Gray Vengeance

by Alan McDermott

‘Yeah, like when airline prices shoot up during the school holidays. Supply. And. Demand. It’s not against the law. It’s called capitalism.’

  Smart had overheard the conversation, and he could see from Sonny’s stance that he was ready for action. He quickly walked over to defuse the situation.

  ‘Sonny, leave it. It’s not worth it. When we send out the patrols tonight, we’ll just tell them to skip this street.’

  ‘What patrols?’ the manager asked, suddenly concerned.

  ‘We’re in the TA, and they’ve called us up because they expect rioting here this evening. It’s already kicked off in some places.’

  The manager looked at them, hoping to see signs of a joke, but both men looked deadly serious.

  ‘Come on,’ Smart said, tapping Sonny on the shoulder. ‘Let’s grab what we need while he’s still got some stock.’

  ‘Hang on,’ the manager said. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘I wish we were,’ Sonny said, solemnly. ‘It’s going to get real ugly tonight.’

  ‘But you have to protect my shop!’

  ‘No can do,’ Sonny said. ‘Supply and demand, I’m afraid. We have a small supply of troops, and I will demand that they’re elsewhere when the mob starts tearing down your shutters.’

  He turned and picked up four folding camp beds, leaving Smart to grab the sleeping bags and other items. The manager chased after them, halting Sonny’s progress.

  ‘You’re just trying to scare me, aren’t you? Why would anyone want to start a riot?’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ Sonny said, picking up a sales tag that had been changed from forty pounds to a hundred and twenty. ‘I would have expected this to bring everyone together, but some people are just in it for themselves.’

  Sonny walked to the counter and dumped the items on top.

  ‘I’ll get this,’ the manager said, rushing behind the till and pushing Brian out of the way. He quickly rang through the sales and came up with a very reasonable price.

  ‘I’ve added a twenty percent discount, too,’ he said.

  ‘Why, that’s mighty neighbourly of you,’ Sonny said in his best Texas drawl. ‘I assume that goes for everyone else, too?’

  The manager nodded, and handed a pen to Brian, telling him to revert all the prices to normal.

  ‘So, you’ll be around here tonight?’

  ‘That we will,’ Smart said, handing over the cash before heading out of the store. Sonny hung back to make sure the woman got her stove at the correct price, then followed him out into the street.

  ‘Sonny, why are you looking at my arse?’

  ‘Just checking to see if your pants are on fire.’

  ‘It was a little white lie,’ Smart said, ‘and he asked for it.’

  Sonny told him to wait while he checked the area for other open shops, and returned after ten minutes with a bag full of food. Loaded up, they trekked back to the office, where Gray was still glued to the TV.

  ‘Any problems?’ Gray asked.

  ‘Nothing we couldn’t handle,’ Sonny said, looking up at the screen. ‘What’s the latest?’

  ‘The talking heads say fifty towns and cities have reported attacks. Whoever did this knows enough about our infrastructure to hit us where it hurts. They say the worst is over, but I wouldn’t be too sure.’

  ‘Why not?’ Sonny asked.

  ‘When you attack your enemy, you have one goal.’

  ‘Hit him hard and fast,’ Smart confirmed, ‘and make sure he goes down.’

  ‘Or does some bloody stupid things standing up,’ Sonny put in.

  ‘Exactly,’ Gray said. ‘You certainly don’t stand back so they can get up and retaliate. They’ve brought the country to its knees, but the clean-up process has already begun. If that’s the end of it, then the roads will soon be cleared, power restored, and people will be back to work in a couple of days.

  ‘If I was behind this, I’d want to dissuade anyone from pitching in and helping out. We’ve already seen the power workers being targeted, and I don’t think that’s the end of it. We’ll probably see more and more attacks on the emergency services, and the hospital bombings could be just the start. Expect further attacks on the police, fire service and any armed forces brought in to help.’

