Axillon99

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Yep. Still has your cat sticker on it, too.”

  “Oh, come on. I was fourteen.”

  Nebraska held his hands up in surrender. “Hey, I didn’t mean that in a bad way.”

  “All right. Give me a few minutes.”

  She followed him to one of the ocean-transport cargo boxes, which had been set up like a bedroom complete with a computer desk. They’d tapped a fiber line somewhere for free high-speed internet, with Wi-Fi throughout their little compound. While she got to work using a ‘seen better days’ desktop, Nebraska ran off to fetch her old laptop since she’d need it for this. Better it hide here among these people than she have it at her apartment where it might get found by the authorities. Some hardware could land a girl in jail for merely having it.

  As irritated as she’d become at her parents for taking their conspiracy theory nonsense too far, she spared a moment of gratitude. She’d never been ‘eight-year-old with a gun strapped to her thigh’ desperate at any point in her life. For that, she at least owed them thanks.

  After some time poking around the net and slipping in and out of the dark web, she found information on AmeriBank executives. Brass arrived with her old Dell laptop, still bolted to the extra case with the military-grade Wi-Fi unit and sniffer. A huge Hello Kitty sticker adorned the lid. Seeing it made her nostalgic. Not that she wanted to be thirteen again, but she missed a life where she had all day to play online before adult responsibilities.

  He sat on the naked mattress behind her, watching as she hunted down addresses and phone numbers.

  “Okay, got a couple places to try. You have any transportation?”

  “Yeah. Come on.” Brass handed her the laptop and stood.

  She followed him deeper into the bridge compound and out a gate on the other side to a parking lot full of concrete rubble and a beat up cargo van with so much graffiti that it blended into the urban decay like camouflage. He called out and two more guys, one black, one Chinese, came running, along with a woman around her age who appeared to be a mix of black and Hispanic.

  “Tito, Larry, and Gina,” said Nebraska.

  The new arrivals all nodded in greeting.

  “Where to?” asked Gina.

  Dakota read off the first address in Brooklyn Heights, where the SVP of marketing lived. “Marketing exec probably has access to web content, but I bet he never touches it himself.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to go after, like, their head of network?” asked Tito.

  “No way. They’d never fall for part two.” Dakota shook her head. “We need someone who has access but no clue.”

  “Oh,” said Larry. “Cool. Cool.”

  Gina hopped in behind the wheel. Dakota took a mid-row seat. Nebraska sat next to her and fumbled a power adapter out of the junk piled up in the middle of the floor. Tito rode shotgun with Larry in the rearmost bench. He huddled against the side, keeping his gaze out a broken back window. Dakota tried not to let the sight of a cut down AK47 in his lap unnerve her too much, but couldn’t contain her worry.

  “Dude, he’s got a damn assault rifle. If we get pulled over, we’re not going to do small time.” She bit her lip.

  “Relax. You’re too important to get taken.” Nebraska fished handcuffs and a black bag out from the pouch behind the passenger seat. “If we’re gonna get nailed, you were kidnapped.” He packed the terrifying items back out of sight.

  “No way,” said Dakota. “That’ll put you away for the rest of your life! I can’t do that to you.”

  “I wanna be kidnapped, too,” whined Gina. “Or just bring those toys with you when we get back.” She winked at Nebraska.

  He grinned back.

  Scarlet-faced, Dakota opened the laptop and refused to look at him. “Uhh, it’s dead.”

  Wordless, he handed her the plug end and ran the other side to the cigarette lighter port up front. She watched him crawling forward until Gina squeezed his ass. Soon after she averted her eyes, her Dell powered up. While the van trundled over rough-paved streets, she booted up the nearly ten-year-old laptop. All the stuff she needed ran under Linux, so old hardware didn’t matter. It didn’t make one bit of difference how fancy or plain one’s screen appeared. Beneath all the flashy graphics of modern operating systems, everything still boiled down to ones and zeroes going out in Ethernet packets.

  Eventually, they parked near the target house in Brooklyn Heights. Dakota fired up the WiFi module and polled for active networks. It took her a little while, but based on signal strength, she narrowed it down to two that appeared to be transmitting from inside the marketing executive’s house. Since one had ‘Brandon2020’ as the SSID, she figured it had been set up for the guy’s son. She focused her attention on R1V3nd3ll.

