by Reece Hirsch
“Hola,” Chris said. “Habla inglés?”
“Yeah,” the man said. “Better than your Spanish, anyway.”
Chris nodded in acknowledgment. “We just want to pass by.”
The man studied them, probably trying to spot any weapons they might be carrying. “Okay. You know you’ve still got a good ways to go to reach Santa Isabel.”
“How far?”
“About ten miles. You know the way?”
“Not really, no.”
“When you get out of this ravine up ahead, you need to veer to the right and head toward the sharpest peak that you see in the distance. You miss the town, and you might not make it out of the desert.”
“Thank you,” Chris said.
“Now we need to keep moving,” he said, motioning for his band to move forward.
From around the bend came a procession of eleven people—four men, five women, and two teenagers. They all had backpacks on and were far better provisioned than Chris and Ian.
One by one they passed. A teenage girl with long legs in shorts coated pale with dust handed Chris a full water bottle. An older man in a ratty straw hat handed a bottle to Ian. Someone else offered a couple of granola bars.
“Gracias,” they said in accents that seemed to amuse their benefactors.
No more words were exchanged as the band of immigrants moved on through the ravine heading north. They rounded another bend and were gone, leaving Chris and Ian in far better shape than they had been.
“That was lucky,” Ian said.
“Yeah,” Chris said. “I think they recognized that we might not make it without their help. So, yeah, we’re lucky guys.” Chris started walking. “For now anyway. C’mon, let’s not waste it.”
Chris and Ian walked on out of the ravine and onto the desert floor. They tried to conserve the water in their bottles as best they could without passing out from dehydration.
Gradually, and then suddenly, night fell and the temperature dropped to a tolerable level. Chris felt weakened but still managed to pick up the pace.
Chris and Ian both saw a pale glow spread across the horizon—the lights of Santa Isabel. Without saying a word to one another, they quickened their pace and headed for the lights. They were going to make it.
28
“Is everyone sure they’re up for this?”
Damian Hull was at the keyboard of a desktop computer in one of the bedrooms of the house in Loja, his hands resting lightly on the ergonomic rest. Serge, Roland, Maria, and Zoey were all standing behind him, looking over his shoulder at the monitor. Zoey’s phishing exploit had worked to perfection, injecting malware into fifteen-year-old Esmerelda Chacon’s computer, which then took command and control of her accountant dad’s computer to steal the user names and passwords to all his businesses’ accounts.
According to the computer’s clock, it was 2:58 a.m. At 3:00 a.m. they intended to execute the hack.
“Stop asking that,” Roland said. “We’re two minutes away. If you see a problem with the plan, then tell me what it is.”
Damian shook his head. “No, I’m just concerned about what comes after.”
“The account transfers are not traceable to us, right?” Maria asked. “We’ve been over all that.”
“They shouldn’t be traceable,” Damian said. “We’re routing the funds through eight different false offshore accounts before they land in a Swiss bank. But with this much money involved, they’re going to hire top forensic resources to track it down.”
“Maybe,” Roland said, “but by then it will be too late.”
“But what if they’ve already invested in hardening their defenses? What if they’re able to track us in real time?”
“I didn’t see any evidence of those sorts of measures in place. They probably think that everyone is so scared of the cartel that no one would attempt something like this.”
This was not a technically complex hack involving elaborately crafted custom malware. The malware that they had used to acquire the accountant’s user names and passwords involved standard hacker tradecraft based on the Zbot software.
They were primed to extract the balances of seven Banamex bank accounts, which contained a large portion of the spoils of the Sinaloa Cartel.
The computer’s display showed 3:00 a.m.
“Okay,” Roland said. “It’s time. This conversation is over.”
Damian sat motionless for a few moments more, then began moving his hands over the keyboard. After several quick flurries he hit the “Enter” key and said, “Done. That’s the first account.”
