For the past few hours, he’d been attacking the chatbot from every angle on one of the IRC message boards that linked to Bounty4Justice’s AI interface. He had no idea what he was looking for. Just figured if he was going to blow off some steam, it would be best to direct it at his enemy. Unlike Novak and Knight, he was terrible at compartmentalizing anxiety. In truth, he desperately—to the level of compulsion—needed to get off that goddamn list, no matter if he’d been granted a temporary reprieve of “not guilty.” Having a faceless, moody Internet mob in ultimate control of his fate—from the welfare of his family to his comings and goings and even his frigging credit rating—was fiercely messing with his mind, eating him alive. “Logic dictates that crowd mentality can turn on a dime,” he’d heard some criminal psychologist say on the news yesterday. Those words kept replaying over and over again inside his head. Thanks a lot, asshole. That’s really fucking comforting. Bad enough that he kept having flashbacks of that pack of Nexi encircling him like a pack of wolves.
There was a light knock on his door.
“It’s open,” he called out.
The door opened, and Connie peeked in.
“Hey, the Cyber Action Team sent over those reports you requested.” She held up a ream of paper. “I emailed the files to you. But I know you prefer the printouts.”
Walter sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Good. Thanks. Put it there on the pile.”
“You look terrible, Walter,” Connie said. “You really should take a break.”
“I can’t. I try to eat or go for a walk or watch TV…Nothing works. My mind can’t unplug. It’s like I’m in full-blown OCD mode. I try to sleep and I wind up staring at the damn ceiling for half the night. This thing owns me.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. Even the NSA is still trying to figure it out. Besides, Novak and Michaels are over in London chasing down the best lead we’ve got. You have to give them a chance to do their thing.”
“I know,” he said dejectedly. “Was anyone able to trace those NcryptoCash payments?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Uuuuuhh,” he groaned. “What circle of hell did this demonic website come from anyway?” He cracked open another bottle of 5-hour Energy and took a swig.
“However,” she said, “on an up note, they were finally able to access SingLao’s shipping software. And they found lots and lots of addresses where large cash payments had been delivered. There were some particularly big payments over the past couple weeks.”
“Bounty-sized payments?”
“Sure looks that way.”
“Okay. That’s pretty good.”
“Granted, most of them were sent to post office boxes.”
“Of course they were.” He chugged the rest of the energy drink and tossed the bottle into the garbage.
The computers and data dumps confiscated at SingLao’s Canadian headquarters were nothing like the antiquated equipment and unencrypted files they’d confiscated from the pin distributor in Jersey City. The savvy Asians up in Ottawa had employed total disk encryption on all their hard drives—a next-generation type for which even the NSA had no backdoor solution. If you didn’t have the decryption key, you were dead in the water. And unlike Echelon’s employees, SingLao’s crew had committed their passcodes to memory, not sticky pads. All but one of those key employees had been shot dead in a blaze of glory during the raid. The big man running the show was nowhere to be found, and Romeyn had admitted that no one had ever known his true identity to begin with, just that he went by the online code name Firewolf.
That left one office worker with passwords locked in his brain, and he was using them for all the leverage he could. Smartly, to maintain his advantage, he’d given the authorities one password for one computer—apparently the one that managed the shipping invoices and NcryptoCash ledger. He’d said that the other computers contained all the big names back in China—and elsewhere—who were running the show, the clients from whom the funds had been collected, and more. Chances were that unless he cut himself a generous plea bargain with ironclad protections, he’d be taking the remainder of the passcodes to his grave. Yet, all in all, Walter figured, the raid had been an enormous success. It would likely force Bounty4Justice to retool its payment system, and maybe—with the right press—it would scare off plenty of would-be participants, who would fear that the authorities might just have gained an edge after all.
“What exactly are you trying to do there?” Connie pointed her chin at his screen.
“Not sure really. I’ve been talking to this stupid bot because, in some crazy way, I find it therapeutic.”
She leaned in close to read some of the prompts. “Are you really asking it to help you?” she said, clearly trying not to laugh.
“Something like that, I guess.” He turned back to his computer and stared at the monitor, tapping a finger against his chin.
“But it’s only a chatbot,” she said. “Garbage in, garbage out. It’s just there to spew out useless information.”
“Maybe. Then again, up until now, no other function of Bounty4Justice has proved to be useless. What if there’s more to it than Q&A logic?”
“Not sure I’m following you.”
Now Walter was deep in thought, thinking back to his first interactions with the chatbot and how it had intuitively made a lucky guess that he was an FBI agent based simply on the questions he’d submitted. It was clever. But he had a sneaking suspicion that its true purpose was more than just some gimmicky customer service tool. “Normally, if I want to query a computer to help me, I’d need to use a language it would understand.”
“Sure,” she said. “If it was a normal computer, you’d just type ‘help.’ Or some command.”
“Precisely.” He ran his wiry fingers over the keyboard to type “help,” then hit ENTER.
The chatbot responded:
› B4J: I can help you. You can type things like: video submission, customer care, or payments.
This wasn’t exactly the “help” he was looking for. So he entered “h” and hit ENTER, because that typically worked with plenty of enterprise software. The same reply came back.
