Strokk eyed his troops, all former Russian special operations forces—Voiska spetsial’nogo naznacheniia, or Spetsnaz for short. Most of them had been operatives or officers of any one of several special-purpose units. Strokk himself had belonged to a Spetsnaz unit within the old KGB umbrella, charged with gathering intelligence and acting on that information for the benefit of the Rodina. Other members had been assigned to Spetsnaz units affiliated with the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). Two of his men had belonged to the Vitiaz’, one of the finest special groups within the MVD. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, many of these Spetsnaz teams had been disbanded or merged with other units to better serve the new Russia. But Antonio Strokk chose to capitalize on his talent, on his training, selling his services to the highest bidder. At first he had gone solo, becoming a contract assassin, operating mostly in the former Soviet republics. Then he’d expanded into Germany and France when Celina joined him. Over time his reputation grew, attracting new members, eliminating larger targets, expanding into new territories, eventually going global, climbing to the upper echelons of the international terrorist community.
In spite of his field experience, Strokk felt a tinge of excitement. Tonight’s mission would allow him not only to eliminate some Americans, but also to penetrate the FBI’s computer network—with the handy technical assistance of Celina, his skillful sister also field-stripping her silenced weapon.
Antonio Strokk was the product of a one-night stand between Nikolai Strokk, a colonel in the KGB serving as military attaché at the Soviet embassy in Caracas, Venezuela, and a local woman working the embassy’s switchboard. Strokk only shared the same father with Celina. Her birth had been the result of another one-nighter with a local street dancer a few months before Strokk was born. Apparently Nikolai Strokk had a weakness for beautiful Latin women, but he also had the sense of accountability, paying for their education in private schools. When his kids reached the age of nine, Nikolai Strokk took them with him to Russia, against their mothers’ wishes, and completed their education at the finest schools in Moscow. Antonio Strokk chose the military path, joining the Spetsnaz. Celina went technical, earning an engineering degree before being recruited to spy for the technical division of the KGB, until its dissolution in 1989.
Strokk rose to his full height of six feet, slinging the Uzi across his broad back, and verifying that his Sig Sauer pistol was safely holstered, as well as the ten-inch knife strapped to his left ankle. “Ten minutes,” he said, rubbing a gloved hand over his pockmarked face.
At exactly 7:30 P.M. the warehouse’s garage door automatically lifted and a single Ford Aerostar van headed down Sixteenth Street, toward the White House, turning left on M Street, and then right on Ninth Street, stopping in a dark alley near the corner of Ninth and H Street, just three blocks from the J. Edgar Hoover Building. The street was nearly deserted, even at this early-evening hour, mostly due to the high crime rate plaguing the nation’s capital.
“Equipment check,” said Strokk, breathing the cold night air, his ebony eyes surveying the dark alley, condensed air curling up as he spoke. Opening a Velcro-secured pouch on his jumpsuit, just above his waist, he removed a pair of miniature headphones. A dark wire connected the headpiece to the two-way radio safely tucked inside the pouch. A flexible, voice-activated microphone extended from the side of the headphones. Strokk adjusted it so that it barely touched his lower lip.
“Radio check,” he whispered. The response of his team members came clearly through the miniature headphones.
Reaching for his dark cotton hood, he slipped it over his head, taking a few seconds to line up the holes with his eyes, momentarily enjoying the warmth the cotton hood brought to his face.
The operatives accompanying him did likewise.
“Time,” he said, cueing his team to start their digital chronographs. Strokk expected to complete this phase of the mission in eight minutes. No more and no less. One operative remained with the van. The rest, Celina included, followed Strokk.
The foursome moved out swiftly, quietly, blending with the cold and humid night, their dark silhouettes racing down the filthy alley, reaching the deserted street, cruising past a small basketball court enclosed by a chain-link fence. Their silenced Uzis leading the way, the team dashed over an unkempt field bordering a red-brick building next to the court. A pair of pines shaded the twenty feet separating the chain-link fence from the back of the small building. Beyond the small field projected a small parking lot, which at the moment held a half-dozen automobiles.
Strokk pointed two fingers in that direction. Celina and one operative cut right, disappearing behind the trees as Strokk and another operative raced around to the front, briefly stopping at the side of the building, next to a bundle of ISDN high-speed modem lines running down the side of the house and into the ground.
“One minute,” Strokk spoke into his mouthpiece. “Measure your fire. Do not damage the equipment.”
His pulse quickening, his lungs expanding as he inhaled through his nostrils and exhaled through his mouth, Antonio Strokk slowly walked up the wooden steps, reaching the front door. A sign that read CAPITOL.COM hung next to the entrance. Putting an ear to the wooden door, right hand clutching the Uzi, which he had set to single-shot mode, Strokk listened to what sounded like a television.
“We’re in position.” Strokk heard the voice of Celina, covering the rear door.
Stepping back, he let his companion pick the lock, before slowly turning the knob.
“Commence elimination phase,” Strokk hissed into the microphone as he rushed inside the small lobby. A security officer munching on a sandwich while sitting in front of a small television set abruptly stood, eyes wide in surprise. Dropping his dinner, the guard reached down for his holstered sidearm.