The sequence repeated six more times. After the seventh stage Damian grinned a wicked grin and brought his right index finger down on the “Enter” key from high above like the arc of a missile.
“And we’re . . . done!”
They all stood around, staring at the screen, as if expecting a more dramatic signifier of what had just occurred.
Finally, Maria said, “What’s the take?”
“Let’s see,” Damian said, accessing a Swiss account online. “That would be five hundred and fifty-four million, three hundred and twenty-five thousand, eighty-nine dollars. And thirty-two cents. Mustn’t forget the thirty-two cents.”
Roland had a bottle of mescal tequila, and he passed it around, each member of the crew taking a swig and whooping.
When the bottle came around to Zoey, she said, “Aren’t you supposed to celebrate after you’ve gotten away with it?”
“Don’t be a buzzkill, Zoey,” Damian said, leaning back in the chair and stretching his back in a vertebrae-popping arc. “The money’s in the Swiss account; we’re all stinkin’ rich. We are the greatest hackers of all time.”
Zoey sighed and shook her head.
“Does that mean you’re not taking your share?” Maria asked.
“Of course I am,” Zoey shot back. “Who turns down that kind of money?” More to the point, Zoey had watched Serpico enough times to know what happens to the person who refuses to take dirty money.
They moved to the living room and broke the seal on another bottle of tequila. Only Damian stayed behind at his computer, standing watch over their systems, calling out for the bottle from time to time. The bottle went around and around the room until it was empty. Zoey had a vague recollection later of Serge eating the mescal worm with a grimace.
The tequila burned in Zoey’s empty stomach, and she felt light headed and nauseated. She couldn’t deny that it had been exciting to perpetrate the hack. And stealing from the Sinaloa Cartel was a victimless crime if there ever was one.
Under the influence of the tequila, she imagined what her life would be like if she took her cut of the hack, which amounted to more than fifty million dollars (her reduced share as a newcomer to the crew), joined Damian’s crew on a permanent basis, and went outlaw. Even in her woozy state she recognized that she wouldn’t be permitted to leave the crew. Not alive anyway.
She was dreaming of pristine white beaches and margaritas when Damian woke her.
“Zoey, wake up. You have to see this.”
Damian’s eyes were wide, and he looked like he hadn’t slept, which was natural after the adrenaline high of pulling off the hack. But what she saw in his eyes was more than adrenaline: it was barely contained panic.
She checked her watch. 5:30 a.m.
“I have to see what?”
“Just come with me, okay?”
Zoey followed Damian back to the computer. He quickly sat down and pointed to a computer security program running on the screen.
“Look.” He pointed to a display with several complex outputs flashing, rising and falling. “Look at this.”
“Yeah? I had too much tequila last night. Just tell me what it means.”
“It means they’ve found us. They’ve already found us.”
Zoey’s head cleared in an instant. “Who’s found us?”
“The cartel. We underestimated them.”
“We used a dead-end IP addres
s and routed the money through all those offshore accounts.”
“I know. Somehow they found their way around it. I don’t know how they found us, but someone’s pinging our servers, rattling doorknobs. Someone who knows what they’re doing.”
“How do you know it’s the cartel?”
“I don’t, but who else would it be? It started ten minutes after we transferred the funds.”
“It could be someone who was already watching us, who knew we were here and was waiting for us to make a move. Law enforcement.”
“Ecuadorean law enforcement?” Damian scoffed. “I don’t think so.”
Now that her head was clearing, Zoey felt the fear burrowing deep, taking hold. And she also wondered why Damian was telling her the bad news before letting anyone else know. He must feel even more alienated from his crew, and closer to her, than she had imagined.
“What about the FBI or CIA?” she asked. “They’ve been looking for you for years.”
“I never thought I’d say this, but I wish that were true. If the US feds had figured out our location, they would have grabbed us up long ago for the Federal Reserve hack. No, this is about the cartel job.”
