by James Phelan
Monica looked at Walker. “What’s he mean? That they’ll kill him once all this is done?”
“Maybe,” Walker said. He held her eye. “Or that Jasper could already be dead.”
“But he’s still broadcasting,” Monica replied.
“They may have pre-taped it all,” Walker said. “We can’t rule that out.”
There was silence as Paul drove on. A mile. Two. Five.
“I think he’s alive,” Monica said finally. “I think he’d have been smart enough to play this out on the technical side—make it so that they think they can’t carry out the cyber attacks without him alive. Paul?”
“He might have done that,” Paul said.
“I think he did,” Monica said, more firmly this time. “So, he’s alive. So, we have to find him. And stop him. Will you help us, Paul?”
Paul glanced out his side window. When he spoke, it was monosyllabic. Unfiltered. Unemotional.
“I’ll try.”
52
Paul stopped the truck at a gate on a fire track that wound up into the San Bernardino National Forest. The gate was steel, the posts treated timber almost a foot in diameter, the chain and padlock rusted. He left the truck to idle while he worked the lock open, unhooked the chain and opened the gate. The air was cold outside. Pines grew tall, reaching for sunlight, their roots finding purchase where they could in the rocky terrain.
“Does this seem like helping Jasper?” Monica said, watching as Paul trudged back over, the shaded ground frosted underfoot.
“He’s got computing gear,” Walker said, pointing to the backpack on the passenger seat; the zip was undone enough to show a couple of laptop computers. “He knows what he’s doing. He’s exactly what we need right now—a guy who knows your brother and his online MO better than anyone else.”
“He got arrested, remember. Caught.”
“That’s to our benefit,” Walker said. “He’s extra-cautious now.”
Paul opened the door. Cold wind cut inside.
“Twenty minutes,” he said, putting the truck into low range and thundering up the overgrown track, small saplings being swiped out of the way by the big nudge bar. He put his headlamps on against the gloom. “Keep your eyes open for bears. I’d hate to run into one.”
•
It took closer to forty minutes because the track was so overgrown. Twenty minutes in, they had to stop to repair a small steel-framed bridge that spanned a thirty-foot ravine with a raging river running through it. Monica watched as Walker and Paul fixed the section of timber planking that had rotted.
“Jasper and I started up a cyber-security company,” Paul said as they worked. “We called it Macro Security. Banks and other corporations hired Macro to hack their networks and steal information, then tell them how to keep bad guys from doing the same thing. So, we spent a lot of time dreaming up ingenious break-ins. Sometimes we used those ideas to boost our street cred and advertise the business by making presentations at elite hacker conferences—elaborate festivals of one-upmanship involving some of the greatest technical minds in the world.”
“I remember Jasper going to one,” Monica said. “In Vegas?”
“Yeah, DEF CON,” Paul said. “We started brainstorming, and we came up with a tool for attacking networks and gathering information in penetration tests—which turned out to be a revolutionary model for espionage. By the end of that year, we’d written a program called Flea. Not only did Flea hide the fact that it was stealing information from penetrated computers, but its spying methods could be remotely updated, switched out and re-programmed through an encrypted connection back to a command-and-control server—our dorm room.”
“That got you noticed?” Walker said. He’d replaced the timber and stood on its center and bounced a few times to check its worthiness. Fine for his weight. A two-thousand-pound truck . . . probably. The steel-frame bridge had seen better days. The drop was steep, eighty feet, rocky below, a tight street of white water. No guardrails.
“We got noticed in a big way,” Paul said, leading them back to the truck. “It was good for our fledgling business, but it also got the attention of law enforcement and the military, which I hadn’t really figured at the time would turn into a burden—those guys don’t take ‘no’ that well.”
“What did they want?” Walker said.
“Us. Our skills. Our thoughts,” Paul said. “After 9/11, when counter-terrorism efforts and intelligence became increasingly reliant on cyber operations, the pressure to militarize those capabilities, and to keep them secret, increased—but those running the show are too far out of the loop. It’d be like working for a bunch of old dudes who think computers know the answers to everything, rather than what we’ve programmed into them.”
In the truck, Paul drove on. The bridge creaked and groaned as they crossed the ravine.
“A few years later,” Paul said, “after Jasper and I fell out, malware now known as Flame appeared in Europe and eventually spread to thousands of machines in the Middle East, mostly in Iran. The thing was, it was just like Flea. Flame included modules that could, through an encrypted connection to a command-and-control server, be updated, switched out and re-programmed remotely—just like what we’d done.”
“That was Jasper?”
“For the government. It had to be,” Paul said. “The Flame software offered a very full bag of tricks. One module secretly turned on the victim’s microphone and recorded everything it could hear. Another collected architectural plans and design schematics, looking for the inner workings of industrial installations. Other Flame modules took screenshots of victims’ computers; logged keyboard activity, including passwords; recorded Skype conversations; and forced infected computers to connect via Bluetooth to any nearby Bluetooth-enabled devices, such as cell phones, and then vacuumed up their data as well. It was good.”
“I doubt my brother would have turned down the military if they were asking him to help out,” Monica said.
