by Reece Hirsch
His father was the one who opened the door. It was his face that Chris saw first when he entered the dining room, trailed by two FBI agents. They were big men who looked like they knew how to use the pistols they wore in pointedly visible shoulder holsters.
Chris would never forget the look of hurt and disappointment on his father’s face, but he would always be grateful for the reaction that followed. Frank took one look in Chris’s eyes and immediately told the agents, “He’s not saying anything to you without a lawyer present.” It was the one time that Chris could recall his father standing up to authority.
Once the legal process began, Chris wasn’t permitted to speak with Josh. Chris’s parents hired a good lawyer and supported him through the process. The lawyer was a grim former federal prosecutor who specialized in scared-straight stories about the prosecutions of first-generation hackers like Kevin Mitnick. Chris was charged with violations of the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act. He got off with probation and a sealed juvenile record because he was a minor, he did what the lawyer told him to do, and, most of all, because Josh never implicated his two friends.
Dylan wasn’t even charged. It was clear that he was merely a follower of the two older kids. Three months later, Dylan’s father, who was a store manager for a department store chain, was transferred to Sacramento and Chris never heard from him again. Chris wrote Dylan one guilt-filled letter, but he never responded.
Josh must have figured that there was no escaping for him, because it was his computer that had been used in the hacking. Chris and Dylan could still walk away if he stuck to his story. As far as Chris was concerned, Josh had given him his life. But, for Josh, things went less well. Because he was unwilling to point fingers at Chris and Dylan, Josh ended up sentenced to two years in the John A. Davis Juvenile Hall in Martinez.
Chris visited Josh regularly at the facility, but it was soon apparent that he had begun using drugs. Those eyes, once so electric, were now dull and unfocused. There was still a light there, but it was the wild, sparking light of a downed power line, there for a moment and then gone. Chris knew that Josh was in real trouble when he stopped asking Chris to bring him books.
On his last visit to the correctional facility, he and Josh fell out as only two boys who have been best friends as teenagers can. Chris couldn’t remember everything that was said, but every resentment that had been festering since the arrest came to the surface. What Chris did remember, he deeply regretted. Josh called Chris a coward. Chris called Josh a screw-up.
A guard came over at the sound of raised voices and told them that the visit was over. As Chris walked out of the antiseptic visiting room, he knew that he would never see Josh again.
Stories about Josh occasionally drifted back to him through mutual friends and former classmates. Josh served out the remainder of his two-year sentence and emerged with a full-blown drug habit. Chris heard that he took a part-time job at a computer repair shop but turned to dealing meth in order to better support his habit. About a year after Josh was released, Chris lost track of him entirely and the stories stopped. None of his old friends knew what had happened to him.
Chris guessed that Josh had either died of an overdose or gone back to jail, this time to an adult facility. He would always feel responsible for Josh’s downward spiral and wondered what would have happened if they had shared the blame for the DOD hack. Chris never extinguished his hope of finding Josh. If he was alive, then there was still a chance to atone for what he had done at age sixteen. Every year, Chris asked an investigator that he worked with to run a trace on Josh, but it was as if he had been purged from the world.
Chris had resolved that he was going to spend the rest of his life trying to correct the mistake. It was a promise that he renewed every morning that he went to work at the Department of Justice and, later, Reynolds, Fincher & McComb.
All of these memories of the summer of 1987 flashed through Chris’s mind in an instant. They were easy to access, like webpages that had been cached from frequent viewing. When Chris refocused, he realized that Zoey was still there in the seat next to him, waiting for an answer to her question.
“Yes,” Chris said, “someone got hurt.”
CHAPTER 36
January 14
Chris awoke somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic to the white noise of the jet engines. The lights were down in the plane’s cabin and almost all of the other passengers were asleep. He checked his watch—12:30 a.m. If the fake death certificate that he’d received from Enigma was to be believed, this was the day he was going to die.
Opening his laptop, he pored over the code of the Lurker virus yet again, hoping to find some previously undiscovered clue to the malware’s purpose or creator. He already knew that there were different styles of coding present in the virus. The injector portion of the virus, which breaks into computers to deliver the payload, displayed extremely sophisticated, labor-intensive coding. Those were the parts that were probably taken from Stuxnet, the virus created by the US and Israeli intelligence agencies. The coding in those segments was clean, without extraneous characters.
The payload, which accomplished the virus’s purpose, was more handcrafted and quirky, the work of a talented but more idiosyncratic coder. It was in this section that Chris had identified a seemingly random series of numbers and letters that he believed might hold the hacker’s calling card. No virtuoso artist wants to go entirely uncredited for a masterwork, an impulse that had been the downfall of many art forgers and hackers.
The sequence read:
b:9y7c6ykh0y6yd\M3:R-I-II-III:RS:MCK:R:AAA:P:FP,MD,WE,XO,ZS,JV,AH,BC,QK,RT:G8U9O3M3G0R3O5M2N1Z\%phgopaigihgiaog22590808adsrcobjfre_w2k_x86i386guava.pd.
He scanned the virus’s thousands of lines of code over and over again until the characters and symbols blurred, but he kept returning to that one anomalous sequence. He nodded off bathed in the light from his laptop screen.
