by Jon Evans
“The human brain is an amazing pattern recognition machine,” Keiran says. “When it recognizes a face it does in a fraction of a second what computers require hours to manage.”
“Yes. We can recognize her. But she’s not going to be parading around the hotel any more, is she?” Danielle asks, exasperated.
“Never mind the future. We have the past.”
Danielle looks at him, irritated by his typically cryptic comment, and then guessing its meaning. “Cameras. The hotel has cameras. You can take them over.”
“Unfortunately, no. This is, after all, DefCon. The hotel cameras get pre-hacked weeks in advance. It scores major bragging rights. I don’t know who owns them right now, but we probably can’t risk asking them for a favour. But I do happen to know that our friends at 7-11 have moved to a central webcam security system in all their stores, so they can document hold-ups and shoplifting across the whole chain. And you know what that means.”
“Shazam to the rescue?”
“With luck. You two can get back to sleep. This will take me an hour or two.” He sounds eager. “I’ll wake you when I’ve got something.”
“That’s big of you.”
“Oh, and don’t forget, don’t go out. Either of you. She saw you too.”
“What if she took over the hotel cameras?” Jayalitha asks.
“Then we’re fucked. Sweet dreams.”
* * *
This time Danielle wakes to the smell of bacon and eggs. It is nine A.M.
“I room-serviced breakfast,” Keiran says absently, as Danielle pokes her head into his room to see what is happening. “Help yourself. I won’t be a moment with this. I’m in their network like a snake in the plumbing.” But both Jayalitha and Danielle have showered, their breakfasts are devoured, and their mugs of tea are almost empty, before Keiran finally grunts with triumph.
“Who would have thought 7-11 would have been such a nut to crack?” he demands cheerfully. “If their head office hadn’t been Shazam-crazy I never could have done it. No matter. Here’s the video from across the street, from ten minutes before you left the hotel. Sing out when you see her.”
Danielle and Jayalitha peer at the slightly grainy footage. She isn’t there. They watch intently, as if Late Night 7-11 Camera was the most fascinating reality TV show ever, as customers line up and pay for for cigarettes, chocolate bars, and Slurpees.
“There!” Jayalitha exclaims. Danielle echoes her. They watch P2 come through the door of the store, glance up directly at the camera for a moment, and then proceed to the counter, where she buys a pack of Marlboro Lights.
“I love that look at the camera,” Keiran says with satisfaction. “Classic hacker instinct. Betrayed you this time, sweetheart, didn’t it?”
“Betrayed her how exactly?” Danielle asks.
“Hopefully,” Keiran admits. “This is conjecture. But think of it this way. You’re P2. You come here for perfectly innocent reasons, to check in on the state of the hacking art, and then you find out that the dastardly fugitives your friends in LA were supposed to track down are here looking for you. And you’re presumably rather annoyed by this turn of events. What do you do?”
“Get out of town,” Danielle says.
“No,” Jayalitha corrects. “I would call for assistance to deal with the dastardly fugitives. I would stay in the city. But I would move to another hotel.”
Keiran nods. “My guess exactly. And at some point, when you check into that other hotel, you will pass a cashpoint or step into an elevator. And you know what that means.”
“We can’t sit here looking at all the cameras in Las Vegas,” Danielle objects. “It would take our whole lives to find her.”
“Quite true. This job cries out for automation. Something like a powerful facial recognition program. I think I can dig at least two of those up on short notice. The one Klaupactus wrote is probably the best. It requires front and side views of the target’s face, but conveniently we now have just that.”
“You were just saying that computers take hours to recognize a face,” Danielle points out.
“Yes. And that’s why they’ll never imagine I can possibly do what I am about to do. Because they don’t know that I have at my disposal the most powerful accumulation of computing power ever assembled on the planet.”
“Excuse me?”
