The Adversary (A Chris Bruen Novel Book 1)

by Reece Hirsch

  People began to pour into the back of the auditorium. Chris gazed out at the crowd and they stared back at him. There was some conversation going on in the audience. It was likely that some audience members at least knew who Blanksy was. Despite the chatter, no one stood up to volunteer information. That was to be expected. It would have taken a lot of nerve to stand up in that crowd and publicly identify a hacker for criminal prosecution.

  “Okay, I tried,” Chris said. “But if you know Blanksy or know where to find him and you say nothing, you’re going to have blood on your hands if the attack happens.”

  The audience of hackers didn’t disperse immediately. Most were still in their seats debating what they had just heard and waiting to see if there was more.

  Chris figured that he had the largest crowd that he was going to get and that people were going to start drifting away soon. He nodded to Zoey. Zoey dialed her cell phone, punching in the number that they had obtained from the intercepted cell call. Chris and Zoey both intently scanned the audience. And then a lone cell phone sounded loudly with the jarring ring tone of an old rotary dial.

  Thank you, Yoshitake.

  At the back of the auditorium, Chris saw a tall man in a leather jacket remove a ringing cell phone from his pocket and glance at the screen. He quickly silenced the phone without answering and disappeared into the hallway.

  The microphone let out another squeal of feedback as Chris dropped it on the lectern and jumped down from the podium to pursue Blanksy’s accomplice. Zoey was already ahead of him, sprinting down the aisle.

  CHAPTER 40

  The man in the leather jacket shoved his way through the throng in the main conference hall, a computer bag slung over his shoulder and bouncing heavily against his back. Chris and Zoey were about thirty yards behind, slowed by the disgruntled hackers that he was leaving in his wake.

  Chris knew he might be armed, but there was no time left to wait for Hazlitt and Falacci or any other assistance. If they didn’t stop him immediately, he was probably going to activate the virus. The crowd thinned as they reached a section of the conference center that was not in use. Now it was a footrace, and their steps clattered on the polished marble floor of the old bank building. The man in the leather jacket turned a corner ahead of them, and when Chris and Zoey rounded the corner, they were met with a long, empty hallway and two corridors branching off to the right and left. Each corridor was lined with closed doors.

  “Which way?” Zoey asked.

  Chris raised a finger for quiet. They listened for any sounds of movement, but there was only the faint buzz of conversation from the conference crowd they had left behind.

  “If I had to guess,” Zoey said, “I’d bet he went right or left. He’d be too easy to spot if he went straight down this long hallway.”

  “Agreed.” Picking at random, Chris set off down the right hallway with Zoey.

  They opened the first door and found a small, empty conference room with a PowerPoint projector and rows of folding chairs. They tried three more doors and found more of the same—the rooms were empty.

  “What happens if we find him?” Zoey asked.

  Zoey was right. Even if they caught up with the man, what would they do without a gun? Chris considered what might work as a makeshift weapon, then pulled his laptop bag off his shoulder and swung it back and forth, gauging its heft. They entered another conference room that was slightly larger than the last. Behind the podium was a plastic accordion-like partition that cut the room in half. Chris and Zoey stood perfectly still and listened. Chris heard a familiar skittering sound that at first reminded him of a rodent inside a wall. Then he recognized it—the sound of fingers flying over a keyboard. Chris nodded to Zoey and motioned for her to wait.

  The sound was coming from behind the partition, so Chris slowly stepped closer, his footsteps muffled by the carpeting. Judging by the persistent pattering of the keyboard, whoever was on the other side was probably too engrossed in their work to notice his advance. Heart throbbing in his rib cage, Chris was having trouble catching his breath. He tightened his two-handed grip on the strap of the laptop bag and felt the vinyl bite into his palms.

  Chris let out a slow breath and then pulled back the partition. And there he was—the man in the leather jacket sitting cross-legged on the floor furiously working on his laptop. At the sight of Chris, he dropped his hands to his sides, like a concert pianist who has just completed a brilliant recital.