“How about a forward slash, then ‘help’?” Connie suggested.
He tried it. Again, the same reply.
Now Connie fell under the spell of the chatbot challenge. “Oh, it’s on,” she said, rolling over the other ball chair. She plunked down beside him, and for the next forty minutes, they tried every string and command they could think of, but nothing could bamboozle Bounty4Justice’s intelligent personal assistant into revealing anything useful.
“Boy, this thing is stubborn,” Connie said.
“I call her Candice,” Walter admitted.
“You have a name for it?”
He shrugged. “With all the time we’ve spent together, I figured it can’t hurt. Candice was my girlfriend back in college. Total bitch. Broke my heart. But, man, what a body.”
“You really are losing it.”
“All right, let’s think this through,” he said. “We’re going with the idea that iArchos is a password, right?”
“That’s the theory the NSA’s running with,” she said. “What it’s a password to is anyone’s guess.”
He stared at the screen long and hard. “Then maybe this is all much simpler than we think. How about we just type ‘password’?”
“Sure. Why not,” she said with zero enthusiasm.
Walter rolled his neck to produce a few audible pops, then plugged the word into the chatbot.
And that’s when something magical happened.
# 63.02
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Walter said in disbelief.
“I sure am.” Connie grinned.
Walter stared at the screen for a long moment, feeling like Alice peering through the looking glass.
› B4J: Sorry. I still don’t understand what you are looking for.
› Anon453we: password
›
ENTER PASSWORD: _
The cursor that had appeared after the prompt was blinking—waiting.
“Are we in?” she asked. “Because it looks to me like this thing is patching us through to some kind of server.”
“Looks that way,” Walter said. “Shit.” This was even better than he’d hoped for. Could Bounty4Justice’s programmers have disguised a network gateway as a chatbot? Could this be an actual access point into the host server or some command interface?
“You’re killing me,” Connie said. “Don’t just sit there—put the password in.”
Walter leaned forward, his fingers quivering. He typed the password at the prompt and submitted it to Candice.
› ENTER PASSWORD: iArchos6I6
› PASSWORD INVALID. ENTER PASSWORD: _
“Damn,” he said, slamming his fist on the desk. “Stupid bitch.”
“Whoa,” Connie leaned away on her ball chair. “No more energy drinks for you, buddy.”
“Sorry.”
“We can do this,” she said. “I’m not going to let old Candice here break your heart again. I have a good feeling about it. Give me that sheet that has all that gobbledygook on it.” She pointed to the Gmail printout. “And that message that came with it from the NSA.”
Walter handed her the pages.
“All right,” she said. “If the password is buried in all this random code, maybe we should assume that the code isn’t all random. Because, let’s face it, ‘iArchos6I6’ plugged into this mess isn’t exactly discreet. And this Tierney-NSA-codebreaker dude is saying that just because ‘iArchos6I6’ is bracketed by these greater-than and less-than signs, that doesn’t mean it’s the whole password.” She shook her head incredulously. “Jesus, we could sit here until the end of time trying combinations and permutations.”
“Unless…” Walter once again fell silent, deep in thought.
“Well?”
“Okay. Look at this format closely: iArchos6I6. There’s this little ‘i’ and this big ‘I.’ Then you’ve got the sixes on either side of the capital ‘I.’ Maybe that’s the key. Let me have your pen.”
She handed it to him and looked on as he underlined “Archos.”
“Archos has six characters,” he said. “See?”
“Yeah. I see it.”
Then he underlined the six characters preceding the lowercase “i”: “89eTf<.”
“Six characters to the left of the ‘i,’ and six to the right. With the ‘i’ connecting them in the middle.” He linked the lines by underlining the lowercase “i.” “See? Six-I-six.” He turned the paper so that it faced her.
“Hmm,” Connie said. “Let’s plug it into this bitch and see what happens.”
He entered the string at the prompt:
› ENTER PASSWORD: 89eTf‹iArchos
Then he exhaled and hit ENTER.
And that’s when the most magical thing happened.
Nexus Official Tweet @nexushackerwire • 1h
Athens, Greece: Assassins claim no ties to Nexus, plead guilty to murdering #JasminBhatia in tragic case of mistaken identity.
nex.wr/1fd1Mr00
Channel NewsAsia @ChannelNewsAsia • 14m
Apparel empress #IshaBhatia surrenders to authorities to honor slain sister; admits culpability in Bangladesh factory collapse.
cna.asia/1oF21
# 64.01
@ London, England
15:57:51 GMT
“Sir, your guests from the FBI have arrived,” a pleasant voice said over the intercom.
“Brilliant,” Burls replied. “Please escort them to my office.”
Burls swiveled his leather office chair to face the windows and gazed out at the spires of Westminster Abbey and the Parliament building’s iconic clock tower. Things were in a shambles. Barring some significant breakthrough in reining in Bounty4Justice, he stood a good chance of being removed from his post straightaway, and that would surely set the record for the shortest tenure for a deputy director in agency history. Now the FBI was knocking at his door, which only promised to complicate matters. Not good.