“Shazam,” Keiran says. “Seven million instances, remember. All of them at my beck and call. And this is just the kind of granular problem you can go massively parallel on. With seven million computers working on this problem, it’ll be like every camera in Las Vegas is looking for our little blonde sweetheart and knows how to shout out to us if she walks by.” He sighs. “It’s a blatant violation of LoTek’s Law, of course. I wrote the parallel processing code hoping I’d never have to use it. It will probably be Shazam’s final blaze of glory. Seven million computer owners will start wondering what just happened to their suddenly very slow machines. Backbone administrators will start asking why global Internet traffic just spiked twenty per cent. But better that than some real-life Gil Grissom trying to work out what happened after our corpses are found out in the desert.”
“What if she left town after all?” Danielle asks.
Keiran nods. “Then I’ll have burned Shazam for nothing. It’s a gamble. But what the hell We’re in Vegas. Let’s roll the dice. Give me space, if you would. Operation Argus has now begun.”
Eight hours later, a beaming Keiran shows them footage of P2 checking into room 1723 of the Mirage. According to the Mirage’s records, her name is Sophia Ward, and she is nineteen years old.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s go have a little chat with our angel of cyberspace.”
Chapter 36
The crowd at the Mirage is very different from that at DefCon; older, Midwestern, conservatively dressed. In the lobby, dominated by an aquarium three stories high crowded with colourful fish, Keiran checkes in with his false ID. He smiles as he takes the keycard. He knows what the desk clerk does not: that the Mirage’s check-in system, which Keiran now owns, recognized the name on his ID and, as per the instructions he programmed before they entered the hotel, has impregnated the magnetic strip on his card with a master-key code that will open any room in the hotel.
They move through the artificially damp air and palm trees of the Mirage’s oasis-themed lobby bar, then the whirling lights and burbling noises of the casino; like all hotels on the Strip, the Mirage is arranged so you can’t go anywhere without walking through an enticing sea of gambling tables and machines. Banks of slot machines face men and women, mostly old, who push buttons like rats in a Skinner box. Even the people who walk the green baize floors without gambling move like extras in a zombie movie. Keiran is relieved when they reach the elevators.
They walk past 1719, the room they just checked into, and stop outside the door to 1723. Keiran withdraws the gun from his pocket, sleek and dully metallic, densely heavy, delivered to their room this afternoon by Trurl. The Polish nihilist hadn’t said where it had come from, other than that it was untraceable, and Keiran hadn’t asked. The weapon feels foreign in his hand. He used to go on shooting expeditions in the California desert with other hacker friends regularly, when he lived in Oakland, but until today he hasn’t held a gun for five years.
Keiran looks looks to his right and left, to Danielle and Jayalitha, checking readiness. Danielle nods. Jayalitha tilts her head Indian-style. Keiran takes a deep breath. He secretly hopes that P2 – Sophia, if that’s her real name – is out, the room is empty, and they can find what they need to know by rummaging through her computer. He’d rather avoid actual physical confrontation.
He inserts the keycard. The little light above the card reader turns green. Keiran pushes the door open and enters 1723, which is a suite. The connecting door is half-closed.
“You’re early,” a voice says from the other room. A girl’s voice, its tone eager and teasing. “Maybe you found some reason to make good time?”
“You will tell us what we want to know or I will strangle you here and now myself,” Jayalitha says. Her voice is soft, almost a whisper, but allows for no doubt. “You led them to my family. For you my husband was murdered. For you my children burned. You are no girl. You are a demon.”
P2 finds her voice, high and quavery. “Please.”
“Cooperate and you won’t get hurt,” Danielle says, parroting every cop show ever, playing good cop to Jayalitha’s murderous cop. “We believe you didn’t fully understand what you were doing. Answer our questions and we’ll leave you be, Sophia. Is that your real name? Sophia?”
The girl on the bed nods.
“Vocalize, please,” Keiran says. “But not too loud.”
“Yes,” she says hoarsely. “That’s my name.”
“Why check in with your real name?” Danielle asks.
