Surveillance (A Chris Bruen Novel Book 3)
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PRAISE FOR REECE HIRSCH
“Regulatory attorney Hirsch’s debut thriller has something for everyone. Hirsch’s fast-paced, film-ready plot and tough, ambitious characters will keep fans of legal thrillers on the edge of their seats.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Hirsch has exploded out of the gate with a mastery of pace and plotting that many authors take several books to find.”
—Elizabeth A. White, Savannah Morning News
“Reece Hirsch is writing and running with the big boys.”
—John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author of The Fall
“Gripping and gritty. . . . All the danger, treachery and action that make a reader clamor for more are there. Well done.”
—Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author of The Patriot Threat
PRAISE FOR THE CHRIS BRUEN SERIES
The Adversary
“Reece Hirsch is both a great stylist and a cunning storyteller, and The Adversary is his best work yet. This is a first-rate thriller that grabs you from the first pages and doesn’t ever let up. I defy you not to stay up late finishing it.”
—David Liss, Edgar Award–winning author of The Day of Atonement
“I thoroughly enjoyed this international thrill ride! Chris Bruen is a dynamic and multifaceted hero who had me cheering out loud. The Adversary had me hooked from page one and never let go. This one’s definitely for your keeper shelf!”
—Andrew Peterson, author of Ready to Kill
“I stayed up late, face bathed in the glow of my Kindle, holding my breath and wondering if I would ever feel safe on an airplane, in a subway, or on the Internet again. A first-rate cyberthriller!”
—Rebecca Cantrell, New York Times bestselling author of The Blood Gospel
“Reece Hirsch brings the fear of cyberterrorism to life in a taut, gripping novel filled with mysterious hackers, shadowy government agents and those who are caught in the middle. Read it as top-notch entertainment, but never forget this book is also a red flag, snapping in the wind, telling us all we’ve been warned.”
—Graham Brown, New York Times bestselling author of Zero Hour
Intrusion
“With Intrusion, Reece Hirsch has written a timely and poignant thriller of international cyber spying while keeping the story a sweaty-palmed thrill ride. Fans of Joseph Finder and Christopher Reich, meet Reece Hirsch!”
—Robert Dugoni, New York Times bestselling author of My Sister’s Grave
“Intrusion is a cutting-edge, prescient thriller that draws the curtain back on the mysterious, little-understood work of data collection, data mining, and cybercrime. The kind of rare thriller that will change the way you think about everyday life and things you normally take for granted. So read it with the lights on, before somebody turns them off from afar.”
—Jon Land, USA Today bestselling author of Strong Darkness
“Intrusion is the best cyber-security thriller I’ve read this year. Reece Hirsch really knows what he’s talking about—and has a talent for making the pages fly. A must-read for thriller lovers!”
—Allison Leotta, author of A Good Killing
“The tension never lets up in this intelligent, high-stakes thriller. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Terry Shames, Macavity Award–winning author of A Deadly Affair at Bobtail Ridge
“Each Chris Bruen book is better than the last.”
—Security technologist Bruce Schneier
OTHER TITLES BY REECE HIRSCH
The Insider
CHRIS BRUEN NOVELS
The Adversary
Intrusion
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 Reece Hirsch
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503933231
ISBN-10: 1503933237
Cover design by Marc Cohen
CONTENTS
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.
—G. K. Chesterton
1
SIGINT HUMINT REPORT (Summary): Christopher Riley Bruen
DOB: February 23, 1976
SSN: 356-97-2650
Height: 6 feet 2 inches
Eye color: Brown
Hair color: Black
Current address: 958 Folsom Street, #10, San Francisco, CA 94105
Past addresses: 452 Union Street, #28, San Francisco, CA 94123; 75 Hill Road, Berkeley, CA 94708
Credit rating: 785
Phone numbers: (415) 555-3874, (415) 555-0923
Highlighted social media: None.
Highlighted books: Purchased The Shadow Factory by James Bamford.
Highlighted media: Viewed United States of Secrets documentary on Netflix.
Highlighted Internet searches: 12 Google searches using search term “NSA”; 9 Google searches using search term “domestic surveillance”; 29 Google searches using search term “cyberterrorism”; [link to additional results]
Job history: Partner, Reynolds, Fincher & McComb, 2006–2015; Partner, Bruen & Associates, since 7-8-15; [link to additional results]
Highlighted telephone calls: 2-12-12: phone call from Bruen to Abrahim Fahid, two links from Watch List Target Muhammad Salim.
Highlighted Sigint Intercept: “Anyone who expects the NSA to back off of domestic surveillance in the wake of the Snowden leaks does not know the NSA.”
