by John Statton
All of her instincts were screaming to get this done and get out before something bad happened. There are just way too many ways this can go horribly wrong, she thought. But for any watching eyes, she needed to proceed at a calm, unhurried pace, as if she had all the time in the world.
She started working the keyboard to access the generator's controls. She briefly spun up the machines, let them run for the prescribed thirty seconds, and then shut them down. She then set the diagnostic program running. It was the same procedure she’d reviewed last night in the hotel through a pirated Siemens training module. SPINALTAP went to work in the background; awakening, extracting its programming, and silently entering the site’s network.
Her luck turned for the worse. Through the window, she could see one of the security Land Rovers pull up in the parking lot. It disgorged two patrol members who started checking the parked cars' license plates against a clipboard list of those permitted.
Fuckkity fuck, fuck, she thought. I hope it takes them quite a while. I can't have them coming in here and spotting the fob. She kept splitting her attention between the guards and the data transfer light on the fob. The security team cleared the vehicles in just a few minutes and started to head towards the control room walkway.
She glanced at the fob, but its activity light was still blinking. She turned back to the window and saw they had started up the path towards the generator installation. Her breathing began to speed up.
Come on, come on, she thought, knowing she had but seconds to pull it out unobserved.
They kept coming. Mariana could now hear a voice and laughter as they shared a joke.
Her tension ratcheted up. She expected to see the doorknob start to turn. Her hand poised to snatch the fob.
Then a small miracle happened. The men stopped ten feet away under the generators’ covered external control station to have a cigarette out of the rain. Mariana felt instant relief but knew this was only a temporary stay. She glanced at the fob light, still pulsing faintly as it moved its cargo into the facility's system. Then it winked out.
She quickly, and unobtrusively, pulled out the fob and slid it back into the necklace. On the computer, the diagnostics completed, and she emailed a summary report to the site’s facilities administrator. Then she pulled on her coat and exited.
Passing the two security guards, she gave them the mixed message of a relief-driven smile and an admonishment they should pay attention to the “No Smoking” signs posted on the fence. The two massive generators drank from fifty-thousand-gallon fuel tanks located only a few steps away. They gave smiles back at the attractive woman, assuring her this would not happen again.
Then the older of the two asked for her papers. Stay cool, girl, she thought as she fished out her ID, and don’t engage. She handed it over. But he was feeling a bit sheepish at being caught in the smoking infraction and gave it only a cursory review.
Sliding into the van's driver's seat, she let out a long pent-up breath and sat for a moment to let the tension wash out of her system. She looked up and noticed one of the guards checking the control room. It had been a very close thing, and she felt utterly drained. Penetrating the facility's systems from the outside was impossible, but from within, from a trusted contractor, through internal systems, security had a blind spot.
She waved to the guard booth as she pulled up to the barricade. That's right, she thought, nothing to see here, just routine preventative maintenance…and slipping a little malicious code into your system. All’s fine. The gate lifted, the guard returned her wave.
As she drove south, the heavy rain gave way to a soft gray drizzle. Turning down the wipers’ speed, Mariana reflected on her dangerous generator technician international spy role. Not exactly what she’d envisioned when joining NetSecure. Damn straight, that was nerve racking. I pulled it off, but hell, I’m not sure if I can do that every month, she thought. It’s hard; none of the people I saw today will ever know what I’ve done for them.
She noted the clock on the van's dash and pressed her foot on the gas. Sander was in town visiting for a long weekend; the months apart had been difficult. They had tickets tonight for a new musical in the West End. Her melancholy mood lifted a bit. She was looking forward to a fun evening together and did not want to make them late.
***
Mariana’s generator report routed to the administrator's inbox, where it sat ready for routine review. It was ranked by his system as the twenty-second most important document for consideration in the queue. Today nothing over a ten got a look. Two days later he finally opened it, scanned the results, and filed it away.
When the report opened, it triggered the files planted and SHAVEPOINT woke up; the semi-autonomous AI created and trained by Mariana’s team for the sole purpose of owning the British election. It silently extracted itself and slithered into the operating system. As the administrator communicated with others throughout the rest of the day, SHAVEPOINT collected and integrated resources, propagating across the site's systems.
Part of SHAVEPOINT flowed into the administrative server which connected into all the other network nodes, gaining the ability to push software throughout the system. To avoid causing suspicious traffic spikes, SHAVEPOINT chopped up information and moved it through different parts of the network.
It moved through firewalls, neutralizing them, but being careful to leave no open door that would be noticed. It detected the security traps common in high-security facilities and those which were uniquely designed to protect this site's data. It settled unnoticed.
SHAVEPOINT grew in complexity and capability over the ensuing months. Mariana continued to make the monthly maintenance run to provide system updates. Fortunately, she never had as close a call as the first day, and was always very adept at hiding her activities supporting each code drop. When completed, the AI's ability to monitor and manipulate vote totals in real-time while covering its tracks gave the team exactly what they needed to control the election results.
