“What’s up?” Borg said.
She flipped up the monocular lens, and Novak noticed the pin stuck in a red gel bracelet on her wrist. It was round, with a white background and a black insignia: the scales of justice wreathed by laurel branches. She was one of Bounty4Justice’s early adopters, he suspected, and a tech guru to boot. Jackpot.
“This is Agent Novak from the FBI. He’s investigating Bounty4Justice. Had some questions.”
She immediately folded her hands behind her back. “What kind of questions? Like—”
“We were just discussing some of the website’s technical aspects,” Big Mike interrupted, preempting her inquiry. “Thought you might be able to offer some insight.”
Borg grinned in relief. “No way. Then it’s true what everyone’s saying in the chat rooms: the FBI is having problems figuring out who’s behind it. Cool.”
Novak smiled. “These things take time.” But he knew any excuse would sound lame. In truth, the online chatter was well informed. “Tell me: what else are the chat rooms saying?”
“Word is that whoever created Bounty4Justice is some kind of programming god. You know, like the ultimate architect. There’s even a contest to see if anyone can identify an actual IP address for any of its servers. Kinda like a bug bounty, where a website offers rewards to people who point out flaws in the code. Bounty4Justice is offering a hundred and fifty grand in NcryptoCash to the winner.”
“Really,” Novak said. “I take it there’s no winner yet?”
“That’s not why you’re here, right? I mean, I’m not in any trouble, am I?”
Novak inferred that she’d accepted the Bounty4Justice challenge and tried to win herself a king’s ransom in NcryptoCash. “No.”
“Woof. Righteous. Some of the best hackers have taken a shot at it,” Borg added. “Even Nexus tried to breach it. You know, those Internet rebel dudes?”
“I’m very familiar with them,” Novak said. The secret consortium of hacktivists known as Nexus fought online censorship by launching crippling cyberattacks against political targets. They’d even managed to shut down servers at the DOJ and FBI from time to time. It was no surprise that they’d found a kindred spirit in Bounty4Justice.
“Then you know they’re pretty serious,” Borg said. “And even Nexus can’t figure out what makes Bounty4Justice tick. They say it’s the digital version of the Gordian knot. You know, like the ultimate puzzle,” she said to Novak. “By the way, the FBI best not try to block the host IP address,” she added gravely. “A couple hackers I know tried it. It didn’t end well for them.”
“How so?”
She gave him a wily smile. “Oh, you’ll see,” she said. “It’s not like the FBI takes advice from hackers. So I won’t spoil the surprise. Let’s just say that Bounty4Justice knows how to protect itself.”
“If you know something, you should probably tell me,” Novak pressed.
“All I’m saying is that the dude who coded it is just really, really good. Incredibly good. Anyone who challenges Nexus to attack his code has got some serious nads. But he’s also a genius, because if there’s any backdoor vulnerability in his coding, you know, like a zero day, they’ll help him fix it. They’re all jazzed up about what he’s doing. They’re watching his back. They say if you mess with B4J, you mess with them.”
“Sounds like a regular old king of the hill,” Big Mike said.
“King of the what?” Borg asked.
“Never mind.” Big Mike thumbed at the kid, telling Novak, “I bet this one’s never even seen a phone with a cord on it. I’m like a dinosaur in this business.”
Novak grinned. He said to Borg, “You keep saying ‘he.’ Do you have the impression that one person is running Bounty4Justice?”
“Figure of speech,” she said. “I assume that all the trolls online are dudes. Even if the screen name sounds totally girly, it’s a dude. Could be one dude, lots of dudes, Nexus, NSA…No way to know for sure.”
“But you’re saying he’s interacting in the chat rooms, so someone’s got to be—”
She shook her head. “Bounty4Justice is loaded up with AI. It uses a chatbot on the message boards. It’s not literally a ‘he’ that you message with.”
“What in hell’s a chatbot?” Big Mike asked. “Is that some porn thing?”
“It’s a program that simulates human interaction,” Novak said. “A virtual assistant.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s not so great for chitchat but super sharp for logical discussion, technical Q&A, that kinda stuff.” She pointed at the iPhone in Big Mike’s hand. “Like Siri’s super-smart big sister.”
