by James Phelan
“That’s what got you busted?”
“No. They never knew we were there. They knew someone got in—we watched them, from afar, online, snooping around the edges. We watched how they recoded and re-tooled their security. We had malware in there, tracking keystrokes, listening to all the conversations via the computer’s built-in microphones. We learned a lot. Even made ourselves security passes; we took images from the computer cameras of the tech crews IDs. We went in and out of their server headquarters each week and started taking surplus supply. Soon we’d built enough computer crunch to move on, and we did.
“We felt untouchable. We set up a legit company doing cyber security for the little guys akin to what only the big boys could do. It paid our way to keep up our other online interests. And it was our downfall. People give stuff away for free, or next to, which is what we were doing. It gets noticed by the big boys in cyber security. They start to wonder why some mom-and-pop outfit has better online security than their own subsidiaries. Competitors probably complained long and loud enough for some big players to hear. We got all kinds of buyout and job offers, and turned them all down, of course. We were saving the world, Jasper used to say, one corner store at a time.”
“But the big guys didn’t like it.”
“Nope. They started losing business—to us, a couple of punks still in grad school. We outsourced and set up a lab with thirty undergrads hot-desking 24/7 for decent pay and great experience. Not in the Valley; in San Fran. We were rolling along. That’s when we got busted.”
“And you went your separate ways?”
“We split. It was something I was doing, so I got busted. I did the time, got the new ID. Cyber-security engineer. It’s what I do best. It’s a small firm and it’s a fraction of what I could earn if I worked some place else, but it’s all I want, all I need.”
Walker looked to Monica. She was on the cot, waving an arm around in the air and looking unfocused in middle distance, like maybe she was seeing something in the air that she disturbed. Walker was now split—if he got a break via Paul to Jasper’s location, or the location of an attack, should he leave her behind? He had thought the three of them could travel together—three might make a better group, if police were now on the lookout for them. And Paul would be a handy addition. But Monica was now a liability—she’d slow him down, and he didn’t have time for that.
57
Paul was silent. He stared at the screen in front of him.
Walker could see that something had changed in him. In his eyes. It was as though he was seeing something clearly for the first time.
Walker said, “What is it?”
“It’s a message,” Paul said, looking at the file open on the screen. “From one person to another.”
“From Jasper.”
“Yes.”
“To who?”
“Me.” Paul looked to Walker. “He wrote that to me. Not to anyone else. To me. He knows that others would be looking into this code. Dozens, hundreds of coders and analysts at the NSA and the Cyber Warfare center would be looking at this same server right now, and he wanted to get this just to me.”
“He doesn’t trust them.”
“But how would he know I’d be looking here?”
“Maybe he knew Monica would find you. Recruit you. And that you’d do all you could to help out.”
“But she wouldn’t have sought me out, not without you. You’re driving this. So, how would he know?”
Walker looked to the screen. “What’s it say?”
“I’m thinking,” Paul said, looking back at the numbers. “It’s a key. A cipher. We used to do these back in college.”
“And what does it mean?”
“I’m thinking . . . it’s a long one. The longest I’ve seen. It’ll take a while.”
Paul’s eyes stayed on the screen. There were three lines of numbers. Seemingly random. Single digit, then double, then followed singles, doubles and triples. Repeated, over three lines.
Walker said, “That’s just gobbledegook.”
“It just needs . . . dashes. And dots. And a key.”
“Can you decipher that?”
“This stuff, I don’t know,” Paul said. “It’s either random shit, or it’s leftover code from something already in the server, maybe a test they’d run once. It’s nothing. But this . . .” he tapped a line above the twenty lines of trash. “That’s it—that’s the proof that Jasper is alive. That he’s made it so that they need him for every coming attack; he’s convinced them that without his final keystrokes, they can’t go ahead, so that they won’t kill him.”
“And they’d buy that?”
Paul nodded. “It’s what I’d do. They might have cooked up their laundry list of targets and he’s worked them into the system, ready to go, but as the government and private industry responds to the threats and starts fire-walling and disconnecting servers, they can pull the trigger on what remains, but it requires further work by Jasper. So, he’s definitely alive.”
Walker looked at Monica, who was still lying down but was now watching her hands above her face. Her mouth was opening and closing.
“She’s seeing little green men,” Paul said. “An hour, maybe—she’ll be fine, you’ll see.”
Walker looked back to the screen.
The numbers weren’t random. And they weren’t trash.
They couldn’t be.
A code.
Latitude and longitude?
A set of possible targets?
“I need a pen and paper,” Walker said.
Paul looked at him. “You really think I have pen and paper? I’m digital, man.”
“Check your truck.”
Paul lingered a moment and then left.
Walker looked at the screen. Four lines of numbers.
It was time. The next cyber attack.
58
Walker had paper—an old road map from the truck, and the inner part of a broken biro. He wrote down the code, number by number, replicating how it was set out. Paul was scanning the Web for news of the next attack.