  ‘To do that would take hundreds, maybe thousands,’ Sonny said as Smart began digging through the bag of food and pulled out a loaf of bread and a tin of Spam. ‘I can picture one or two slipping past immigration, but not that many. To be honest, Tom, I think we’ve seen the last of it.’

  ‘I was just hypothesising,’ Gray said. ‘I hope I’m wrong.’

  What should have been a ninety-minute drive turned into three hours on the road, and when Harvey arrived at the gates to the country home, he wondered if he’d made a mistake. The wrought-iron gates were covered with rust, and the large house beyond looked like it hadn’t seen an inhabitant in decades. The grounds were overgrown, with weeds and grass standing over a foot high.

  He spotted an intercom system on one of the gateposts and pressed the button.

  ‘Remove your helmet,’ a tinny voice said.

  Harvey complied, as did Thompson, and seconds later the gate clicked open.

  ‘Bring the bike up.’

  Thompson pushed the gates open and Harvey started the engine, easing through the gap and waiting for her to climb back on board. He slowly made his way up the weed-infested driveway, and as they neared the front door, it opened. A man dressed in black slacks and white shirt came out to meet them, and instructed Harvey to park the machine at the rear of the house.

  Harvey drove slowly around to where a large garage held half a dozen cars and a few more motorcycles. He secured it inside and they walked back round to the front, where the man was still waiting.

  ‘You must be Sarah and Andrew,’ he said, holding out a hand. ‘I’m Tony Manello. Welcome to Brigandicuum.’

  Manello looked to be in his mid-thirties, and the accent reminded Harvey of his trips to New York. The NSA agent led them into what had once been a grand hallway. Years of neglect had taken their toll, and cobwebs hung from the ornate coving. Protective sheets had been thrown over the few pieces of furniture, and a thin layer of dust covered everything, giving the room a deathly, grey feel.

  ‘Housekeeper’s week off ?’ Harvey asked.

  ‘All the action takes place downstairs,’ Manello said, leading them into the library, where thousands of books still adorned the shelves that lined three of the walls. The other wall housed a goods elevator, and Manello entered a code on a keypad. The doors whirred open and they walked into the huge compartment.

  ‘You guys don’t do things by half measures, do you?’

  Manello smiled at Thompson. ‘In this case, size does matter. We had a lot of large equipment to install, and this was the only way to get it a hundred yards below the ground.’

  Manello hit a button and the conveyance dropped at a sedate pace. Within thirty seconds they hit the basement and the doors opened onto a scene straight out of a science fiction movie. The cavern was a lot bigger than either of them had expected. One wall was dominated by a set of eight giant screens that must have been more than a hundred inches wide. On the main floor, at least two hundred personnel were sitting at monitors, working feverishly.

  What struck Harvey was the noise—or more precisely, the lack of it. Apart from a few hushed conversations, the only sound was the staccato clicking as a thousand fingers played over keyboards.

  ‘Impressive,’ Harvey admitted. ‘So what does it do?’

  Manello led them over to a control panel beneath the giant monitors. On the screens, a counter ticked over at colossal speed, the number already past the hundred million mark.

  ‘How much have you been told?’ he asked.

  ‘Only that you have the means to identify the people behind the a
ttacks.’

  ‘Then allow me to elaborate. There are more than seven billion people on this planet, and anyone worth worrying about is going to have a way of communicating. They might use a computer, or a laptop, or it could be a tablet or smart phone. What this program does is alert us whenever someone types one of our trigger keywords into their device.’

  ‘That’s hardly new,’ Thompson said. ‘We’ve been able to intercept transmissions for years.’

  ‘Who said anything about transmissions?’ Manello smiled. ‘The moment someone types ‘jihad’ or ‘attack,’ we’re alerted to it. Our system is notified, and we pull down the entire typing session to see what context it’s being used in. If it’s innocent, like an author writing his next blockbuster, we filter them out. If it’s a genuine threat, we do a full download from the device, including location and registered owner.’