Big Mike grinned. “You mean to tell me a robot is running Bounty4Justice?”
She nodded. “Parts of it, at least.”
Novak wasn’t convinced. “Do you think it’s possible for a website to be truly untraceable, to be a ghost?”
“Before Bounty4Justice, I’d have said no. Now?” She raised her eyebrows. “I guess I’m starting to believe in ghosts. At the end of the day, though, every website is just a bunch of ones and zeros sitting inside equipment like this.” She patted the big server cabinet to her right.
Big Mike added, “Problem is, Agent, you can put these servers anywhere in the world. Could be all in one place or spread out in different locations. Could even be out floating on a barge somewhere in international waters. Take one offline, another one with identical backup goes active somewhere halfway around the world, different identity, different server. Redundancy.”
Borg said, “In my opinion, chasing that website is a fool’s errand. The only surefire way to shut down Bounty4Justice is to nail the programmer himself.”
“How would you suggest doing that?” asked Novak.
“You could try to bait him. But first you’d have to identify him. See, sometimes they put stuff in their code,” she said cryptically. “You know, like graffiti. Bragging rights. Alpha male and all that. Like a screen name.”
She was biting her lip and rocking ever so slightly from side to side. He sensed that she knew a lot more than she was letting on. “Are you saying you saw something like that when you tried to hack the site?”
“Did I say I tried to hack the site?”
Novak shrugged. “Can you show me what you saw?”
She looked at him and crossed her arms over her chest.
“Christine, people are dying because of this.” He made a point to stare directly at her pledge pin. “Lots of people. And I know they’re portrayed as—”
“I get the whole morality thing,” she said. “I do. You can spare me the sermon.”
“So you’ll show me?”
The Village Voice @villagevoice • 1h
NYC police commissioner calls @Bounty4Justice “eBay for assassins.”
bit.ly/1lft56.45rFg
# 20.01
@ Manhattan
Wearing a wireless headset and pacing nervously to and fro across the open hexagon of carpet squares that formed a no-man’s-land between his team’s six workstations, Walter looked like an air traffic controller pushing tin on a holiday weekend. In fact, he was hosting a conference call with two of his senior team members and a group of lead technicians and bureaucrats working out of Visa’s headquarters in Foster City, California, trying to devise a workaround to unravel the tangled mess Bounty4Justice had made of the credit card fulfillment network. Walter’s team was angling to manually recode the website’s future transactions in real time to stump its algorithms—throw the whole thing into a loop and gum up the works to buy some time to trace the activity and find a point of origin. Thus far, they were making little headway.
“Walter,” Connie called to him in a loud whisper.
He glared over at her and held up a finger.
“Wal-ter!” she said, louder and more forcefully.
He pressed the mute button on his headset. “Can you give me a minute?”
“No. Come here. You need to see this. Quick!” She waved him over and tapped h
er finger on the upper left corner of her center monitor.
He went back to the call to excuse himself, muted his headset again, and signaled his two techs on the conference call to keep things going. Then he stepped up behind Connie’s chair and crouched over her shoulder for a better look. “This better be good.”
“Look,” she said. “It just keeps going up and up and up.”
“Ho-ly shit.”
Since yesterday, the field tagged “ACTIVE MARKS▶22” on Bounty4Justice’s home page had been static. But now the 22 was gone and the number that replaced it was progressively moving higher and higher:
…77
…85
…92
…101
…106
“My God, this can’t be happening,” he said. “Scroll down.”
Connie worked the mouse, and dozens of new faces began reeling up onto her screen, each tagged with flag icons for the United States and countries throughout Europe and Asia; even a smattering of debut marks from Canada, Australia, and South America. Pages and pages of them. Most of the bounties were still at zero, but many were beginning to climb in value in two-dollar increments.
“Jesus,” he said. “Filter it for the U.S.”
She did.
The field now specified “ACTIVE MARKS▶USA: 31,” except the 31 wasn’t static; it was spinning upward, too:
…33
…34
…37
…40
…41
“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” he muttered.