***
Mariana's team moved into what they christened as Toad Hall. The name owed more to a largish-sized frog who initially barred their path to the front door, than to the author, A.A. Milne. They sent the amphibian to the lush garden edging the tall fence surrounding the property.
This Hall was an old Edwardian house in a relatively nondescript London neighborhood with excellent connectivity. The living room's windows were blacked out. Desks assembled and chairs rolled. They brought in workstations and servers, sealing them behind the firewall. Soon, keyboard clatter filled the house as each team member dug into his or her assignment.
It was the Monday after Mariana’s first successful run to plant code at Commission HQ. She’d set up an office in a second-floor room where a gas fire kept the space warm. Mansfield’s face was on her laptop’s screen; they were videoconferencing through a secured connection.
Mariana explained their status, “We’ve got FIXISIN code ready for survey result manipulation and all of the polling outfits identified. We’re far enough out from the general election that no one is doing real measurements. Every poll to date is an outlier. The public is only beginning to be aware the election is looming closer. Unless the current government calls a snap ballot, we've got a nice runway for launch.”
“Excellent news. How fast can you have the targets penetrated?”
“A couple of weeks at worst. We've mapped their network security and its trivial, university or corporate-level flimsy protection.”
“Fantastic. Now, what about rigging the voting?”
“We've penetrated their data center and started to insert SHAVEPOINT into the system. You know how much trouble we've had getting access to that system. Frankly, it was fucking hard. One of the most secure facilities I've encountered. This was not breaking through a sleepy Maginot Line. Instead, it’s an Iron Curtain. But we broke it and will have monthly data uploads. We own the system, and it gives us the power to tune election results to reflect the pre-election polling.�
�
“By the way, how helpful was Boris?”
“A good guy, he fits in well with the team and more than fully contributed. I’ve built a positive relationship with him. We owe the Israelis for SHAVEPOINT.”
“That’s good news. When we get this whipped, I want to talk with you about tossing a wrench into the Iranian nuclear program. We need to chill out Israel’s leadership before they take matters into their own hands and go shooting off rockets in a gunpowder factory. Stopping the Iranians’ crazy program would be a goodness for the entire region.”
He then took a turn in the conversation, “You and Sander doing OK?”
“Yeah, but it’s been rough, we’re pulling long hours here, and San Francisco is not exactly next door. We'll be OK though; I got to see him last weekend.”
***
When Mariana got back from dinner that evening, she found Blair waiting in her office. He’d emerged as one of Mariana’s most valuable team members, but he was such a sexist jerk. In honest moments of reflection, she knew his brilliant hacking skills were barely keeping him on the team, He has a know-it-all misogynistic attitude combined with a ruthless streak that could be relied on to take the shortest path between A and B, no matter how much glass he breaks in the process.
Blair was sitting in her chair. Looking up, he asked, “Hey, have you ever heard about an old CIA program called TOWNCRIER?”
“Hey back at you, and get out of my chair, cowboy. No, can't say I have. Why do we ‘need to know’ about it and am I going to want to hear some old secret you've dug up?”
Blair stood and made way for Mariana as she moved around the desk. She was more than a little aware his eyes were locked on her chest as he said, “I’m talking to this CIA guy, and you know how we get to swapping stories. It turns out they have been tracking Western European politicians for decades. I mean everything; phones, emails, school, health, and employment records. If any of this crew so much as colored outside the lines they know about it.”
“Sounds like an interesting data set for sure.” They finished exchanging places around the desk, and she was happy for the distance it put between them.
Blair continued as he settled into his chair. “I got to thinking about our Mr. Shepard and wondering if there was any dirt we should know about.”
“And you did a little nosing around, completely unauthorized, in the CIA's clandestine files.”
“Yeah, that's the size of it.”
“What did you find?”
Blair leaned back and gave a sharp exhale of frustration. “Nothing. The asshole is completely clean. He's been under the scope for over ten years and in all of that time not even so much as a parking ticket. It’s unnatural. I mean everyone should have a dirty little secret to exploit.”
“Give it up, Blair.” She leaned forward on the desk and looked directly at him.
“No, wait. It got me thinking, if we could not find anything on Shepard, why let that stop us? Why not make up something salacious? We can make it exceptionally vile and plant it across enough systems to provide authentication. I had the team put a little something together.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“What would you say if within twenty-four hours Shepard could be fending off pedophilia charges stemming from a college job counseling at a youth summer camp?”
“No way.” Mariana leaned back in her chair and pushed a bit away from the desk.
“Yes way. It’s ready to go, all you need to do is approve it, and he's sunk. This’ll appear in one of their tabloids; we’ll have clean hands. The media here is a pack of wolves. They’ll feast on him.”
She took one long cold look at him and said, “Blair, you need to drop this, the answer is no.”
“Look, I thought you said this guy’s dirty, he’s Moscow's tool. What does it matter? Why not use every avenue we've got to make it happen?”