  ‘Are you saying you’ve hacked every device on the planet?’

  ‘Basically, yes, though ‘hacked’ would be the wrong word. The software is hidden deep inside the operating systems. It was developed by us, and we just handed the files to the software vendors with the instruction to incorporate it into their systems. All we had to do then was drop a file into the target folder on our server and wait for each device to find it. Once they do, the keyword list is stored in their device’s RAM, leaving no footprint.’

  ‘Surely someone is going to stumble across it one day,’ Harvey said. ‘There are people out there who rip code apart for fun.’

  ‘Not this code,’ Manello assured him. ‘It is a separate file that can only be opened through a command prompt and requires a sixty-four-digit password. That password is hashed and buried inside the kernel, and when we asked our best people to decrypt it, they came up empty, despite the massive computing power available to them. The chances of anyone stumbling across it and being able to read the file are too small to be of any significance.’

  Despite the assurances, Harvey could see trouble looming. The US government had been extremely embarrassed by the Edward Snowden affair, which had come on the back of the WikiLeaks scandal. Compared to those revelations, Brigandicuum would be devastating. Even if it managed to identify and stop the attackers within the next forty-eight hours, privacy groups would have a field day. Still, from a law enforcement perspective, it was undoubtedly a useful tool that would significantly reduce the terror threat to the country. But if word of it ever got out, a lot of careers were going to be cut short.

  ‘When you say you do a full download, how much data are we talking about?’

  ‘Whatever’s on the device.’

  ‘But how do you get round the ISPs’ download limits? My laptop, for example, has a terabyte hard drive. That’s a lot to send. Besides which, my phone account only allows me five hundred megabytes of data per month.’

  ‘That’s all taken into account,’ Manello assured him. ‘The kernel contains a high compression algorithm that cuts the size of the download by ninety percent, which makes most devices manageable. If it is still above a certain size and data limits start to interfere, we have the option to remote onto the device instead. We don’t like to do that as it can leave a trail, so that’s always the last resort.’

  ‘Are you sure users won’t be aware of the downloads?’

  Manello shook his head. ‘In the case of a really big grab, they might notice Candy Crush Saga freezing for a split second, but that’s about it.’

  ‘With the power going out all over the country, isn’t this all redundant?’ Thompson asked.

  ‘Laptops and phones work on batteries,’ Manello pointed out, ‘and while many areas have been affected by the power cut, there are plenty that are still connected.’

  Harvey nodded. ‘What happens if an employee takes this to the newspapers?’

  ‘Then we hit a button and make it go away. Unlike other system updates that require the user’s permission, we can do a forced upload and remove the Brigandicuum software instantly. The file is opened, overwritten a dozen times with garbage, then sliced apart one bit at a time. I’ll leave damage control to the politicians; it’s what they’re paid for. As an operator, I happen to love it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Thompson, ‘but still . . . you have hardware makers involved. Seems like too many parties involved to keep a secret like this.’

  Manello shrugged. ‘This technology’s been in place for a year and we haven’t heard a peep. Still, we’ve only now activated it, so you may be right in the end.’

  Manello seemed unconcerned, and for good reason, thought Harvey. If news of the venture reached the public, it would be the government taking the flak, not the analysts dissecting the mountains of data flooding onto their servers.

  ‘So you’ve had hundreds of people sitting here for twelve months, just waiting for the go signal?’

  ‘No, we’ve been operating with a skeleton crew,’ Manello explained. ‘They’ve been mostly doing maintenance and stress-testing the equipment, but we got orders to ramp things up last week for a full-on demonstration for your prime minister.’

  ‘Why does it have such an obscure name?’ Thompson asked.

  ‘It was chosen because it was unlikely that anyone would ever type it into their handset or computer by mistake. If anyone does use it, it is instantly flagged and we know that someone is discussing the program.’

