The Paladin

by David Ignatius

  Bogdanovich was waiting in his office. Dunne had called ahead and said he had a big problem and needed help urgently. It was past five-thirty when Dunne arrived, and most of the special agents and technicians had left for the day. Bogdanovich badged him past security and led him upstairs to his corner office, glinting with the light of the low, fierce sun above the grand span of the Liberty Bridge.

  “I need help, Rick,” said Dunne. “I’ve got a red-hot mess on my hands.”

  “I hear that someone tore up your office, and your home, too.”

  “Who told you?”

  “The Allegheny County Police Department. They know we’re friends. They seem to think it’s your fault.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Obviously. But what’s going on? Otherwise I can’t help you. No way. I’ll get busted.”

  “Crazy story. If I tell you all of it, you won’t believe me.”

  “Tell me part of it, then.”

  Dunne scratched his red beard. He hadn’t shaved in nearly a week.

  “You know how weird shit sometimes happens that goes off the books. The ‘Executive Series’ traffic from NSA suddenly isn’t available on a particular subject, or the distribution list gets cut down to a few people? Does that ever happen in the Bureau?”

  “Sure,” answered the FBI man. “Lots of times. When something is hot, or it’s bad news for the big shots, they put it in a separate compartment so that most people won’t know about it. Or they just kill it off in cable traffic.”

  “But ask yourself: How does one of these weird busted operations get started? Somebody is sent on an assignment, and they find out something important, and the big shots say: Holy shit! This is important. We want a piece of this action. And then the games begin.”

  “Sorry, Mike, I’m not following you.”

  “You’re not supposed to. Listen, do you believe in government conspiracies?”

  “Not usually. Most government agencies can’t do simple things right. How could they pull off something really complicated?”

  “I used to think the same way. But not anymore. Because I’m caught in one.”

  Bogdanovich shrugged. “You’re not telling me anything useful here, Mike. What’s the problem? Who’s chasing you? What’s so important that people took apart your home and office trying to find out what it is? Level with me. Otherwise, this is bullshit.”

  Dunne looked at his friend, smart, solid, trustworthy. Would he understand? Dunne was about to speak, but then he shook his head.

  “You wouldn’t believe me. You’d think I was nuts, and then I’d lose the last friend I have. Let me work this alone a little while longer, until I have some pieces that fit together in a way that I can explain.”

  “But you’re in danger, Mike. Someone is coming after you. You know something that can blow them up, and they’re ready to take you down to stop you. You’re not exercising good judgment here. You need to trust people.”

  Dunne shook his head. “I did that once before.”

  Dunne looked out the window toward Pittsburgh. A fallen empire. Jason Howe was right about that, at least. He turned back to Bogdanovich.

  “I need someplace to hide for a few days. A safe house. Someplace where you stash your snitches and informants. Just a few days. And some documentation, like you’d give to one of your people if they were in trouble. Just a few days. Then I’ll be cool.”

  “Why the hell should I do that, man?”

  “Because I asked you. That’s the main reason.”

  “I need another reason.”

  “We’ve known each other for, what, fifteen years. Have I ever told you a lie?”

  “Nope. That’s why we’re friends.”

  “Okay. Something terrible is going to happen unless I can stop it. People have built some wicked cyber tools. They can take down financial markets, create panic, ruin the lives of ordinary folks. If we miss this, people will be asking for years why we didn’t do anything.”

  “If it’s that big a deal, let the government handle it.”

  “I’m trying to tell you, Rick: ‘The government’ is part of the problem. You need to give me a little space, to figure some things out. Then it’s all yours, and I promise, it will be the biggest case of your career.”

  “I liked the first reason better.”

  In the silence, they both watched a coal barge move slowly down the Monongahela. There weren’t many of those left. The old ways of doing things were nearly obsolete, but not quite. Bogdanovich leaned toward his friend.

