The Exphoria Code

by Antony Johnston

  Andrea turned to them and said, “No sign of anything airborne at the venue, according to our people. Even in the dark, you’d expect them to see something out of the window, right?”

  “Maybe, but only if it was on a similar plane,” said Bridge. “If he flies really high, or really low, they wouldn’t see it. And then he could quickly drop or ascend to the venue floor, and they’d only have seconds to spot it. What you really need is something like proximity sensors on the outside of the building to warn against this sort of thing.”

  “I somehow doubt they had things like this in mind when they designed the place. It’s all a bit sci-fi.”

  “iPhones were sci-fi until suddenly they weren’t,” said Bridge. “In the meantime, we’ve just got to cope. Tell them to keep looking, while I keep scanning.” Andrea returned to her phone, shouting instructions.

  “One minute,” said the driver, squeezing between taxicabs bound for London Bridge station. The car’s passenger side wing scraped lightly against one of the taxis, and Bridge wondered if the cabbie would be able to get compensation from MI5. How would he know?

  They were close enough for the sniffer software to pick up every signal around the building, and Bridge filtered them out as quickly as she could. Ciaran, Monica, and Steve Wicker were in a secure VOIP chatroom connected to a Jawbone bluetooth mic wrapped around her ear, but up till now all she’d heard from it was the sound of keyboards clacking. She pressed Talk on the headset and said, “Shitloads of signals, as expected, but I’m not seeing anything that looks likely. None of the transit delay patterns look like obvious remote control packets.”

  “Maybe the drone isn’t there yet,” said Ciaran. “The party’s scheduled to last ninety minutes, you could be in for a long wait.”

  “Sudden thought,” said Steve, “Bridge, how granular is your frequency selector? Is it default?”

  “No, replacement upgrade,” she replied. “Point-oh-one gigahertz increments. What are you thinking?”

  “If he’s building his own extenders, he might have them fixed on a non-regular frequency. For this usage, we’d normally assume low frequency would be best, right? Drone control is low data bandwidth, and low frequency is more reliable over distance.”

  “Here,” said the driver as they stopped in front of the Shard, and the three passenger doors automatically popped open. Andrea and Giles de-bussed with practised efficiency, and Andrea immediately shouted at the police to turn off their flashing lights. Bridge, meanwhile, struggled to climb out without accidentally closing her laptop, and found herself surrounded by police officers and vehicles on the narrow road. The MI5 driver showed no sign of going anywhere, so she used his car roof as a makeshift desk for the HP and began adjusting the scanner software’s frequency.

  “All right, let’s see if he’s broadcasting on an unusually high frequency. Kind of crappy over long distance, but if he’s packed the area with custom transceivers, there could be one right next door.”

  “It’s what I’d do,” said Steve. “Not sure what that says about me, but —”

  “What it says is you’re a bloody genius,” said Bridge as the software lit up. “I reckon I’ve found him. There’s an ultra-high frequency signal, just idling in this area.”

  “What do you mean, idling?” asked Giles.

  “I mean it’s just sitting there, like in a standby mode. All it’s doing is broadcasting itself as ready, tiny packets, but nothing’s actually happening.”

  “Definitely sounds like our guy,” said Ciaran. “And if it’s idle, that means the drone isn’t in range yet.”

  “If we’re right about the plan, and if this is the right signal,” said Bridge. “Lot of ifs.” Nobody replied. They were all thinking the same thing, but were too polite to say it out loud. What if Bridge’s theory is a load of rubbish?

  “I’ve started a traceroute,” said Steve. “You never know, we might get lucky.”

  Giles had been watching in silence over Bridge’s shoulder, letting her work, while Andrea talked to the police officers surrounding the building. Now she returned, wearing a radio earpiece, and stood on her tiptoes to peer at the laptop screen. “Did I hear that right? You’ve found it?”

  “We think so,” said Giles. “Won’t know for certain until he attacks.”

  “Oh, that’s very comforting. I do love standing around, waiting for something to happen.”

  “If I’m right, we won’t have too long to wait,” said Bridge.