Strokk fired twice. The silent rounds made a soft clapping sound as they tore into the guard’s chest and neck, shoving him back into his chair, blood jetting onto the cluttered desk.
The dark silhouettes rushed across the foyer, furnished with weathered chairs, a sagging sofa, and walls lined with bulletin boards under gray fluorescents.
Strokk removed the keys from the security guard and used them to unlock the thick door leading to the interior of the building, which housed the servers for the local Internet service provider. He burst into the main room, expecting chaos at the sight of hooded men bearing automatic weapons. Multiple screams echoed inside the murky interior, illuminated by the pulsating glow of a dozen color displays, the sound mixing with footsteps and hastily spoken words.
Bodies rushing between desks, humming servers, and glaring monitors filled his field of view. Many screamed, others cursed, some dove for cover behind desks and filing cabinets. A few raced toward the back door of the building.
Strokk lined up the closest figure and fired twice, a cloud of blood and foam erupting from his chest and neck as he fell on the carpeted floor while thrashing pathetically. Another shot to the head and motion ceased.
Strokk switched targets, automatically pressing the trigger, taking out the technicians one at a time with surgical precision, without damaging the equipment, with the satisfaction that he was delivering a powerful blow to the Americans and their high technology. The former Spetsnaz officer carried out his contract with icy efficiency as skulls burst, as chests exploded, as figures collapsed over the carpeted floor, on their desks, against the walls.
A man reached the rear door, opening it, trying to escape, but an invisible force shoved him back into the room, victim of Celina’s deadly accurate fire.
It was over in thirty seconds. As Celina cleaned up a terminal and began to work the keyboard of a Unix workstation, Strokk and the other two operatives set up a defense perimeter. One of them wore a security guard uniform beneath his black suit. He took the place of the dead guard, whom Strokk dragged inside the main room while the second operative cleaned up the blood splashed on the desk and chair.
The front lobby secured, Str
okk’s second operative took a position behind the building, hidden in the shadows of the pine trees, the perfect vantage point to cover their getaway.
Strokk gave his handiwork one last glance before pulling up a chair and watching his sister perform.
2
Three blocks away, Susan Garnett sat quietly in her office, working her keyboard, trying to get everything ready prior to her deadline, the time when the virus would strike again: one minute after eight this evening. The time was now fifteen minutes past seven and the seasoned FBI analyst had her door closed. A DO NOT DISTURB sign hung from the doorknob.
Night had fallen on the nation’s capital. A moon in its third quarter diffused its wan light through the half-open blinds covering her windows, providing the only illumination in the murky room, aside from the glare radiating off her laptop’s color screen.
Bloodaxe’s basic idea was to include a “Scent” string at the beginning of each software trap deployed across the Internet service providers not just in the Washington area, but also across the nation. As normal Internet traffic flowed across the ISPs, Scents, transparent to the network, would tag onto programs containing the countdown sequence Susan had disassembled from the passive virus trapped in one of her software cocoons. That conditional attachment algorithm guaranteed that a Scent would attach itself only to the mysterious virus as it replicated its way across multiple networks in preparation for the next event. Bloodaxe had speculated that the virus infection rate was exponential in nature, doing most of its growth across systems in the final minutes prior to the event, climaxing to maximum expansion the nanosecond before systems froze.
At 7:40 P.M., Susan Garnett wrote a program in C++ that automatically loaded thousands of Scent files into a larger program that resembled a Trojan horse. She released tens of thousands of Trojan files onto the Internet, reaching Internet service providers across the United States, covering every possible path in and out of the country, including a dozen Teledesic satellites in low Earth orbit and all eight Hughes Electronics’ Spaceway satellites in geostationary orbit, used heavily by Internet traffic.
Each of the Trojan horses released its pellets upon entering their assigned ISPs, “scenting” every virus crossing their network. Another one of Bloodaxe’s theories was that not all of the mutations automatically erased themselves during the freeze routine, leaving the authorities without any leads to follow after the event. The master hacker believed that among these “warrior” self-destructing mutations were “queen” mutations, highly sophisticated versions of the warrior virus tasked with monitoring the deployment of the troops prior to the strike. Bloodaxe had proposed that while the warriors used the event to self-destruct, the queens used that time to return to the source. The Scents would make a trail for the FBI to follow by using a “Sniffer,” another brainchild C++ program of Hans Bloodaxe. Susan had found Sniffer and Scent, and dozens of other custom programs, in a remote ISP in Oregon, where the hacker kept his most coveted programs. Bloodaxe had given her the ISP address after they had signed an agreement to allow him use of a personal computer under the supervision of a local software technician. The privileges would be removed if his help did not result in the eradication of the virus.
At 7:50 P.M. Susan leaned back in her swivel chair and rubbed her temples. She had done it. The feedback from the ISPs indicated a successful deployment of Scents. Now it was time to wait.
Susan stood and stretched, yawning. She stepped outside her office and into an ocean of gray cubicles under an array of fluorescents, heading for the rest rooms on the other side of the open area, but she didn’t get that far.
“All set?”
