by Reece Hirsch
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 Reece Hirsch
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
“Search And Destroy”
Written by Iggy Pop and James Williamson
©1973 (Renewed) BUG MUSIC (BMI) and EMI MUSIC PUBLISHING L TD.
All Rights for EMI PUBLISHING LTD. in the U.S. and Canada Controlled and Administered by SCREEN GEMS-EMI MUSIC INC.
All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN-13: 9781477849026
ISBN-10: 1477849025
EISBN: 9781477899021
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013911781
Originally released as a Kindle Serial, August 2013
For Betty, Walt, and Brad
Table of Contents
EPIGRAPH
EPISODE 1
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
EPISODE 2
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
EPISODE 3
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
EPISODE 4
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
EPISODE 5
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
EPISODE 6
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
EPISODE 7
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
EPISODE 8
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kindle Serials
It’s … clear that we’re not as prepared as we should be, as a government or as a country… . Just as we failed in the past to invest in our physical infrastructure—our roads, our bridges, and rails—we’ve failed to invest in the security of our digital infrastructure… . We saw this in the disorganized response to [computer virus] Conficker. This status quo is no longer acceptable—not when there’s so much at stake.
—President Barack Obama
Lookout, honey, ’cause I’m using technology.
—Iggy and the Stooges, “Search and Destroy”
EPISODE 1
CHAPTER 1
December 28
It was one of the heaviest air traffic nights of the year. Pete Egan was an hour into his 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. shift at Albuquerque airport’s Terminal Radio Approach Control, known as TRACON. There was a scraggly Christmas tree in the corner straining to hold up a string of lights, but it was hard to make the cavernous air traffic control center look festive.
Jimmy Brindisi took a seat at the radarscope next to Pete, extra large coffee in hand.
“How’s that coffee, Jimmy?” Pete asked, providing the traditional setup.
“It keeps me sharp, on the edge, where I gotta be,” Jimmy said, reciting Al Pacino’s line from Heat. Ever since Pete noted that his oddly overemphasized cadences resembled latter-period Pacino, Jimmy was always doing Pacino. Now Pete wished he’d never made the remark, but there was no putting that genie back in the bottle.
“You could have brought me one.”
“I never bring you one.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“You do look like you could use it. You sleeping okay?” It was the sort of question that controllers asked one another, looking for early warning signs of a flameout.
“Like a baby. A big, drunk baby.”
In fact, Pete hadn’t been sleeping well. He had been having nightmares all week. Or, to put it more accurately, he’d been having The Nightmare, the one that plagued all air traffic controllers who were willing to admit to it. Most people’s bad dreams are remarkably standard issue in comparison. Standing naked in front of a crowd of strangers. Taking a test that you haven’t studied for. But air traffic controllers are not most people. When they descend into eyelid-twitching sleep, they are greeted by their own custom-fitted nightmare.
Pete was now standing in front of his radarscope, with his headset on. His eyes were locked on the green screen and the white flashing blips that represented passenger planes. His feet shifted slightly to keep the circulation going, but not enough to disturb his unwavering gaze.
When Pete was plugged in at TRACON, everything else receded into the background. In a weird way, this form of intense concentration was almost relaxing, because everything else was purged from his consciousness. When he was juggling planes, he had no available bandwidth to worry about his mortgage, his daughter’s medical bills, or workplace politics.
Most airline passengers assume that their fate is in the hands of the occupants of the air traffic control tower that they see rising above the low-slung airport terminals. But the control tower only handles takeoffs, landings, and ground traffic. It is TRACON controllers like Pete who do the real work, from a bunker-like building at the edge of the airport. If a tower controller was a primary care physician, then Pete was a neurosurgeon.
“Two coming in heavy, Pete.” It was Darnell Meacham, a controller at the Air Route Traffic Control Center in Phoenix known for his Zen-like calm. “Hotel Sierra Whiskey Two Five Zero and Tango Echo Oscar Nine Eight One.”
These were the aircraft call signs for two 757s entering Pete’s airspace en route from Phoenix. “Coming in heavy” meant they were big planes that required extra separation as they approached the airport due to the turbulence they trailed in their wake.
“Roger that,” Pete said. Then, to the first approaching plane: “You’re eight miles from outer marker. Maintain at two thousand feet till localizer.”