Connie scrolled down the list, and Walter felt a lump growing in his chest. The new targets weren’t just garden-variety criminals. Among the faces of miscreants he didn’t recognize were a few he did, including a senator and a congressman.
“What do we do now?” she asked, looking pale and spooked.
“Damned if I know.”
ATLAS-5 SECURE MESSAGE BOARD
Session: 10.25.2017.11:02:14UTC.TLPANH.5479551622-09-32
› PIKE: Have you figured out if the algorithms running on Bounty4Justice have the same signature as Razorwire?
› JAM: Can’t know for certain, but they appear to.
› PIKE: How can you not know?
› JAM: Because we designed the program to be untraceable. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do: hiding.
› PIKE: Why the hell would it show up on a website for assassins?
› JAM: No idea.
› PIKE: We designed fail-safes to make sure something like this would never happen.
› JAM: We’ve tried them all, I assure you.
› PIKE: We’re running out of time. I need to advise Firewolf.
› JAM: Give me a few more days. I have an idea that might work.
› PIKE: I can’t stall much longer. We’ve got a lot riding on this. Everything.
› JAM: Understood.
› PIKE: And see if you can take down that ridiculous website.
› JAM: You’re reading my mind.
AS OF 8:00 AM PDT, YOUR CURRENT BOUNTY IS $481,858
CURRENT STATUS: Guilty
FOR THE LATEST UPDATES, VISIT:
http://www.bounty4justice.com/JACOB.FELDSTEIN
I C U Feldstein! Keep your eyes on the road or you might get into an accident, jackweed! LMAO!!!
I’m right behind you dirtbag! U got your car fixed? Coming to get you now!
I hope there’s no mom and babies out there on the PCH!
Where you going Jacob? You think Bounty4Justice won’t find you?
# 21.01
@ Big Sur, California
Wednesday, 10/25/2017
08:23:18 PDT
Jacob Feldstein had retracted the top of his Maserati GT convertible before the first news chopper appeared overhead, twenty minutes ago, and, man, did he regret it, because now there were three of them and there’d be no pulling over to put it back up. Not with the Pacific Coast Highway transitioning to a shoulderless two-lane hemmed in by cliffs on one side and ocean on the other for the next few miles.
“You’re nothing but a bunch of cocksucking vultures!” he shouted at them, stomping on the gas. The paparazzi and news people had been camped outside his house in Malibu all day yesterday. Around three this morning, he’d had enough. Figured he’d make a getaway. He’d opened the garage, raced away in his car, and headed north…just kept driving and driving. Now they’d somehow not only found him but had gone airborne, hovering over him like the Furies in some fucking Greek tragedy. “Leave me ALONE!” he bellowed.
He was feeling completely jacked up and dizzy and depressed, all at the same time. No surprise since he hadn’t slept all night and had been popping Adderalls and swigging Jack Daniel’s nonstop for a day straight. His mood was a roller coaster of sensations: up, down, up, down. Just like his awesomely shitty life. Just like this winding road to nowhere.
Admittedly, he hadn’t thought through his exit from L.A. How could he with that ridiculous website dragging him even deeper through the muck? Ever since someone had posted that fucking traffic video of him running over that woman and her babies, it was like he’d become Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, or some shit like that. How the fuck had someone managed to get that video, anyway? Whatever the case, it wasn’t as if he could sue the website, seeing as even the FBI couldn’t figure out who was running it.
His best course of action was simply to escape. Immediately. He figured a hastily packed bag and his American Express Platinum Card were all he needed. Perhaps he was being a bit impulsive and reckless. But if he could just get away from it all for a few days or weeks and go hole up in some swanky hotel upstate, he could regroup and hash out how to rebuild his brand. Wasn’t that exactly what he’d advise a client to do? Work the spin with TMZ, get a few before-and-after photo spreads in People magazine to show the amazing metamorphosis from tragedy to success. You’ll be fine!
This was nothing but a rite of passage, Hollywood’s version of hazing, Feldstein tried to convince himself. His mood lifted a bit. It’s just gonna take some time.