“They hadn’t been asking us to help out,” Paul said, slowing the truck and putting it into low gear to navigate a tight switchback in the road. “They were asking for everything. And they’re idiots—all that money, and that’s the best they can do? Hacking military networks is like playing chess with a pigeon—no matter how good you are, the bird is going to shit on the board and strut around like it won anyway. That’s how they react, when they realize people breach their stuff. They’re like—we had a breach, but hey we found it, we patched it, so we won. Idiots.”
“Sounds like you were the one who hesitated,” Monica said. “You could have joined Jasper.”
“Yeah, I hesitated. But he did too, at the start. He felt he wouldn’t be able to effect any real change. And he was right, at the time. It wasn’t until a few months later that we saw what the DoD did with our Flea architecture that he was sold on their vision.”
“What was that? What did the DoD do?” Walker said.
“It was small. But it led somewhere big. It was a malware virus that would be named Duqu, which targeted fewer than a hundred machines, collecting information about the computer systems controlling industrial machinery, and to diagram the commercial relationships of various Iranian organizations.”
Walker said, “That led to Stuxnet.”
“Yep. This was when Jasper first started with the Army cyber stuff, after his training accident. The first versions of a computer worm, designed not for espionage but for the physical sabotage of machinery, began to infect computers in several countries but primarily in Iran. It was a thing of beauty—it was one of the most resilient, sophisticated and noxious pieces of malware ever produced. But then it got out. After the worm was loose on the Internet, analysis by private experts produced a detailed account of its source, aims and target. They called it Stuxnet, they tracked it back to the US and it had destroyed the uranium-enrichment centrifuges at Iran’s nuclear facility in Natanz. It was the first known cyber weapon to cause significant physical damage to its target, and t
he first autonomous weapon with an algorithm, not a human hand, pulling the trigger.”
Walker looked at Monica, who was fidgeting and getting restless and checking her watch.
Just over an hour to go.
53
Not so much a hut or cabin, Walker saw, but a freight container. The small kind. Twenty feet long. Used for shipping and seen on the backs of trucks around the world. And here, on a mountain. Sitting on precast concrete footings that had been dropped in before the container. Maybe by air. A Chinook or something would do it easily enough—they were designed to drop huge artillery pieces and vehicles and tons of troops and supplies in otherwise inaccessible places. The Boeing CH-47: the workhouse of the US military since the 1960s. Walker missed them.
“How’d you get this up here?” Walker asked.
“I didn’t,” Paul said. “It was part of a fire-prevention thing in the eighties, when they started phasing out the watch towers. There are still a few of them dotted about. They were designed as refuges for fire crews who got separated. They’ve got water sprinkler systems all over to keep them cool for up to an hour, in the event of an emergency.”
He pulled the truck parallel and killed the engine. As they all climbed out they felt the cool mountain air. There was no view through the trees, which were pines and firs. Walker could make out the sound of running water nearby. The last melts from the winter, or maybe the creek ran like that year round. But he doubted it; on the track heading up he’d seen cedar and oak dying from drought. Systems playing havoc. If it wasn’t fires it was drought and if it wasn’t drought it was beetles or some such.
“What can we do here?” Monica asked.
Paul didn’t answer. He merely unlocked a hefty padlock at the end doors of the container and pushed aside some cobwebs. He then sprayed lubricant on spark leads and primed the fuel lines. The generator started up with a putt and cough, then he adjusted the fuel and air mix and rolled out a flexible exhaust hose. Beyond the generator were a couple of dirt bikes, which he wheeled out.
“Think you can kick these over?” he said to Walker.
Walker took the spray can and went to work on the bikes. One was four stroke, the other two. The two stroke started on the third kick-over, a puff of blue smoke belching out of the exhaust. Walker topped off the tank from a jerry can of gas and mixed in the two-stroke oil. The other bike took a couple of minutes of kicking-over, then Walker rode it around the container. The tires were sloppy and low on pressure, but he couldn’t see an air compressor. He turned off the bike and leaned it on its stand, next to the other, and went into the container.
The first room was the generator and storage area, about seven feet tall and wide and ten feet deep. A plastic water tank took up half the space. There was a wall behind that, about half a foot thick, and beyond that was another room. The door to get in was not unlike that on a battleship or submarine, in this case not to form a water-tight pressure seal but a smoke and heat barrier. This room was set up as the safe room. The floor and walls and ceiling were all half a foot less than what was a usual shipping container’s internal dimensions—insulated against the potential heat of a bushfire, Walker presumed. He had to duck to move about.
The only furnishings were a stack of plastic chairs, a fold-out camp bed and a desk. There was a stash of water bottles and canned food to last someone a couple of weeks.
“I’m going to connect via a VPN account that redirects to international servers at unpredictable intervals,” Paul said, setting up his laptop and then plugging it into a power board along with an extension lead, which he took and hooked up to a fold-up satellite dish that he clipped onto the container’s external door frame.
“And that will do what?”
“We’ll see what we see,” he said, calibrating his laptop and typing in commands to a screen that to Walker seemed archaic: a black background with plain type, mostly white, though some was in light blue and yellow. A series of commands and requests and data inputs and answers.
