by Reece Hirsch
“So why aren’t you still working for them now?”
“I didn’t want to take the money. I didn’t like seeing my work used to exploit gullible, regular people. Like I said, I’m not a thief.”
“So how was this news received?”
“Not well. But, in the end, they just stopped communicating with me. They kept the money they were going to pay me, and I never heard from them again. Fortunately, I didn’t learn anything about their identities, or I don’t think they would have let me go.”
“Aren’t you worried that this will put you back on their radar screen?”
“Sure I am. But you pushed all the right buttons. What am I supposed to do? Pass up an opportunity to get an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe, save the life of your future child bride, and avert a major global cyber crisis? What girl with any sense of drama could pass that up?”
Chris had to wonder whether Zoey was telling the truth. He didn’t doubt the part about collaborating with Enigma and Ripley in the phishing scam. But it was less plausible that she would turn down their money. For all he knew, she was still collaborating with the Lurker crew and was alerting them to every step he took.
“I need to ask you again—why didn’t you tell me all this sooner?”
“Put yourself in my shoes for a minute,” Zoey said. “You’re the guy who hunts down hackers for a living. Why would I confess to something right off the bat that you might misinterpret? Anything I did that involved theft was done because they were threatening me. And now you understand how dangerous these people are. What was I supposed to do?” In a sign of agitation, Zoey started punctuating with her hands. “And maybe this is a way for me to even the score with them.”
Chris had to admit that Zoey sounded like she was telling the truth now, but he wasn’t sure if he would have brought her if he had known this before they boarded the flight. Of course, Zoey knew that.
“I’m here because I want to help you and this Sarah,” she concluded, exasperated. “And if you can’t see that, well …” She pulled the headphones from around her neck and snapped them over her ears.
Throughout the last leg of the flight, Chris and Zoey mostly slept and stared at their TV screens. Chris considered whether he should part ways with Zoey when they touched down in Spain but decided against it. If she was working with the hackers, then she would probably lead him to them, even if it was by walking him into a trap. If that’s what it took to find Sarah while she was still alive, then he was willing.
Chris stole a sideways glance at Zoey as she dozed in the seat beside him, headphones still on. As a former prosecutor, Chris liked to think that he had a good internal lie detector, but he had no idea whether Zoey could be trusted.
The cabin lights dimmed and the plane descended toward Barcelona. Looking out through the oval window, Chris saw the lights of the city glimmering below like phosphorescence on the surface of a dark ocean.
As Zoey sensed the descent, her eyelids fluttered and she asked, “So what do we do when we get there?”
“We go visit that factory and see what happens.”
CHAPTER 16
January 11
Jet-lagged and sleep-deprived after sixteen hours of travel, Chris and Zoey blinked and squinted in silence as they waited in front of the baggage carousel in Barcelona’s El Prat airport. After picking up their bags, they stepped outside into the bright, cool morning. Chris hailed a cab and used some half-remembered high school Spanish to get them to their hotel.
As they entered the sprawl of the city, Chris noted how many subtle distinctions can mark a place as foreign. Perhaps it was the flat landscape or the makes of the cars. Maybe it was the width of the highway or the style of the billboards. The cumulative effect was that of a place that was both familiar, as any modern Western city would be, and yet markedly unfamiliar.
They checked into the elegant Hotel Casa Fuster, a landmark of moderniste architecture (they were on BlueCloud’s expense account, after all). The hotel was almost Moorish in style, its white and tan stone façade studded with narrow arched windows and dominated by a turret over the entrance. After stowing their bags with the English-speaking staff, Chris was approached by a tall man with shoulder-length, jet-black hair and fine features. He was holding a package the size of a shoebox wrapped in brown paper and twine.
“Excuse me, Mr. Bruen.”
“Yes?”
“I have a package for you from your benefactor,” the man said, handing over the box.
“Oh,” Chris said, recognizing that the man had the business-casual-artist look of one of BlueCloud’s creative techies. “What is it?”
“You should open it in private.” The man turned and walked briskly out of the lobby.
Chris entered the restroom off the lobby and opened the package inside a stall. The box contained a Beretta 92 semiautomatic pistol. Apparently, Dave Silver thought that he needed a weapon. Chris was no marksman, but he did know how to handle a gun. When he worked at DOJ, he was friendly with some FBI agents who liked to frequent one of those cigar lounge/firing ranges that enjoyed a brief vogue. He considered whether carrying a gun was more likely to save his life or get him killed but decided that he was glad to have it. Chris stashed the gun in his computer bag, which he slung over his shoulder.
After Chris rejoined Zoey in the lobby and explained their welcoming gift, she asked, “Don’t I get one, too?”
“I think they could probably tell that you’re dangerous enough without one,” Chris said.
With that, they headed directly for the Fiat factory. As tired as they were, there was no time to rest.
The cabbie dropped them in the city’s Sants-Montjuïc district, in a desolate industrial park known as Zona Franca. The Fiat factory was a massive redbrick structure going to seed, with the signage out front scrubbed of any corporate allegiance, and assorted broken windows testifying to its disuse. As Chris studied the building’s ruined visage for signs of life, a pigeon fluttered out of a smashed window.