  “Step away from the laptop,” Chris said.

  “You are too late,” he said with what sounded like the ghost of a Russian accent. The man smiled, revealing a mouth full of small, yellow teeth. It was a smile that had the same effect on Chris as when he turned over a rotten log to find a host of tiny, pale creatures.

  The man started reaching into his inside jacket pocket. Expecting the move, Chris quickly stepped forward, swinging the laptop bag in a broad arc. Just before the blow landed, Chris saw a look of surprise on the man’s face. The bag connected with his temple with a loud, metallic thump and he crumpled to the floor, bleeding from an ugly gash on his forehead. Chris and Zoey stared down at the unconscious man for a moment.

  “That worked better than I thought it would,” Zoey said.

  Chris bent down and opened the man’s jacket. There was no gun, but there was a Taser, the kind with electrodes on filament wires that could be fired like a gun. Chris took the Taser and put it in his laptop bag.

  “This was the same kind of Taser that was used by Ed’s killer,” Chris said.

  “Steady there, Chris. You don’t know that he did it.”

  Zoey was already sitting in front of the laptop, trying to tell if the virus had been activated, and whether there was anything to be done. Chris gazed at the prone man for a long moment, wrestling with the impulse to take his laptop bag and finish what he had started. For an instant, he glimpsed something dark inside himself that wanted to claw its way out. The anger didn’t disappear, but the moment when he might have allowed it to blind him passed. Although he hadn’t been sure what he would do in this situation, Chris discovered that, fundamentally, he believed in the law. He was going to let the law deal with this.

  “Chris?”

  “What have you got?” Chris asked, snapping back into focus.

  “The virus might have been activated, but there’s nothing here for me to work with.”

  Chris needed to do something with Blanksy’s accomplice. He looked out in the hallway and saw a janitor’s trash can on wheels in front of a utility closet. Zoey and Chris lifted the man so that he was seated in the full trash bin with his head and legs dangling over the sides. They rolled him into the utility closet and when they got there, Chris reached inside the man’s jacket and removed his cell phone. He was just beginning to regain consciousness when they pitched him inside and locked him in by wedging a chair under the doorknob.

  Chris showed the cell phone to Zoey. “The last call he made was probably to Blanksy.”

  Chris turned on the phone and checked the recent calls. “Here’s a 212 number from ten minutes ago.”

  “Okay, so what are you waiting for?” Zoey asked.

  Chris dialed the number.

  A cheerily professional male voice answered. “W Hotel Times Square.”

  Chris asked the front desk clerk if a Mr. Hartigan was staying there. Or a Mr. Crash. Or a Mr. Blanksy. No luck.

  “So you think he’s there?” Zoey asked.

  “Yes, but we’re going to have to go there and find him ourselves.”

  EPISODE 7

  CHAPTER 41

  Chris and Zoey entered the main hall of the DefCon conference, hoping to find a taxi out front that would take them into Manhattan to the W Hotel. After Chris’s controversial performance, they were attracting plenty of hostile stares from the crowd of hackers.

  Chris froze and clutched Zoey’s arm. On the other side of the vaulted lobby, a man and woman in suits were at the registration desk, questioning the long-haired
kid who dispensed the conference badges. They had to be FBI agents. Given Chris’s current level of notoriety in the room, someone was going to point him out to the agents any second.

  “FBI,” Chris said, turning sharply and walking quickly away.

  Returning to the unused wing of the event center, they hit the first emergency exit they could find. It brought them to a hallway that led to a loading dock. The agents were probably calling in reinforcements for a manhunt.

  Chris and Zoey hurried through the empty loading dock and onto a residential street with rows of brownstones fronted by barren trees. There were no taxis in sight, but Chris knew that if they didn’t put some distance between themselves and the conference site, they’d be picked up within minutes. They walked quickly and in silence past the handsome Fort Greene brownstones.