“So what do we do?” Zoey asked. Her eyes involuntarily turned to the front door. She half expected someone to kick it down at any moment.
“You know the answer to that question,” Damian said, rising from his chair and switching off the computer. “We run like hell. Wake everyone up.”
29
He had only fifteen minutes until his rendezvous with the journalist Nickles, and Sam could not sit still. He was already at the location, the Four Seasons Hotel Prague, so he took a walk down to the Charles Bridge, the broad fourteenth-century stone span that was one of Prague’s most famous landmarks, connecting the Old Town with the Little Quarter.
Sam passed beneath the sandstone-block arch of the Old Town Bridge Tower and onto the broad walkway, which was lined at each juncture with a statue of a saint. He gazed up at the bridge’s centerpiece, a gilded representation of Jesus on the cross from the seventeenth century.
The bridge was thick with pedestrians. Small white clouds pebbled the sky like the cobblestones beneath his feet. Sam felt safer moving through the crowds, and his breathing slowed.
His feigned illness might have bought him twenty-four hours, but certainly no more than forty-eight. By now the Working Group had figured out that he had gone rogue. Sam had managed to get a flight out of the United States before they knew enough to suspend his passport, but his former colleagues had to be close on his trail. They also would have reviewed audit trails and concluded that they were facing the most significant national security breach since Snowden. Nickles had assured him that the newspaper was going to install him in a secure location, where he could hide out.
He knew that once he began speaking with the reporter, it would not be possible to maintain his anonymity. Nickles might offer it at first in order to seal the deal, but Sam knew it could never hold. The disclosures would lack credibility unless the whistle-blower was willing to stand up and be accountable for the leak. And other media outlets would dig until they learned his identity, anyway. Which meant that his life was about to change irrevocably. From now on his name would be mentioned in the same sentence with Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. If he returned to the United States, he’d be prosecuted for treason. If he fled to a country without an extradition treaty, then he might live the rest of his life in some sort of stateless limbo, the house pet of some regime that had decided to take him in as a taunt to his homeland. And when that regime changed, or decided to defrost relations with Washington, he would once more become a refugee.
He made it about halfway across the bridge before turning back, far enough to get a panoramic view of Prague—Prague Castle spread out over one side of the Vltava River, and ancient red-tiled roofs overlooking the other. And everywhere were the spires, towers, and onion domes of churches and cathedrals, the Gothic, the neo-Gothic, and the Baroque all straining toward the heavens like the prayers of a dozen different faiths.
By the time he arrived back at the Four Seasons, sweaty and slightly out of breath, it was 9:58 a.m., just in time for the 10:00 meet-up. In a moment of weakness he imagined that he could walk on past the hotel, grab a taxi to the airport, and return to his job at the Working Group as if nothing had happened. But Sam knew it was too late to go back, and he wouldn’t have done so if he could have.
The Working Group needed to be stopped, or at least slowed. He had no illusions that his disclosures would eliminate domestic surveillance abuses, but he knew that the agency needed to be more accountable for its actions. The Snowden disclosures had opened the national debate about NSA surveillance, but Sam hoped that his leak would finish the job, creating a case that was impossible to dismiss.
Sam took a seat in a corner of the grand hotel lobby, with its tan marble, chandeliers, and elaborate flower arrangements, and anxiously scanned the crowds for Nickles. In his lap he held a pink pastry box tied with string from Ludmilla’s Bakery, the sign by which Nickles would recognize him. Sam ate when he was nervous, so he had already devoured the kolaches that he had bought; the box now contained only a smattering of pastry crumbs and flecks of apricot filling.