“Packing a little tight there.” It was unusual for Darnell to editorialize. Besides, Pete could see that the separation was perfect for the two new flights, as well as the two ahead of them that were almost ready to begin their descent.
“Looking good from where I’m sitting,” Pete said.
Albuquerque International Sunport Airport handles more than five hundred flights per day. Pete took pride in the esoteric skill set that allowed him to bring them in safely. As veteran controllers put it, Pete could dance. For Pete, the radarscope screen was like a three-dimensional chessboard—and he was always at least two moves ahead. A good controller could see the planes converging on an airport and bring those little white blips in like a pearl necklace across the nig
ht sky. If weather, pilot error, or equipment failure threw him a curveball, Pete always left himself an out, a window in which he could make those little split-second adjustments and shimmies that a controller must have the ability to make. Because no matter what happened, you could not freeze. You had to keep it moving, keep it fluid.
Darnell’s voice crackled over the headset, unusually urgent. “What are you doin’ there, Pete?”
“What do you mean?”
“Hotel is nearly on top of Tango.”
“No, no, that’s not right,” Pete said. “I’m good.” His radarscope showed a safe distance between the two 757s. “I’ve got five miles’ separation.”
“Negative, Pete. I show three miles’ separation and closing fast. Real fast.”
Pete double-checked his scope, but it still indicated that there was a safe distance between the two planes. If they were as close together as Darnell said, an alarm would have sounded on his equipment. His boss would be tapping him on the shoulder by now like a baseball manager about to pull a shaky relief pitcher. Something was very wrong here, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. He had never known Darnell to misread his instruments.
“Darnell, I don’t know what’s up, but my scope doesn’t lie, I mean …”
Pete stopped in midsentence. His radarscope had just blinked off for a split-second in what looked like a short circuit. This had never happened before in twenty-five years on the job. Not once.
An instant later, the round green screen blinked on again, and Pete exhaled in momentary relief—until he saw what was now on his scope.
The two white blips, representing massive 757s full of holiday travelers, were on top of one another—he was looking at a midair collision.
There were no windows in TRACON, but in his mind’s eye Pete saw the fireball in the sky, heard the explosion, and then the screaming descent as half a million pounds of aluminum alloy and hundreds of passengers plummeted to the desert floor.
Then Pete’s radarscope went black, along with all of the other scopes in the control center.
Pete collapsed into his chair, his knees buckling underneath him. Now a cacophony of strident voices was coming through his headset. Darnell and several other controllers were shouting and cursing. At the next station, Jimmy was saying something to him that he couldn’t make out.
Pete tore off the headset. He couldn’t listen anymore. Without a working radarscope, he was helpless to stop the tragedy unfolding in the dark skies above. His breath was shallow and labored. The pressure in his chest felt like a heart attack.
If this was The Nightmare, Pete would be waking up right about—now.
But this was the nightmare that you don’t wake up from.
CHAPTER 2
January 4
In Christopher Bruen’s line of work, they called his assignment a “knock and talk.” And that’s all that was supposed to happen. No one was supposed to die.
Bleary from jet lag, Chris gazed out the window of the Mercedes at the green waters of Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht canal. His flight from San Francisco had gotten in late the night before and his body clock was so out of whack that he’d barely been able to sleep. The cocktail of cancer drugs that he was taking didn’t help matters. At least the morning sun was mercifully pale, smeared across low clouds. The car shot across a bridge and into the brick-paved streets of the Jordaan neighborhood.
Remko de Groot, a relentlessly amiable, relentlessly blond associate at the Amsterdam law firm Kunneman Blenheim, played tour guide as he drove, although Chris wished that he would stop talking.
“The Jordaan has always been a bit funky, with lots of artists and students. Even Rembrandt lived here when his career was not going so well.” Remko glanced over to see how his travelogue was being received. He continued nonetheless.
“The neighborhood is on the upswing now. The great old houses are getting renovated. Some of them date all the way back to the sixteenth century.”
Chris ran a hand through his shock of unruly black hair as he watched the buildings blur past the window. He had a long, pale face, a thin, pointed nose, and heavy-lidded eyes, giving him the finely calibrated look of something bred for a particular purpose.
“Are you okay, Chris?” Remko asked, his eyes thankfully on the road. “You don’t look so good.”
“Thanks, I’m fine,” Chris said. “I just don’t travel so well these days.”
