting. As I said, this other IT person, some guy named Sanjay, framed your sister in a very clever way. That said, Caroline was able to point out several inconsistencies that argued for her innocence. Nevertheless the bank fired her anyway. Two days later, she launched an attack on their system and knocked all of their ATMs off-line for a week.”
Nina shook her head and smiled. “Ever since we were kids, she’s always had a serious temper.”
“Well, her serious temper got her into serious trouble. It didn’t take long for the authorities to show up on her doorstep. Within two days of the ATMs going down, they picked her up.”
“Wait a second. You said she had knocked the ATMs out for a week.”
Nicholas now smiled. “She did, but no one could figure out how to break the program she had written and get them back online. They threatened to lock her up and throw away the key, but she refused to give in. It was a Mexican standoff. Finally, the bank blinked. They apologized for firing her and offered her a severance package. The authorities, though, were another matter.
“A crime had been committed and they had no intention of letting your sister walk. They wanted to throw the book at her, or so they said.”
“What did they want?” Nina asked.
“They wanted her. And seeing as how no bank was ever going to hire her after what she had done, she took them up on their offer, in exchange for immunity from prosecution, of course. That’s how she wound up at ATS. They’re basically the IT people for the entire U.S. government.”
“She never told me any of this.”
“It took me a while to get it out of her, believe me,” said Nicholas.
“So what does this have to do with Caroline’s flash drive?”
Turning back around, he made several more keystrokes. “I think your sister built one of her back doors into this flash drive.”
“You do?” replied Nina as she got off the bed and walked over to the desk.
“I do. And if I can find it, I think I can get us in.”
Nina watched over the next ten minutes as Nicholas continued to type in strings of code into his computer.
Suddenly he hung his head and then shook it slowly from side to side.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Nicholas smiled.
“You found it?”
“I did. There’s a back door, but you’ll never believe what the password is.”
Nina put her hand on his shoulder and gave it an excited squeeze. “Tell me.”
Nicholas pointed at a small box on the screen and then typed the six-letter code that opened up the drive: S_A_N_J_A_Y.
CHAPTER 19
It was unlike any drive he had ever seen before. The amount of data it contained was staggering. There were literally thousands of files stored on it and room for multiple terabytes more. Nicholas had heard about theoretical jumps in microstorage capability using discs coated in protein from salt marsh microbes, but he had never interacted with one until now.
“What’s all this?” Nina asked.
Nicholas scrolled through the directory. “I’m not sure.”
“Caroline said you’d know what to do. Whatever’s on that drive, she said they were going to kill her over it. You have to figure it out.”
“I’m trying, but it’s like being given a puzzle without the top of the box.”
“So start lining up the edges,” replied Nina. “Do what you have to do to work your way in. I need to know what happened to my sister.”
“I want to understand all of this as well, but deciphering what we’re looking at is not that easy.”
“Neither was figuring out how to unlock the drive, but you did it,” she said, placing her hand again on his shoulder. “You can do this too.”
Nicholas liked the confidence she had in him.
“What can I do to help you?” she asked. “I’m not a computer person, but there must be something. Just name it.”
“How about some coffee? I think our long night is about to get much longer.”
When Nina returned with a pot and two mugs, she asked, “What have you found?”
He had been chewing on the top of a pen, an exercise that sometimes helped him focus. “Are you familiar with filter bubbles?”
“No.”
“It’s a term used to describe how search engines, Google in particular, are studying every online move you make and then tailoring what results get returned in response to your search queries. You and I could both conduct the exact same search and Google would kick back completely different results. If we each typed in ‘Egypt,’ you might get sightseeing and travel information, while I get information about politics and the Arab Spring. Everyone is being placed in their own bubble online.”
“But they’re not getting the same information,” Nina stated.
“Exactly. By controlling what you see, they can reinforce, or even shape, how you think. It’s like going to the library only to have the librarian hide half the card catalog when she sees you coming. Information is being filtered based on what computer algorithms think you want to read. The problem is you have no idea what’s being left out. However you see the world, whatever your politics or belief system is, you have to work to uncover any contradictory information.”
“So much for the Internet existing to bring people together,” she replied.