  Chris contemplated the virus attack that was probably only hours away now. He reviewed what he knew, or thought he knew, about the Lurker virus. It was designed to exploit BlueCloud’s Aspira operating system. That didn’t help to narrow down the possible point of attack, though, because Aspira was used by nearly every business and government agency in the country. It was clearly a virus that could be activated remotely but, once activated, it required some time to find its mark. It wasn’t like flipping a switch.

  If the Lurker virus was intended to shut down New York City, then there were a few obvious targets that the FBI was undoubtedly monitoring—the New York Power Authority, Con Edison, MTA, New York City Transit, major hospitals like Mount Sinai, Beth Israel, and New York-Presbyterian, and JFK and LaGuardia airports. The key, though, was being able to spot the often subtle indicators that a virus was present. Ed had given the virus its name because it had the capacity to burrow into systems and cover its tracks, lurking on computer hard drives, waiting for activation like a sleeper cell.

  Chris and Zoey made their way out of the residential neighborhood and reached Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn’s main thoroughfare. They felt exposed standing on a street corner trying to hail a cab, but they managed to catch one. They needed a place near the subway where Chris could spend a few minutes on the phone sending a warning before they caught a train into the city. After a conversation with the cabbie, they settled on Fort Greene Park.

  The park was deserted except for a couple of dog walkers and a mother with a stroller. The trees were mostly bare and there were patches of snow on the ground. Chris and Zoey sat down on a bench near a child’s playground where they couldn’t be seen from the street.

  “Before we head into the city, I need to talk to Hazlitt again,” Chris said. “I want to make sure that they know what they’re dealing with.”

  Chris dialed Hazlitt on his prepaid cell. He picked up on the first ring.

  “You shouldn’t have run,” Hazlitt said.

  “So you keep saying,” Chris said.

  “I didn’t catch your little speech, but I heard about what you said. So Jay Hartigan, aka Blanksy, is who we’re looking for?”

  “It seems so. Your colleagues will find one of his accomplices in a utility closet in the east wing of One Hanson. He’s wearing a leather jacket and has some sort of Eastern European accent, possibly Russian. I’m pretty sure he killed Eduardo de Lamadrid.”

  “You know you’re making our job too easy.”

  “Well, someone has to do it. What you need to know is that I’m pretty sure he activated the Lurker virus before we could stop him.”

  There was a silence on the other end of the line, then Hazlitt asked, “How long do you think we have?”

  “Whatever that virus is designed to do, it’s probably going to start doing it soon. It could take hours or minutes, I don’t know.”

  “So, since you seem to have all the answers, do you know where Blanksy is?”

  “I’m pretty sure that he’s staying in the W Hotel in Times Square,” Chris said. “It faces right out on Times Square. Probably a good place for a ringside seat to watch as all hell breaks loose.”

  “Do you know what name he’s under?”

  “No.”

  Zoey whispered something to Chris, who nodded. “There’s something else that you should know.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sure you’re watching for the virus at all of the key points in the city’s infrastructure—the power grid, the airports, hospitals.”

  “Yeah, right. So?”

  “There’s something you should probably be looking for. A way Blanksy’s crew might disguise what they’re doing.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “A virus as potentially disruptive as this one will usually leave some clues that it’s infected the host. Little glitches in the system, crashes, the kind of thing that shows up in additional calls to the help desk.”

  “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know,” Hazlitt said, sounding impatient.

  “I’m getting there. You’re probably checking with the help desk at power companies like Con Edison, correct?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Because if their system was infected, they would most likely be getting a higher than normal volume of calls.”

  “Yes, of course. What’s your point?”

  “What if the calls aren’t going to the company’s help desk?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment. Then, this time with far less attitude, Hazlitt said, “You’re saying that Blanksy’s crew might hack into the help desk line and take the calls themselves?”