THREAT LEVEL 1 ALERT: Telephone call 9-10-15 from PRIORITY Watch List Target Ian Ayres to Bruen number (415) 555-8814 (new business listing Bruen & Associates).
REFERRED TO WORKING GROUP FOR IMMEDIATE PROCESSING AND THREAT REMEDIATION.
PROCESSING OUTCOME: CLASSIFIED. LEVEL 2 CLEARANCE OR HIGHER REQUIRED.
2
The day that Bruen & Associates opened for business was one of the best days of Chris Bruen’s life—until the first client walked through the door.
Chris had always dreamed of starting his own law firm, and he’d imagined that, given a blank slate, he could create the kind of workplace that he had never found in fourteen years of practicing law—egalitarian, loose but well managed, nonbureaucratic, fun. A
place that was more about doing the best, smartest work than putting dollars in your column.
Things were still fairly quiet on that first morning in the new redbrick building on Howard Street in San Francisco’s South of Market district. His office resembled a blast site, with open cardboard boxes and files scattered everywhere. As he listened to voice mails from clients with questions about the new firm, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos played softly in the background.
Chris was braced for possible surprises on the firm’s first day. In fact, he half expected that one of his hacker adversaries might “swat” his new office. Swatting was a favorite hacker prank, and it involved placing an anonymous call to the police or FBI and reporting a false hostage situation, terrorist threat, or some other extreme event that would draw a SWAT team down upon the unsuspecting victims. Chris had already called the police and FBI to warn them that they might be getting that sort of anonymous tip, hoping it would at least give the authorities pause before they came in locked and loaded.
The firm was operating with a skeleton crew consisting of a receptionist, a file clerk, and the head of the computer forensic lab, Zoey Doucet. There were a couple of talented associates at Reynolds Fincher whom he had trained in privacy and security law, but it would have been improper to offer them jobs before he had resigned from Reynolds Fincher. He planned to begin the process of bringing them over later in the week. By not contacting them immediately, Chris was actually doing the young attorneys a favor. Right now his previous partners would be asking them all sorts of blunt questions; this way they could provide nonanswers with a clear conscience.
Chris rolled his phone to voice mail and rose from behind his desk, deciding to take a stroll around the office. In the crush of constant deadlines, it was too easy to let a moment like this slip past. He didn’t consider it a victory lap—more like a conscious effort to imprint on his memory the beginnings of something good. He had high hopes for the firm, and he expected that Bruen & Associates would not remain a scrappy start-up for long.
As he emerged from his office, the receptionist, Becky Martinez, quickly slid a thick book into her lap and under her desk. Becky, a night school law student, was putting her life back together after a bad divorce. She was exactly the sort of person that Chris was committed to hiring for this new enterprise—bright, kind, and highly motivated.
“It’s okay to read if the phones aren’t ringing,” Chris said. “You don’t have to hide your law books from me.”
“Thanks. I wasn’t sure how you felt about that.”
“I don’t think things are going to be this quiet for long, though.”
“I hope not.”
“Me too, Becky. Me too.”
Chris walked down a short hallway off the reception area to the computer forensic lab. The secure entry keypad had not yet been installed, so he was able to duck in.
Zoey didn’t notice him immediately. Nestled in a thicket of servers and computer monitors, she watched as the output from an antivirus program scrolled across her three screens.
When she finally noticed Chris, she said, “You’re going to need to double the number of servers if we’re going to be competitive. You know that, right?”
“Good morning to you too.”
“Sorry, but I love my new toys. I want more.”
“Is there anything that you need to do your job that you don’t have?”
“Well, no,” Zoey conceded. “But you never know when a big breach might come along and max out our resources.”
“We’ll get there. Dave Silver at BlueCloud just agreed to pay a big retainer against our fees to help subsidize our start-up costs.”
“It’s nice to have billionaire friends.”
“Well, he’s not exactly doing it out of friendship. He owes us. We sort of saved his company when they were being blamed for the Lurker virus.”
“Oh, right, there was that.”
“So how do you like having your own shop?” Chris asked, resting a hand on her shoulder.
“I’ll let you know when things are fully built out,” Zoey said. Then she broke into a grin. “But yeah, it’s pretty awesome.”
Chris noticed a glass vase that stood on one of the lab’s wooden nonconducting countertops. Rather than flowers, it was filled with a limp bouquet of multicolored wires held together by a big ribbon tied in a bow. A Hello Kitty card was pasted to the front of the vase with tape. It read:
Congratulations, Geek Girl! (We knew flowers were too girly for you.)
From the Bottom of the Hill Gang
Zoey had been a bartender for several years at the Bottom of the Hill, a music club on Potrero Hill, and she stayed in touch with the crew there.