“Actually,” said Nicholas, “the Internet was created to be a military communications network that could withstand a nuclear first strike. It was developed in the 1950s, but didn’t transmit its first message until October 29, 1969. It was supposed to be the word login, but only the l and the o were transmitted and the system abruptly crashed.”
“How ironic.”
“Indeed,” he replied as he exited
out of an article and scrolled through the other files. “Filter bubbles are only one kind of issue Caroline saved articles on. There’s a bunch of material on Internet legislation as well, Net neutrality, the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act—”
“Why would she have saved all of those?” Nina wondered aloud.
“I can’t tell.”
“It must mean something. What’s Net neutrality?”
“Basically, it’s a move by elements within the government who want to have authority to censor the Internet,” replied Nicholas.
“That’s not good.”
“No, it’s not, and the PCNA Act is even worse.”
“I haven’t heard of that one either.”
“The PCNAA is also called the Internet ‘kill switch.’”
“That, I have heard of,” replied Nina. “That’s the law that would place a giant off button in the President’s office, right?”
Nicholas nodded. “And if there’s ever some sort of mega cyber attack, the President would have the ability and sole discretion to shut the Internet down.”
“Until the attack was gone?”
“For as long as the President saw fit. All he or she would have to do is keep renewing the state of cyber emergency.”
“You act like it’s that simple,” Nina said as she raised her hand and snapped her fingers. “Once the threat’s gone, the President would have to turn the Net back on. You can’t just continue to say there’s a state of emergency when there isn’t one.”
Nicholas raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think so?”
“Lobbying for the ability to censor the Web isn’t good in my opinion. I don’t like censorship of any kind, anywhere. I want the Net to be free and open. But I find it hard to believe that a U.S. President would claim there was an ongoing emergency and use it to keep people off the Internet when there really was no emergency at all.”
“Three days after the 9/11 attacks,” said Nicholas, “the President of the United States declared a national state of emergency. Over a decade later, it’s still in effect.”
“What?”
“The United States has been under a continuous state of emergency since 9/11.”
“And Congress just allows that?” asked Nina.
“It’s not something Congress votes on. Under the National Emergencies Act, the President is required only to inform them of his decision. The act was created so the President couldn’t establish a never-ending situation. A state of national emergency is only supposed to last for two years. The 9/11 state of emergency has been renewed repeatedly since it was established.”
“On what justification?”
Nicholas looked at her. “Terrorism.”
“But terrorism was around before 9/11,” said Nina, “and it’s going to continue to be around.”
“And so will America’s continuing state of national emergency.”
“I don’t understand that, though. Why? What’s the point? What power does it give them?”
“You hit the nail on the head. It’s about power. Supposedly, there are about five hundred legal provisions that can be bent or absolutely thrown out the window under a national state of emergency.”
“Such as?” she asked.
“The most famous are the ability to suspend two major Constitutional rights—the right to habeas corpus, which deals with unlawful detention, and the right of National Guard troops to appear before a grand jury.”
“Why would a National Guard soldier ever need to appear before a grand jury?”
“I’m not an attorney, but I would assume that because they’re citizen soldiers that they have some right to civilian courts and aren’t bound specifically by the military tribunal system,” Nicholas said with a shrug.
“But that doesn’t answer my question.”
“Well, when do charges normally get brought against a member of the military?”
“When they break the law,” Nina replied.
“Or,” Nicholas pointed out after thinking a moment, “when they refuse to obey.”
The look on the young woman’s face immediately changed. “If National Guard troops refuse to carry out actions against their fellow countrymen, the last thing the government would want is for those issues to be adjudicated in a civilian court.”
“Agreed,” he said. “There’s a school of thought that believes that buried within the Patriot Act are certain additional provisions the government can call upon only in a state of emergency and that is why it has been kept going. Again, I’m not a lawyer, but power is a heady drug. Only the very strong can resist its pull. Those with power tend most often to search out more in order to solidify their positions and prevent themselves from being dislodged. It’s how a republic slips from freedom into soft tyranny and eventually despotism.”
“But I still don’t understand why Caroline would be interested in all of this.”
Nicholas shrugged. “Maybe it had to do with what she was working on at ATS.”