  ‘I take it that the figure on the screen is the number of hits you’ve had.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Manello said. ‘Unfortunately, everyone and their brother is talking about the attacks, so the number of hits will soon reach the billions.’

  ‘When you say talking, do you mean the software can pick up the keywords in a conversation too?’

  ‘That’s right. It also analyses any videos recorded or downloaded.’

  The numbers continued to tick over, nearing two hundred million after just a few short minutes. Harvey wondered if the people monitoring the incoming data could ever hope to keep up, given the enormity of the task.

  ‘I read that over a hundred billion emails are sent every day,’ Harvey said, ‘and many of those are spam. How do you cope with those numbers?’

  ‘Fewer people send emails than receive them,’ Manello smiled. ‘A spammer will send a single email to maybe a hundred thousand victims, but our only concern is the person writing the email, not the people who receive it. Not unless it turns out to be of interest to us.’

  ‘Isn’t there a way to filter it out to show only the keywords used before the attack?’ Thompson asked.

  ‘Only if you have a time machine. It just isn’t possible to identify anything typed into a device prior to our program’s activation. The exception would be anything saved in a phone’s call or SMS logs. We plan to check for videos and files that were saved to disk, too, but the software has to be updated to do that, and then we have to distribute it to every device. We’ve got developers working on inserting a filtering option, but it could be twenty-four hours before it gets rolled out worldwide. This system was designed to be proactive, not reactive. If we’d gone live last week, this would be another normal December day, and the bad guys would already be locked up.’

  ‘So where do we begin?’ Harvey asked. ‘Is there any way to narrow down these numbers?’ He nodded to the screen, where the digits were already pushing a billion as more and more devices connected to the server to access the keyword list.

  ‘There isn’t that much we can do at the moment,’ Manello admitted. ‘The sheer volume of data makes it impossible to check everything, so we’re using local algorithms to check for multiple keywords in each download.’

  ‘How about narrowing it down by IP address? I understand each IP relates to a certain country. Can’t you focus on a specific range, such as the UK and Nigeria?’

  He told Manello about the DSA video.

  ‘Interesting. Yeah, we have that capability,’ Manello said, ‘but
up until this moment we had no idea where to focus. I’ll pass that along and hopefully it’ll narrow things down a bit.’

  ‘Have you got anyone else looking at the data, or is this it?’ Thompson asked.

  ‘There are a few hundred analysts back home in Fort Meade with access to the feed, but even with them we’re going to be snowed under.’

  What had promised to be an exciting development in their fight to halt the attacks now looked to have faltered at the first hurdle. Harvey hoped Manello’s prediction of better success to come was accurate.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me a moment, I have to report in.’ Harvey took himself to a private area and gave Ellis a brief account of the situation. ‘Do you want us to come in, or remain here?’

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Ellis said. ‘See if you can get access to a terminal and reach our servers. Co-ordinate with your team from there. As soon as you get anything from the NSA, let me know.’

  ‘Will do,’ Harvey assured her. ‘What’s the latest?’

  Her sigh told him it wasn’t going to be good news. ‘Around seventy percent of homes are without power, six Tube stations have been hit, traffic is at a standstill in almost every town and city centre, and the emergency services are screaming for reinforcements. Up to now, seventy hospitals have reported explosions, and the rest are being evacuated to makeshift units in the car parks. The PM is mobilising the troops, but they won’t be effective for at least twenty-four hours. They have the same logistical problems as everyone else: transporting large amounts of equipment is out, so they’ll be using helicopters for the more serious incidents until we can get the roads cleared.’

  ‘How did we miss this?’ Harvey asked. ‘There were no warnings of any kind.’

  ‘Complacency,’ Ellis said. ‘We’ve always thought of terrorists as clumsy, disorganised, and few and far between. Today shows us just how wrong we were. That’s a mistake that won’t be repeated.’

  ‘Now that we have this NSA system activated, it’ll be hard for them to catch us napping again,’ Harvey said. ‘I just wish we’d switched it on last week.’