Chris awoke with a start. It might have been an hour later or only fifteen minutes, but it was still pitch-black outside the oval window. His subconscious must have been working overtime, though, because he now had an idea.
The coded message alternated between numbers and letters, and there was something hidden in the numbers that had struck him. Chris paged down to the segment of the coding to make sure that he hadn’t imagined it, but there it was in every other digit of the code following “RT”—Chris’s Social Security number.
Why had Enigma placed Chris’s Social Security number into the code? If he simply wanted to lead authorities to believe that Chris had created the virus, then he would have been more obvious and wouldn’t have bothered to mask the SSN, however transparently. As a means of pointing the finger at Chris, this was a clumsy and not very effective tactic. But as a means of sending a coded message for the sole benefit of Chris, it was pretty clever. Anyone else would assume that the nine digits of the Social Security number were just part of the coded message—only Chris would recognize them for what they were.
Chris tried dropping out the nine digits of his Social Security number to see what was left after the introductory section: GUOMGROMNZ. Just a random string of letters, but a short one that would probably translate into no more than two words.
He stared at the letters, waiting for a pattern to emerge, but nothing came. He rubbed his eyes and gazed out the window at an undifferentiated black expanse of ocean and sky.
And then it dawned on him. A hacker taking the name of Enigma would have to be a cryptography enthusiast—Enigma was the name of the machine used to encode Nazi military communiqués during World War II. The British recovered an Enigma machine and code book from a capsizing German submarine and installed it at Bletchley Park, a country house outside London, where a team of military cryptographers decrypted a series of intercepted Nazi messages, helping turn the tide of the war. Chris was now convinced that Enigma had encrypted the message using the Enigma code. But to decrypt a message encrypted using that code seemed impos
sible without one of the antique Enigma machines, which were preserved in military history museums.
Chris formulated a plan, but he would have to wait until the plane was on the ground to test it.
He considered waking Zoey to tell her what he had learned, but she was sleeping in the seat next to him like someone who might not get the chance again for a while. He let her sleep. After all, he didn’t know yet if he was right.
When the wheels of the plane finally bumped down and they felt the g-force of deceleration, Chris immediately accessed the Internet on his smartphone. He searched the Internet for the term “Enigma machine simulator.”
And there it was, just as he remembered it, a website offering a downloadable mobile app that replicated four different editions of the Enigma machine. It was a labor-of-love project created by an English cryptography expert for fellow crypto geeks.
The first segment of the code key was “M3.” A quick review of the website proved that he had guessed correctly—one variety of Enigma machine used by the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe was designated as the M3. There was no single Enigma machine used by the Germans—it evolved through the war years as the Nazis tried to stay ahead of the Allies’ code breakers.
Chris downloaded the Enigma machine simulator app onto his smartphone and was soon looking at a photo of the M3 device, a big black box with metal rotors, a keyboard, and a plugboard of raised buttons. The Enigma machine scrambled letters through its three rotatable wheels, which had twenty-six electrical contacts on each side. A letter of a message entered on one side of a wheel was encrypted through a random electrical contact to a letter on the other side of the wheel, the first of numerous scrambling procedures built into the system. As he typed in the encrypted text on the touch screen image of the Enigma machine, the app produced a loud clacking sound like a heavy-duty manual typewriter.
The rest of the code key fell into place, reflecting the options that could be selected when using the M3 Enigma machine. “R: I-II-III” signified that he should select the option of using all three of the machine’s rotors. “RS:MCK” meant “Rotor Start” at setting “MCK.” The next portions of the code told him where to set the Enigma machine’s three metal rings and the keys that should be pressed on the plugboard on the front of the machine. Using his smartphone, Chris entered each of these options into the app.
All that remained was to input the encrypted text.
Chris hit the ENTER key and a moment later the decrypted text appeared: DARBYCRASH.
Darby Crash, lead singer of the Germs.
Blanksy’s hero.
Blanksy, the seemingly harmless prankster who had pestered him to speak at DefCon, was Enigma.
CHAPTER 37
What did he know about Blanksy? Not much, really. But they had spoken often enough over the years for Chris to feel betrayed. Blanksy had provided information that had been useful in several investigations, and Chris had begun to trust him. At the very least, he had believed that he was the immature, pop culture–obsessed fanboy that he made himself out to be. Blanksy had always seemed so jokey and harmless that Chris suspected Enigma might have enlisted him as an unwilling collaborator, as he had with Zoey.
He thought he knew the hacker’s name—Jay Hartigan—but he now doubted that was his real identity. Chris knew that Blanksy liked seventies LA punk bands like the Germs, so maybe he was from California. He knew that Blanksy was active in organizing the DefCon hacker conference because he had tried to get Chris to speak there. Blanksy had to have friends at DefCon and some of them would likely know how to find him. Although the discovery of Blanksy’s involvement was significant, it remained to be seen whether it brought them any closer to actually stopping the cyberattack on New York City.