She remembered Mansfield’s admonition about character attacks, but more importantly, she did not want to see her team stoop to that level “I don't doubt it would be a masterful smear, but we don't need to take the step. I've got confidence in what we’re doing. Shut it down, all of it, and let me know as soon as that happens.”
Later that night after Blair was finished deleting the aborted operation’s files, he composed a confidential email to Mansfield. He was concerned Mariana did not have the grit to make hard operational decisions in the field. He saw this as a significant step in the wrong direction and wanted her boss to be aware of his misgivings.
***
Election night, and Mariana’s team had gathered in Toad Hall’s living room to watch it all go down. The BBC was playing on the sixty-inch flat screen. The night followed the script exactly as they had written. It had been a difficult assignment, with long hours, but in the end it worked so well it scared Mariana.
The team was celebrating with an intensity mirroring how hard they had worked. Champagne—the real deal from France—was flowing with each round of results delivered by the BBC announcers. As the six raised their glasses to each other, the announcers droned on in the background about the Conservatives’ stunning victory after wandering in the political wilderness for a generation.
In region after region, races that polling had shown to be razor thin were being captured by what commentators were calling the Conservative Wave. Unremarked was any problem with the election process, where the new polling system had distinguished itself in quick results and apparent poll-tracking accuracy. The drink and lack of sleep conspiring to dampen the flare of her concern over the entire project, Mariana watched the results and joined in with her jubilant friends.
It was in the middle of the giddy, elated, champagne-fueled hugs across the team that Mariana realized she might be in trouble. She turned from Scott to give Blair a hug too. As they embraced, she felt his hands drop to her hips and pull her in. At the same time, the innocent peck on the cheek was intercepted with his lips and pressed with a surprising passion. Mariana pushed away, her hand on Blair’s chest.
“Whoa, buddy,” she said. “This is not happening, too much alcohol, you need to step back.”
He stopped as instructed, but in his eyes Mariana read something else. Rejection? Hurt? Anger? She could not tell. Fortunately, as she glanced around, she found no one else seemed to have noticed her and Blair’s interaction, the group’s attention instead focused on the screen displaying the latest results. She gave him a wide berth for the rest of the night and decided he needed to be off the team as soon as possible.
By the next morning the keyboards fell silent, the servers wiped. All the big pieces quickly packed up and loaded in a removals lorry headed to the airport. Each team member closed up their laptop and in ones and twos discreetly made their way to Heathrow for flights to different parts of the world.
Taking off that afternoon, the gray clouds along the aircraft’s climb mirrored Mariana’s mood. Her ethics concerns from the night before had returned, along with her hangover. She felt conflicted about the work, even as she and her team took accolades from the few in on the secret. This was a dirty secret. It did not matter that she’d worked for a higher good. It was the kind that ate at you just for carrying it around.
She felt trapped in this hidden cloak-and-dagger world. Depression closed around her. Subverting an entire nation’s will was a stain on her soul that would never wash off. What was worse, what she knew could take Sander down with her. The thought just added to her burden, and it was amounting to a crushing weight.
She had to cut him adrift. There was no way his career, and possibly his freedom, could withstand what she was doing if it ever came to light. He would be devastated knowing she had kept this from him.
If what she’d done was ever revealed she would be pure poison. A live witness is dangerous. A live witness’s partner was in-bounds because of either the knowledge they may have, or their use as a lure to bring the witness into a kill or capture zone. Afterward, it never went well for the partner.
Ev
en if they played more gently, NetSecure could still tar her and Sander with civil and criminal charges. Nothing like facing financial ruin and twenty years in prison. The sharks in Legal had a reputation for steering the company away from embarrassing public disclosures, leaving only scapegoats behind. She knew there were no coed prisons with adjacent cells.
The plane moved over the pole. She peered into her reflection mirrored in the darkened window. Her thoughts dwelled on the hazards to Sander. It may be too late. Even if she broke it off tomorrow, would he ever be out of the danger zone? It was kind of a temporal call; how many years since the breakup would he still be on the watch list?
There was the unknown; her secrets may never come out. She grimaced, and the face in the window did the same. They were in agreement about the necessary next step. She could not run the risk. She resolved to end it with Sander. It was going to be the hardest thing she had ever done. Especially since “national security” was the only reason she could give him. She needed to do this if she loved him, it was the only way.
She thought, Such a bitter cup to taste in the name of love.
#
Chapter 8
First Kill
December 2007
Over the years since the War of Northern Aggression, Charlotte, North Carolina, had transformed itself into a national financial center. Major powerhouse institutions such as Bank of America, Wachovia, and First Union headquartered there and brought new jobs and prestige to the city. Bank of America's chairman, Hank McCoy, had recently built an enormous tower dominating the surging skyline. Now, storm clouds were on the horizon as the industry began to reel from its real estate credit practices. Citizens with foresight were referring to the Bank's edifice as McCoy's last erection.
