Breakpoint

by Richard A. Clarke

  “You’re working too late for a man of your age, Sir Dennis,” Rubenstein teased his old friend.

  “As I recall, Sol, you are four months older,” Sir Dennis replied gravely.

  “Yes, but it’s five hours earlier here.” Rubenstein got down to business. “Yes, we are still getting details on the explosion, but the most important thing is that one of our officers was there and was apparently responsible for preventing the attack from getting to Google or the university research center. That center was linked to Globegrid and was probably the target. Don’t know yet who did it, of course.”

  The voice link was traveling over a military satellite channel, and during the brief pause in their conversation they could both hear the subtle sounds of its transmission and encryption. “So it continues,” Sir Dennis intoned. “Sol, our Beijing station thinks that there is some sort of internal tension in the Chinese leadership. We have a source there who is in a position to know, has access. The source, however, won’t give up his subsource, who we think is pretty highly placed. The subsource says he will only meet with a senior official of our Secret Intelligence Service.”

  “Could be a lure,” Rubenstein cautioned.

  “Funny, that’s what Brian Douglas said.”

  “So let me guess. The Deputy Director of SIS decided to assign himself the task,” Rubenstein replied.

  “Of course. Brian lands in Beijing about now,” Sir Dennis said, looking at the antique clock on the fireplace mantel. “He knows how to sense a setup, how to arrange a meet so he can get out.”

  “Indeed, he proved that in Tehran, but I doubt he speaks Mandarin and he is a few years older now than when he did the Iran mission.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Sir Dennis said, standing up and looking out at the evening traffic coming down from Trafalgar Square and passing below his window on Whitehall toward Parliament. “Sol, the media is full of speculation and leaks that China might be behind the attacks. Senators talking about the need to respond. I hope your President is not feeling the need to—”

  “The President is ensuring we are prepared, that we have a spectrum of options if the evidence goes where you and I think it will.” Sol’s view from his Executive Office Building suite looked south from the White House complex across the park toward Reagan National Airport. Aircraft taking off veered sharply to avoid the no fly zone over the White House. The huge spotlights were just coming on at the Washington Monument. “My job—no, Dennis, our job—is not just to come up with the evidence, but it is then to tell our political masters how to handle it without making a complete mess of things.”

  Sir Dennis reached for his battered Peterson pipe. “Or to help the Chinese to figure out how to undo what someone in their government may have done. So bloody minded of them about Taiwan, willing to sacrifice their own economic progress to reclaim something they haven’t had in sixty years. The deal they struck with us on Hong Kong worked out nicely. It’s still independent for all practical purposes, a Special Autonomous Region.”

  “I agree. What kind of capitalists are these Chinese, anyway?” Rubenstein joked.

  “Indeed.”

  1830 EST

  The Dugout

  Watertown, Massachusetts

  Soxster sat in a room lit by the light from seven flat screens. He was in the Dugout, a computer facility more capable than those run by most information technology companies. The Dugout, however, had been built with devices found in dumpsters in parking lots behind information technology companies—castoffs rebuilt and improved by Soxster, Greenmonsta, Yankeehater, Fenwayfranks, and the rest of the hacker gang that rented the space in the old shoe factory. They all had day jobs at universities and high-tech corporations in the Boston area. By night, they got to their passion, exploring cyberspace, its dark recesses, its faulty glitched-up networks, its unprotected systems around the world.

  “When we find an app, a program, that has a glitch, we tell the right people,” Soxster had assured Jimmy Foley. He hadn’t said how fast they did the notification.

  The first to arrive at the Dugout that afternoon, Soxster had tried to track down Susan and Jimmy. Now that he had succeeded in finding Susan, he was sending a text message to Jimmy.

  Jimmy Foley had just pulled into a roadside rest stop in the California desert, to empty his bruised kidneys. When he had found out that he could rent a Harley Heritage Softail near LAX airport, he had leapt at the chance. The bike had a fat front fork like the classic 1949 Hydra Glide, and was made to look original right down to the Fat Bob fuel tank. Now, with most of southern California behind him, he was thinking maybe he should have gone for the car that the office had reserved for him. He felt his PDA vibrate and flipped it open to read the text messages.