  “Let’s just say you are a confidential source. You’re in danger, obviously, given the attacks on your home and office. We’re just doing what we’d do for any source who was at risk. No more, no less.”

  * * *

  Bogdanovich picked up the bulky phone that he used for talking about classified information. He called his colleague Janelle Martin, who was the special agent in charge of the FBI field office for Pittsburgh, located in a plain, flat, low-rise building across the river.

  “I’m sending over an informant,” he said. “I’ve got all the paperwork here. He’s part of a dark-web undercover operation we’re running. He needs papers. Fake ID, Social Security number, credit cards, new phone, all that stuff, billable to us. We need to do it quick, like today, so he doesn’t get burned.”

  Bogdanovich paused, while SAC Martin asked several bureaucratic questions and otherwise covered her ass so that she wouldn’t get in legal trouble if something went wrong with this operation, and then came back.

  “He’s a big guy, red hair. Scotch-Irish, I’m guessing. Use whatever cover name you like. He needs a safe house, too, an address that will match his ID. You got some apartments you aren’t using?”

  Martin scrolled through her inventory and reported back to Bogdanovich. He put his hand over the phone and spoke to Dunne.

  “You can stay here in Pittsburgh, or in York, or in Erie. What do you like?”

  “I like Erie,” said Dunne. “By the lake. My dad took his boat up there sometimes.”

  “Erie,” Bogdanovich told his colleague. “I’m sending this guy over right now. He needs new tags for his car, too, I guess. Don’t ask questions. I’ve got the file here. Don’t worry about it.”

  He paused a moment while Martin ran her name search, and then said, “Okay,” and rose to walk Dunne to the door.

  “Your new name is Andy Maguire. Don’t do anything stupid, because this time it’s on me. If you fuck up again, you will go back to prison, and people in the joint may discover that you were an FBI informer. Not nice. Hear me?”

  “Understood. Thanks for trusting me. You won’t be sorry.”

  Bogdanovich shook Dunne’s hand and sent him off to Neverland.

  38 Brooklyn, New York – June 2018

  Jacob Rosenberg was at his computer, listening to the Comet Is Coming on his headphones, when his phone lit up with a text message from his friend and sometime mentor Jason Howe.

  Rosenberg didn’t look at the text from Howe right away, or any of the other messages that had backed up on his phone. He had a project to finish for Lorenzo Ricci, and it was already tomorrow in Italy. So he and his two apprentice geeks kept tending the graphics-processing units racked on the warehouse floor, trying to finish their almost-real video before midnight. The lights from the blade servers blinked in the darkened laboratory like distant stars.

  Rosenberg had softened since his time in Urbino. He still had a goatee, but it was better trimmed now, and he’d stopped shaving his head, so that he had a neat cowl of black hair that he parted and combed every morning, like a normal person. He’d put on a little weight, too, eating and drinking in the restaurants and bars of Brooklyn. Life was about money now, not agitprop, and Rosenberg was settling down. He’d gotten a girl pregnant three months ago and, at first, he didn’t tell her to abort the baby.

  The laboratory was in a small warehouse in Williamsburg, on a street where every building was painted in fluorescent colors so that s
trolling outdoors was like walking through the pages of a comic book. Rosenberg’s apartment was farther west in Brooklyn Heights, overlooking the bridge and the East River, near the building where Lorenzo had bought the penthouse flat. It was all too easy. Rosenberg was becoming just another computer criminal, as opposed to what he had imagined for himself several years earlier, when Jason had recruited him into the digital army.

  Ricci had been specific about this new project: He wanted a piece of video that would cause a sudden, sharp fall in the share price of a company called Humford Holdings. He explained the basic story line to Rosenberg: The company was vulnerable. Short sellers believed it was overvalued because of the inflated reputation of Howard Schubert, its chief executive officer. Schubert had assembled a portfolio of companies that looked ordinary enough when you examined them individually, but as part of Humford Holdings they seemed to sparkle with fairy dust. If the market believed that Schubert was about to resign, reasoned Ricci, then the company’s stock would be crushed.