Predictably, the media was crucifying the National Crime Agency for its cock-up with Baron Andrew Smith, screaming that the NCA and the GCHQ had overstepped their bounds in manipulating the public’s trust to satisfy their own objectives, easily inflaming public sentiment against a government already viewed as Orwellian. Following the debacle, Burls had endured a rather blunt dressing-down from his superiors: warnings, accusations of incompetence…even outright threats. He’d reminded them that Bounty4Justice was an unorthodox enemy that required the employ of unconventional tactics. Not surprisingly, that position held little sway, seeing as the inherent design of bureaucracy was all about passing the buck. He did have one closet advocate, whose support was offered not in the boardroom but at the sinks in the loo. “In the underworld of spy games,” the veteran had told him, drying his hands with a paper towel, “tradecraft is everything, and rules are made to be broken. All fine and dandy…unless you get caught. In the intelligence business, it is our job to keep breaking the rules, while never getting caught.”
It had been nine days since the baron’s death, and Burls was still trying to determine exactly how his crew had been so thoroughly trumped. Naturally, he suspected that an insider had tipped off Bounty4Justice about the agency’s clandestine plot to hack the enterprise. Exactly who that insider might be remained a mystery.
There was a light knock on his door. Burls pushed aside his somber thoughts, perked himself up, and said, “Come in.”
His assistant, Sarah, opened the door and directed the two Americans into the room. The female agent was absolutely stunning. Her handsome male colleague looked vaguely familiar. Burls stood and circled his sleek, glass-topped desk to offer a jolly American handshake.
“Greetings,” Burls said. “Welcome to London.”
# 64.02
“To what do I owe this pleasure?” Burls asked, once Novak and Michaels had settled into chairs opposite his desk.
“First off,” Novak said, “I’d like to extend my compliments for your going straight at Bounty4Justice. Despite any blowback, it’s the only way we’re going to take it down. As you may know, my own team’s efforts in asking the Russians to block Bounty4Justice didn’t work out so well. Nevertheless, our position remains that aggressive measures are our only viable option.”
“Ah, yes,” Burls said, nodding. “I thought you looked familiar. I’ve got to say, that’s quite a mess you handed the Kremlin.”
“Well, that news clip of the mob pulling your dummy out of its body bag was memorable, too,” Novak replied.
“Right you are,” Burls said, laughing.
“Point being, sometimes our plans don’t always go as planned.”
“Indeed.”
Since the Voronov affair was already an open book, Novak went on to chronicle the FBI’s ensuing efforts and strategies to contain Bounty4Justice, after which Burls broke down his operations—and the tragic aftermath—in detail for them.
“At first, we thought the baron had merely suffered cardiac failure due to the shock of everything that was happening,” Burls said, explaining the botched sting operation at the Windsor Arms. “Perfectly understandable that a man in an already fragile state could easily have succumbed to that level of anxiety. Those people were out to kill him, after all. It wasn’t until a video posted to Bounty4Justice the next day that we realized the heart attack he’d had in the lift was no accident. That same software we’d obtained from the manufacturer of his cardiac pacemaker for our faux attack was employed in actuality by the assassin. We found a discreet camera lens installed in the ceiling of the lift, wired to an encrypted satellite phone stowed in the cab’s ceiling panel. The entire episode was performed remotely. All very clever, indeed,” said Burls.
“Any idea who might have done it?” Michaels asked.
“We’ve got leads but, truthfully, nothing solid,” Burls admitted. “Reason suggests that if we
can identify who might have tipped Bounty4Justice about our strategy, then maybe we can find our man. Could be an insider. Perhaps someone on the staff at the building who’d bugged the baron’s residence and listened in on the plan. Even an outside contractor is a possibility, since there’d been plenty of them going in and out of that service entrance. We’re conducting interviews, checking phone records, bank accounts, that sort of thing. It’ll take some time, but I’m confident that eventually we’ll get to the bottom of it all.”
“Well, on that note,” Novak said, “we’ve got something I think you’ll find of interest.”
# 64.03
Novak opened the slim folio he’d brought along and handed a sheet of paper to the deputy director. Then he tipped his head to Michaels, the persuader.
Michaels explained, “What you have there is an email that was sent from a Gmail account, originating from an Internet café here in London in May of last year.”
“I’m not sure I understand what this all means,” Burls said, scanning the text. “Is this computer code?”
“It’s a random cipher that’s meant to distract from the string of characters highlighted there near the bottom of the code block.”
Burls studied it, then shook his head. “What does ‘iArchos6I6’ mean?”
“We believe it’s a passcode,” Michaels said.
“I see. And what exactly does ‘Razorwire’ refer to?”
“That’s what we came here to find out. That email was sent to one of your staff members here in this office. The recipient is listed there in the metadata header.”
Novak studied Burls’s expression as he focused on the email address that ended with a domain designated for the National Crime Agency—@nca.x.gsi.gov.uk—and blanched at the name tagged to it.
“Can’t be,” Burls muttered.
“I assume Mr. Grimes works for you?” Michaels asked.
Bounty Page 31
