by Reece Hirsch
Tourists were snapping photos of the statue with their phones, and Zoey couldn’t avoid having her picture taken. She wondered if any of the tourists were members of Damian’s crew, more interested in her than in the Say Hey Kid.
To get out of the frame of the amateur photographers, Zoey took a few steps away from the statue and into the milling crowds. A woman bumped into her with a tossed-off apology. She took a few steps back after the collision, and a man, who was offering scalped tickets, jostled her. When the third person brushed past her, she began to suspect that these collisions weren’t accidents.
Recognizing a classic pickpocket technique, she quickly searched for her wallet, which remained in place. But she also found a thick white envelope that had been stuffed into her jacket pocket.
She removed the envelope and opened it slowly. This time there was no note, but there were four plane tickets. The first ticket was from San Francisco International Airport to Vancouver, British Columbia, leaving in three hours. The second ticket was from Vancouver to Rio de Janeiro. The third ticket was from Rio to Bogotá, Colombia. The fourth and final ticket was from Bogotá to Quito, Ecuador, on an airline that she had never heard of called Air Andes. Clearly, the circuitous route was intended to make it harder to trace her travels.
There was also a Canadian passport with a photo of someone who looked a bit like Zoey with blonde hair.
Zoey looked at the first ticket, then checked her watch. Damian was giving her scant time to decide if she wanted to make her flight. She knew almost nothing about Ecuador but imagined that if Damian was there, it must be a country that was unlikely to cooperate in extradition to the United States.
More troubling, Zoey had no idea what she’d be getting into with Damian. Was he alone or part of some criminal hacking crew? Was he retired or very much in business? Would he really protect her, or would he use her as a bargaining chip with the law enforcement agencies that sought him?
Zoey stared at the ticket for a long time as the crowd of baseball fans flowed past and around her. The truth was she had little choice. At least Damian presented the possibility of a place to hide in a brightly lit and unsafe world where very few shadows remained.
She shoved the tickets and passport back in her jacket and crossed the street to the drugstore to buy some blonde hair coloring.
10
When Sam arrived for his first full day at the Working Group facility, Sigrid promptly summoned him into her immaculately neat office. You didn’t often see high-ranking intelligence officials with messy offices. Not when every note and scrap of paper counted as classified material.
“Before you meet your new team, I have something I’d like to show you.” She rose. “Come with me. I think you’re going to appreciate this.”
Sam followed Sigrid down several long hallways into a wing of the new building that was still largely unoccupied and smelled of new carpet and paint. There was a security guard in front of the door, who examined Sigrid’s credentials even though he clearly knew her on sight. Sam also had to present his badge and ID. If he hadn’t been accompanying Sigrid, he was certain that additional authentication measures would have been required.
Sigrid held out a tray. “All electrical devices have to be left at the door. No exceptions.”
After they had both returned to their predigital state, Sigrid punched a string of characters into the cipher-locked door, and it unsealed with a gasp.
Inside were rows of servers in sleek black and brushed chrome casings. The only sounds were a low electrical hum and the murmur of the frigid air-conditioning.
“So, this is your version of Black Widow?” Sam asked.
Black Widow was the NSA’s $17.5-million Cray computer that processed surveillance data at blinding speeds of hundreds of teraflops, hundreds of trillions of operations per second.
“No, this is something new,” Sigrid said with a smile.
Sam noticed that the walls of the room were lined with a slate-gray substance. He walked over and ran a finger over its rubbery texture. “What’s this?”
“We’re in a Faraday cage,” Sigrid said.
A Faraday cage was a shielded room designed to prevent electromagnetic energy from entering or escaping. Sam’s mind raced at the notion: he could think of only one reason why a computer would need to be housed inside a Faraday cage.
“That’s right,” Sigrid said. “We call it Skeleton Key. It’s the first quantum computer.”
“I thought that was just a pipe dream.”
For years Sam had heard talk around the agency about quantum computing, but it had always sounded like science fiction. Quantum computing was based on the principle of quantum superposition, the idea that an object simultaneously exists in all states. A conventional computer operated using binary bits, zeroes and ones. A quantum computer, theoretically, would use quantum bits, or qubits, which were simultaneously zero and one.
Conventional computers, no matter how fast, could only perform one calculation at a time, which meant that it took years and hundreds of computers to break a common 1,024-bit encryption key. Sam didn’t know much about quantum physics, but a quantum computer would supposedly be able to skip past millions of unnecessary calculations to crack a code in record time.
“It’s real,” Sigrid said. “And we’re doing it.”
“How long have you had this?”
“The breakthrough came six months ago when we found a way to stabilize and scale the thing, stringing together enough qubits so that we can run Shor’s algorithm and break public key RSA encryption. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an extremely fragile machine, but in the early days it was like trying to build a computer out of dandelions.”
“And you need a Faraday cage because the computer uses photons or electrons to perform the calculations.”
“Exactly. The computer needs to be completely isolated from the external environment. Just bringing a cell phone in here can put it out of commission for a week.” She paused. “You want to see what it’s capable of?”