  SOXSTR:

  James, assume you know what Connor found up north and what happened?

  JXF3:

  Hey, no, what’s my boss up to?

  SOXSTR:

  She is ok. No damage. Just read her chart off the Stanford Hospital net. Minor concussion and some scrapes. Supposed to be released in a few hours. So much for HIPAA, eh?;)

  JXF3:

  Not funny dude.

  SOXSTR:

  No, for real. U been cut off from the net? The blast at SCAIF. Susan was there, man.

  JXF3:

  Yeah, been on a bike driving across the desert from LA. What happened?

  SOXSTR:

  The Globegrid node near Stanford where Susan was visiting. It’s on Moffett Field, NASA-Ames. 18 wheeler smashed thru the gate, killed some guards, then went kaplooee on the campus. Knocked all the windows out at the Googleplex, right in the middle of their afternoon massages and Pilates.

  JXF3:

  And Connor was there when it happened?

  SOXSTR:

  Must have been somewhere nearby. Can’t ask her cause they took all her toys off her in the ER.

  JXF3:

  Jesus. Thanks. I’ll find out more from IAC.

  SOXSTR:

  Wait. I found TTeeLer again on the net. Got him into a one-on-one chat room and he gave it up that he was TTeeLer. He’s been hiding out in an apartment near Twentynine Palms. He’s AWOL from the mob that hired him. Afraid to move.

  JXF3:

  Did he tell you anything more why he left them?

  SOXSTR:

  Just that they had him doing the usual money crime stuff on the net, then hacking infrastructure, then he heard about some plan to kill people and he boogied.

  JXF3:

  Get his street address and I’ll go get him.

  SOXSTR:

  He wants to meet you in a public place first. Check you out.

  JXF3:

  I’m meeting a friend at a grille called Globe & Anchor. See if you can get him to go there.

  SOXSTR:

  Will do. Jimmy, watch your 6. This shit ain’t over. Whatever this shit is. EOT.

  1610 PST

  The Globe and Anchor Grille and Pool Hall

  Twentynine Palms, California

  A cue ball smashed against racked balls as Jimmy walked into the dingy poolroom side of the Marine hangout. He scanned the few people in the room, looking for someone who would fit the description Soxster had just sent him. There were no matches. “Gimme a Bud, will yah. I’ll be right out. Gotta wash some road off me,” Jimmy Foley called out to the young blond bartender. As he strode by her on his way to the men’s room, he judged from the diamond on her finger that she was a Marine’s wife. Despite the motorcycle helmet and gloves, the dust and grime from the highway had made it through to his hands, face, and short cropped hair. He made an attempt to clean up, although the word clean was not what came to mind in the smelly men’s room. Nonetheless, the cold water felt bracing on his face. He put his face in the sink and let the water run over his head. He flashed back to too many nights as Lt. James X. Foley III in Marine bars around the world.

  After he toweled dry with the coarse, brown paper towels, he walked into the toilet stall and withdrew the Sig from und
er his biker jacket. It had no safety. He cocked it to put a round into the chamber and then thumbed the decocking lever. As he reentered the poolroom, Jimmy noticed a young man standing at the bar with two poured glasses of beer. He matched the description of TTeeLer. “Hey, didn’t you use to hang out at the Dugout?” Jimmy said as he walked up to the bar.

  “Long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away. Or at least until they kicked me out,” TTeeLer shot back, turning to view the room behind him. He did not offer to shake hands.

  Jimmy nodded to the bartender. “Bag of pretzels.” Then he pointed to a table in the corner, away from the door. “Let’s sit down.”

  Opening the pretzel bag onto the table, Jimmy did his ingratiating teenager look over at the bartender. As he did, he said softly to TTeeLer, “My name is Jimmy. I am an armed police officer here on federal business. I can get you out of here safely, but we’ll want to talk with you once we get somewhere secure.”

  “We can talk here if you’re not recording this. But if you’re wearing a wire, forget it. I am not incriminating myself,” TTeeLer insisted.