“Here . . . There’s been a global hack of flight plans,” Paul said, tapping a screen. “News sites are saying this is it.”
He opened a browser and pulled up a news site to run in the background so they could listen in.
“Interesting . . .” Paul said.
Walker continued transcribing the code.
“I don’t think this is Jasper.”
“The code?”
“No—the code, whatever that is, that’s Jasper. But the airline thing. I think it’s someone else, taking advantage of an already crazy situation.”
“Why?”
“It’s too low tech.”
“Like leaking data?”
“No, the way it would have been done,” Paul said. “That kind of thing is like eighth-grade hacking—it’s just brute forcing the flight plans to bump them out for a few hours, a day tops, while tech teams reset.”
“And you think someone’s out there just adding to the chaos?”
“It happens all the time. It’s like when there’s a riot going on and everyone starts to go out into the streets and loot and create more havoc. You know how many attacks there are every month on US government networks, let alone private? Billions.”
“You may be right.” Walker put down the pen and ripped off the corner of the code, pocketed it, and passed a copy to Paul. “Reading material. You never know—a pattern may jump out at you.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll think about it. Maybe get it through to my friends, see if they can make something of it.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
“Makes me wish my father was here,” Walker said, staring absently out the door to the woods.
“Why? What does he do?”
“He—he’s . . .” Walker looked at Paul. “Nothing. He does nothing. But he’s always seen patterns in places where others can’t.”<
br />
“Well, in the meantime, every major airline in the world will be grounded,” Paul said. “It might take the big Americans an hour to get back up, and others up to half a day to reboot and purge their systems.”
“How do they do that?”
“By using guys like me.”
“And how many guys like you are there?”
“Plenty . . .” Paul stopped himself. He looked at the screen. “Not enough. Not for something like this—every tech security firm in the country will already be clocking overtime to secure networks. To retest and get them on this? It’ll not only take time, it’ll keep them from doing the security work. Think of the money involved in the total shutdown of global airspace for a few hours.”
“Maybe whoever has Jasper wants them tied up,” Walker said. “Think about it. All the tech heads working for the airlines for the next, let’s be conservative and say six hours—there’s no one there building the walls, certainly no one there manning the walls.”
“It’ll take up all the time until the next attack, maybe longer.”
“And that’s what they want. They want to exploit that vulnerability.”
“So, we get a warning out now?”
“It won’t matter. They can never plug the security gaps in a couple of hours. They don’t know in what form the attack is coming, and how much of the code is already inside their servers—and if they try to do a measured shutdown and purge and reboot, it might just trigger the event early.”
“So, we move on to what’s next,” said Paul. “What’s the next event?”
“It’s in those numbers. They’ll start with the biggest ticket item. Start looking at possible targets and then—”
“Damn!” Paul slammed his hands down on the keyboard. “The sat link’s dead.”
“But the generator’s still going,” Walker responded, suddenly on the alert. “I’ll check it.”
He went outside. The dish was still connected, the angle remained how he’d set it.
Then came two sounds, almost simultaneously: the generator dying and a buzzing noise, in the sky.
A drone aircraft.
59
The drone was flying a wide arc a few hundred feet out. Walker scanned the woods and the scrub. Nothing. He raced back to the cabin, where Paul was trying to hand-start the generator.
“They’re here!” Walker said. He picked up Paul’s rifle, put a round in the breech and moved to Monica, who was still doing her hands-in-the-sky routine.
“Where?” Paul said.
“I don’t—” Walker stopped. He saw them. A HALO drop. High Altitude, Low Opening. They were coming in from the north, with the wind at their back. Maybe 10,000 feet out. Falling at around 250 feet per second. Four of them. Tiny dots. Growing bigger.
“The bikes—” Paul started to say.
“Split up!” Walker ordered. “Put Monica in the back seat of the truck and I’ll take her—you take a bike, meet at Jasper’s apartment in Palo Alto. You know it?”
“Got it.”
As Paul lifted Monica and made his way to the truck, Walker took up position outside the container and dropped to a knee, lining up the drone through the scope of the rifle. Crack! Miss. He followed its arc, his mind working out the drop with gravity that the bullet’s trajectory would take, and the wind resistance that would sheer across its path as he fired east—
CRACK.
Miss.
He reloaded.
He took a deep, measured breath as he continued to follow the drone’s flight. It was executing a circle, maybe a thousand feet in diameter with the container at its center. It was now almost to the south. The wind would be behind the bullet, not sheering across it. He exhaled and his finger tightened—
CRACK.
Hit.
The bullet struck a wing. The drone lurched to the side, a tight banking. The aileron control on one wing was severed, forcing it away on an unsteady flight path.
Paul zoomed past Walker on one of the bikes. Walker ran to the other bike and kicked it onto the gas-bottle stove.
The intruders were ten seconds out. Almost in range of pulling their chutes, then they’d open up with weapons.
