Dark Trojan (The Adam Drake series Book 3)

by Scott Matthews

  “What are these?”

  “They were in the top drawer of the programmer’s desk. I don’t know what’s on them. And there are two drawers of files of programmer’s code at Walker’s residence your man can study, along with that mini supercomputer I described. We’ll find a way to beat this thing, Bill.”

  “If we don’t,” Bradford replied, “I’m ruined. All these years, and I let my guard down just once and rely on someone I thought was a friend. Then this happens. It’s my fault, all of it. I should have vetted Canaan—Capelli—more thoroughly and not rushed to meet our deadline when Nick Kawasaki was killed. The very thing my security software was designed to protect against is about to be the Trojan horse that brings down the entire energy grid.”

  Drake tried to sound optimistic. “It might be the fourth quarter, but the game’s not over yet. Why don’t you take these flash drives and get your team started on them. I need to call Liz and find out if she’s learned anything from the two guys she’s questioning.”

  On his way to the break room for a much needed cup of coffee, he called Strobel. “Liz, have you learned anything helpful from our two captives?”

  “They’re not very talkative. They may both have concussions, but they’re alert enough to demand that the consulate of Paraguay be notified that they’re being detained. They claim they’re citizens of Paraguay.”

  “Did they say who they’re working for?”

  “They claim to work for our Mr. Walker. Members of his house staff. But they look like bodyguards to me.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. Sounds like both of them need some enhanced interrogation.”

  “Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind.”

  “Want me to come back and assist you?”

  “I’ll have another go at it first. I was polite initially, but they need to understand that as co-conspirators of a plot to destroy or damage the electrical grid where a death results, they’re facing the death penalty. Paraguay can’t help them. Neither can their boss.”

  “What did Director Rallings say when you called him?”

  “He’s asking the CIA to send him what they have on the Greek Golden Dawn. He told me to focus on preventing a blackout. And he told me to tell you he had no idea that Bradford’s cyber attacks would lead to something like this, but he’s glad he asked you to check things out.”

  “We’re lucky he did.” Drake admitted. “Is the FBI cooperating?”

  “They are for now. The two agents are watching me closely, but I think they’ve been told to stay out of my way.”

  “The Cyber Command analyst should be here at EIS within the hour. If you learn anything, or if Bradford’s man finds something in those files or on the computer in the vault, let me know immediately.”

  “You do the same. Good luck.”

  Chapter 73

  Four DHS special agents arrived at the EIS offices at 2:00 a.m. with the Cyber Command analyst, now wearing an orange jump suit, handcuffs, and shackles. The young man’s hair was disheveled and his eyes were bloodshot. He was clearly frightened of the men who had flown him across the country.

  Drake introduced himself to the lead agent and explained that Ms. Strobel was questioning two other men, and would join them soon. He directed them to take their prisoner to the conference room.

  When they had shuffled him down the hall and seated him on the other side of the big conference table, Drake asked them to leave so that he could talk with the analyst alone.

  “I’ll have some coffee brought in,” he said in his good cop voice. “You look like you could use some. Did they treat you all right?”

  The analyst raised his eyes. “They think I’m a traitor. How do you think they treated me?”

  “You are a traitor,” Drake said, “but I still hope you were treated fairly.

  “They were rough, yes, but they didn’t beat me, if that’s what you want to know. Who are you? Their boss?”

  “Who I am isn’t important,” Drake said with a shrug of his shoulders. “Right now, I’m the person standing between you and a trip to Guantanamo. You are a co-conspirator in a terrorist plot to hurt a lot of people in this country. If you tell me what I want to know, you might get to stand trial here instead of being detained indefinitely on an island in the Caribbean.”

  “I’m not a traitor. And I’m sure as hell not a terrorist.”

  “You gave a copy of deadly computer worm to a terrorist who’s using it to crash the U.S. power grid. What would you call yourself?”

  “Listen,” the analyst leaned forward, “first, the Flame worm I worked on is available all over the place. Iran made it public once they discovered it. If someone’s using it for some terrorist thing, I don’t know anything about that. Second, the Flame worm is designed to carry out cyber espionage, not shut down an energy grid. Theoretically, the worm is smart enough to do what you say, but you’d have to modify it a lot to do that.”

  Drake got up and walked the long way around the conference table. He stopped behind the analyst and leaned down and spoke directly into his right ear. “You haven’t denied that you gave the worm to someone. Why is that? I think it’s because you did and that’s why you were trying to flee the country. Am I right?”

  The analyst stared straight ahead and remained silent.

  Drake stepped back and waited through a full minute of silence. Then he reached around and slammed the table with his right hand and shouted in the analyst’s ear, “Am I right?”

  The analyst jumped an inch off his chair and began shaking.

  When he was back in his seat on the other side of the conference table, Drake calmly said, “This is going to end badly for you if you don’t start cooperating. So let’s make this easy for both of us, or at least for me. I killed a man tonight. A Hezbollah terrorist. I raided another man’s home, the man I believe you gave the worm to. One of his men committed suicide rather than talk to me. Is that what you’re prepared to do? Are you going to bite down on a poison fake tooth and kill yourself? ’Cause if you are, go ahead and do it. I’m tired and would like to go to bed.”

