The Adversary (A Chris Bruen Novel Book 1)

by Reece Hirsch

  Chris sipped his black coffee as he continued up the Embarcadero toward the fog-colored column of the Ferry Building, where the clock in the tower read 8:40. People were moving with a sense of purpose to make it to their desks by 9:00. As a partner in a law firm, he had no boss to glower at him if he showed up at 10:00 or even 11:00. But, in the end, it was a moot point, because the press of client demands kept him coming in well before 9:00 on most days.

  He crossed the Embarcadero and the open concrete expanse of Justin Herman Plaza, passed the Vaillancourt Fountain, which resembled a bunch of giant, corroded ventilation ducts, and entered the lobby of 4 Embarcadero Center.

  Chris emerged from the elevator into the firm’s thirty-eighth-floor reception area, which was bright with sunlight from the floor-to-ceiling windows. He saw managing partner Don Rubinowski standing and talking with a cluster of the attorneys, their suits punching black holes in the bright panorama of the Bay that was spread out behind them.

  Don nodded at Chris as he passed by. Things had been a little awkward since he had returned to the firm. Everyone thought that he must hold a grudge over the way they had summarily suspended him when the FBI declared him a suspect in the threatened attack. Chris understood completely—it was just business. What corporate client would want to retain a law firm that had a potential terrorist among its partners? Chris knew that Don considered him a friend, but he couldn’t jeopardize the livelihood of the other partners by backing him, especially when all appearances indicated that he was guilty as hell. Chris didn’t hold a grudge, because he knew that being a partner in a big law firm is a little like swimming in a school of sharks—even though they seem to be working together, one shark does not sacrifice itself for another. Chris just acted as if nothing had happened and waited for everyone to start behaving normally.

  Chris was pretty sure that Don would always hold him at least partly responsible for the trouble that he had gotten himself into. After all, as Don had so pointedly noted, he had no business sleeping with one of the firm’s paralegals to begin with.

  Being back in the office brought frequent reminders of Sarah. He had learned that Sarah had been using her real name at the firm. She had moved to Sacramento from Boston, and she and Dylan had dated for a time. The romantic relationship had faded but their partnership as the hackers Ripley and Enigma lasted more than twenty years, with Josh Woodrell joining the criminal enterprise later. Dylan’s story about the death of Sarah’s brother in Afghanistan checked out. Jim Hotchner had been shot and killed by an Afghan police officer, along with three other American special forces soldiers, at a base outside Kabul.

  As far as the firm was concerned, Sarah had simply moved on to a new job somewhere and never provided a forwarding address. His partners never learned that they had hired a hacker and terrorist. Chris knew that Sarah had to be in federal custody, but his inquiries about her status were stonewalled. The facility that housed Sarah probably did not, at least in any officially recognized capacity, exist.

  In the wake of the cyberattack on New York, Homeland Security and a host of other agencies had dedicated themselves to hunting down Dylan’s cohorts with a zeal previously reserved for al-Qaeda. Most of the hacker crew, including Soma, had already been apprehended in a series of arrests from Amsterdam to the Ukraine to Barcelona. The identities of most of the remaining hackers in the crew were known, and they were running for their lives.

  Chris arrived at the door to the computer forensic lab and was visited once again by memories of Ed de Lamadrid. As he entered the lab, Chris half expected to see Ed gliding around from one monitor to another in his favorite black leather desk chair. Instead, he was greeted by the lab’s new director. She was wearing a Bikini Kill T-shirt under a gray cardigan, jeans, and black Converse All Stars—Zoey. She swiveled around from her three-monitor setup and smiled her crooked smile.

  “You don’t even have to say it,” she said.

  “Did I say anything?” Chris asked.

  “You were radiating disapproval.”

  “Has Don seen what you’re wearing today?”

  “Oh, yeah, he saw it.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He just got that sort of tight-faced look he gets. I think he needs to dial down the Botox.”

  Chris put a fist to his forehead in mock hopelessness. Zoey laughed. “Hey, you know what I told you going in …”

  “Yeah, right,” Chris said. “You don’t do corporate.”

  Zoey nodded and returned to scrutinizing her monitors. Chris could tell that Zoey was beginning to enjoy her work at the firm, in no small part because her presence irritated so many members of firm management. Although a few misgivings were expressed about Zoey’s attitude and hacker past, Chris was allowed to bring her in as Ed’s replacement because he had leverage with the firm after they wrongly suspended him. His partners knew that Zoey and Chris had collaborated on the investigation of the Lurker virus and, if they weren’t going to hold the episode against Chris, then they couldn’t really hold it against Zoey, either.

  Zoey had drifted through her twenties and half of her thirties without focus, unable to find anything that matched her very unique skill set and temperament. Chris knew just how grateful she was for the opportunity, even though it would take months, maybe even years, before she fully copped to it. He could wait.

  Chris was glad she took the job. Ed’s presence still seemed to haunt the forensics lab, but at least now he felt like a friendly ghost. He was pretty sure Ed would have approved of his successor.

  Most people of Chris’s age trailed a few ghosts with them through life—the people lost along the way. For Chris, however, they took the form of a nightly CNN panel show. After Tana’s death, he had taken to tuning the television to CNN while he slept. He found the drone of the murmuring voices comforting. Over time, though, the cast of talking heads had melded with his dreams, morphing into a panel of commentators comprised of his dead friends, family members, and acquaintances.

