by Reece Hirsch
“No, that won’t be necessary,” Zoey said. “Everyone always says I have the maturity of a fifteen-year-old, anyway.”
Damian approached her with a sheaf of printouts. “Here,” he said, handing them to her. “In case you need more than that, here’s Esmerelda’s social media profile. Apparently, she likes One Direction and unicorns.”
“I can work with that,” Zoey said. “God help me, but I can.”
“Excellent.”
“But back to my original point, guys . . . You know they’re going to come for us, right?” Zoey looked around the room at a set of blank faces. “If there’s even the slightest trail leading back to us, they’re going to find it and send some guys here with machetes, blowtorches, and car batteries.”
“That’s why you’d better be as good as he says you are,” Maria said.
“Well, it happens that I’m better than that,” Zoey said. “Damian knew me as a callow youth. I’ve refined my skills since then.” She paused. “And what exactly are you bringing to the table, anyway?”
“You don’t get to ask me that,” Maria said.
“I think I just did, though.”
Damian intervened. “Girls, let’s just maintain our focus here, okay? Zoey’s right that there’s no margin for error on this one. It has to be like we were never there.”
“Can I ask a question?” Zoey asked.
“Certainly,” Damian said.
“If you really got three hundred million dollars from the Federal Reserve hack, then money is no longer the point, is it?”
“Money is always the point,” Roland said. “It’s how we keep score.”
Crazy suicidal idiots, Zoey thought.
“Okay, so you’re all rich now, but look at how you’re living.” She waved a hand at their cluttered rental space. “You can’t even spend the money that you do have; why do you need more? You think taking down the Sinaloa Cartel is going to allow you to come out into the open and start spending your millions? I don’t think so.”
Damian sighed. “After Jordan won his first championship ring, he could have said, ‘Well, it doesn’t get any better than this. Guess I’ll retire.’ But no, he kept playing.”
“But if it’s about fame, you said it yourself—no one can ever know about this.”
“We’ll know,” Roland said. “And years from now, in the places that matter, the people that we respect will know. Besides, we can’t just sit around and do nothing.”
“Get a hobby, why don’t you?” Zoey said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to rob the Sinaloa Cartel because you’re bored!”
“You need to be committed to this, Zoey,” Damian said. He sounded concerned for her.
Roland inched forward on the couch as if he might be about to stand up, depending upon what Zoey said next. “I think what Damian’s trying to say is that we’re not really asking you. We’re not taking a vote. Or if we are, you don’t have one.”
Zoey knew when to stop pushing. “Okay, I got it. I just didn’t realize I was living in a fascist state.” She paused. “Does that mean I don’t have a cut too?”
“No,” Damian said. “You do this, and you’ll be a member of the crew, and you’ll get an even split. But if you don’t do it—”
“Yeah, I got the threat the first time.” Zoey picked up the papers that Damian had provided. “I guess I’ll go and get acquainted with Esmerelda.”
Zoey reviewed the Facebook timeline of Esmerelda Chacon, which was filled with Harry Styles of One Direction, Taylor Swift, and yes, unicorns. Esmerelda seemed like a typical fifteen-year-old—maybe a tad immature for her age. Zoey knew exactly what buttons to push to get her to click an attachment and introduce their password-stealing malware.
It was really quite simple. Looking at the comments on her Facebook postings, it was clear that Esmerelda’s BFF was a girl named Celia Fargas. It took Zoey about five minutes to find Celia’s email address. In another five minutes she could have mocked up an email from Celia’s email account with a file attached regarding free tickets to a One Direction concert in Mexico City. That was an attachment that Esmerelda would open in about two seconds flat.
But Zoey didn’t want to do it. She knew that the Sinaloa Cartel would eventually figure out how the account passwords were stolen and how the malware was introduced. Even though they’d likely blame Esmerelda’s father, Zoey could imagine them holding Esmerelda accountable too, especially if she inadvertently opened the door to the hackers.
Zoey wanted no part of Roland’s plan. While the accountant for the Sinaloa Cartel should have known the risks that he was running, stealing from the drug lords was guaranteed to unleash a tidal wave of violence, and some of the casualties would undoubtedly be civilians. In retaliation for the massive theft, the cartel would want to send a message writ large and in blood.
Zoey rose from the computer and walked down a hallway to the house’s back porch, which looked out on mangy patches of grass and a majestic, fogbound mountain range on the horizon.
The night air was cool and still smelled strange to her, leafy and tropical and filled with the chirping of unfamiliar birds. She considered how she would escape from this place, but she realized it would not be so simple. Loja was a small town. Trains and buses were infrequent, and Damian and his crew would pick her up before she could board one.
What she needed was a car, but no one left keys lying around the house. If they caught her trying to escape, Zoey knew that they’d kill her. Roland would kill her.
“Nice night, isn’t it?”
Zoey jumped at the quiet voice behind her. Roland’s.
“Yeah,” she said. “Just clearing my head.”
“It’s a little noisy for my taste,” Roland said. “All those freaking birds chattering gets on my nerves. It’s not that it’s any quieter in London, but for me that’s all white noise. It’s like I don’t even hear it at night.”