As they taxied on the runway at JFK and waited for the ping that would send everyone scrambling for the overhead bins, Zoey’s eyelids fluttered. She had been half-asleep and half observing him as he decoded the message from Enigma/Blanksy. The clacking sound from his mobile phone as he entered the encrypted text had roused her.
“That sound,” she said, yawning. “What were you doing?”
Chris told Zoey what he had discovered. She had heard of Blanksy but had never encountered him directly.
“So who is this guy and why does he hate you enough to go to all that trouble?” Zoey asked.
“I just don’t know. Maybe if I saw him, or saw what he looked like, I’d recognize him.”
“Do you think he’ll be at DefCon?”
“I’m almost certain of it. He tried to persuade me to speak there by hijacking my home computer.”
Zoey laughed. “I’d love to see you in front of a DefCon crowd.”
“He timed the attack to occur during the conference, probably so he could show off in front of his peers.”
“So all of Blanksy’s little geek buddies will be there at DefCon,” Zoey said. “There’s bound to be someone there who knows where he is.”
“If they’ll talk to us.” Chris checked his watch. “And we only have about seven hours until the event. Seven hours to find Blanksy.”
Chris and Zoey disembarked from the plane and walked quickly, but not too quickly, through the terminal. They stopped only to purchase two new prepaid cell phones from a shop along the concourse and discard the phones that they had purchased in Europe.
They had checked bags in Paris because they thought it would attract suspicion to board an international flight without luggage. They weren’t going to stop to collect them now at baggage claim. Chris didn’t want to spend a moment more than necessary in the airport, which was clearly under heightened security.
Chris and Zoey were walking down a long terminal hallway lined with airline gates, newsstands, and fast-food restaurants. Ahead of them, Chris counted about ten airport security personnel, and those were just the ones that he could see.
Zoey leaned over to him, “Have you ever seen so much security at an airport?”
“Not since right after 9/11 … or in Tel Aviv,” Chris said.
“If they really expect the attack to happen, why don’t they do something to alert people?”
“What are they going to do?” Chris said. “Evacuate New York City?”
As they passed through the baggage claim area and neared the exit to the taxi zone, Chris noticed an airport security guard who seemed to be staring at them from across the terminal.
Zoey followed Chris’s gaze. “Do you think he knows who we are?”
She got her answer when the security guard began walking toward them, slowly at first and then breaking into a jog.
“Let’s go,” Chris said.
As they exited the terminal into the bright, cold day, a chill wind hit them. Chris’s heart sank when he saw the long line at the taxi stand.
“Follow me,” Chris said, walking briskly toward the unoccupied taxi at the front of the line.
Chris opened the door and climbed in, with Zoey right behind him. He heard disgruntled exclamations from the taxi line but did not look back. Cutting a New York City taxi line was a good way to get yourself killed, but Chris knew that if you were going to try it, you must show no weakness, no hesitation. The attendant in charge of the taxi stand was gesturing wildly at Chris through the closed window of the taxi.
The driver turned around, his pale, hangdog face filling the opening in the Plexiglas partition that separated the front and back seats. “That’s not the way it works. You gotta wait your turn.”
Chris pulled a roll of bills from his pocket, peeled off five twenties, and passed them forward to the driver.
“I’m sorry, pal, but there are rules.”
Chris peeled off another wad of bills. The taxi driver didn’t refuse the offering. The taxi stand attendant was knocking insistently on the window now, but the driver was examining the bills and seemed to be wavering.
The security guard who had spotted them was pushing his way through the crowd, much closer now. Chris shoved an entire roll of crumpled twenties through the par
tition.
The driver rolled down his electric window on the passenger side an inch and yelled to the taxi stand attendant, “Hey, Carl, I’m sorry, but I gotta take this one. I owe you one.” As an afterthought, he added, “Medical emergency!”
The taxi pulled into a stream of cars leaving the terminal.
“Where to?” asked the driver over the smooth jazz on the car radio.
“Where’s the closest place that we can get another cab quickly?”
“You sure?” the driver asked. “You paid me four hundred bucks already.”
Zoey whispered to Chris, “They’re going to call his dispatcher. He’s going to be getting a call about us soon.”
Chris nodded.
The cabbie was wearing a Bluetooth headset and nodding to someone on the phone. They couldn’t hear what he was saying over the burbling, smooth jazz. Maybe he already knew who they were.
“Just take us where we can get another cab,” Chris said. “And if anyone asks, tell them you dropped us at a different hotel. That’s what the four hundred dollars is for.”
“Okay. The airport Hilton is a good bet. Always a bunch of taxis there at this time of day.”
At the Hilton, they quickly caught another cab.
Once inside, Chris said, “I think we missed our meet-up with Silver’s guy, the one who was going to give us the guns.”
“He probably saw us run out of there.”
“I guess we just have to hope he catches up with us.”
As they hummed along the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, Chris took the opportunity to check his home voice mail. It was comforting somehow to listen to the messages. They were signs that his old life still existed, even if it was only in the minds of a couple of curious and worried friends who wondered why he had suddenly dropped off the face of the earth. Absentmindedly, he programmed the number for his home voice mail into a speed-dial button on the prepaid phone. It made him feel like he was still connected, however tenuously, to his former life.