  The undead pundits mostly offered point-counterpoint commentary on his day’s events. The panel included his mother and father—there was love there, but the relationships were not without complexity. Ed was there, too, benignly giving him shit as usual.

  But his dead wife, Tana, was the one true fixture on the panel. When the topic of Zoey came up, as it often did recently, Tana followed the discussion with a smile. Occasionally, in an aside to the television audience, she rolled her eyes at him in one of her signature mannerisms. Chris suspected that she liked the way that Zoey kept him off-balance, just like she used to. She didn’t want him to be alone anymore, and she certainly didn’t want him to feel guilty for having lived through cancer.

  “Still watching for signs of the Lurker virus, but it hasn’t returned,” Zoey said. “I also just got off the phone with Sirius Security Consulting in Berlin and they haven’t seen anything, either.”

  “I’m hoping that it died with Dylan, but you never know,” Chris said. “He clearly had a large team working with him.”

  “But then again, he also had trust issues,” Zoey said. “After all, Pietr Middendorf had already betrayed him and he felt the need to stage that scene in Amsterdam to send a message to the rest of the crew. You don’t send that kind of message to people you trust.”

  “Maybe without Dylan the auction of the Lurker virus never took place,” Chris said. “If so, there are a lot of disappointed terrorist organizations out there.”

  “I feel their pain,” Zoey said.

  “But the precedent’s been set. Weaponized viruses are a reality now and the whole world knows it. Every fringe group on earth wants one.”

  “Yep. Like Dylan said—the iPad of terrorism.”

  They worked in silence for a while. Chris reviewed a report on their investigation of an employee’s theft of a database of more than three hundred and fifty thousand Social Security numbers from a client. Thanks to Zoey’s forensic work on the employee’s laptop, they would be able to demonstra
te what was stolen and how with a certainty that would stand up in court. At the other end of the lab, Zoey was hunched over her monitors with her bulky silver headphones on, head bobbing slightly.

  Zoey slid the headphones down around her neck. “Come over here. You should see this.”

  Chris walked over and stood behind Zoey, looking at the screen, his hands on the back of her chair in a familiar gesture. “What am I looking at?”

  “Something new,” Zoey said. “This malware has shown up in all of our honey traps in the last twenty-four hours.” The honey traps were dummy servers maintained by the lab to troll for the latest viruses.

  “And?”

  “Look,” Zoey said, nodding at the screen. Characters and numbers were cascading across the three monitors.

  “How many antivirus programs have you run?”

  “Twenty-three so far.”

  “Hmm,” Chris said. He knew that there were only about thirty-two serious AV programs. If this bit of malware wasn’t recognized by any of them, then they were looking at something new in the world—and new viruses were far and away the most dangerous. A new virus exploiting a previously undiscovered operating system vulnerability was what created a Zero Day event like the Lurker attack on New York.

  Chris and Zoey sat down and simply watched in silence as the rest of the programs ran, streaming characters and numbers. This didn’t happen very often and, when it did, it meant that something bad was on the way.

  Finally, the programs stopped running. At the bottom of each screen was the message “UNKNOWN MALWARE.”

  Zoey slumped back in her chair. “You think this is Lurker 2.0?”

  Chris frowned. “I knew this day was coming, but I just didn’t expect it so soon. It’s Zero Day again.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank my agent and wartime consiglieri, David Hale Smith, for his belief in this book—and for finding me a new home at Thomas & Mercer. I’m grateful to the entire team at Thomas & Mercer — my editors, Courtney Miller and Alison Dasho, along with Jacque Ben-Zekry, Amara Holstein, Shannon Mitchell, and Marcus Trower, for providing the most author-friendly, collaborative, transparent, and enjoyable path to publication imaginable. I’m looking forward to working with them on the further adventures of Chris Bruen.

  Ed Stackler provided his usual astute editorial insights after reading the first draft. Winston Krone, of Kivu Consulting, helped me get the data security details right (and any remaining errors are definitely on me). Jay Hershey and my law firm partner, Ron Dreben, generously took the time to read early drafts, and their input made this a much better book. Cyber warrior Shane McGee provided a reality check of the early chapters.

  I owe a debt to several books that provided invaluable background on hackers, computer viruses, and Stuxnet, including Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, by David E. Sanger; Worm: The First Digital World War, by Mark Bowden; We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous and the Global Cyber Insurgency, by Parmy Olson; and The Art of Intrusion, by Kevin D. Mitnick and William L. Simon.

  As in most good things in my life, none of this would have been possible without the grace, patience, humor, and brilliance of my wife, Kathy. Especially the patience.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Reece Hirsch’s first book, The Insider, was a finalist for the 2011 International Thriller Writers Award for Best First Novel. Like The Adversary, that book draws upon his experiences as an attorney—although his legal work is a lot less exciting and hazardous than that of his character Chris Bruen. Hirsch is a partner in the San Francisco office of an international law firm, specializing in privacy and data security law. He is also a member of the board of directors of 826 National (www.826National.org). Hirsch lives in the Bay Area with his wife and a small, unruly dog. www.reecehirsch.com

  This book was originally released in episodes as a Kindle Serial. Kindle Serials launched in 2012 as a new way to experience serialized books. Kindle Serials allow readers to enjoy the story as the author creates it, purchasing once and receiving all existing episodes immediately, followed by future episodes as they are published. To find out more about Kindle Serials and to see the current selection of Serials titles, visit www.amazon.com/kindleserials.