Bateman glared at it. “Bullshit, Rosemary. You’re not sticking me in some cellblock with the dregs of society. Not after all I’ve done for you.”
“Please,” she sighed.
His face turned red, and he leered at her venomously. “They’ll get to me on the inside, you know that. Those fucking Armenians have eyes and ears everywhere. You can’t put me in a cage and hope for the best.”
“We’ve requested that you have your own cell. So, don’t worry, you’ll get the white-glove treatment. If you don’t like it, have your lawyer talk to the judge. But for now, it’s county.”
“You still need me to testify. Remember that. I might decide to change my end of the deal, too.”
“You might want to go and pack a bag.”
Welcome to B4J Messenger!
You’ve been activated for text alerts and prize notifications.
To update your settings, please visit:
http://www.bounty4justice.com/ALERTS
To download our free app, click here.
# 15.01
@ Federal Plaza, Manhattan
Novak swiped his badge outside Cyber Command’s secure entryway, got a green light, then proceeded into the Special Operations/Cyber Division brain center. With all the digital equipment packed into the floor’s expansive footprint, it seemed as if he’d entered a Best Buy showroom. LED monitors outnumbered the cyber techs three to one—flickering, luminous screens packed with data tables and charts and graphs and maps and every other configuration of pixels imaginable. Yet as far as Novak could tell, the takeover by the machines was far from complete. Artificial intelligence, with its logical algorithms, was far superior to the human brain when it came to compiling vast amounts of data, then analyzing it, parsing it, and performing regressions and correlations. But within all that examined data, AI still lacked the cunning to spot the subtle patterns in malice and trickery of the human variety.
In this cyber war room, dozens of investigations were under way to study, mitigate, and terminate all varieties of digital threats, including a Romanian botnet named EZpickPINS that was tricking commercial banks into transferring consumer funds to secret accounts in Sweden; a ransomware Trojan named LockNLoad that completely encrypted a victim’s hard drive and demanded two hundred dollars in bitcoins for a decryption key; and a website named Cardertopia3 that peddled stolen credit card data in huge batches, along with all the gadgetry and accoutrements to convert it to printed plastic. Each operation was global in reach and involved dozens of partner nations, because cybercrime was everyone’s problem. No borders. No rules. And the crooks were scattered all over the globe, spreading like bacteria.
Nearing Walter’s office, Novak smiled and waved to the half-dozen young techs who had been exclusively tasked to Operation CLICKKILL, pleased to see a couple of the cyber unit’s rising stars among them. He rounded a corner and knocked on the only door in the hallway that wasn’t glass.
“Come in,” a voice yelled.
Novak opened the door and slipped inside.
“Hey, Roman,” Walter said, without taking his eyes off his computer monitor, which would qualify as a big-screen TV at most bars and made his tiny windowless office feel even more cramped.
“Morning,” Novak said.
“Grab a seat, if you want.” He nodded to his right, to a balance ball hooped in a frame of casters.
“I’m good, thanks.”
Walter was sitting on his own ball chair, which forced his back to curve in nearly perfect alignment. He also had a wavy keyboard with padding for his wrists, a wrist-friendly gel-edged mouse pad, and a mouse that conformed to his hand like Play-Doh. The overhead fluorescent lights were off, rendered unnecessary by soft-glowing halogen gooseneck lamps.
The Bounty4Justice home page filled the right half of the screen, and Novak watched as Walter scoured some source code in a program window tiled to the left of it.
“Tim’s on his way,” Walter said, using the mouse to highlight a string of numbers. “Just need to finish this real quick. By the way, did you notice I registered you for text alerts?” He pointed to the Bounty4Justice page.
“I was hoping that was you. Felt a bit creepy to get the welcome message.”
“Sorry, should’ve told you sooner. Anytime there’s an important change on the website or a bounty paid out, you’ll receive a text update on your BlackBerry. I only tagged U.S. targets. Otherwise this thing will be blowing up our phones every ten seconds.”
“That’s convenient,” Novak said.