The sun shone whitely through a haze, making everything look blanched. They were only a few hundred yards away from the city’s port, on the Mediterranean, and the air smelled of petroleum and saltwater. Through some online research, Chris had found that the place had once manufactured entire Fiats, then just side body panels, then nothing at all. He had been unable to tell if the facility was back in use, but now that he saw it, the answer seemed obvious.
Chris knew it would be difficult to get a cab in that deserted part of town, so he attempted to negotiate with the cabbie to wait for them while they were inside the factory. The cabbie, a small, implacable man in a red-and-blue-striped FC Barcelona soccer jersey, shook his head, demanded payment, then sped away, disappearing down the empty street. Aside from a few pigeons, they were now the only living things visible in the urban landscape.
“Well done,” Zoey said.
They approached the front door of the plant, which was secured with chains and a padlock.
“Let’s go around, see if anything’s open,” Chris said.
“Do you think they’re watching us right now?”
“I doubt it. I don’t think they could know that Eddie Reiser had this information, and I also don’t think they know that I’ve spoken to Eddie.”
“What if Eddie told them you were coming?”
“Possible, but I doubt it. He seemed genuinely scared.”
“Scared enough to have second thoughts about crossing them?”
“All we really know is that they once placed a phone call from this place. Maybe they never came back here again. This is probably going to be a waste of time, but it’s all we have to go on right now.”
They walked around to the side of the plant, testing a window, a door, and then another door. Chris tried a doorknob and it turned.
“Why would someone lock the front with chains and a padlock and then just leave a back door completely unsecured?” Zoey said.
“Let’s see,” Chris said.
&nbs
p; He pushed open the iron door and peered inside. The windows were boarded up, so they could see very little inside the vast, gloomy industrial space.
“What do you see?” Zoey whispered.
“Not much. But if anyone’s in here, I think they’d notice this light coming in.”
Chris waited a moment in the doorway while his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Eventually he made out the shapes of a couple of industrial presses used to stamp out car body panels. There were also side panels stacked against the walls.
As Chris stepped inside, Zoey behind him, he saw that there was a single source of light, and it was coming from an office on a catwalk above the factory floor. A soft blue glow, like that of a television set, shone from the open door. Chris removed the Beretta from his computer bag.
Chris pointed at the light. “I’m going to take a look,” he said.
“I’m coming with you.”
Chris and Zoey crossed the floor to the steps that led up to the catwalk. Chris’s foot struck something metal that clattered loudly across the concrete. They froze and waited for a response, but there was none. The factory was so perfectly silent that Chris imagined it was listening to them. They stood motionless for a long moment, watching dust motes spin in a beam of sunlight from a shattered window high above them, then moved on.
They reached the metal steps and climbed them, with Chris taking the lead. When his head cleared the landing, he was able to see into the office from a low angle. The door was open and the room appeared to be empty. The light was coming from a computer monitor that had been left on. Looking up and down the catwalk, Chris saw that there were three other offices up there, but they were all dark. After listening for sounds of movement, Chris stepped up onto the catwalk.
To call the place an office was an overstatement—the room was small and bare, with a single metal desk, no chair, and a computer. Clearly, no one had worked there in a very long time. It made no sense that there was a computer on the desk, and even less that it was plugged in and left on—unless whoever had staged this scene was expecting them.
Chris stepped around the desk to examine the computer monitor. It was blank, but there was a yellow Post-it note stuck to the screen. Scrawled on the note in pen were the words “For Chris + Zoey—Press Play” and an arrow pointing to a file on the computer’s desktop.
Zoey peered over Chris’s shoulder at the note. “This is not good.”
Any sense of control that Chris had vanished in that instant. He wasn’t pursuing, he was being led.
After staring at the note for a long moment, Zoey asked, “So, are you going to press Play or what?”
“The computer could be wired to a bomb,” he said, leaning down to scrutinize the wiring.
“So what do you want to do?”
“I want you to climb back down and get outside. Just in case. Then I’ll press Play.”
“I’m not leaving here without you,” Zoey said.
“Would you prefer that we call a Spanish bomb squad? Explain to them why we’re trespassing in this abandoned factory? Explain to them why we’re afraid of a computer that’s been left on?”
Zoey nodded. “I see your point. I’ll go back down the steps, but I’m really not sure this is a good idea.”
Once Zoey was back on the factory floor, Chris walked over to the computer and rested his hand on the mouse. His heart gunned, and he had a momentary loss of nerve, stepping away and pacing about the small room like a prisoner in a cell. But Chris knew that if he didn’t do this, he might as well abandon the search for Sarah.
Finally, he placed his hand on the mouse again, bracing himself and turning his face away as he clicked on the desktop icon.
Instead of a bomb detonating, all he heard was the precise click of the mouse.
When he turned around, the computer screen filled with a close-up image of Sarah Hotchner sitting in a high-backed wooden chair. The video was grainy and had probably been shot using a cell phone. Strips of duct tape were wrapped around Sarah’s neck and forehead, binding her to the chair so that she was unable to move, trapping her gaze for the camera. Sarah’s eyes darted. He couldn’t tell what was happening. Chris tried turning up the volume on the computer, but there was no sound with the footage. It was like watching some sort of sick pantomime.