“I know what you mean,” Zoey said. “San Francisco’s the same way for me.”
“You aren’t homesick, are you?”
Zoey realized that Roland had assigned himself to watch her. To stop her from making any attempt to escape.
“No, not as long as there are people back there that want to kill me.”
“I heard your objections about the hack. Now I see you standing out here, not working on the job. I have to wonder if you’re up for this.” He moved closer.
“I’m up for it.” Zoey realized how unpersuasive that sounded, and she realized that Roland might have already decided to kill her. She needed to say something persuasive. Fast. “In fact,” she added, “I’m nearly done grabbing the user names and passwords. That’s why I have time to get some fresh air.”
This seemed to bring Roland up short. “Right. Well, I’ll tell the others. So we’ll be set to perform the exploit tomorrow then, yeah?”
“Sure,” Zoey said. “Tomorrow’s good.”
Roland returned to the main room, but Zoey knew that she would have no opportunity to make a run for it now. Damian, Maria, and the boys would be all over her to confirm her progress and make plans for the hack.
Zoey returned to the computer, resigned to obtaining the passwords as quickly as possible. She liked a challenge, but now her life depended on her ability to steal what Damian and Roland had already failed to obtain.
She knew that one of two things was going to happen the next day. Either Damian’s crew was going to steal five hundred and fifty million dollars from the Sinaloa Cartel, putting all of their lives in danger, or she was going to die.
24
When Sam returned home to his redbrick ranch house in Aiken, South Carolina, he saw its bland normalcy as a defense of sorts. Who would expect that treason was being committed and national secrets stolen behind those rosebushes and that green lawn with its shushing sprinkler?
Sam went immediately to his home office and downloaded the data from his smartwatch to a new, air-gapped laptop. Air-gapping meant that the computer was pristine and had n
ever been connected to the Internet, never exposed to any malware or prying eyes.
He poured sweet tea from a plastic pitcher in the refrigerator and waited as the documents downloaded. Twenty minutes later the transfer was complete, and he was able to see what he had.
Sam clicked on a document at random and found an interoffice memo that referenced the NSA’s decampment to the newly formed Working Group, which was referred to as Project Tortoise Shell. After scrolling through a few routine meeting agendas, he found a document that described the workings of the Skeleton Key decryption program and the NSA’s plans to keep its existence a secret, even from other branches of the government.
A few documents later there was a reference to the threat posed by Ian Ayres’s discovery of the Working Group’s existence and the need to “mitigate” the situation by assigning Anton Corbin to the problem. It didn’t require much imagination to see that the seemingly nondescript memo was nothing less than an NSA-ordered hit on a civilian who had uncovered its clandestine plans.
Sam drained the glass of sweet tea and went for his Jim Beam.
The files were voluminous, and Sam spent the rest of the evening reading them and cataloging them by subject. Collectively, the documents portrayed an NSA that responded to the Snowden disclosures not by changing practices or becoming more transparent, but rather by retreating further into the gloom of interagency murk and imposing even more draconian internal security measures to ferret out potential whistle-blowers.
By morning Sam knew that he had a treasure trove of classified material. It was more than the proverbial smoking gun—it was a smoking handheld rocket launcher with grenade attachments. Now the question was what to do with the information.
To maintain the ruse that he was down with the flu, Sam had called in, hacking and coughing, and gotten an update on the manhunt from Josh, who informed him that Anton Corbin was closing in on his prey. Bruen and Ayres had been spotted sleeping in an unfinished house outside San Diego. Corbin had commissioned another team to assist in the pursuit, and now the two teams were collaborating.
Much as Sam had feared . . .
Well, now he had the documents he’d sought. It was time to take a permanent leave of absence from work.
During the night he’d concluded that releasing the documents to the press would be the best course. As long as he held the information alone, he remained in grave danger. Once he’d shared it with a member of the press, simply killing him ceased to be an effective means of plugging the leak. And leaking it might even afford some measure of protection.
But whom should he leak it to?
To answer that question, Sam spent the morning conducting searches online on a public computer at the tiny local library—searches harder to link to him than those performed on his laptop. Sam needed to identify a journalist who was reputable enough to be taken seriously but also iconoclastic enough to stand up to the inevitable threats from the NSA and, most likely, the Oval Office. He considered the New York Times, but when he read about how they had folded to NSA pressure not to write about the materials disclosed by Edward Snowden, he decided against reaching out to them.
He finally settled on Derek Nickles, a reporter for the Defender in London who was particularly interested in privacy issues. He had recently aided a US Army corporal in Afghanistan who leaked documents describing military interrogation techniques.
Sam spent the morning reading accounts of Nickles’s past skirmishes with the NSA, growing ever more certain that he had found his man. He decided to make contact with Nickles through his public email address at the Defender.
The email, which Sam sent from a clean laptop using a dummy IP address, read, “I have a story that I know you are going to be interested in. Have you installed encryption?”