“Tell me about it. It’s got all its bases covered. Trust me.”
“Are you able to trace the text messages?”
“Still working on that. They’re just like the ones sent to Lombardi’s iPhone, and they all point to proxy servers that keep changing addresses.”
Walter’s team was now working twenty-four/seven on rotating shifts against a tireless enemy that required no sustenance other than the power grid. The fatigue showed on his face, and Novak noticed that his wire mesh garbage can was filling up with empty 5-hour Energy bottles.
The door opened. “Mornin’, fellas,” Knight said. He swooped into the room, Mets mug in hand. “Anything yet?” he asked Walter.
“Negative.” Walter plopped his elbows on his desk and buried his fingers in his Afro.
“We’re running test transactions through the website,” Knight explained to Novak. “You know, sign up to vote, pretend like we’re paying customers. Figured we might find an easy way to cut to the chase.”
“Seems logical,” Novak said.
“Anything but logical,” Walter replied bitterly.
Novak noticed that Knight was fidgeting like a smoker suffering from nicotine withdrawal. For a long moment, he stared at the family portraits stuck to Walter’s filing cabinet. Walter’s wife was a blond bombshell, and his son and daughter could easily grace the cover of a Ralph Lauren holiday mailer. Novak could only imagine that Knight was trying to reconcile how he’d been a star quarterback at Dartmouth yet had a family portrait of his own that featured a frumpy wife and four chubby kids who all wore glasses.
“Shouldn’t headquarters be helping you with that?” Novak suggested delicately.
“Huh, yeah,” Walter quipped. “If they’d return my calls, maybe.”
“Seems they’ve got bigger fish to fry,” Knight explained. “Just between us, even Hartley’s having a tough time shaking their tree.”
Novak wasn’t surprised. The FBI Cyber Division—grossly underfunded and hopelessly understaffed given the overwhelming scope of its mission to mobilize against nearly every variety of cyberthreat—supported not only the agency’s fifty-six field offices but also the demanding member agencies of the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, which included the CIA, DoD, DHS, and NSA. Contending with more than ten million cyberattacks aimed at domestic targets each day and on nearly every front, headquarters, it seemed, had yet to rank Bounty4Justice as an escalated threat.
“That’s why I’ve sent an advisory notice to NCFTA and IC3,” Walter said. “I’m hoping maybe they can lend a hand, see if we’re missing something. The more the merrier, right?”
The National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance pooled intelligence from academia, private industry, and law enforcement to help mitigate high-level cyberthreats. Similarly, the Internet Crime Complaint Center linked the FBI to the National White Collar Crime Center and the Bureau of Justice Assistance, as well as to the rock stars of cybersecurity at the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) housed at Carnegie Mellon University. Conceding the investigation so early on, thought Novak, underscored the severity of the threat posed by Bounty4Justice.
Walter’s rail-thin assistant, Connie, appeared in the doorway. “Hi, Roman. Hi, Tim. Sorry to interrupt.” She flipped aside a long ringlet of natural dark curls from her face, looked over to Walter, and held up a thick folder. “Here’s that info you asked for.”
“Super. What’s the gist of it?”
“As best
we can tell, it mostly used Twitter to spread the word. We also found some postings in chat rooms, but nothing mainstream. I printed them out for you.” She plunked the folder down on his desk with a thump. “But here’s what’s really weird: as far we can tell, Bounty4Justice has only been online for ten days.”
“Ten days?” Walter asked.
“That can’t be right,” Novak said. “There’s no way it could’ve gained traction that quickly. It would have had to raise money for the bounties.”
“A few million at least,” she said. “At two dollars a pop. But we’ve confirmed that the first five targets were killed within the first week of it going live. Lombardi was killed on day nine.”
“Are you sure?” Knight asked.
She nodded. “Of all the ISPs we queried, the earliest we show the domain popping up was ten days ago. It’s all there in the folder. Unless it went by another name…” She shrugged.