Sarah’s eyes were fixed on something before her and out of the frame, with a look of sheer panic. She was speaking faster now, pleading with someone. A man’s hand appeared holding a straight razor, turning it slowly as if to catch the blade in the light. The hand with the razor moved slowly downward and out of the picture.
Then Sarah’s lips parted and she let out what could only be a violent scream.
Chris noticed Zoey leaning in beside him and staring at the screen with a stricken look.
Sarah screamed and thrashed against the bindings, then finally closed her eyes. She had passed out. Then Sarah’s image disappeared and the camera closed in on a sheet of notebook paper. A message was scrawled in block letters with a ballpoint pen: “MEET AT THE PLANE AT TIBIDABO AT 5:00 P.M. IF YOU CONTACT THE POLICE, SARAH DIES.”
EPISODE 3
CHAPTER 17
Michael Hazlitt didn’t like the idea of breaking into Chris Bruen’s apartment and searching his computer files, but he really didn’t have much choice. Earlier that day, an anonymous call had been placed to an FBI hotline alleging that Chris was involved in a major cyberattack targeting a US city on January 14.
While there had been no mainstream press coverage about the possible January 14 attack, the rumor had gone viral on the Internet, at least within the hacker and techno geek subculture. Almost anyone could have placed the anonymous call, and it was most likely false. It was no secret that Chris had plenty of enemies, particularly after the death of Pietr Middendorf in Amsterdam.
Chris wasn’t answering his phone, and he wasn’t at work. Then Hazlitt ran a trace on Chris’s credit cards and discovered that he had purchased two tickets on a flight that had just landed in Barcelona. Hazlitt knew that the threatening email Chris had received was routed through a Spanish IP address, so it was clear Chris was either conducting his own investigation, which Hazlitt had warned him not to do, or he was actually in on the scheme.
Suddenly, the anonymous hotline call became a priority, and Hazlitt and his partner Falacci were standing outside the front door of Chris’s apartment with a search warrant. Falacci held an umbrella to keep the cold rain off Hazlitt as he used the lock-picking kit. The umbrella wasn’t doing much good, because the wind was whipping the rain at them horizontally. They could have kicked in the door, but Chris would have noticed the damage to the doorjamb.
Finally, the lock clicked and they stepped inside.
“Jesus, it’s miserable out there,” Falacci said. “You could have been a little faster with that lock.”
“Easy to criticize. You had the tough job of holding the umbrella,” Hazlitt said.
“Well, at least we know he won’t be coming home anytime soon,” Falacci said. Peering into the bathroom, Falacci said, “You think he’d notice if I took one of his towels to dry off?”
“Leave it,” Hazlitt said, motioning for Falacci to join him at Chris’s laptop computer, which was on a desk in the corner of the living room. “If we have to follow him to Spain, then he has a big lead on us already. There’s no time to mess around.”
The laptop was encrypted, but the FBI, through its collaboration with the NSA, had a backdoor that permitted access. Once they were past the encryption, Falacci proceeded to examine the laptop’s contents, using a write blocker to preserve the forensics.
As Hazlitt looked over his shoulder, Falacci opened up the “Documents” file on the hard drive. They found what they were looking for almost immediately. There was a folder labeled “January 14.”
“Would you look at this,” Falacci said softly.
Falacci clicked on the folder and scrolled through a list of documents. He opened the most recent one.
It was
a copy of an email from Enigma to Bruen dated two days ago that read, “Looking forward to finally meeting you in person in Barcelona. Someday, when the world has forgotten about September 11, they’ll still be talking about January 14. Come to the Tibidabo amusement park in Barcelona on January 10 at 5:00 p.m. local time. We’ll be at the airplane.”
“Are you seeing this?” Falacci said.
“Yeah,” Hazlitt said. As an investigator, he was thrilled to uncover evidence that would make his case and convict the suspect when he was apprehended. But he also felt a queasy anxiety, because he understood that a serious threat had just grown much more serious. Although he wouldn’t admit it to anyone, even his partner, Hazlitt formed the conviction in that moment that, no matter how relentless their pursuit, more innocent people were probably going to die before this was over.
“He’s in on it,” Falacci said. “The cocky bastard is one of them. He’s a terrorist.”
Falacci rapidly clicked through the other documents in the folder. Each one was more incriminating than the last. There were notes on the development of the Lurker virus, more email exchanges between Bruen, Enigma, and Ripley, and materials on the design of the electrical power grids in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Atlanta. There were also schematics for a computer system used by Albuquerque air traffic control.
“We’ve even got him linked to Albuquerque,” Falacci said.
Hazlitt leaned in to the screen. “This is all a little incredible, don’t you think?”
“It is what it is,” Falacci said.
“Maybe. Are any of these emails in Bruen’s inbox?”
Falacci clicked over Bruen’s inbox. “No, they seem to have been deleted there. He was tucking everything away in this folder.”
“Why would he keep all of this incriminating evidence in such an accessible place, even with encryption?”
“Obviously he wasn’t expecting us. Maybe he’s not as smart as we thought.”