  “I almost feel bad. This guy’s a fantasy geek, too.” She poked a couple keys and frowned. “And he’s smart enough to password protect his network.” Another finger tap started a brute-force intrusion module.

  “So we’re screwed?” asked Nebraska.

  “No. If this thing doesn’t crack his network password, I can capture all Wi-Fi traffic, then filter down by this SSID and extract the MAC address of his client’s network card. From there, it’s just a matter of grabbing the data burst with the info we need and letting the decryption routines chew on it.”

  Her brother leaned in close, staring at the screen. The dumbfounded look on his face struck her as cute. “How long will that take?”

  “Well, if I have to attack the encryption, probably a couple of weeks of leaving this thing powered up and running. Odds aren’t great that he won’t have changed his password by then.”

  “Oh.” He frowned.

  The laptop beeped.

  “Well, our guy’s smart enough to put a password on his Wi-Fi network, but he’s not smart enough to use a good one. My caveman has a leet-speak dictionary. He had a one-word password with some of the letters swapped to numbers. We’re in.”

  “Cool. So you own his network now? And what’s a caveman?”

  She smirked at him. “It’s my brute force proggie. Custom by the way, and no, I can’t just see the traffic… or we could use his internet connection. Now for the hard part. Everyone stay quiet.”

  Dakota loaded a softphone client and dialed the guy’s home number.

  Six rings later, the voice of a prepubescent boy said, “Hello?”

  “Hi,” said Dakota with overly forced cheerfulness. “Is your father home?”

  “Uhh, who is this?” asked the boy.

  “Is this Brandon?”

  “Yeah,” said the kid.

  “Hi Brandon. It’s Kelly from the bank. I need to talk to your father for a minute or two. It’s important, but not bad.”

  “Umm. Okay, hang on. He’s taking a dump.”

  Tito snickered.

  Dakota almost laughed. “Okay.”

  For a minute or three, tinny video game sounds came back over the phone.

  “He’s out. Hang on,” said Brandon before muffling the phone and yelling, “Dad?”

  Murmuring preceded a man saying, “Hello? This is Mr. Snyder.”

  “Good afternoon, sir. I’m sorry to bother you on the weekend. My name is Kelly. I’m from the information security team at AmeriBank. There’s been an attempt to access your account. We need you to log in over the VPN as soon as possible and change your password. Don’t tell me what it is. Remember, no one from the IT group will ever ask you for your password. It’s important that you change it though, so whoever compromised it can’t get back in.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Mr. Snyder, sounding alarmed. “Hang on. I’ll do it now. Do I need you on the line?”

  “I can wait with you if you like, but I don’t have access to see your password so it wouldn’t make a difference either way,” said Dakota using her Amazon Café customer service voice.

  “All right then, uhh. Gimme a minute and I’ll get it changed. Did they cause any damage?”

  “Nothing we’ve seen yet. We caught it early and kic
ked them out.” Dakota started recording all traffic on his Wi-Fi network.

  “Good. All right then, I guess I should go do this. Thanks for the warning.”

  “No problem sir. Have a great rest of your weekend.”

  “You too.”

  She clicked off the call.

  “Whoa, you gotta call people to hack?” asked her brother, wide-eyed.

  “Yeah. It’s called social engineering. It’s not all hiding in the basement and working black magic through a keyboard.” She poked him in the side. “You watch too many movies.”

  “So… what did that accomplish?” asked Gina. “By the way, you do a really good cute voice.”

  “Thanks.” She chuckled. “Well, at some point within the next few minutes, Mr. Snyder is going to log into the AmeriBank VPN and change his password. I’m capturing all the data going over his Wi-Fi network, so somewhere in that garbled mess of information is enough to tell me what VPN software they use, what those credentials are, and what his new password is. Once I decode all this shit and install the correct VPN client, I should be able to waltz right onto the AmeriBank network.”

  “Awesome. I have no idea what the hell you just said, but awesome.” Nebraska grinned.