“Maybe someone provided seed money to get it going,” Walter said, staring at the folder.
“Or the whole thing’s a scam,” Novak countered, “and there is no money.”
Knight and Walter exchanged glances.
“Have any of the assassins in these other countries been caught yet?” Novak asked her.
“According to the legats, no,” Connie said.
“They all looked pretty professional to me,” Knight noted. “It’s not surprising.”
“But that doesn’t make sense, either, does it?” Novak said. “We’ve got an unproven website that pops up a week and a half ago, supposedly raises a few million bucks online, and attracts sophisticated killers who happen to stage high-impact killings and video them without a hitch?”
“Hang on, Novak,” Walter said. “It is possible there were botched attempts we haven’t heard about. Maybe we’re only seeing the ones that produced confirmed results.”
“I’ll let you guys burn your brains on that one,” Connie said. “Got lots more to look at.” She went back to her post.
“And the mystery doesn’t end there,” Walter said. “On the back end, Bounty4Justice is running through an anonymity network that looks and feels a lot like Tor.”
“Shit,” Tim said.
Novak shared his sentiment. They’d run across Tor many times in their investigations, and it was the FBI’s worst nightmare. Tor—the name derived from an acronym for a software project called The Onion Router—was an open-source communications platform created with good intentions by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in 1996 to safeguard military communications for operatives behind enemy lines, political dissidents, and informants. It diced up messages and wrapped each data packet in layers of encryption—like an onion—before relaying them through volunteer servers worldwide to completely erase the IP addresses of both sender and recipient.
Nowadays, anyone could download a Tor-enabled Web browser for free to bypass the commercial Internet and the prying eyes of ISPs and law enforcement personnel and connect peer to peer through the darknet—the shadowy subzone of the Deep Web that Google and Bing and Yahoo couldn’t access. The darknet was where every variety of criminal dwelled in near-perfect anonymity: child pornographers, weapons dealers, drug dealers, identity thieves, hackers, and counterfeiters. And Tor was the diving gear that allowed one to plumb the depths of the darknet.
Thinking it through, Novak was confused. “But I thought you can’t run Tor through a standard Web browser?”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Walter said. “That’s what’s so crazy about all this. This website somehow bridges the gap through some kind of gateway, no plug-ins required. As far as we can tell, nobody’s ever seen it before. So we have nothing to go by. Which means there’s no known back door that we can use to get around it.”
“But it still has an IP address, right?” Novak asked, figuring its host server’s Internet protocol address was like a business’s phone number in the Yellow Pages.
“Sure. Problem is that we have no clue what it’s connected to. It’s like a goddamn black hole on the other end. That shouldn’t happen, either.”
“Well, if it’s not Tor,” Knight said, “then what is it?”
Walter shook his head. “I don’t know, Tim. I just don’t know. And while we sit here and try to figure it out, Bounty4Justice is going megaviral. I mean blowing up the bandwidth. We just started collecting analytics. But by last night, Bounty4Justice had become the top trend on Twitter. It blew away every record. Now, thanks to all this free publicity, everyone will want to give it a try. Especially when they’ve got lawyers on TV telling them that there’s probably nothing illegal about paying for one of these damn pledge pins. Look at this.” He pointed at the monitor. “These bounties are shooting up like crazy. And once everyone hears that any interactions between participants and the website are completely untraceable?…Forget it.”
Novak could see that next to each active target, the graphics tallying the bounties in real time were spinning faster than the thousandths of a gallon on a gas-pump meter.
“Sorry to interrupt again,” Connie said. “I think we have something. We’ve got a trace on those credit card transactions.”
Walter’s face brightened, and he sat up straight on the ball chair. “Really?”
“Really,” she said.
Sag Harbor Express @sagharboronline • 14m
DEVELOPING: @FBI arrives at #AlanBateman estate in response to assassination threat posted on @Bounty4Justice.
bit.ly/1zYnnSBClllo
# 16.01
@ Sag Harbor
“We’ll be transporting Bateman over to the Suffolk County Correctional Facility in Riverhead for the time being,” Michaels said through DeJoy’s two-way radio as she paced the kitchen. “So I’d like you to send over a couple more patrol cars to assist in the transport.”