  “I’ve seen it happen before.”

  “Really. Huh,” Hazlitt said, frankly amazed at the ingenuity of the technique.

  “The fake help desk employees would try to ameliorate the situation, get the employees back to work, keep them happy, just like a real help desk would. They might even do a better job than a regular help desk, because they would be highly motivated.”

  “Because if the company doesn’t see any of the warning signs of the virus, they’ll never know what hit them.”

  “Exactly,” Chris said.

  “Why haven’t I heard of this tactic before?”

  “Working in the private sector, I guess I see a lot of hacks that never reach the attention of the feds.”

  “I want you to stay on the line,” Hazlitt said. “I’m actually at Con Ed headquarters right now. I can speak with their privacy officer. It shouldn’t be hard to test this theory.”

  The line went quiet for a while, but Chris could hear Hazlitt and Falacci talking in muffled tones.

  “Hang on,” Hazlitt said. “This should only take a few minutes. Con Edison is sending an email to all employees asking them to respond if they’ve filed a help desk call today. We’ll see if the numbers that we get back match up with what the help desk is reporting.”

  Chris held on the phone for perhaps ten minutes, watching a couple of small, barrel-chested dogs chase each other around the park. The sky was low and hazy. It looked like there might be more snow.

  Finally, Hazlitt came back on the line. “Well, Con Edison is infected. The emails are pouring in and they’ve already far exceeded the number of calls the help desk is reporting—the fake help desk. We’ll see if we can trace them.”

  “You won’t find them,” Chris said. “They’ll be ready for that. They knew you’d figure it out eventually.”

  “At this point, our only option is to hunt them down. The virus has already been activated, and we still don’t have a security patch. We haven’t even isolated a particular vulnerability in the operating system.”

  “What do you mean ‘our’ only chance?” Chris said with a slight smile. “Are you acknowledging that we might be on the same side?”

  “What I think really doesn’t matter,” Hazlitt said. “But okay, yeah, I’ll admit it. But that’s just my personal opinion and it doesn’t change my orders. We’re still coming for you.”

  “I wouldn’t expect anything less,” Chris said. “And I won’t be turning myself in just yet.”

  “I wouldn’t expect
anything less, either,” Hazlitt said. “And I’m warning you to stay away from the W Hotel, okay? We’ll bring him in.”

  Chris hung up on the FBI agent.

  CHAPTER 42

  As dusk settled in, Chris watched the throngs pushing through the turnstiles at the Jay Street subway station, faces slack, heading home, the forced smiles of the workplace gone.

  “They have no idea what’s about to happen, do they?” Zoey said.

  “There’s probably been some kind of statement about a threat warning, but I doubt that many details have been provided,” Chris said. “No one wants to create a panic.”

  “I don’t know why panic gets such a bad rap,” Zoey said before descending the steps to the platform. “There are some situations where the only appropriate response is batshit panic. I don’t like to eliminate it as an option, you know? In the email that went to the New York Mayor’s Office, Blanksy said that the virus was going to be activated tonight … and it’s nearly dark. I’m not sure how I feel about boarding this subway train. Do you think the virus could shut down the MTA?”

  A dirty sirocco swirled through the tunnel as a train pulled into the station.

  “It’s possible,” Chris admitted. “But there are good people combating this sort of threat. US Cyber Command in Fort Meade, Maryland, is dedicated to protecting the infrastructure.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Zoey said. “But are they good enough to stop this?”

  “Well, they say that you have to be right five hundred times out of five hundred in defending attacks. The adversary only has to be right once.”

  “Not helping,” Zoey said. “I’d hate for this train to stop when we’re under the East River. I’ve always had a thing about that.”

  “Believe me, I thought about taking a cab into the city,” Chris said. “But it’s rush hour and it would take forever. If we’re going to catch up with Blanksy, I think our best shot is to get into Manhattan as quickly as possible on the subway before any sort of shutdown occurs.”