Sam stared at his laptop screen for a while, foolishly expecting an immediate response. For all he knew, Nickles was on a deadline and not checking his emails.
The next morning Sam called in sick again—the last morning he figured he could safely do so. He’d spent the previous day reviewing and organizing the stolen documents, a massive task. Still no response from Nickles, who no doubt received plenty of cryptic messages about big stories, giving him a low threshold for crackpot BS. Sam would have to offer something more in order to get Nickles’s attention and distinguish himself from the random paranoids and conspiracy theorists. And all that without revealing anything specific about the materials that he had in his possession.
Sam left the house by the back door and took a route through the woods to the library, fearing that he might already be under surveillance. He typed another email to Nickles on his laptop:
SAM: You didn’t respond to my email yesterday. I really do have something that you’re going to want to see, but it’s not the type of thing I can put in an unencrypted email. So I’ll ask you again. Have you installed an encryption program?
Five minutes later, finally a response:
NICKLES: No, I’m afraid the newspaper doesn’t use encryption. Can’t you just tell me your story idea?
SAM: This is not a story idea. It’s the biggest story of your career. And I know your work. I know you’ve published some major exposés.
NICKLES: Who are you?
SAM: Someone with a top-secret security clearance who’s had a change of heart.
NICKLES: Do you work at the NSA?
SAM: I’m not saying anything more until you install encryption and purchase an air-gapped computer.
NICKLES: How do I know that you’re for real?
SAM: I guess you can’t. But there’s one way to find out.
NICKLES: Right. What sort of encryption would you consider suitable?
SAM: I’ll send you the program. All you have to do is download it.
NICKLES: You’d better not stick me with malware. If I muck up the system here, my boss is going to take it out of my paycheck.
SAM: I’ll get back to you soon. You probably already have an idea of the kind of document that I’m going to be sending you. I assume you know that just receiving them could be viewed as a criminal offense.
NICKLES: Let me and the lawyers worry about that. I believe a journalist is never a criminal when he’s doing his job.
Sam promptly sent Nickles a strong encryption program. After Nickles confirmed that the program had been downloaded to an air-gapped computer, Sam pressed the button and transmitted a sampling of documents, just enough to highlight the magnitude of the story. Once he had developed more confidence that Nickles and his editors had the nerve to publish the material, he would deliver the entire contents of the flash drive.
Sam stared at the screen as ten minutes passed.
The computer pinged with the arrival of an email.
NICKLES: Are you still there?
SAM: I’m still here. Have you started reading?
NICKLES: Yes. I want to meet with you. In person.
SAM: So you’ve got a sense of what I have.
NICKLES: When can we meet?
SAM: Let me get back to you on that. You know it’s not that easy for me.
NICKLES: I can imagine.
SAM: I think my life may be in danger.
NICKLES: Just based on what I’ve read so far, I think that could be true.
SAM: I was kind of hoping you were going to disagree with me.
NICKLES: Sorry.
SAM: You keep reading, and I’ll get back to you to set up a meeting.
NICKLES: I look forward to meeting you.
SAM: I’ll bet you do.
Sam signed off, overwhelmed by powerful and competing impulses, chief among them relief. Relief to have unburdened himself and shared the story with Nickles. In some respects this matter was out of his hands now, as Nickles, his editors, and the Defender’s legal team would decide whether and how to publish his disclosures.
Sam rose from his library carrel and examined for the first time the library’s other denizens—a weary librarian, a middle-aged guy peering over his glasses
at a laptop, and a mother and daughter turning the pages of a picture book—all oblivious to the momentous event that had just occurred. He felt like he had just stepped onto a bullet train without knowing the destination. No matter how carefully he tried to orchestrate what came next, it would take on a life of its own now.
25
Chris raised the phone to his ear as he stood in the half-finished house outside San Diego, staring through an open wall into an inky sky pocked with stars. The caller ID was blocked, so he didn’t know who was on the other end, but he suspected that it was whoever was operating the minidrone that had just found him and darted away.
“Who’s this?” Chris said.
“A friend.”
“I’m going to have to doubt that.”
“Fair enough. Then let’s just say that I’m someone who’s decided to help you.”
“Were you operating the drone?”
“No, but I know who was, and I know where you can find him.”
“I recognize your voice. You’re the one who warned me when those agents were on the way to the hotel room.”
“Yes, but it’s not important who I am. There’s an agent who’s in San Diego right now. Thanks to the drone, he knows where you are and he knows what you plan to do—cross the border into Mexico.”
Chris was silent. He didn’t want to confirm the statement. But more than anything he felt sick, because if this man on the phone knew this much, then Chris realized that he had few options left, and those were quickly disappearing.
“Why are you telling me this?” Chris asked.
“Because they’re going to kill you and Ayres, and I don’t think you deserve to die.”
“You said you knew who was after us and where we can find him.”
“Yes,” the man said. “Now you’re getting to the point. The agent who’s after you is named Anton Corbin. And right now he’s in Room 213 in the Days Inn in Palm City.”
“What am I supposed to do with that information?”
“I honestly don’t know. But I wanted to do something that might give you a chance.”