“Of course.”
Sigrid led him over to a pair of monitors. “See this data feed? These are the encrypted internal communications of Russia’s SVR intelligence service. And here’s Mossad.”
Sam leaned in to read some of the feeds and nodded appreciatively. “This is a game changer. Who knows about this?”
“There are a few managers here at the Working Group, and a handful of the highest-ranking people at the CIA and FBI. But no one outside of the Working Group knows how we do this. We share our results with the other agencies as appropriate, but we’d never give them the technology.”
“When they saw the data that you’re pulling down, the CIA and FBI must have recognized that you’d achieved some sort of breakthrough.”
“They can recognize whatever they like, but they’re only getting the results, not the method. That’s always been the NSA’s value proposition, and now it belongs to the Working Group.”
“Congress won’t like this.”
“That’s why they’re not going to find out,” Sigrid said. “By transferring the technology to the Working Group, we keep this whole enterprise in the shadows. The NSA is coming under new scrutiny, but this isn’t the NSA, is it?”
If you say so, thought Sam, but he simply nodded thoughtfully.
Moving to another monitor, Sigrid scowled. “Now we get to your first assignment. This is a special project. A penetration consultant named Ian Ayres stumbled upon the existence of the Working Group.”
“Does he realize what he’s found?”
“He knows enough.”
“What’s the objective?”
“Find him. That’s your job. You don’t want to know more than that. Unfortunately, he shared his information with an attorney, Chris Bruen, so they’re both targets, and we believe they’re together.”
“Do you have any idea where to start?”
“They were at the San Francisco Police Department’s Central Station yesterday. Af
ter that we lost them. That’s where you come in.”
“Any leads?”
“Well, Bruen is a privacy and security attorney, so he’s sophisticated, but that may actually work in our favor. Bruen set up what he thinks is a secure website with strong encryption to communicate with the head of his forensic lab.”
“So he’ll think he can speak freely.”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“Today you’ll be introduced to the resources at your disposal, but aside from this it’s all going to look very familiar to you. You’ll have access to all of the data you tapped into at the NSA and more. Telephone metadata of internal US calls, US-national-to-foreign calls, corporate partner access, traffic camera data, upstream surveillance, the works.”
Sam nodded again. It was what he would’ve expected. Upstream surveillance meant tapping into infrastructure to extract data, including the fiber-optic cables that shot text and telephonic data across the ocean floor. An invaluable complement to telephone tapping. Ever since the NSA’s ThinThread project in the 1990s, the agency had been amassing enormous volumes of telephone and Internet traffic data. In the early days, though, the agency’s computers lacked the power to sift the data and identify actionable counterterrorism intelligence. Fortunately, computing power and “big data” analytics tools had grown exponentially more powerful in recent years, to the point where the NSA could more fully exploit the petabytes of data that it collected on a daily basis.
To put the NSA’s data collection in perspective, 200 petabytes was equal to all printed material on earth. And given the ceaseless suck of the data cascading into NSA servers, the agency was now measuring its stored data by the exabyte, which consisted of 1,000 petabytes. Five exabytes (5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) constituted enough information to fill 37,000 new Libraries of Congress—more than all the words ever printed. To say that the NSA was dealing in big data was a profound understatement. It was more like staggeringly massive, mind-of-God data.
As the NSA worked to develop Skeleton Key, its surveillance programs had been about to enter their golden age. Then came the Snowden era and Congress’s efforts to apply the brakes to NSA bulk data collection. It made sense to Sam that the agency’s leadership would form the Working Group as a work-around, especially with the newly unleashed powers of quantum computing.
“So the encrypted website is our main lead on Bruen and Ayres,” Sam said. “Let’s hope they keep using it, right?”
“Right,” Sigrid said. “But they’re not your average civilians. If it were that easy, we’d have located them again by now. We wanted our best data analyst on this one, and that’s why you’re here. I’ve emailed you their dossiers.”
Sam nodded. “Thanks.”
Sigrid backed away from the monitors. “Time to introduce you to your team.”
“What are their credentials?”
“They’re as technically skilled as any analysts we’ve ever had at the NSA. Maybe a little lacking in social graces, but that goes with the territory.”
Sam smiled. “I know the type well.”
Sigrid looked at him as if she were politely refraining from saying what was on her mind.
“Okay, I am that type.”
“They’re fairly young, so you’ll need to ride herd on them, and you’ll need to watch closely for potential Snowdens.”
Sam nodded again. They left the Faraday chamber and returned to the cubicle farm that adjoined his office. As they approached, they heard hooting male voices.
“This one’s going in my keeper file,” said an Indian American kid in his late twenties with a neatly groomed mustache and beard.
“Those are some lovely, lovely tatas,” added his colleague, a rotund Anglo fellow of about the same age with frizzy hair. “Captain, we’re going to need more hand lotion and Kleenex. Rajiv’s pud cannah take any more,” he said, sliding into a bad impression of Star Trek’s Scotty.