  “Make people believe that Schubert is quitting,” Lorenzo said. “I don’t care how you do that.”

  Rosenberg said he would make it so. At Stanford years before, he had told friends he wanted to be a screenwriter and only later became a software engineer. When he created a piece of video, he liked to tell a story that had the arc of a plot and conveyed a lesson beyond its impact on financial markets. That was why Ricci kept promoting him: He wasn’t just a computer geek, he was an artist; he created false narratives that were believable.

  Rosenberg toyed with various plotlines. Schubert was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Schubert had been sued for sexual harassment by a former employee. Schubert’s accounting firm had found irregularities and resigned from the account.

  But as Rosenberg worked on the problem, the answer become obvious: Schubert was dying. He started tuning his network to create the evidence of this imagined fact so that it would appear to be a real fact. In his world, “real” was a term of art.

  In the racks of servers arrayed beyond Rosenberg’s desk lived the neural network he had been training so diligently these last weeks. He had started with a video template: a composite face of a middle-aged man with a facial structure and physical attributes similar to Schubert’s. Then he added video of the actual Schubert, gathered by members of Lorenzo’s team, and fed the clips into the neural net to create a believable face and voice for the fake CEO he was creating in the laboratory.

  Rosenberg and his team shaped a first draft of their scripted drama. It was designed as a cell phone video, which would appear to have been shot secretly at a briefing given by the imaginary Schubert to several of his most senior managers. In the thirty seconds of video, a hoarse-voiced Schubert would explain to this intimate group that he would be having surgery in a week for stage four bladder cancer. The managers’ faces wouldn’t be visible as they heard this grim news, only Schubert’s.

  The cell phone camera would show him, full-face, pronouncing his own death sentence.

  Then the computational work had started, and it continued to this moment. A first neural network created the imaginary death speech for Howard Schubert, simulating his face and voice. Then a second neural network detected small flaws in the simulation that made it less than perfectly believable: the shadow on Schubert’s nose that didn’t match the direction of the lighting; the slightly off-tone pitch of his voice when he began with the words “I have some bad news”; the momentary mismatch of his mouth with his voice.

  Fixed. Fixed. Fixed. The first network corrected the flaws as soon as the second network detected them. It was like Darwin’s natural selection; in the digital test bed, each dysfunctional error was erased; only the strongest, the most believable, survived. Rosenberg had a magisterial feeling as he watched the play of lights on the machines arrayed in the stack, their chips and processors forming a net that was so much like consciousness that it was consciousness. Fake; detect; fake; detect.

  As Rosenberg watched the latest iteration of his generative adversarial network, he told his assistants: Our Howard Schubert is alive; he’s real; he’s dying of cancer. Then he sent it back for another round of create and re-create, to make it still more perfect.

  The delivery system needed to be as believable as the image itself. The video would be loaded in a cell phone, and the phone would be shared, for a fee, with a hedge fund that had a big position in Humford Holdings stock. Obtained from a friend; can’t say where; a word to the wise; time to push the button. And in the moment the sell order was executed, Rosenberg’s performance – no, his art – would be complete. It wouldn’t prompt a standing ovation, but something more powerful: a cascade of hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps billions, as positions were unwound.

  * * *

  Rosenberg finished his last retake of the Schubert video just after midnight, a little later than he’d planned. The techs ordered cars from Uber and Lyft and said weary goodbyes, and finally Rosenberg was alone in his office at the far end of the warehouse and able to go through the messages that had been left on his phone.

  He had a half dozen texts in three different encrypted apps. The one he read first was the long message from Jason Howe, the uber-geek, the man who liked to call himself “Eric” in homage to a radical historian nobody had ever heard of, and who had disappeared monk-like to distant Taiwan. Jason claimed he had decided to work on chip design in Taipei because it wasn’t as boring as other things, but Rosenberg knew he had escaped to a safe harbor before one of the Italians convinced Ricci that he was a risk no longer worth taking.