“I didn’t think you could find me.”
“Well,” Keiran says, pleased, “you’re very good, but you’re not omniscient.”
“Can I put on a shirt?” Sophia asks.
Keiran looks at Danielle, who nods. He takes a shirt hanging over a chair and throws it to her.
“Who were you waiting for?” Danielle asks, as Sophia puts it on. “Your boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
“When will he get here?”
“I expected a couple more hours.”
“How could you?” Jayalitha bursts out. ” How could you condemn so many people to agony and disease? How could you be so cruel?”
“It wasn’t me,” Sophia says, shocked. “I don’t have anything to do with it. That was all Shadbold. I just make sure he doesn’t get caught. That’s all I do.”
“Why?” Danielle asks. “How much does he pay you?”
“It’s not about the money.” Even frightened, she injects a hint of scorn into her tone when she says money.
“The tools,” Keiran suggests. “He gave you a whole fucking arsenal to play with, didn’t he? What have you got? Fundamental exploits?”
“Yes. But that’s not why I help him. I wouldn’t do it for that. Never. He’s an awful man, I know that. But if they find him out, all his research will be cancelled, just thrown away.”
“Right. You’re a humanitarian helping him out to speed the cure for cancer,” Danielle says sarcastically.
“My dad is dying,” Sophia says quietly. “He has cancer. Just like Shadbold. Late stage. If it wasn’t for Shadbold’s drugs he’d already be dead.” She looks at Jayalitha. “I’m sorry for your family. I didn’t order whatever happened to them, you know. I just tell him things I find out, he makes the decisions. I’m trying to save my father. And the rest of the world can fucking roll over and die as far as I care. That’s all I know. I’m not going to let my dad die.”
“You foolish, selfish witch,” Jayalitha says.
“Let’s steer the conversation back to constructive topics,” Keiran says. “These tools he gave you. What are they?”
Sophia says, “I don’t know for sure where they came from. I think they’re military.”
“Military?”
“Military, NSA, something like that. I can’t imagine who else could have had them and not revealed them. We’re talking fundamental exploits. At the operating system level. Get me onto a network with these tools and I can own just about any machine on the planet.”
“You’re going to show me these tools,” Keiran says. “And burn me a copy. Then you’re going to show us all the evidence that Shadbold, through Justice International, is poisoning thousands of people and then performing illegal pharmaceutical research on them. Anything less and we sic her on you.” He nods to Jayalitha.
Sophia swallows and shakes her head. “I’ll show you the toolkit. But I can’t give you evidence. There isn’t any. It’s destroyed as soon as it’s not useful any more.”
“You can point us to the scientists who design the studies,” Danielle says. “And the ones who analyze the results. You can show us how they ship the cancers to India. You can tell us who collects notes from the field and sends them back. You can tell us enough.”
“No. No! I won’t. My father,” she stops, has to visibly compose herself. “What do you care? But I won’t. Do anything you want to me. I won’t betray him. I won’t let him die.”
There is a brief silence.
“We’ll start with the tools,” Keiran says, “then discuss the rest.” He nods to the laptop on the desk. “You’re going to log me in as root. Typing very slowly indeed.”
Sophia looks at him wide-eyed. Keiran understands. Giving someone else root access to your machine is a wrenchingly personal violation.
“Now,” he snaps, and raises the gun towards her, feeling ridiculous.
He half-expects her to laugh, but instead she pales, rises, walks over to the desk, wakes up her laptop – Debian Linux, as he expected – and slowly logs in as he watches. Her root password is a string of twelve gibberish numbers and letters. Keiran takes a moment to memorize it.
“Now what?”
“Sit back on the bed a moment.”
She obeys. Keiran sits at her laptop and disables her machine’s wireless connection. He can’t risk her somehow triggering an alarm. “Now come back here,” he says, “and show me what Shadbold stole from the military.”