  The analyst began rocking back and forth in his chair. When he stopped rocking a minute or so later, he said quietly, “I had a big online gambling debt I couldn’t pay. I was told that if I provided him a copy of the Flame worm, he would wipe my debt off the books. If I didn’t, he would reveal my gambling to my employer. I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Did you modify the worm to attack the energy grid?

  “I would never do that. I stole a copy of it, but I didn’t do anything that would hurt my country.”

  “Do you know the man who was blackmailing you?”

  “No. He was just a voice on the phone. But he knew me! He knew my unlisted cell phone number, everything about my gambling. Things no one else could know. At first, I thought it was a counter-espionage test the Cyber Command was running. Until he killed my Golden Lab as a warning.”

  “Do you think you can help us find a way to keep this worm from activating at noon today?”

  “I can try.” By now the analyst looked almost pathetically eager. “I can’t promise anything, though.”

  “That’s all we can ask right now. I’ll have some coffee and a sandwich brought in. The agents who brought you here are right outside, so it’s best if you don’t try and leave.”

  Chapter 74

  Stepping out of the elevator into the EIS reception area, Strobel waved to Drake down the hall, where he was talking with two DHS agents she knew.

  He waved back and walked to meet her.

  “How’d it go?” he asked her.

  She grinned and brushed her hair behind her ears. “We have two soldiers of something called ‘the Alliance’ detained now. They gave me their names and little else. But I was able to learn that Asuncion, Paraguay, is where they call home and that Mr. Ryan Walker, their emplo
yer, is apparently also the leader of this Alliance.”

  “Did they admit to the Alliance being behind the worm?”

  “Not so much. But both of them seemed to be proud that we’d think so. I think they know the Alliance is involved but aren’t willing to admit it. We’ll find out, though it might take some time. So how are you doing here?”

  “The analyst from the Cyber Command is here,” Drake said, “but he denies modifying the worm. He says he was blackmailed into stealing a copy of the Flame worm.”

  “Has Bradford made any progress?”

  “Let’s go find out. I brought some flash drives back that might help.”

  They found Bradford looking over the shoulder of John Lewiston, his cyber security expert, who was studying lines of programmer’s code on a monitor.

  “We may have found the key on one of the flash drives you gave me,” Bradford said without looking up. “John thinks this is the exact code for the suicide function. Now we can get to work building a repair kit to counter it.”

  “Will you have enough time?” Strobel asked.

  “It’ll be close. But we have all our utility clients on standby right now. As soon as we have the kit completed, they’ll have it in seconds.”

  “Good luck, Bill,” Drake said. He stepped back as two members of Symantec’s rapid response team moved in to see what Bradford was talking about.

  Hearing her cell phone beep in her purse, Strobel walked to the back of the work area and took out her phone to read a message she had just received. After texting a quick response, she returned to Drake’s side.

  “Your father-in-law just landed and will be here shortly,” she told him. “He wanted to come and let Bradford know he’d have his support when all this gets investigated.”

  “Did you know he was coming?”

  “He let me know when he left D.C., and, yes, I knew he was thinking about coming. He asked me to keep him informed.”

  She watched Drake’s reaction on hearing that she’d been communicating with his father-in-law. When she had told him at dinner the week before that the senator had offered her a position on his staff if she left DHS, a phone call she’d received had kept her from hearing if he would be comfortable with her working for his father-in-law. Later, he had told her it he didn’t think it would bother him. But she knew in her heart that if accepting the offer harmed her relationship with Drake, it wouldn’t be worth it. For that reason, she was willing to be patient. At the same time, she had no intention of giving up on her hope of securing his love some day.

  Drake was watching her think. “Have you decided to join his staff, then?”

  “I haven’t informed DHS yet, but yes.”

  “Good, I think you’ll be a great addition to his team. When Secretary Rallings leaves DHS, I won’t be his troubleshooter any longer. I might have to visit my in-laws more often in D.C., though,” he said with a quick smile.

  She returned his smile and prayed that the color rushing to her cheeks wasn’t too obvious. “Well, I’d better check on the cyber analyst in the conference room,” she said to avoid an awkward moment. “And make arrangements for his return to D.C. if he’s not going to help us here.”

  When she turned away, she firmly resisted the urge to celebrate with a quick fist pump.

  Chapter 75

  Drake was still watching as Bradford huddled with his team. They had worked through the night, and despite the endless cups of coffee and cans of Red Bull, they were tired and clearly worried. It was half past eight in the morning, and they hadn’t finished putting together a repair kit that they were confident would keep the worm from destroying power transformers across the United States.