Susan turned around, regarding Troy Reid, leaning against a gray cubicle wall, arms folded. He wore the same pair of slacks and white shirt from this morning. He looked worse, still unshaved, and probably with a body odor that matched her own.
“Looks that way.” She checked her watch. “It’s now just under ten minutes to show time. I’m going to fall asleep unless I sprinkle some water on my face and get some coffee. Be right back.”
“I’ll walk with you.”
She brought him up to speed on the way, stopping at the entrance to the ladies’ room. “I think I can manage in there by myself.”
Reid waited for her with a mug of steaming black coffee when she got out. She sipped it as they walked back to her office, sitting side by side in front of her laptop. The time was 7:59 P.M.
“All right,” she said, checking the digital timer that was synchronized to the last virus strike. “Here we go. Fifteen seconds … ten … five … three … two … one.”
Her screen froze, triggering the start of a new event. Susan kept her eyes on the digital clock next to the laptop.
“Eighteen seconds,” she said the moment the system returned to normal. She had her fingers ready and tapped the commands required to release tens of thousands of Sniffers to go after the queen viruses. “Let’s hope Bloodaxe was right.”
The Sniffers expanded radially into every ISP in the area, resembling an army of hound dogs following the prey’s scent, searching, smelling, tracking. The packets of C++ code spread across New England in the first few seconds, reaching the southern states and the Midwest five seconds later. California and Washington were last, roughly ten seconds after Susan had released them.
“Got one tracking in southern Colorado,” she said moments later, when one of the Sniffers E-mailed a small file, or “Bark,” back to her, announcing a hot trail, a direct match between the code in Scent and the code in Sniffer. The Bark included the coordinates of its current ISP in longitude and latitude. A surge of confidence suddenly swept through her. The hunt was on.
In the next thirty seconds her electronic hounds were barking from hundreds of ISPs all over the United States, following the scent left behind by the queen viruses returning to the source. She could track their progress visually on an electronic world atlas, which read the incoming coordinates and automatically mapped them on the screen, also recording the event in digital video in memory for future review.
Susan had selected a map of North America as a starting point, ready to pan around depending on where the Sniffers went. Black dots representing Sniffers tracking prey moved about on the light blue map in seemingly random fashion, hopping from ISP to ISP, many of them crossing paths, separating, and doubling back, before slowly heading south. The dots began to cluster on a Hughes Spaceway satellite in geostationary orbit over southern Mexico and Guatemala. Susan scrolled down to position the icon representing the Hughes satellite in the middle of the screen. The map in view now covered all of Mexico, the Gulf, and portions of Central America. The dots moved from the satellite down to a location in the middle of the Yucatán Peninsula.
And then they disappeared, marking the original location of the virus.
“Where is that?” asked Reid.
“According to the last recorded Bark, the virus originated at…” She zoomed in on the location where the dots had converged before vanishing. “Looks like longitude ninety degrees and thirty minutes west. Latitude seventeen degrees and four minutes north.”
She zoomed in some more, clicking an option to add names of regions, cities, rivers, and mountain ranges.
“But that’s in the middle of nowhere. There shouldn’t be any ISPs down there.”
“Middle of the jungle,” Susan added, disappointed. “The lowlands of the Petén, to be exact.” She pointed to the name on the screen. “In Guatemala, around sixty miles from the border with Mexico.”
“Where is the closest large city?”
“That would be either Belmopan to the east, in Belize; Guatemala City, two hundred and fifty miles to the south; or Campeche, to the north in the Yucatán Peninsula. The closest towns are El Subín, to the east, or Tenosique, to the west, by the Río San Pedro, both around fifty miles from the coordinates.”
“Something went wrong,” Reid said, getting up. “This doesn’t make sense. How can the world’s most sop
histicated virus emerge from such a remote location?”
Susan remained sitting, dragging the mouse to an icon on the top left corner and double-clicking it. A window opened up that resembled a VCR remote control. She clicked on the PLAY button and watched the digital video of the short event. The Barks originated from hundreds of ISPs within seconds, moving in a random pattern before heading south, hopping from one ISP to the next, then beaming up to the Hughes satellite, and back down toward the Petén jungle. “I don’t know what to say. The Sniffers all converged on only one location.”
“I’m not buying it,” Reid said, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt to his elbows. “You might want to make a call to Haynesville for more help. Looks like something may have fooled the Sniffers, sending them astray.”
Susan remained silent, staring at the screen as she replayed the event a second and third time. “Do you think that the queen virus has a scent of her own? Perhaps something that overpowered our own scent?”
“Possibly. But how can we tell?”
Just then a notification appeared on her screen. [email protected] wanted to start an Internet chat with her.
“That’s strange timing,” said Reid, leaning down.
“Not really. He said he would check in right after the event.” She clicked on it.
HANSB@HAYNES:
HOW DID IT GO?
SGARNETT@FBI:
I SEE IT DIDN’T TAKE YOU LONG TO GET ONLINE.
HANSB@HAYNES:
JUST LIKE RIDING A BIKE. WHAT’S THE STORY?
SGARNETT@FBI:
I THINK THE SNIFFERS FOLLOWED THE SCENT TO THE WRONG PLACE.
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