  “Calm down. Talk quieter. No, I am not wearing a wire. I am here to get you out, safely.”

  TTeeLer shook his head, “Not tonight. In the morning. I have to spend the night with Naomi. She’s this single mother in the apartment next to mine. I want her and the kid to follow me out of this shithole town. And I have a lot to explain to her tonight.”

  Jimmy watched two off-duty Marines playing pool. “It’s not safe to go back there if someone has made you while you have been out of the building. This is a small town.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” TTeeLer said, hanging his head down. “But I think the goons probably stopped looking for me in town. Last thing they think I’d do is stay here.”

  “Okay, so let’s talk. Who are they?” Jimmy asked.

  “I don’t know who the big guys are. I just see the local staff. Mainly Americans. Goons for security and some cyber-savvy crooks, who get instructions and ideas from some off-planet being, L.A., Moscow, I don’t know where. A higher intelligence than them, anyway.” TTeeLer was very stressed out and twitchy. His dark blond hair was stringy. Jimmy took him to be about twenty-two, maybe a few years older.

  Jimmy put his head in his left hand, obscuring his mouth to anyone looking at him. With his right, he felt for the Sig on his waist and he kept an eye on the door. “So let’s start with the money. What did they have you do to raise money?”

  “Usual, at first. Phishing messages for bank accounts and credit cards. Then we forgot about the banks and hacked into the credit-card clearing companies, pick up a couple of hundred thousand names, card numbers, socials. Big bucks. Then we started dropping this app, Ethercap, onto cable TV and DSL systems in wealthy neighborhoods. Remotely, of course. Cable or DSL, they’re nothing more than a local area ethernet. Then we’d pick up every e-mail, every web page anybody on the street saw or sent. Some kinky stuff, but also big online stock-trading accounts. Easy to pick off their passwords with a keystroke logger. Open a bank account in the Caribbean. Sell the stock, bank transfer the money out. Easy pickings.”

  Jimmy kept smiling.

  “Then we hit on this sweet deal with the music sharing systems, peer-to-peer. Turns out in every company, some idiot has downloaded music sharing software. You just go online and instead of searching for ‘Beatles Greatest Hits,’ you type in ‘Merger Plans’ or ‘New Product Plans’ or ‘Personnel Files’ and you get the company’s secrets right through their firewall.” At that thought, TTeeLer smiled.

  “All of which you then sell on the Net,” Jimmy mumbled. “Soxster said something about infrastructure? What’s that all about?”

  “That’s where it all started to get all weird. They were having us hack into the power company and shit. Map the network. Leave a trapdoor to get back in easy. SCADA systems. Railroads, pipeline companies, Army bases. I couldn’t see the money in it, but hey, they still paid me the big bucks, some in cash and some in direct deposit. Deposits came from a bank in Kuwait.”

  Jimmy sipped slowly at the beer, not wanting to have to go back to the bar or ask the bartender to come to the table. “But that’s not why you left, went AWOL.”

  “Not AWOL, I quit. I just didn’t tell them I quit, because my guess is that it’s the Hotel California, you can never leave.” More off-duty Marines came into the room and got cue sticks and beers. “No, I left when I heard them talking about needing to hack in somewhere to change the formula on something. He said, ‘It’ll kill ’em all, hundreds, maybe thousands.’ Listen, whatever your real name is, Jimmy, I will steal from you in cyberspace if you are stupid enough to let me, but I am no killer. Nobody’s giving me the needle in some state pen. So I waited for the next cash disbursement and left the reservation a week later.”

  A Marine had started to hit on the bartender and was now getting yelled at by about three others, confirming Foley’s suspicion that her husband was in the Corps. Things looked like they would settle down peacefully. “Where is the reservation?”

  “Near town, not far, but outside. I got out by hopping in the back of a delivery van. Hopped out at his next stop about twenty minutes later and I was in town. They never let us go into town since the day we showed up out here. But the reservation is big. Lots of buildings, satellite dishes, runway. Shit, man, they even had little UAVs, RPVs, you know, planes without pilots. And a lotta guns.”