  “If you’re right,” repeated Andrea, with emphasis. “We had a word for people like you in the Forces; Quasis.”

  Bridge tried to figure out what the nickname could mean. “Quasi-skilled? Quasi-normal?” She shrugged in defeat.

  Andrea smirked. “Quasimodo, you big daft. ’Cos you’ve always got a hunch.”

  “Bit harsh,” Giles snorted.

  “I didn’t know you were a soldier,” said Bridge, looking down at Andrea. “I thought…well, I mean…”

  Andrea gave her a withering look. “No height requirement in the army, Ms Sharp. So long as I can kill you with one hand, it’s all good.”

  Bridge looked to Giles for help. “Can’t tell if she’s joking.”

  “Best tread carefully, just in case,” Giles said with a smile. “And be fair, Andrea. This isn’t some vague gut feeling. You saw the CTA’s evidence, and you know what Bridge found in Agenbeux.”

  “Hang on, she’s read my reports?”

  Giles shrugged. “More like an oral summary.”

  Text scrolled up the side of a window on the laptop screen. “Activity,” said Bridge. “Here we go. Ultra-high frequency, RC-style packets. Hang on, though…there’s a side stream of really high-bandwidth, low-latency traffic, funnelled from multiple destinations. It’s like he’s watching Netflix on half a dozen monitors at once, or — shit, it’s multiple units. He’s not flying one drone, he’s got a bloody fleet of them.”

  “The high traffic streams are probably mounted camera feeds,” said Monica through the headset. “Which suggests they’re being controlled directly, not following a pre-programmed route. That’s probably good for us.”

  “Multiple drones?” said Andrea. “So which one has the material?”

  Bridge frowned. “No idea. Maybe all of them.”

  “Fucking hell. Right, I’m going in.” Andrea marched toward the entrance, shouting into her earpiece. “Move everyone away from the windows. Fast as you can, but be subtle. They may have cameras watching.” Bridge wasn’t sure how an entire party retreating could be in any way subtle, but that was Andrea’s problem. The Scot pointed at a police sergeant as she passed, and shouted, “You, get that woman with the laptop whatever she needs and stay with her till I say otherwise.” Then she ran into the building.

  The sergeant jogged over. “What can I get for you, ma’am?”

  “You can stop calling me ma’am for a start. It’s Bridge.” She turned to Giles. “We should probably get the fire service down here. And I guess a hazmat team might not be a bad idea, just in case.”

  “Biohazard and CBRN fire already en route,” said Giles, “I called them from the car. Are you OK for power, connectivity, all that?”

  “Yes, fine.” She turned back to the sergeant. “I don’t suppose I could get a cup of tea from somewhere?”

  The policeman chuckled. “Absolutely, ma’am. You too, sir?”

  “I should bloody coco,” said Giles. “Bridge, what are our chances? Is this hacking app of yours going to work?”

  “All I can say is, it’s our best chance. Do you really think I want to be standing here at potential ground zero?”

  “Not much would surprise me this evening,” said Giles, craning his neck to stare up at the towering glass edifice.

  “I think I’ve got him,” Steve shouted in the chatroom. “Location’s in Rotherhithe, hang on… I can get you within a h
undred metres, but you’re on your own from there. Stand by, I’ll ping you the location.”

  “Steve’s found Bowman,” Bridge said to Giles. “He’s just east, in Rotherhithe.”

  Giles copied the location from her screen, then leaned close to the bluetooth mic and said, “Well done, Steve. We’re on our way.” He turned to Andrea’s driver, who had remained ready in the driver’s seat. “Mind if I commandeer you?”

  “My pleasure, sir.”

  “Bridge, stay here and keep on those drones,” said Giles. “I’ll try to cut him off at source with an AR squad. Get the copper to find you a table,” and he slid into the back seat. Bridge lifted the HP off the car roof as it sped away with Giles inside.

  The sergeant approached Bridge. “Tea’s brewing in the van, ma’am. Is he…?”