“But all that is policy stuff. I thought she was on the tech end of things, working with Homeland Security and things like that.”
“That’s in here too,” he said as he opened another file, “and it makes a bit more sense, since DHS is responsible for cyber security across the civilian, military, and intelligence communities. Caroline copied truckloads of DHS Web pages and wiki articles. The acronyms for their programs and divisions go on and on—NCCIC, NCSC, NCRCG, NCSD, NPPD, CNCI, CS&C.”
“Still nothing, though, that points specifically to what she was on to.”
“There was an interesting article about the National Operations Center at DHS and something called their Media Monitoring Initiative,” said Nicholas. “Apparently, since 2010, Homeland Security has been gathering personal information on journalists, news anchors, and reporters. Interestingly enough, they consider anyone who uses social media like Twitter, Facebook, or any of those platforms as being in the media.”
“So they spy on everyone, all the time. It is just like China. How come no one knows about this?” she asked.
“Some do, but I don’t think anyone appreciates the extent to which this goes. Your sister seemed to and that may be what she was warning us about. There’s lots more here, but like any puzzle, we have to take it one piece at a time.”
Nicholas tried to sound confident, but the task was overwhelming. There was no key to why Caroline had archived all of this material. It all dealt with computers or cyber issues in one form or another, but why shouldn’t it? Caroline was an IT specialist. None of this was anything unusual, much less something worth killing over. There had to be a bigger picture. What was it she wanted me to see? Nicholas went back to chewing on his pen, pausing only for an occasional sip of coffee.
∗ ∗ ∗
For hours he scrolled through article after article; cached Web page after cached Web page. The whole drive was like some enormous digital scrapbook.
Scrapbook! What if that’s exactly what it was? The articles obviously only told part of the story, like pictures. What if there was something written on the back of them—something that explained why the articles were significant?
Reopening one of the articles he had been reading, he looked at it from a new perspective. Most of the hackers he knew were incredibly bright, and Caroline Romero had been no exception. Many enjoyed the digital art of steganography, disguising messages or information but hiding them right in plain sight. They could be hidden among the millions of pixels in an image or even inside a digital sound file. The possibilities were endless. It was known as security through obscurity.
Caroline, though, was practical. Considering the hoops Nicholas had jumped through to gain access to the drive, he couldn’t believe she would have set up another huge leap of security challenges.
Studying the document in front of him, he realized something. The Web article, like all the others, was the printable version. That meant it didn’t contain pictures, but it did still contain links.
Ev
en though he knew none of his equipment was currently connected to the Internet, he still checked one more time, just to be sure.
Convinced that he was safe, he floated his cursor over the article he was reading and clicked on one of its links.
Instantly he was transported into a whole new area of the drive he hadn’t known existed.
CHAPTER 20
Whatever new technology was being used for the drive, it was impressive. Not only was the storage capacity unlike anything that had come before, so was its ability to partition off and disguise enormous chunks of data as simply unused space. It was like a movie lot—the building façades look perfectly real, but open up one of the windows, or walk through one of the doors, and there’s an entirely different reality behind it.
Nicholas was tempted to wake Nina, who had once again fallen asleep on his bed, but decided to keep reading.
Clicking back and forth between the surface articles and what Caroline had attached beneath, he began to understand what she had attempted to do. It was a complete, painstakingly thorough documentation of every single venture and initiative that Adaptive Technology Solutions had ever been involved in. From the articles and wiki pages on DHS to investigative reports on the NSA, every piece of hardware, every software program, every patch, every string of code ever written, updated, or sold was documented. The depth to which ATS was entangled with the United States government astounded even him. The deeper he delved into the information, the further down the rabbit hole he was taken.
Considering his history in the sale and purchase of classified information on the black market, Nicholas was particularly interested in the dossier Caroline had assembled on the National Security Agency. Much of what he had always suspected was suddenly confirmed.
Within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, the unparalleled listening ability of the National Security Agency—which had always been aimed outside the United States—was turned inward. No longer was the NSA restricted to tracking foreign spies and terrorists, whose surveillance had to be signed off on by a judge of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Now, in the name of national security, all American citizens were suspects, and due process had been completely abandoned.