His iPhone chimed, and he snatched it from the console, gritting his teeth. It was another fucking text message from some unknown sender. They’d been streaming in ever since Bounty4Justice had posted all his personal information, including his cellphone number, on the Web. “Fuckers,” he seethed. He jammed the phone back in the console.
Some of his former clients—the very same sleazeballs whose asses he’d saved from doing hard time in a federal penitentiary—were snubbing him on Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood. His parents weren’t returning his calls; nor was his airhead sister, whose only response had been a stupid Instagram of a Siamese cat dangling from a tree branch with a tagline that said, “Hang in there.” His slutty, money-grubbing girlfriend had tapped out a curt text: “This is all a little too much for me to deal with right now, Booboo. It was fun while it lasted.”
Even his best client—a goddamn cold-blooded murderer, for fuck’s sake!—had left him a nasty, drunken voice message: “Hope you’re happy there, Jaaaacob. See what this little stunt of yours has done? How do you think a jury’s going to vote if they see your ugly mug sitting next to me in a courtroom? They’re going to FRY MY ASS! Even this slimy fucking town has some scruples left. You and me are fucking done. I already canceled that retainer check, so don’t go trying to cash it. Have a nice life, you fucking narcissistic LOOOOSER!”
His iPhone pinged again. “Stop! STOP! STOOOOOOOOOP!” But when he picked it up, he realized that the number of the incoming call, from Los Angeles, seemed familiar. He stared at the digits for a long moment, trying to place them. The blare of a horn brought his eyes back to the road, where he had crossed the double yellow line and was flirting with a Toyota Tundra. He cut the wheel hard to correct course. “I see you, asshole!” He gave the Tundra the middle finger as it whipped by, nearly fumbling his phone out onto the roadway in the process.
The Maserati was climbing high above the
shimmering Pacific now, nothing but blue sky ahead.
One of the choppers swooped in low along the cliffs for a close-up. It was painted navy blue, and he couldn’t see any markings on the fuselage. Probably an enterprising paparazzi pulling out all the stops to get some exclusive top-dollar photos for the tabloid covers.
“Leave me alone, you fucking cocksucking fucks!” he screamed. Through the chopper’s open side door, he could see the cameraman flat on the floor, framing his shot—though his camera looked awfully slender—and Feldstein gave him the finger, too.
The iPhone chimed again. Same number in Los Angeles. He stared at it for another long moment. Because of its vague familiarity, he felt compelled to answer it.
“Who is this?” he yelled.
With all the wind rushing around him, he could barely hear the female voice on the other end.
“Mr. Feldstein, this is Special Agent Cynthia Fass with the FBI.”
“Did you say ‘FBI’?”
“Yes. F-B-I. Can you hear me?”
“I hear you. What do you want?”
“For your own safety, I’d like for you to reconsider LAPD’s offer of protective services. Bounty4Justice is tracking your movements in real time…using the GPS on your cellphone. If you don’t—”
“Listen to me, Cindy! I don’t need protection, understand?”
“Running will not help your situation, Jacob. Please pull over and let us help you.”
“Help me? Are you fucking serious? You think you can help me?” He laughed wildly, yanked the treacherous phone away from his ear, stared at it long and hard in disgust, then launched it on a Hail Mary out over the guardrail. “Fuck you, Cindy! Fuck ALL of you!” He watched the phone sail out into the blue sky, then plummet into the crashing waves below. Thanks to the Adderall and Jack Daniel’s, his attention drifted right along with the phone, and he heard his tires thumping over the reflector nubs that split the roadway.
Then a loud pop seemed to come from the chopper; an instant later, his steering wheel dipped hard to the left, and his front left tire made an awful whump whump sound right before the rubber peeled off the rim. He heard another blaring horn and looked up to correct his trajectory, then realized that the math wasn’t going to work this time. And for the first time in a long while, he performed a selfless act: he swerved his gleaming murder weapon hard to avoid the Honda minivan aimed directly at him in the oncoming lane with nowhere to go.
Bounty Page 10