  “Changed his mind,” said Bridge. “Now, can you find me somewhere to put this bloody computer down?” The sergeant led her to his car, fitted with a driver’s laptop stand over the gearshift median. He disconnected his own computer and tossed it on the empty passenger seat, then beckoned for Bridge to climb inside. As she swung the stand towards her and sat the HP on it, a constable appeared carrying two polystyrene cups of tea.

  The sergeant took them, handing Bridge her cup and keeping the one intended for Giles. “Have a feeling I might need this.”

  “Hold that thought,” said Bridge, as a background window on the screen lit up. “MaXrIoT’s locked on the signal,” she said to the chatroom. “Here we go.”

  She punched Execute.

  The ‘IoT’ in MaXrIoT stood for ‘Internet of Things’, the world of so-called ‘smart devices’ that had become so pervasive. Smart door locks, smart thermostats, smart kettles, smart TVs, smart dog bowls, you name it. The majority of these devices had security so laughable, it might as well not be there — passwords like 123456 that, once entered, put the device into ‘engineer mode’ where it could be made to do almost anything. And not all were housebound, domestic devices. Small business CCTV setups, car entertainment systems, even smart pedometers were the same. On many of these devices the password was permanently hardcoded into the firmware. Still others had literally no security at all, not even a simple password. If you knew where to look online there were archives listing default passwords and entry methods of entire product categories, just waiting to be hacked. Or you could download a ‘black hat’ package like MaXrIoT that did all the hard work for you. Point it at an online target destination, and the app would use that password archive to automatically hack as many smart devices as it could find around the world, making them part of an enormous ‘botnet’ that could be turned against the target.

  Many people didn’t understand this as a real threat. What good was hacking a smart TV, anyway? What damage could it do? But it wasn’t the smart devices’ own capabilities that programs like MaXrIoT were interested in. It was their internet connections. Every smart device had a connection to the online world, which meant every one of them could be made to send a request to any other internet-connected device via its Internet Protocol address, or IP. A single request, for a webpage or network ping, might not seem like much. But when millions of devices all sent simultaneous requests, and continued sending them at the rate of a thousand every second, the traffic could overwhelm the target’s bandwidth and knock out huge data centres in what was called a Distributed Denial of Service attack, or DDoS.

  But while programs like MaXrIoT existed for one sole purpose — to conduct DDoS attacks — and governments around the world had been trying to figure out a way to outlaw them for years, strictly speaking they remained legal. Not that the hackers who used them cared either way. These packages were developed and distributed underground, found only in the dark, secret, unlinked places of the internet, destinations only the best (or best-funded) hackers knew existed. There was a hunger for DDoS resources, and if one was somehow eliminated, ten more would take its place within hours.

  Steve Wicker had been right. Trying to trace the wifi signal back to Bowman’s location would be difficult, and take time they didn’t have. Bridge could tell from the traffic that he was anonymising his origin, bouncing between servers around the world, and satellites above it, to obfuscate his IP address. But Bridge wasn’t trying to attack Bowman. She was attacking the drones.

  Because the drones weren’t anonymised. Their IPs were child’s play to isolate. And once they were in its sights, MaXrIoT threw everything it had at them.

  Bridge watched the counter rise as the package travelled the globe, recruiting smart devices to its botnet; from zero to a hundred in five seconds, then three hundred, seven hundred, a thousand, five thousand, and up and up it went. The DDoS immediately began filling the drone signal traffic with garbage, a torrent of meaningless requests and pings. Bridge exhaled slowly, trying to relax. It was going to work. Everything would be fine.

  A couple of hundred metres above her, windows shattered as a bomb exploded.

  82

  The first explosion blasted glass into Andrea’s back and left her deaf in one ear.

  She’d just arrived at the party. Her officers, along with the members of Special Branch in attendance, had done as they were told and begun moving people away from the windows without causing a fuss. But some of the partygoers were stubborn, demanding to know why the police were getting uppity and insisting they be told what was going on before they would move.