  “Take me with you,” Rosenberg had said when Jason first told him of the Taiwan plan, and he had half meant it. But now the money was so sweet, and it turned out that what people always said about how crime doesn’t pay wasn’t true.

  Rosenberg grasped his phone and clicked on the blue-and-white Signal icon. The message from Jason Howe was in a gray box, too long for one screen.

  J-Man. Core dump in Taiwan. Complete system crash. I’m in Palo Alto, living our origin story and over-caffeinating at ZombieRunner, but I need a serious favor. I want to come in from the cold, for real. I know Ricci and the fratelli probably think I’m a flake, especially after my hasty departure from Taipei. But I want to be part of the action when The Party goes down. Can I tuck myself in your suitcase? Seriously, I want to be there. Lots of stories to tell you, but they’re all in Chinese. You remember the Na’vi word for the neural connection when two creatures connect their queues in Pandora? It’s Tsaheylu. Your brother.

  Rosenberg thought about the request for a long minute, and then began with a simple two-word answer.

  I’m here.

  He told Jason to send details about when he would be arriving in New York, and he would take care of the rest.

  Rosenberg skimmed through his other messages: Ricci wanted coding for a new payload, using a zero-day exploit he had just acquired. Okay, tomorrow. The director of security in Milan advised that Jason Howe had left Taiwan, and to report any contact. Rosenberg just messaged: Okay. Let them do their own spying on employees.

  Finally, Rosenberg had three priority messages from Tom Goldman. The first reported that he had begun final staging of the operation at the data-recovery center in New Jersey; the second said he was awaiting word from the techs about the precise time when the heat sensors would crash; the final one reminded Rosenberg to have all necessary gear ready for Data-Save, at all times, pending final notice by phone.

  Rosenberg was tired. He found the flash drive that Goldman was so antsy about and put it in his pocket. Sometimes he walked back to Brooklyn Heights, but tonight after one a.m. it was sketchy in Williamsburg, with all the hookers and drag queens and pimps outside the bars, and he ordered a black car. When he got home, he had a shot of vodka, and then two more.

  * * *

  Very early the next morning, Rosenberg was awakened in his Brooklyn loft by a phone call from Goldman. The ring of his phone was insistent
. Rosenberg let it roll over to voice mail, but Goldman called again immediately.

  “I need you now in New Jersey,” he said. “Seriously. Now. It’s going down at Data-Save. How soon can you get here?”

  “Shit,” said Rosenberg. “What time is it?”

  “Five o’clock. The system will crash at seven-fifty. You go in at eight. We have less than three hours. Hustle.”

  “Remind me where you are.”

  “Whippany. It’s west of West Orange and north of Morristown, south of I-280. Tell me you remember.”

  “You drove last time. What’s the address?”

  “Put this in your phone. Nineteen-sixty Mt. Herman Avenue. It’s a big, fat warehouse filled with computers. Meet me at the McDonald’s across the street. I warn you: Lorenzo will not be happy if you’re late.”

  “I’ll be there. But, Tom, I don’t respond well to threats. Especially this early in the morning. They make me anxious. I don’t do my best work.”

  “Don’t be a pussy. You sound like Howe. Just bring the flash drive, please. Otherwise this is a waste of time.”

  Rosenberg sighed. “I’m not an idiot. I have the flash drive.” He pulled on his jeans and his black hoodie. He had promised Jason Howe back at Stanford that he would keep faith, no matter what.

  * * *

  Rosenberg arrived at the McDonald’s across from the data center at 7:23. He had to take a yellow cab, which cost more than two hundred dollars, because no Uber driver answered his call. He was grumpy all the way out on the interstate. Dealing with Tom Goldman reminded him that this was a dirty business covered by smooth talk. The best thing about computer code was that it was simple, just a string of zeros and ones.