* * *
“Holy Christ,” Keiran says, yet again.
“Yeah,” Sophia says. “An undiscovered fundamental exploit in the Linux kernel.”
“Except it’s not in the kernel per se, is it?”
“No. In the way GCC compiles it.”
Keiran and Sophia exchange a brief marvelling look. Keiran can tell that Danielle, who sits on the bed holding the gun awkwardly while he and Sophia work at her laptop, is not impressed by their professional camaraderie. But whether the girl next to him is evil or misguided, Keiran has to respect her.
It’s clear she hasn’t succeeded only because of the military-grade hacking weapons Shadbold gave her. Most hackers wouldn’t understand how to use this attack suite, much less how its exploits work. Half a dozen fundamental Windows exploits, two in Apple’s OS X, this one in the Linux kernel, and another, stunningly, in IBM’s CICS mainframe transaction architecture, used by multimillion-dollar big-iron machines around the world. A clutch of Internet Explorer flaws, and one in Firefox, that allow a web server to take control of any machine that visits its site. Remote root access to Cisco and Juniper routers. Subtle security holes in Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server databases. All together, a suite of exploits that give the knowledgeable user the ability to take over almost any computer or network on Earth. Sophia has built a brilliant harness which automates their use; given an IP number, she can reduce almost any computer to servility within five seconds.
“You did this all by yourself?” he asks.
“I had to. I couldn’t trust anyone else.”
“I’m impressed,” he admits.
“Enough of the love-in,” Danielle says sourly. “Let’s get to the important stuff.”
“Just a moment. I want a copy of this,” Keiran says. He draws a burnable CD from his day pack, inserts it into Sophia’s machine, and begins to burn a copy of her military attack suite. “All right. Let’s get to what you know about Justice International.”
Sophia stiffens.
“Just a moment,” Danielle says. “Sophia.”
“Yes?”
“Your father. When did he get sick?”
“Three years ago,” Sophia says.
“How did you get into hacking?”
“Come on,” Keiran says sharply. “We have no time to saunter down Memory Lane, her boyfriend’s going to be here soon, and I’d very much rather not have multiple ho
stages.”
Danielle says, “Keiran, shut up.”
Keiran considers his options and decides to follow orders.
“Sophia, tell us. Briefly,” Danielle says.
“All right. Well. The usual way, I guess. I was always good at it. I always won all the state math and computer contests. And was top five in the nationals. My dad worked at Xeroc PARC in the seventies.” Keiran whistles, impressed; Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center was where modern computing was born. “My mom died when I was young so he sort of raised me. Anyway I got bored in computer class one day and started just playing around. This was in the early days of the Net, security was pretty slack. First I hung around in hacker chat rooms. I don’t know, I was a kid, I thought breaking into stuff was cool. Anyways I found this stupid implementation bug and hacked into the CIA. First I got arrested. Then they let me go, ‘cause I was a kid and I didn’t really do anything. There were a couple newspaper stories and everything. It was embarrassing. Anyway then my dad got sick. I was hacking around looking for ways to get him better, maybe fund more research, and I found Mr. Shadbold. He was doing lots of public research funding back then too. He took me to his boat.” Danielle nods. “Oh, right, you’ve been there. Anyway I started doing some technical work for him. And then one day he told me about this other secret project and how he needed to keep it secret. And I could tell right away it was the only way my dad might make it. When they diagnosed him they gave him six months.”
A phone rings, startling everyone. Keiran’s cell phone. He looks at it suspiciously. The LED readout claims the caller is Trurl, but there’s no guarantee that the call display hasn’t been hacked. He pushes the answer button but says nothing.
“LoTek,” Trurl says. “Remember I was keeping a backup eye on your phone monitor? P2’s phone came alive again, ten minutes ago, in the Mirage Hotel. I cross-referenced Alexis Park and Mirage bookings. The only intersection of the two sets is a woman named Sophia Ward, in room 1723 of the Mirage.”