  Andrea was arguing with one of them, a senior civil servant, when the first drone hit. The explosion took out several windows and blasted glass into the room. She’d been standing between the civil servant and the windows, and absorbed most of the impact with her back. But the civil servant took a faceful of glass, and when Andrea pushed herself upright she found him lying on the floor, shivering in silent shock. She grabbed his arms and started to drag him backwards to safety, until a burly Five officer ran over and scooped the civil servant up, dropping the man over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift.

  “Evacuate, now!” shouted Andrea, struggling to be heard above the cries, screams, and roaring wind.

  The officer opened his mouth to respond, and the second drone exploded.

  83

  “What the hell do you mean, explosions?” Giles shouted into his phone.

  “Two so far,” said Bridge on the other end of the line. “The software’s going as fast as it can, we’re at over a hundred thousand botnet agents now. That has to be enough to stop it.” She sounded more hopeful than sure, to Giles’ ears.

  “Casualties?”

  “No report from the party, yet. None down on the ground, but we’re probably all coated with caesium.”

  “Thirty seconds,” said the driver, accelerating out of a hard corner.

  “Just keep at it, Bridge. We’re nearing the source, but we don’t know how many more of those things Bowman might have up his sleeve. If he gets wind of us, he might send them all crashing in at once.” The car stopped. Giles leapt out, narrowly missing a collision with the police assault van he’d summoned during the journey as it screeched to a halt. He faced a row of shops, with single-storey flats over them. “Shit. Can Steve narrow it down? Looks like the target’s in a flat above some shops, but there’s a dozen of them.”

  He heard Bridge relay the question, then say, “No, sorry. We’re dealing with wireless signals here, not a fixed line. Area radius is as good as it gets.”

  “Then where the bloody hell are you, Bowman?” mused Giles, looking at the row of buildings. The shops were closed, dark except for the odd soft glow of a security nightlight, while most of the flats above had lights on behind drawn curtains. “He had to move here fast, possibly at short notice. Maybe he’s squatting in a flat?”

  “Not if it was a planned contingency,” said Bridge. “He’s been smart so far. We can probably assume he had a backup on standby. Can we check occupant records?”

  “It’ll take too long. An
d once we breach, the game’s up. Like you said, he’s smart, and he’ll have an escape route. Something hidden…” He trailed off, noticing something different about one particular shop front. The windows were papered over, the business closed, but there was no ‘To Let’ sign above the frontage. And a dim interior light illuminated the newspapers covering the glass. “Stand by, we may have him. Sergeant,” he waved to the officer in charge of the waiting armed police, “that closed-up store. Breach immediately.”

  Giles stood back as the police took positions, broke down the shop door, and charged inside with flashlights blazing, making enough noise to wake the entire street.

  After thirty seconds the sergeant called out that it was clear, and Giles approached. He hadn’t heard any shots fired or shattered glass, and everyone had stopped shouting. That meant either Bowman was incapacitated and silenced…or that his hunch had been wrong.

  It wasn’t wrong. An Acer laptop sat open on a trestle table, running specialised software, with video feeds of aerial cameras playing in small windows. Empty packaging boxes of expensive consumer drones, the models from the ID fraud purchases, were stacked neatly in a corner. Several units lay around the edges of the shop interior, many partly dismantled.

  But Bowman was gone.

  84

  Bridge sipped her tea as Giles explained what they’d found. Since they’d last spoken there had been one more explosion, before the MaXrIoT package finally succeeded and disabled the two remaining drones. They hovered in default mode less than a hundred metres from the Shard windows, while the firemen who’d arrived after Giles departed raised ladder platforms to reach them.

  It felt like a pyrrhic victory. She’d prevented two more explosions, and Andrea assured her that while there were some nasty injuries, there had been no fatalities. But three drones had still exploded, and that meant Bridge, Andrea, everyone at the party, all the gathered police and firemen, and probably everyone in the building would all have to be decontaminated of fallout. It was possible they were beyond saving, but Bridge was oddly calm about that. She was more concerned that the whole area might be off-limits for years, potentially decades to come. They might even have to pull the Shard down and dispose of it, but in light of events, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Otherwise it would become a constant reminder, an empty symbol of terror with its shattered windows.