  Jimmy was using his detective training in interrogation. Just let the subject talk. Do not make a big deal out of what you want to know, pick it up in pieces, come back to it. “So the formula they’re going to change so that a bunch of people die. Any idea—”

  TTeeLer hit the table with his fist. “Man, I have racked my brain. I mean, the whole reason I hung around for a week after I got my cash was just to see if I could find out what shit they’re planning, but I got nothing. And I think some of them were getting suspicious of me askin’ about things.”

  “Ever see any Chinese? Russians? Arabs?” Jimmy queried.

  “Russians, yeah, but only a few at our place. But I’m sure there are other places, doing other shit. We were just here because they were really interested in what was going on at the base, but they wouldn’t let me in on that shit. Enough for tonight, man. I’ll tell you more when I get the written deal, the no prosecution deal. Tomorrow.”

  Jimmy tried to think if he had offered him that. “Sure. Tomorrow. When and where?”

  TTeeLer looked around the pool hall. “There’s a 7-Eleven near Amboy and Adobe. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning. There’ll be three of us, including a kid who’s four. And bring some help, buddy, just in case.” Jimmy Foley watched for any reactions in the room as TTeeLer walked toward the back of the hall, then ducked through the kitchen door. At least, Jimmy thought, the kid was smart enough not to walk out the front door, but not smart enough to stay out of trouble.

  Almost a half hour later, Jimmy looked up from his PDA to see Dr. Mark Rathstein coming toward him. “Foley, sorry I’m late.” He was trim, in a blue polo shirt and khakis, with graying hair and glasses. “Good to see you. Long time. You look great. Welcome to Twentynine stumps.”

  “Dr. Rathstein, didn’t expect you would want to meet in a pool hall,” Jimmy said, thrusting a hand out. Mark Rathstein, he knew from his Marine days, was a Navy doctor who also had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering.

  “I come here to work when I want to get away from the office,” the doctor said, and then yelled to the bartender, “Two Coors Lights.”

  “When I saw you were coming, I checked that it was you, then got myself assigned as your host,” Rathstein said. “You left NYPD?”

  “No, Doc, just got assigned down in D.C. to work with the spooks for a year, to learn how Feds think. Think of it as field research. Supposed to increase my chance for promotion. Great to see you, too, and thanks for volunteering to show me around. So, what is this place out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  The doctor waited while t
he waitress deposited two cold mugs of Coors and a bowl of popcorn. “How’s your dad doing? Great guy. Did he retire yet, or is he still doing law at seventy-plus?”

  Jimmy winced. “Thanks for asking. Yeah, Dad retired. Had to. Fast-onset Alzheimer’s. They can’t do anything for him. He’s in a home near my brother’s on Long Island.”

  “Sorry, Jim. My mother went that way,” Rathstein whispered. He took a small sip of froth and beer. “So you asked to see the base here? Marine desert training base. Amazing you never got stuck here before going to Iraq. What we’re doing at the hospital is an extension of what we did a few years ago in Bethesda. Back then we were giving Marines from Iraq new arms and legs, lightweight, electronic, tied directly to the brain. Now we’re giving them new arms and legs before they’ve lost the ones they were born with, so they don’t get shot up in the first place.”

  Jimmy leaned across the table. “Doc, listen, as a jarhead, we all owe you guys a world of thanks. The body armor in Iraq saved lives by protecting our trunks, but not our limbs. We had more guys lose limbs and live than in any war before. Thousands. What you guys at Bethesda did with your gizmos was make those lives worth living.” Jimmy toasted him, clinking his mug against the doctor’s. “How’s this new stuff work?”

  Dr. Rathstein beamed, excited to share the story of his work. “Think spacesuit. Not just Kevlar plates here and there, but the entire body is inside a suit that is heated and air conditioned. The suit monitors body functions and reports problems, fixes some of them by itself with medication patches and injections. There’s liquid nutrition supplied. And, of course, the whole thing is bullet-and flame-resistant and Netcentric, connected with an internet address.”

  “Bullet resistant ain’t bulletproof,” Jimmy said while dripping yellow mustard on a pretzel. “Sounds like a heavy load to be luggin’ ’round on top of all the weapons and shit they have to carry.”