Nickles had originally proposed that Sam meet him in the London suburb of Acton, but Sam had promptly vetoed that suggestion. Many of the top-secret files that he had in his possession were labeled “FVEY,” meaning that they were approved for disclosure to the NSA’s four closest surveillance allies. The “Five Eyes” English-speaking alliance consisted of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Meeting in one of the Five Eyes countries would mean conducting their illicit rendezvous under the NSA’s nose. And Britain was probably the least secure jurisdiction imaginable due to the close partnership between the NSA and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. Not to mention England’s nationwide video surveillance infrastructure, which was among the most robust on the planet. Sam had finally proposed Prague because it wasn’t in a Five Eyes country, it always had its share of American tourists, and it wasn’t too far for Nickles to travel. Sam also wanted to see Prague, and he realized that this might be the last trip that he ever took.
As Sam scanned the lobby, he wasn’t looking only for Nickles. He recognized that despite the precautions taken with encryption and the air-gapped computer, this meeting was not safe. Nickles had undoubtedly told his editor about the story. What if the editor felt compelled to tip off the NSA for fear of being charged with espionage? Or communicated insecurely with others about the story?
It was also possible that Nickles himself might inadvertently lead federal agents to Sam. Nickles was a known thorn in the side of the intelligence community, and it wasn’t a stretch to imagine that they were observing him, tapping his phone lines, intercepting his emails. A sudden trip to Prague would be exactly the thing to pique such agencies’ interest.
But it wouldn’t be necessary to find Sam through Nickles and his newspaper. The Working Group undoubtedly knew that he had flown to the Czech Republic and were looking for him in Prague. The agents would not be particularly interested in arresting or pressuring Nickles, except as a means of finding and plugging their leak. Harassing journalists was generally more trouble than it was worth.
The bottom line was that this meeting with Nickles was the most dangerous time for Sam since the moment he had downloaded the data onto his smartwatch. Surveying the lobby, he thought everyone looked like a possible agent.
A figure pushed forward through the red-uniformed throng of a youth soccer team. It was Nickles, who was balding except for a penumbra of wispy brown hair around the temples. Somehow he managed to look both older and younger than the mug shot that accompanied his columns.
As Nickles approached, Sam stood and balanced the pastry box on the arm of his chair.
“Daniel?” Nickles said, using the pseudonym that Sam had provided.
“Nice to meet you, Derek.”
“I have so many questions I want to ask you,” Nickles said. “How would you like to proceed?”
“I’ll go up to my room. It’s number 315. Give me fifteen minutes, then you come up. We can camp out in the room while I give you a complete download of the documents.”
“I can start writing my stories from there,” he said. “You know, I haven’t snuck around a hotel like this since I was cheating on my first wife.”
“And I thought I shared too much.” Sam stood abruptly, walked across the lobby, and took the elevator to the third floor. He didn’t see anyone following him, but spy tradecraft was hardly his specialty.
He unlocked the door with the card key. The room was formal and lavish and beyond Sam’s price range as a federal employee, but he figured that since this might be his last act as a free man he might as well splurge. Sam plugged the flash drive with the Working Group documents into his laptop on the desk and then went to the bathroom.
When he emerged from the bathroom, he already knew that there was something amiss about the hotel room. His eyes went directly to the ornate iron grate that covered the air-conditioning vent above the sofa. The iron grate had been pried open at the bottom, leaving a sizable gap. Sam stared at the grate, wondering what it meant. The answer was immediate.
There came a faint buzzing sound, like that of a wasp or a hornet. For that reason it took Sam a moment to recognize what he was seeing when the thing crawled through the opening in the grate. It looked like a wasp with a shiny rounded head and wings. But it was a little too large to be an insect. The “head” was a camera, and the “wings” were tiny rotors.
It was a drone.
The sight of the flying robot in this antiquated hotel room was so incongruous that Sam had to stare for a moment. His first reaction was to laugh. Then he realized that he should be afraid.
Sam started to move toward the door, but the drone crawled out of the grate onto the wall and then launched itself into the air, the buzzing growing louder. It sped across the room and hovered over the door, directly in his path. Sam was about to push past, but then he saw what appeared to be a two-inch antenna on the front of the device. No . . . not an antenna.