Chris was a partner in the San Francisco law firm Reynolds, Fincher & McComb and an expert in data security law. Before entering private practice, he had been a chief prosecutor in the Department of Justice’s computer crimes section. While Chris was at the DOJ, it had been his job to convict hackers. At Reynolds Fincher, he continued to battle cybercriminals, but out of the public spotlight and for better pay.
For the past two weeks, Chris had been hunting down the hacker known as Black Vector, whose real name turned out to be Pietr Middendorf. Chris always found the pursuit more interesting than the next step, which was inevitably anticlimactic. When he was uncovering the clues to the identity of a hacker, he was playing to his analytical strengths. When he reached the end of the trail, Chris inevitably found a misguided young person, typically male, who reminded him a little too much of himself when he was that age.
Remko’s guided tour of Amsterdam was cut short as they arrived at their destination, Middendorf’s apartment building at 5 Boomdwarsstraat. It was a nondescript, modern, four-story redbrick structure. Remko found a parking spot a block away so that they could make an inconspicuous approach. Chris didn’t think that much stealth was necessary—their target was probably not going to be expecting them.
It was a bitterly cold January morning. Chris tensed like he had been slapped as he climbed out of the car. He unfolded himself to his full height of six foot three, then stretched and yawned on the sidewalk.
They were paying Middendorf a visit because he had stolen the source code of Aspira, the world’s most popular computer operating system, which belonged to Chris’s client BlueCloud, Inc. The source code for an operating system like Aspira consists of millions of lines of code supporting a host of applications. A sophisticated hacker with access to that code could identify system vulnerabilities that would keep cybercriminals in business for years.
Middendorf had boasted on an online message board that he would publicly post the source code in two days. The hacker thought that he was shielded by the anonymity of his handle and that no one could uncover his true identity. He was wrong.
Chris and Remko walked up the quiet street toward the apartment building. The rising sun wasn’t lending any warmth to the day. A garbage truck was clanking and grinding on the next block. The gutters and sidewalks were still littered with exploded firecrackers and other detritus from the recent New Year’s Eve celebrations.
The security door to the apartment building was ajar, so they would be able to walk right up to Middendorf’s apartment on the top floor. They entered the vestibule. The bulletin board in the lobby was covered with posters for local rock bands appearing at the Melkweg club. Chris examined the mailboxes and saw the name “Middendorf” written in ballpoint and scotch-taped above the box for Apartment 4.
The objective of a knock and talk is to shut down a hacker and recover the stolen intellectual property as quickly and quietly as possible. The last thing BlueCloud needed was international press reports that its source code had been compromised, which would call into question the security and stability of its immensely popular operating system.
Remko looked at the name, then turned to Chris. “What if he climbs out the window onto the fire escape and runs?”
“If he runs, then he runs,” Chris said. “I’m a lawyer, not a cop.”
They walked up the narrow steps, with Chris taking the lead. Chris carried a leather folder with two documents. The first was a legal complaint charging Middendorf with violations of Dutch computer crime laws, which Remko’s firm had helped prepare. Chris intended to flash the p
leading at Middendorf to convince him that they were serious.
The second document was a settlement agreement that Middendorf would be asked to sign to avert the filing of the complaint. The agreement required the hacker to make no public statements, consent to a search of his computer, and return all copies of the stolen source code. There was no guarantee that Middendorf hadn’t concealed a copy of the code on a cloud server or at some other location, but Chris would make it clear that if the source code turned up on the black market, he would return, but this time collaborating with a prosecutor in a criminal case.
When they reached Apartment 4, on the top landing, Chris felt a tightening in his stomach. In moments like these, Chris wished that he was the kind of lawyer who stayed behind a desk. He glanced back at Remko to make sure he was ready, then he rapped on the door.
Inside, Chris heard a muffled voice. Then a chair scraped and there was a sound that might have been papers falling to the floor. Whoever was inside wasn’t approaching the door.
Chris hammered with his fist until the door rattled in its frame.
After about thirty seconds, they heard a man, speaking in Dutch. It had the intonation of a question. Chris assumed it was something to the effect of “Who’s there?”
“Do you speak English?” Chris asked.
A pause. “Yeah, I speak English. Who’s this?” The English was fluent, and the voice was high and adenoidal like a teenager’s.