“The first attack that they had Jasper do was a multi-platform hack,” Paul said. “That’ll take us too long. Like, weeks. But this morning’s? One target, right? The OPM databases. I can look at that. The servers will be down but they’ll be ghosted elsewhere. I can see if he’s left us anything.”
“Breadcrumbs,” Walker said.
“That’s right,” Paul said, his fingers working faster on the keyboard than Walker thought possible. “Unless they had a techie or coder or someone as good as Jasper or me watching over his shoulder, they’d not notice it. Something small. A word or catchphrase that leads to a file. His chance to get a message out.”
“But if they had someone like that, why have Jasper at all?”
“True,” Paul said. “But Jasper would know things about the NSA that outsiders wouldn’t. So, you can bet that whatever is coming, one or more will be a cyber attack at the government or the NSA.”
“How long will this take?” Monica asked.
Paul’s fingers stopped for a split second, then resumed.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Their systems are down and I’m gaining entry to other servers that acted as back-up until the time the techies there managed to disconnect it all. Maybe a few minutes, maybe up to an hour.”
He hit enter, and the screen scrolled with information, letters and numbers.
“I gotta go through all that,” Paul said. “Ah . . .”
He stopped and smiled. Pointed at the screen. A familiar word among the tech babble.
“Ares,” Walker said. “A Greek god?”
“Of war and chaos,” Monica said. “Jasper was always fascinated by Greek gods. And he’s always put them as place markers in his coding.”
“He put them into all his codes, a kind of signature,” Paul said. He reset the code running on the computer. “In September 2011, another piece of malware took to the Web: later named Gauss, it stole information and log-in credentials from banks in Lebanon. That had his fingerprints all over it.”
“That’s when Jasper was in Geneva,” Walker said.
“Right,” Paul said. “He was losing it. Seeing all the spy crap and what we were doing. I tried to talk him into quitting, coming out to the Valley and starting something up again. But he wouldn’t hear it. He wanted to work his way up, do what he could for the country. I kept telling him we could do more from the outside.”
“You always wanted more,” Monica said. “You always wanted the best. The unobtainable.”
“I was a teenager when you knew me, Mon.”
“It’s you.”
“I changed.”
Monica didn’t reply.
“Look, I get it, okay?” Paul said. “But this is it—it’s who I am. I work and I live and that’s it. You’ve seen my place. Hell. Maybe one day I’ll meet a girl and fall in love and get married and have a kid or two. That’d be great. I’ve got the time for it, doing what I do, right? All those guys I went to college with? They’re pulling eighty-hour weeks for what they earn and they’ve got it all in their Truman Show houses in Silicon Valley but you know what they don’t have—time. Time’s all I appreciate now. You would too. Jasper as well. If you’d been where I’ve been. It was minimum security, but still. You’ve got no idea. None.”
“Spare me,” Monica said.
“Well . . .” Paul flicked between screens and was running code on several sites at once. “Where would we end up if we never changed? In this wired world we are now all in. You’re in my world. All those people out there; social media masking as intimacy. Nope. I can’t do that. I wanted to be free. Out here, I’ve got that.”
“In late 2011,” Monica said after a moment, “Jasper was working on something big, he said, that would protect the country.”
“That’s what he told me too,” Paul said. “Something called Monster-Mind.”
“I’ve heard about that,” Walker said. “It’s an automated detection and protection system, right?”
“Yep,” Paul replied. �
�It detects cyber attacks and then strikes back, all on its own.”
“You never wanted to work on something like that?” Monica asked.
“Hackers have a reputation for getting high,” Paul said. “If I worked for the government, I could never get high again. Some of the best don’t join for that very reason. Plus, what would I do—join the DoD Cyber Unit? Have to do all that PT, the push-ups and runs and shooting drills? Pfft. No thanks.”
“We’ll make food,” Walker said, grabbing a small propane burner and a pot and a couple of cans of chili beans.
Monica looked at him like he was wasting time.
“Take it from someone who learned fast and learned the hard way: you eat and rest when you can,” Walker said.
She looked at Paul plugged into his computer and capitulated. She followed Walker outside the container and watched him set up the stove on a large boulder that was half-buried in the ground. He set the stove alight and poured the contents of the cans into the pot.
“I’m going for a walk,” Monica said. Walker hadn’t seen her make her way over to the truck, but she was there, leaning against the cab, hands in her pockets.
“Where?” Walker said, looking around.
“Does it matter?” she said.
Walker watched her. She was edgy again. Nervous energy. It was better to keep her occupied.
“Okay,” he said. “Don’t go too far away. We don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“He said it might take up to an hour.”
“You’re going to walk for an hour?”
Monica shrugged.
“Are you okay?” Walker said, taking a step toward her.
“My brother’s been kidnapped and beaten and God knows what else to force him to destroy the free world in a day and a half. Yeah, I’m great.”
“I know you’re conflicted.”
“Am I?”
“He hurt you. Maybe this is his penance.”
“This isn’t about what he did to me.”
