An Armageddon Duology (10 page)

“
N
o fucking
way
, man.”

Two young men sat in the middle of a nearly empty warehouse, a dense clustering of high-tech equipment forming an isolated island in the middle of the space. Three to four rows of nested black towers formed a maze around them, the cabinets housing shelf upon shelf of computer banks. A thick series of cables and power cords snaked across the dusty cement floor like an obscene vasculature bringing nutrients to a gestating embryo. In the center of the maze was a set of tables holding five or six large flat screen monitors.

“No way, Chen.”

The contrasting pair sat in front of the monitors, typing on keyboards, staring at a scrolling data stream. Chen was dressed in fatigues, close-cropped hair topping off a thin and angular frame, a tight tank-top revealing tattoos painted across his arms and back. He sat upright, tense, tapping the screen in front of him.

“I’m not shitting you, Dave, these are
his
accounts! Offshore, unregulated. It took me this whole week to get to them.”

Dave swept his long, unruly hair out of his face, a tangled mass of brown and blond, greasy and unwashed. His general appearance was slovenly, and he slouched forward gazing at the screen. He shook his head in disbelief.

“Can’t believe Fawkes left a security hole.”

“Well, he’s not running the bank servers, now is he?” said Chen, his voice defiant.

“Five hundred million? I mean,
what the fuck?
”

Chen shook his head. “I dunno, man. Something’s up with this. Something really not cool.”

“Yeah, how does Fawkes get half a billion dollars? You think it’s related to all this shit going down?”

“Look at the withdrawals!” Chen scrolled through the banking records. “It’s like five million here, ten million here. Restore Our Future. American Crossroads. Strong America Now.”

“Sounds like student council assholes,” Dave said, upturning a bag of chips into his mouth, his words garbled.

“They’re conservative SuperPacs, you fuck.”

“SuperPacs?”

Chen rolled his eyes. “You’re such a fucking pothead, Dave.”

“Amen and praise Jesus, you bet!” said Dave, smiling.

“Whatever. Look, there are transfers to Europe, China, India. It’s like he’s some multinational! These transfers are totally laundered. No transaction codes, no IDs, nothing!”

“Ain’t no money for nothing, dude.”

Chen nodded. “Something is
really
not cool here.”

A loud scraping noise startled the pair. They spun in their chairs and looked behind them, through an opening in the maze of the server farm. The large door of the warehouse had been yanked open, and three men walked into the cavernous space. In the middle was a young man, thin, nearly gaunt, dressed casually in a black T-shirt and jeans. His short-cropped black hair and pencil-thin goatee were offset by a pair of shaded smart glasses. He constantly fiddled with a smartphone affixed to his belt. Flanking him on either side were two much larger, muscled men. They wore nondescript business attire, their eyes hidden behind black sunglasses. Their expressions were indecipherable.

“Shit,” said Chen under his breath, spinning slightly to position his hand over the keyboard and enter several strokes. The windows on the screen disappeared. He turned back quickly to the approaching men as they neared. The three stopped a few feet in front of the hacker pair, silence lingering for several moments.

“Yo, Fawkes!” said Dave awkwardly. “What’s this? Fucking Terminator Ten?” His smiled floundered against the stony gazes of the three men.

Hands continuously tapping the smartphone, Fawkes appeared to stare straight ahead at something outside the room. “You were always such a fucking waste, Dave. You could’ve been the best black hat to ever crawl out of 4chan. You know, when that shit-hole was actually worth something.”

Dave flipped him the bird. “Up yours. I still am.”

Fawkes ignored him. “Chen. It’s too bad you had to be so curious. Killed a lot of cats. I thought you’d be more grateful after I gifted you this little playground.”

Chen licked his lips, glancing between Fawkes and the two men on his sides. “What’s up, Fawkes? We’re just hanging.”

Fawkes finally took off his glasses, his gray eyes burning into Chen. “I’ve had a tick on you for weeks, Chen. I know you’ve been poking around the offshore accounts.”

Chen sat utterly still. The large room was silent except for the constant hum of the server farm around them. Dave broke the eerie stillness.

“So the fuck what, man? It’s not like you haven’t hacked your way through a hundred accounts.”

“But those are
my
accounts, Dave. Accounts that are too important to be messed with. Or for anyone to know about.”