  “What now?” asked Tito.

  “Give it another five minutes, and we go… umm… home.” She glanced out the window at the beautiful house, and sighed. No hate on those people, but she couldn’t help but feel more than a little jealous at the sort of life she’d never be able to have. Ramen and tiny apartments for me.

  Almost two hours later, Dakota extracted the password from the decoded network packets around the same time the Pulsar Secure VPN client software finished installing on a desktop system the group used for cyber-attacks. She couldn’t help but roll her eyes at the ‘off-the-shelf’ DDOS client her brother’s associates had on it. She’d advanced beyond that bullshit by age twelve.

  It took a little finesse to handcraft a cryptographic login token using the information she’d gotten from Snyder’s system, but after a tense few seconds, the effort paid off with a green indicator light and a good connection to the AmeriBank corporate network. She fed it Snyder’s username and password―the new one he’d just changed―and the man’s desktop appeared, complete with a picture of a cute little boy with straw-blond hair. Brandon, she figured, from a few years ago. It surprised her they didn’t have a two-factor token authentication, but perhaps the system would only prompt for that if she tried to access account information or get into any applications involving money. For that, at least, she felt grateful. No one had to break into his house to steal the code generator or try to pickpocket him.

  Her guess proved out. Snyder had access to the web development folders. Nebraska handed her a USB stick with the altered files on it. Evidently, one of their people had cloned the bank’s website, and their team of artists and goofballs had spent the better part of the last week making a mockery of it. Chances are, the bank would have everything back to normal from backups in four or five hours, but for a little while, they’d look foolish. The attack amounted to little more than a juvenile prank, but this was also the same bank that tried to sue children for writing ‘Save the Earth’ with sidewalk chalk near one of their branches, calling it ‘criminal vandalism.’ Of course, their parents had been protesting the bank’s financing of oil-drilling projects and put the kids up to doing it, but sidewalk chalk? One light rain shower and it’s gone, and these corporate pigs had the gall to term it ‘vandalism.’

  She sighed, and with an imperious frown, mashed the enter key to begin the upload of website files. “In thirteen minutes, there will be an epic amount of penises on their website.”

  Nebraska blinked. “You changed the files?”

  “Huh?” She glanced at him. “No, why?”

  “There’s no penises. It’s political stuff. Our slogans, evidence of the bank’s fuckery and crap like that. Where’d you get penises from?”

  “The last time I saw you and your friends commit an act of political disobedience, you―”

  “Yeah, yeah… I was like fifteen.” He rolled his eyes.

  While waiting for the file transfer, she started poking around the network. A folder ATM_REG caught her eye. She skimmed a listing of ATMs in the area, complete with their model number, software version, and IP address.

  “Oh, hey…” She grabbed his shoulder. “Screw these guys. Can you send a crew to the ATM by Fulton and Williams?”

  “Sure, why?”

  “It’s about to puke money.”

  “What?” He gawked. “You can do that?”

  “I think. It’s an old Model 880. They have a feeder test routine that cycles the cash handler to make sure it works. If there’s any bills in it at the time, they go flying.”

  “Whoa, that’s serious.”

  “Nah, at most it would only gonna be a couple grand.” She poked her finger into his chest, staring into his eyes. “And it better go toward food and clothes. Not booze or drugs.”

  “I’m clean,” said Nebraska. “No more heroin. I swear. Been off that shit for six months.”

  Tito nodded. “He’s legit. Dude still drinks like a mofo though.”

  “Dick.” Nebraska thumped him in the leg. “This is my sister.”

  “What?” Tito rubbed his thigh. “I ain’t like sayin’ ‘nice tits’ at her.”

  Nebraska hit him again.

  Tito leaned around to make eye contact with Dakota. “Nice tits, girl.”

  “Thanks,” she muttered with a smile, knowing he only said it to tweak her brother.

  “Stop that!” Nebraska hit him again. “She’s my sister. That’s like, really uncomfortable.”

  She glanced at him. “Oh, like me hearing Gina talk to you wasn’t just as bad. And you’re really going to… do stuff with her later. Tito’s just messing around.”