“Definitely the best part of monitoring surveillance feeds,” Rajiv said with a sigh. “Thank God for sexting.”
Sigrid appeared over the cubicle wall and glared down at them. “Gentlemen, this is your new supervisor, Sam Reston.” She looked from one analyst to the other. “As usual you make an appalling first impression.” She gestured to Sam. “Sam, meet your team—Rajiv Gupta and Josh Epstein.”
Sigrid’s introductions were followed by sheepish nods from the bearded one and the chubby one.
“Sam just moved over from the NSA, and he has been doing this work longer than you all have been alive. You have a lot to learn from him, and I hope you will choose to do that. This is what an adult looks like. Now I’ll leave you all to get acquainted.”
Sigrid strode away, leaving Sam with his new team.
“Let me just turn this off here.” Gupta quickly switched off a monitor full of sexting photos. “You never know what’s going to come up on the feeds.”
Epstein stood behind Gupta, shaking his head and saying in a stage whisper, “You have no idea.” This was followed by a lewd—and vigorous—hand gesture, which Sam ignored.
“What are you all working on—besides the obvious?”
“We’re monitoring the computer of a guy in Pakistan who’s a mouthpiece for ISIS,” Epstein said. “Eventually, we figure he’s going to connect with operational types.”
“Malware?” Sam asked.
Epstein nodded proudly.
“Aren’t they too sophisticated for that?”
“Ordinarily, yeah, but we got it into his computer’s firmware, so antivirus programs won’t detect it.”
“How’d you manage to install it?”
Gupta slid his chair over. “We set up a fake version of Facebook, and when he went there we used it to download the virus into the firmware. Now the only way he’s going to get rid of us is by throwing out the computer.”
“And what have you learned?”
“Not a lot so far, except that he’s a huge fan of the Iranian national soccer team.” Gupta looked at Epstein, who nodded in agreement. “And I mean a huge fan.”
“I’ve watched so many of their matches now that I’ve become kind of a fan too,” Epstein said. “They’ve got this defensive midfielder, Andranik Teymourian—”
“He actually wanted to order an Iranian soccer jersey,” Gupta interrupted, pointing a thumb at his partner. “You tell him what would happen if he came in wearing an Iranian national soccer jersey.”
“I’d rather not contemplate that,” Sam said.
A silence followed as they considered the degree to which the watchers were themselves watched.
“So you’re one of the pre-9/11 guys,” Gupta finally said.
“Yes.”
“It must have been pretty intense at the agency after the towers fell.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“And you don’t like to talk about it, do you?”
“What do you think?”
Sam didn’t much care for this new generation of data analysts. They had no sense of mission or history. They were just kids enamored of their super-high-tech toys who treated critical counterterrorism surveillance as if it were the latest Xbox game.
“Why don’t we start with what you know so far about Chris Bruen and Ian Ayres,” he said.
The pair eyed him for a moment, then fell into line. Collectively, they clearly hadn’t decided yet whether it was safe to challenge his authority, but, like third graders, it wouldn’t take them long to begin seeing what they could get away with. Sam decided that he would enjoy the modicum of clout he possessed while it lasted.
Gupta showed Sam the security camera footage of Bruen and Ayres at the SFPD’s Central Station the day before.
“Why do they climb out the window here? What did they see?”
“Our lead field agent, Anton Corbin. He was speaking to a detective and was about to take them into custody.”
“Did he tell the detective who he was working for?”
“No, all Work
ing Group agents have official-looking credentials that say they’re affiliated with some kind of high-level FBI-CIA joint task force. Anyone who checks credentials gets a legit response from the government, but they never know who they’re really dealing with.”
Sam took a seat at Gupta’s monitor and reviewed the CCTV footage tracking Bruen and Ayres. He watched them scramble down the escalator of a BART station and onto a train, the fear palpable in their frantic movements. Two stops later another camera caught them exiting at the Embarcadero station. They’d been smart not to stay on the train too long.
There was a rough break in the footage, and then he was watching a grainy security camera feed from a parking garage near Civic Center Plaza. The pair had probably taken a taxi from the Embarcadero to the Civic Center area but had been spotted by running facial-recognition software on CCTV feeds. They were moving quickly but trying not to run, clearly aware that there were cameras on them. The hunt would have been so much easier if they were, like most citizens, oblivious to the capabilities of a modern surveillance state.
Bruen and Ayres rounded a corner, heading toward Van Ness Avenue, and the video footage came to an end.
“Is that all we have?” Sam asked.
“That’s it, boss,” Gupta said.
“I want a list of every hotel within a two-mile radius of Civic Center Plaza. Then I want to know if we have access to closed-circuit security feeds for each of those hotels. Use the facial-recognition software.”
“I can have that in five minutes,” Epstein said, fingers already moving over his keyboard.
“If they were just running flat out, we would have seen them somewhere by now. The most likely bet is that they holed up in a hotel room fairly soon after they turned that corner.”
Epstein tapped a little drum solo on his desk with his fingers. “There are quite a few hotels in that part of town.”