“Fawkes, what’s going on?” asked Chen, his face grave. “Hundreds of millions? What are you up to? What’s with the bodyguards?”

Fawkes laughed. “You stupid fucks still don’t get it. You actually think a hundred million is a lot! Try seven-hundred
trillion
—that’s the size of the derivative market. Did you know that? And it’s
all
virtual money.” He gestured vaguely to the walls of computers around them. “It doesn’t exist except inside investment bank computers and people’s very active imaginations. When things are bytes in compiled data structures, they are
meant
to be hacked. It’s fucking righteous deeds.” He laughed. “I’ve got
trillions
of dollars, you clueless ass. Those accounts you stumbled on were early, poorly secured penetration tests.”

Chen blinked. “Trillions? That’s not possible. What’s the game, Fawkes? This doesn’t make sense. We were against all this stuff!”

Fawkes fit his glasses back on, his voice growing slightly distanced. “I don’t have the time to explain to you losers. You never had the balls, Chen. None of you did. We hacked our way to the truth, but it didn’t set us free. We found out their dirty little secrets, and all of you panicked.
Pissed your fucking pants!
You wouldn’t dare do what had to be done. You hit
MasterCard
or outed bad cops.”

Dave and Chen looked at each other anxiously. Chen spoke again. “What has to be done?”

Fawkes began fiddling with his smartphone, staring off into space. With his other hand, he lifted a black and white object, a tight string hanging off the back. Placing it on his head, he pulled downward, the elastic string tightening around the back of his head, the object fitting tightly over his face: a mask of a smirking man stared back at them.

“What the fuck?” whispered Dave.

Fawkes motioned toward the two men beside him, who nodded. His voice was muffled. “Core dump, bros. The system software is too corrupted. Time for a reboot.” He turned his back on them and began to walk away.

Chen shifted nervously in his chair as the large forms of the bodyguards approached the two hackers. “My God, it
is
you! All of this!” His voice rose dramatically in pitch. “Are you insane? Do you understand what will happen?” Silence. “That’s not what we were about! No one reboots the fucking world!”

Fawkes stopped and sighed, his fiddling paused. The mask turned back toward them. “I do. And nothing is going to get in the way of that, not even Anonymous.
I’m
Anonymous now—what you all should have been.” He laughed. “You’d be amazed what you can do with a trillion dollars.”

Fawkes resumed his distracted gait and headed for the exit. The bodyguards who had entered with him reached into their jackets and removed pistols. Bulging suppressors were attached to the ends.

“Ah, man, no way, no way, no way! This isn’t happening!” cried Dave, his eyes large. He stood up trembling in his chair, looking around the wall of computer cabinets hemming them in. Chen didn’t move, but simply closed his eyes.

A sudden scream ripped through the warehouse, punctuated by a series of sharp spits. The following silence was disrupted only by the echoing clap of shoes on hard concrete.

C
BD
: And so this was the first hard evidence that drones were being used?

MR. RIDEOUT: Right. But we all believed it was drones from the start. Nothing else fit.

[
R
EDACTED
]: And yet your division, led by Savas, still refused to share this information with other FBI divisions and national agencies.

MR. RIDEOUT: Refused? We didn't refuse anything. This was all unfolding in real time. Do you understand how that works? We'd barely get a chance to breathe before the next shock wave hit. We had barely just put this together. And the evidence wasn't going to win any court cases. I'm sure John would have been happy to share more. In fact that's what we did!

CBD: When he contacted NSA?

MR. RIDEOUT: Exactly. Angel made a breakthrough.

[
R
EDACTED
]: This is when Lightfoote broke numerous cybercrimes laws and released dangerous viral codes into the internet?

Mr. RIDEOUT: Worms. They were worms. Yeah, damn. She sure as hell did. And it worked! But the damned NSA just blew us off, right when the whole thing went to shit.

I
t was past midnight
, and the basement at the FBI building was staffed only by three people. Two women and a man hunched over monitors as the steady buzz of computer servers churned around them. The bald woman stared across at the other two, her expression grave.

“Well, John, there was something about ‘explicit permission to go full madwoman.’”

“I didn’t know you were going to turn everything back on us!”

“It’s a logical byproduct of the search algorithms.”

Cohen placed her hand on Savas’ shoulder and yawned. “Can we just have one night without another crisis?”

Lightfoote stood up, a short tank exposing her midriff and rows of chiseled abdominal muscles. She walked over to the banks of servers and ran her hands over them like a nurse would a sick child.