Walker checked that Monica was secured in the back seat of the truck and then started the big diesel engine and dropped into gear. With the rifle next to him he drove, his hands tight on the wheel, doing a big loop back down the track. He stopped a hundred yards out, just in sight of Paul’s bike as it disappeared.
PING PING.
One of the group in the air had a long rifle. A sniper. They’d just deployed parachutes. But shooting from an arrested fall was harder than shooting from the steady ground.
Walker lined up the gas bottle under the remaining bike.
CRACK.
Boom.
60
Walker drove the truck down the track toward the ravine and stopped when the tiny steel-frame bridge spanning it came into view—along with a car. A black Suburban, stationary on the other side, blocking any hope of crossing. Walker stopped the truck, put it in park and pulled on the brake.
“Monica, I’m sorry about this,” he said, looking at her, syringe in hand. “But you need to be in the here and now.”
She didn’t hear him, didn’t understand, or maybe both. Her head was leaning heavily against the back seat. Walker thumbed the cap off the syringe, turned it around and jabbed it into her chest. She let out a gasp, and her hands started to shake.
Walker looked across the ravine. Thirty feet.
Two men.
The driver, who stayed behind the wheel. And the passenger, who was half out of the car, propped against the open door, pointing an HK416 assault rifle. At Walker.
Walker put his hands in the air, clearly visible and empty above the dash.
“What are you doing?” Monica mumbled, trying to sit up but clearly still spinning.
“He’ll shoot us before we can get past them.”
“But—”
“Out the car, now! Let me see your hands!”
Walker climbed out slowly, leaving the Colt and the rifle on the seat but shoving a screwdriver that had been in the side pocket into his boot.
The guy looked at Monica, who was swaying in the back seat.
“What’s with her?” he shouted.
“She’s drugged.”
“With what?”
“I don’t know. She took it by accident.”
The guy watched, his eyes raking over Walker and then Monica. Then he stepped around his door, his assault rifle still aimed at Walker’s center mass. He was big; one of the biggest Walker had seen. Then he smiled and put the assault rifle on the hood of the Suburban. He removed his thigh holster and the utility belt on his black paramilitary uniform, and then his tactical webbing vest and body armor. Walker knew from vast experience the type of knives and other lethal and non-lethal weapons that now sat on the bonnet of the Suburban.
The guy started to move across the bridge, heading toward Walker. The veins in his thick neck pulsated with every movement, and were visible at thirty feet away. The skin on his face and knockout hands and forearms was flushed red with adrenaline and the exertion that came with moving such bulk around. His head was close-shaved, a bulbous thing, a basketball. Beady eyes. Madness in there. At least six-five, well over 300 pounds. Steroid bulk. This man was strong, angry, sure of himself.
Walker decided to meet him halfway.
“You’re that Air Force punk, Walker. You’ve given us trouble. And it’s my lucky day.” He chuckled and looked back to his friend, who was less than impressed but clearly was not going to interfere with this animal. “You’re nothing to us, Walker. It’s Monica we’ve come for. So, you’re surplus. Redundant. A gift, really.”
“What about our friend? He’s a good technician. Has insights to the situation with Jasper.”
“We’ll find him.”
Which means he got away. Which means the other guys would be headed down here. Which means they would be on f
oot, and if they skipped the winding road and went over the terrain in a straight line, homing in on the GPS location of their buddies, they would be here in under twenty minutes. Which made sense, now. This brute was like a cat playing with a mouse for the benefit of pleasing its master. Walker wasn’t a fan of cats; they strutted about like they owned the joint.
Like this guy.
Twelve feet away. Walker stooped moving. The giant did too.
Walker said, “Who are you?”
“I’m a whirlwind.” The guy chuckled. “You’re not going to know what hit you.”
“Funny man.” Walker stared at him, then looked over the edge of the ravine.
“You won’t think so,” his opponent said, his maniacal smile replaced by blind fury, “when your teeth hit those rocks down there.”
Walker liked blind fury: it clouded judgment. This guy was former military, and Walker knew all about that. He said, “What do you want with Monica?”
The guy started for Walker, taking big strides. “You’ll never know.”
Walker shook his head. Wrong answer.
•
Harrington stood and looked at the charred remains of the computer gear and cabling, the fire still melting away in blue-green flames at the plastics, the smell of kerosene in the air.
His three guys came running back. They stopped short, hands on their knees, sucking breaths, shaking heads.
“Have the helo search for him,” Harrington said to them, then into his tactical mike: “Team two, report?”
There was a moment’s pause, then the driver of the team-two vehicle replied. “We got them. Repeat, target acquired and detained.”
Harrington smiled, told his man they would hoof it by foot and be at their GPS location in fifteen minutes.
61
The target had been acquired, yes, but not detained. Not yet.
Walker knew that this huge guy was ex-Army because of his stance. You could pick them, in hand-to-hand combat, the differences between Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Even within the four branches of the military, there were differences; and then further differences in what the Special Forces outfits like SEALs and Delta used. This guy was Army. And probably good at the job, once.