“That might take a while, Agent Michaels,” Chief James Kelly squawked from the talkie’s speaker. “I’m spread thin with this storm. We’ve got accidents all over the place, downed power lines, a coked-up stockbroker threatening his wife with a butcher knife…and my shift’s just getting started. Let me get through all this—then I’ll send as many bodies as I can spare.”
“Can you assure me that you’ll have backup here by noon?”
Five seconds of dead air.
“Yes. I should be able to do that.”
“I’ll be here waiting. Oh, and please send along an extra vest for Bateman.” Not that any body armor would do much good against a sniper round, she thought.
“Copy that.”
She handed the talkie back to DeJoy.
“Our department had to lay off a bunch of guys in January,” DeJoy said in the chief’s defense. “Budget cuts and all.”
“Well, at least you won’t have to babysit him anymore.”
“So much for overtime,” DeJoy muttered, clipping the radio to his belt.
Michaels shrugged.
DeJoy took out his personal smartphone and resumed whatever app he’d been playing with. Michaels moved over to the windows and stood there with her arms crossed. The storm truly was making a mess of things. She could barely see across the bay through the rain and haze. Deep in the mist, she imagined a sniper hunkered down on the deck of a boat, watching, waiting, and it sent an icy chill through her.
On the far right of her field of vision, she registered a figure darting across the grass, and her left hand instinctively reached to the Glock strapped under her arm.
“What is it?” DeJoy asked, rushing over to her side.
“I thought you activated the alarm?” Her eyes trailed the figure, headed toward the boat dock, and she withdrew her hand from the Glock.
“I did.”
“Fucking Bateman.” She tried to pull the sliding door open, but it was locked. “How do you open this?”
DeJoy fumbled with the locks as he glanced out toward the dock, where the figure vaulted onto the aft deck of Alan’s Mistress. “Is that him?”
“Sure is. Looks like he really doesn�
��t want to go to county. Hurry!”
# 16.02
Scrambling outside onto the patio, Michaels cupped her hands around her mouth, yelling, “Alan! Get back here!” But either the storm drowned out her voice or he was ignoring her. Probably the latter.
Scurrying along the cruiser’s aft deck, Bateman unclipped a bowline connected to the starboard cleat. Then he disappeared into the cabin.
“Oh, no you don’t, you son of a bitch.” She raced to the edge of the patio and dropped down off a retaining wall, her dress flats sliding on the wet grass below.
The boat’s twin outboard motors came to life, and the smell of gas wafted downwind at her.
“Alan!” She broke into a slippery sprint, cursing her prissy shoes, rain pelting her face and eyes. The boat’s motors revved hard, props churning the water violently, seeking traction. Just as she reached the dock, the bow bucked high and heaved forward, and Alan’s Mistress shot out into the open water, cutting a deep V wake.
“Fuck!”
She didn’t think he’d make it far, since she could see a Coast Guard Jayhawk doing a flyby along the eastern shoreline. Still, there was no way in hell she could risk letting him get away.
Tethered to the other side of the dock, an eighteen-foot bowrider motorboat rigged with a waterskiing pylon rocked up and down in the churning water. Figuring there was a slight chance that Bateman or Sotheby’s might have left the keys in the ignition, she ran over to it and unzipped the cockpit cover, her fingers shaking with adrenaline.
DeJoy finally reached the dock, saying, “What are you doing?”
“Unclip the lines,” she said.
“What?”
“Get the lines! Do it!” She pointed to the tethers.
Knox’s cruiser came tearing down the main driveway, light bars strobing, sirens blaring.
Michaels dipped down into the bowrider and checked the ignition. Sure enough, there were the keys. She put the throttle in neutral, primed the pump, and turned the key. The cold engine coughed, then sputtered out. She tried it again, with the same result.
Bounty Page 8