  “‘Do stuff?’ Geez, Kota stop treating me like I’m twelve.”

  “As soon as you stop living like you are.” She squeezed his arm.

  “Oh, shit. Here it comes.” Tito shook his head. “Get a job, apartment, girl, have kids, etc. You didn’t tell me your big sis was part of the routine.”

  “I’m not ‘part of the routine.’ I just don’t want my little brother to get himself killed.”

  “I love you too, sis.” Nebraska patted her on the back, a little too hard.

  She waited there in the cargo box while Nebraska, Tito, and Gina ran off. Eight minutes later, a new instance of a softphone client on her laptop rang with an incoming call.

  “Hola, tengo un conejo muy esponjoso,” said Dakota.

  Gina’s voice came over the line with uncontrolled laughter.

  “¿Tu conejo es esponjoso?” asked Dakota. “Lamento que tu conejo no sea esponjoso.”

  Gina laughed harder.

  The phone crackled. “Hey, what are you saying?” asked Tito.

  “Oh, nothing. Just nonsense.” Dakota grinned. “You guys there?”

  “Yeah,” said Tito. “What are we looking for?”

  “One sec.”

  She ran the ATM diagnostics client she’d downloaded while waiting for them to get in position. After plugging in the IP address of the machine at their location, she clicked to connect. The progress wheel spun for a few seconds, and miraculously, it worked. She snickered to herself, muttered, “Ka-ching,” and clicked the button to test the cash dispenser.

  “Whoa,” yelled Tito. “This thing just exploded.”

  “Stay calm, stay calm,” rasped Dakota.

  “We good,” said Tito.

  Dakota closed the ATM diagnostic program and disconnected from her VPN connection to Norway. Then, she disconnected the VPN connection to Munich. The initial VPN link from the local network went to Moscow. With any luck, the bank’s IT people would blame Russian hackers and think the branch to Manhattan had been misdirection.

  “Dude, this is like four grand,” blurted Tito over the phone. “Big time.”

  “Bah,” said Da
kota. “The company blows more than that on balloons for stupid corporate events.”

  “Yo, Kota, thanks… This shit is serious, yo. You’re a lifesaver.”

  She sighed. “More like life support. You’re dying a slow death out here.”

  “It’s what I need to be doing.” Nebraska let out a long, slow sigh. “Someone’s gotta stand up to these people.”

  She stared at the black screen and primitive ASCII bar graphs fluctuating in time with sound levels on the softphone line. Being against ‘the corporate man’ was cool and all, as long as it didn’t involve her brother winding up dead somewhere in the street. Dakota hated getting older. Already, doubt crept in. Did that happen to everyone? Would she cave in and just flow with society like everyone else by twenty-five? Thirty? At what point had what Nebraska gotten himself involved with gone from being awesome to stupid and dangerous? It wasn’t as though the two-percenters would ever start caring about the poor. For that matter, short of an actual second revolutionary war, the people in the middle would never demand change. They’d keep right on arguing over political party, race, religion, women versus men, whatever the two-percenters could think of to keep isolating people with. While all the little guys bashed each other over bullshit, the elite sat on their hill and laughed, watching the ‘serfs’ battle like some socioeconomic MMA pay-per-view. Only here, the fighters paid to put on the show. She’d lost hope somewhere along the past few years that things would ever get better. The wealthy did far too good a job keeping the poor at each other’s throats, so they never looked up at the steady drizzle of bird shit falling from on high.

  “The best we can hope for is a wide enough umbrella,” said Dakota, her voice weak.

  “Huh?” asked Nebraska.

  She bowed her head and sighed. “Nothing. I’m just tired. Look, I need to get home.”

  “No probs. We’ll drop you off.”

  A half-chuckle slipped out past her wistful smile. “All right.”

  The Feral

  13

  Nebraska had tried to give her $500 of the haul from the ATM, but she declined since he needed it more. He wouldn’t back down, and she eventually settled on accepting $300. Concerned that the bank might somehow trace the bills’ serial numbers, she insisted that he stop at a handful of shady check cashing places to get money orders in varying amounts before cashing them elsewhere. Better to dump the bills before the bank noticed them missing and started hunting.