  After a week and a half of seemingly random violent events, they were now facing a threat at high noon that would cripple the country. At any given time of the day, there were 5,000 commercial airliners in the air that would have to land without the benefit of air traffic controllers guiding them down. There were at least 125,000,000 cars on the road each day that would have to make it safely home without the aid of traffic signals. The Internet would be lost for commercial transactions and cash would suddenly be king when people couldn’t use ATMS or their credit cards or do online banking. Water and food supplies would be exhausted in days.

  How did we let ourselves become so vulnerable? Drake shook his head at this apparently unanswerable question. A government’s first responsibility was to protect its citizens, and what was more basic than keeping the country’s lights on? But he knew that in this new age of warfare—cyber warfare—there were very few crucial infrastructures that were really safe. Bradford had shared with him that the tiny country of Israel alone fought off a thousand cyber-attack hits a minute! It wasn’t hard to imagine that ten times that many cyber-attacks were aimed at the U.S. each minute.

  As Drake stood there, watching a new breed of warriors working to defeat an unseen enemy and trying to get his head wrapped around the scope of the vast threat facing the country, he didn’t notice his father-in-law enter the room until the senator walked up behind him.

  “Is Bill going to figure this out in time?” Senator Hazelton asked quietly as he rested a hand on Drake’s shoulder in greeting.

  Drake turned and they exchanged a warm one-handed man hug. “It might be close,” he murmured, “but I think he will.”

  “Liz tells me you’ve had quite a time here the last week.”

  “That’s an understatement. Five dead, and it looks like the man behind it has safely left the country.”

  “Liz mentioned the banker. Is that who you mean?”

  “Oh, he’s more than just a banker,” Drake said, trying to keep his voice low. “He used a Hezbollah terrorist to take out an international assassin on the Queen Mary, two solar CEO’s who were somehow involved in this cyber attack, and a California Member of Congress.”

  The senator shook his head. “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t think we know. Liz has interrogated two of his men. They say they’re citizens of Paraguay. So he might be in South America.”

  “So this isn’t domestic terrorism. The President won’t like hearing he has another foreign policy problem.”

  “I doubt that he’ll label it ‘foreign’ right away,” Drake said. “There was a faked suicide note left near the two dead solar CEO’s. The FBI will investigate that…while the press does his bidding and demonizes a few more patriot groups.”

  Senator Hazelton chuckled. “And here I thought you were apolitical!”

  Drake avoided telling the senator, whom he respected as a man and as a politician, what he really thought about the president and politics in America by turning back to look at Bill Bradford, who was slapping his cyber security expert on the back and waving the Symantec team over to the monitor.

  Both men watched the excitement growing in Bradford’s group of security experts. Now they were waiting for an indication that a breakthrough had been made.

  Liz Strobel came into the room and stood beside Drake. “Have they done it?” she asked.

  “We’re waiting to hear.”

  “Liz,” Senator Hazelton said, “if they have, we need to celebrate. If you and Drake can find someone to cater lunch for everyone, I’ll pick up the tab. Order some champagne, too. The country will never know how close we came to disaster, but that doesn’t mean we can’t recognize these heroes.”

  Bradford left his team and walked over.

  “Senator, you brought us good luck. We’ve got a repair kit that works. The utilities will have it within the hour, which gives them enough time to use it before noon.”

  “Good work, Bill. The country owes you.”

  “Actually, it owes you and Secretary Rallings. If you hadn’t suggested that Drake pay us a visit, we would have blacked out.”

  Chapter 76

  While Strobel used her iPhone to search for
a local caterer and order lunch, Drake slipped out and took the elevator down to the building’s entrance. He needed both some fresh air and a moment alone. His felt his life was changing. Some decisions had to be made.

  The last ten days had convinced him that he could honor the commitment he had made the day after 9/11 to take the fight to the enemy without being in uniform. The anger had burned so hot that day that he had walked away from a job at one of the best law firms in Oregon and headed straight to the local army recruiting office. That anger, aimed then at an enemy that delighted in killing innocents, was more controlled now. But he could still feel it just as strongly when he thought about the banker and the men behind the attempt to crash America’s electric power grid.

  He walked to Bradford’s car in the parking lot, stopped beside it, and looked north at the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Cars were still streaming into the city for another day of work, work that was possible because there was still electricity to keep the lights on and run computers and elevators and air conditioners.

  One decision he knew he had to make was how he wanted to keep fighting the fight. Did he want to continue his law practice and occasionally answer the call when someone like the Secretary of DHS or his father-in-law requested his service? Or did he want something more?

  The other decision he knew he should make was closer to his heart: What did he want to do about the feelings he had for Liz Strobel? He didn’t want to feel guilty about the way he felt when he was with her, but he also didn’t want to betray the love he would always have for Kay. He’d told Liz he wasn’t ready to pursue a relationship, but he also didn’t want her pursuing a relationship with someone else.

  Both decisions, he realized, would have to be made fairly soon. With Secretary Rallings retiring from DHS and Liz joining his father-in-law’s senate staff, he needed to decide what he wanted to do with his law practice and how he was going to handle seeing the woman he was attracted to working side-by-side with the senator.