“Funny,” Chris said. “And true.”
“What can I say? They know me.”
Chris pointed at the vase. “I didn’t think of you as a Hello Kitty kind of person.”
“I’m not. That looks like Erin’s work.”
Chris examined the blank-faced, big-headed cartoon cat. “You know, I once met someone from the Hello Kitty marketing team. Do you know why Hello Kitty doesn’t have a mouth?” He placed both hands on his chest. “Because Hello Kitty speaks from the heart.”
Zoey swiveled around in her chair to face him. “I think Hello Kitty doesn’t have a mouth because if she did, she would never stop screaming.”
Chris laughed, appreciating as always Zoey’s deeply twisted mind. After his wife died, Chris had opened an account with an online dating site but quickly abandoned the experiment. He didn’t like treating a relationship as if it were merely another online search that could be perfected through the judicious selection of search terms. If he’d applied only the standards of what he thought he wanted, he never would have found Zoey.
“Write up your wish list of what you’d like for the next stage,” he said. “I think I’m going to be in a position to make it rain.”
Across the hall from the forensic lab was the file room, the domain of file clerk Ira Rogers. While the file clerk job wasn’t very demanding, Ira was a perfect fit for it. He was starting an independent record label and had proven himself a talented producer of quirky art-pop records. His natural meticulousness behind the mixing console carried over to his day job at the firm. Chris didn’t expect Ira to love being a file clerk, but he did his job efficiently, and he was an interesting person to have around the office—if only to hear his critiques of Chris’s music choices and his debates with Zoey over hyperspecific ten-best lists (Ten Best Songs with a Backward Guitar Solo, Ten Best Songs in Which the Singer Has a Fake British Accent, etc.).
Some sort of symphonic electronic pop music played softly in the file room, but Ira was nowhere to be seen.
“Ira?”
Ira emerged from between two sliding floor-to-ceiling stacks of files. He was pale and delicate looking, with washed-out blondish hair cut short. Even when drugs weren’t involved, there seemed to be something about the rock-and-roll life that kept guys like Ira as rail thin as teenagers. As the years advanced, Ira would probably end up resembling one of those sinewy, wizened raptors of rock, like Iggy Pop or Keith Richards.
“Yes?”
“What are we listening to?”
“Woodkid. Made a big impression at Coachella last year.”
“I somehow missed that.”
“If you’re interested in joining us in the twenty-first century, you could check out my latest playlist on Spotify.”
“I love it when you condescend to me musically.”
“What can I say? Could you keep your mouth shut if you heard someone misstating the law?”
“Fair enough.”
“You need anything, boss?”
“No, just checking in.”
“I’m good. How about you? You good?”
“Very.”
“Are we getting the day off to celebrate the occasion?”
“No.”
“Then I guess I’d better get back to my filing.” Ira gave a slight amused sm
ile to his new boss, who must have seemed as watchful as a new parent.
During this start-up phase, Ira’s role was particularly critical. The transition process was going to take some time because each client had to approve the transfer of their files to the new firm. Since the book of business that Chris was taking with him was worth millions of dollars a year, his former partners were not particularly motivated to speed the file-transfer process along. One of Ira’s duties was to pester the file clerk at Chris’s former firm to make sure files were transferred as quickly as possible.
The move had been a long time coming. Chris had grown weary of skirmishing with his former partners at Reynolds, Fincher & McComb over clients and billing credits. He was also tired of being thrown under the bus by his colleagues whenever he found himself in a precarious situation that might compromise the firm’s reputation. In fairness to his former partners, though, Chris did seem to have a knack for running afoul of law enforcement and government agencies in the course of his practice defending clients against the predations of hackers and cybercriminals.
Once he’d made up his mind to leave the firm, things had moved quickly. He retained Solomon Heck, an attorney who specialized in advising lawyers on the ethical issues associated with transferring a practice. The first rule was that a partner owes a fiduciary duty to the partnership and cannot have conversations with the firm’s clients or employees about moving until a resignation notice has been submitted. Chris had violated that rule only once, when he had informed Zoey of his plans. He figured that was not such a major ethical lapse, because he happened to be sleeping with Zoey. Or maybe that first ethical lapse of having a relationship with someone he supervised made his second ethical lapse seem more palatable. The proverbial slippery slope . . .
Within an hour of pressing the “Send” key and delivering his resignation email to Reynolds Fincher’s managing partner, Chris was being escorted out of the building by security guards. Then he and his former partners were in a race to telephone his clients to confirm whether they were staying or going. Fortunately, no one else at Reynolds Fincher possessed Chris’s credentials as a privacy attorney, so virtually all of his clients pledged their allegiance to the new firm.