“That meeting at the NYU computer science department spooked me. They weren’t coming clean with how bad things were, and what was said was bad enough. I knew then we couldn’t trust any of the other agencies to handle this. Worst of all was the NSA. They know the most and share the least.” She patted the metal shelving holding the individual units of the server farm. “So, assuming the worst, I let loose some worms of my own.”

“What?” said Savas, his eyes wide.

She turned her green eyes toward them. “
Full
madwoman, remember?”

“Yeah, breaking Federal law?”

“Well, that’s all not going to matter much longer anyway if we don’t get this under control soon.”

Savas swiveled in his chair to face Lightfoote. “Angel, what are you talking about?”

“My little wigglies reported back. It’s
everywhere
, John. Gone fucking viral is the phrase. All my babies,” she leaned her head against the machines, “they’re all infected. We’re infected—FBI is infected.”

“Damn.” Savas rubbed his temples. “Okay, so what—”

“The whole goddamned world is infected! This thing has simultaneously exploited every known security whole in the underlying operating systems. It’s like a MIRV missile for the internet with multiple warheads. Each one hits something, somewhere, in every system. And that’s all it needs. One weakness. Then the worm is in.”

Cohen whispered softly. “What is it doing?”

“Nothing yet. Nothing active. Or, whatever it’s done was done before we began monitoring it and it has covered its tracks. There’s a bunch of encrypted code that comes along with the thing in every infestation. That’s got to be the heart of it. Whatever it’s up to, I’d bet it’s contained there.”

“Can you get into it?” asked Cohen.

“Not yet. But I’m worried that when I do, it won’t be straightforward. Whoever did this has made an attack that is sophisticated beyond anything the internet has ever seen. The code isn’t complete or standardized.”

“I don’t understand,” said Savas.

“Those encrypted modules? They’re really diverse. Not one the same size on each system. I think it’s distributed. It’s like a P2P system where pieces of the file to be shared are stored all over the internet in different places. When you download your pirated film, the software at the end assembles a composite file from hundreds, sometimes thousands of independent file elements.
That’s
what’s going on here. The worm has spread to tens of thousands, probably millions of computers. Each infection is one of a large set of different worms—let's call them strains like for viruses. Each strain carries a different piece of the code.”

“Then if we can kill some of the strains, it can’t put the full program back together and we stop it?” asked Savas.

Cohen shook her head. “If I understand this, then each strain will have thousands of copies of itself all around the world. We’d have to hunt every one of them down.”

Lightfoote nodded. “Exactly. It’s too distributed. It’s like having a million backups on different servers where literally every computer is a potential backup system once infected. We’ll never stop it that way.”

“Then how?” asked Savas.

Lightfoote shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Okay, then what does that code do when assembled?”

“I don’t know that either. I haven’t cracked any of the encryptions, and there are already hundreds of different packages I’ve found with the worms. We need the NSA computers to be working full time on this.”

“You think they know?”

“Yes. Definitely. They’re poking around infected systems, just like I did. So many computers are poorly secured, it’s easy to get into them and find things out. They
have
to know by now, or they shouldn’t have the keys to their computer arsenal.”

Savas stood up. “Then it’s about damn time they opened up and worked with us. Tomorrow morning we’ll get this moving.”

Cohen grabbed his arm. “Are you sure about that? I think you might be overestimating the influence the FBI has on the NSA. They’re so frighteningly close to Big Brother, we’re not going to have much pull.”

Lightfoote nodded. “And they aren’t going to look at my little enterprise as anything remotely useful compared to the fleet of processors they have. From a certain perspective, they’re right.”

“So, what then? We wait here helplessly for the NSA to formulate a cure and perhaps share it with us? If this thing shuts us down, we’re crippled to investigate the killings and abductions, anything at all really. We can’t remain that vulnerable!”

“Try the NSA, John,” said Cohen, walking up to Lightfoote. “Meanwhile, I suggest that you leave the leash off Angel. Don’t rescind your madwoman decree.” Cohen took Lightfoote’s shoulders in her hands, squaring up to face her. “Angel, why don’t you see what you can do about this thing. Assume we’re on our own. Assume it’s a matter of life and death.”

Savas nodded. Lightfoote stared between them and then back at her server.

“Okay. But be careful what you ask for.”