Wormhole (43 page)

Mark moved over to the window, glancing down the empty driveway, his mind on Jennifer’s words. “Why hasn’t the US government already stepped down hard on the NPA?”

“Things were getting out of hand even before we got ourselves captured. The government’s been able to establish good security in the Northeast corridor and in the major metropolitan areas, except for Detroit, which is pretty much a no-man’s-land. Most of the rest of the country is hit or miss. Some areas are well organized. Others not so much. It’s making it hard to get food and supplies around. The NPA’s a minor annoyance.”

“The chaos should help us.”

“Once we get out of the Northeast corridor,” said Heather.

“Our best bet seems to be the Seneca Nation in western New York. They’re a large, well-funded tribe that generates over a billion dollars a year from their casinos and retail operations. Heavy NPA ties.”

“We’re going to need some funds and IDs.”

“Taken care of. I’ve arranged for delivery of three of the identities we prepared in Bolivia. Passports and driver’s licenses will be express-mailed tomorrow. We just have to get to the Mail Boxes Etc. in Harrisburg, where I’ve set up mailboxes in those names. We also have bank accounts at Bank of America, Citibank, and Chase. I’ve transferred sufficient funds for our near-term needs. Good news. Our new selves have excellent credit histories.”

Jennifer reached over and grabbed a stack of pages from the printer, passing them to Mark and Heather.

“Here’s your new backgrounds. Take a second to scan them. You two can pack up the laptop. By the way, I replaced our digital
fingerprints and DNA records in the federal databases with those of known criminals.”

Heather nodded. “We need this to look like a routine break-in. I’ll bag the jewelry on our way out. Then we’re going to need a car.”

“They’ll wonder about the clothes.”

“It won’t matter. By the time they figure it out we’ll be long gone.”

Mark glanced at the clock, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Eleven twenty-four a.m. As good a time to start the rest of their lives as any. “OK. Let’s do it.”

The US Food Service plant in Severn, Maryland, was a big operation, the main building really formed from two large buildings whose northwest corners connected. The plant had been built to facilitate big-rig loading and unloading, with employee parking on two sides, the northeastern lot surrounded by trees. It was exactly the kind of place Heather had been looking for. Early afternoon meant the parking lot was full of people back from lunch for the afternoon shift, too early for people to be thinking about leaving.

Jennifer stepped from the northern tree line, seated herself on the curb, and popped open the stolen laptop, waiting fifteen seconds as it awoke from sleep mode. As Mark and Heather kept watch, she initiated the subspace receiver-transmitter SRT scan. With the SRT, she didn’t need any back doors or exploits such as her worm had exposed. Jennifer limited the search radius to one
hundred meters, the grid filling with a list of programmable systems sorted by distance, the closest at the top.

People thought of cars as mechanical devices, and in the old days they had been. Now they were mobile computing platforms, brimming with programmable electronics. And anything that was programmable was reprogrammable. Most of these systems could be hacked by amateurs with inexpensive wireless interfaces. All of them were vulnerable to Jennifer, Mark, or Heather, armed with an SRT and a computing device.

The white Ford Fusion five parking spaces to Jennifer’s right gave a short squawk and blinked its lights.

“Looks like our ride is ready,” Mark said, leading the way.

“You drive,” said Heather. “Jen, you and the laptop get the backseat. I’ll take shotgun.”

Mark opened the driver’s door, slid inside, and pressed the
START
button.

“I-95 north?”

“No,” said Heather. “I want to stay on surface streets, at least until we’re north of Baltimore. You ready, Jen?”

Jennifer closed the door and leaned her back against it, positioning the laptop in her lap. “Give me a minute to bring up the traffic light grid and traffic cameras. Once I’ve completed the initial sort, it’ll be easy to re-sort as we move. This time of day I should be able to arrange for a delay-free trip.”

As she began to type, Jennifer felt her hands start to shake, tremors that migrated up into her arms and shoulders.

“Jen, you OK?” Heather reached into the back to place a hand on her leg.

Focusing her will, Jennifer damped down the shakes. They were still there, just not so obvious.

“Just coming off the drugs. Don’t worry. Nothing I can’t handle.”

Mark swung the car out of the lot and north onto Telegraph Road.

“If you need me to pull over or anything, let me know.”

“I’ll be fine.”

Heather shook her head. “Check the local police dispatcher logs.”

“Working on it.” Jennifer opened another window on her display. “Shit! We’ve got a problem.”

“What?”

“Bad luck. Our car’s owner must have seen us leave the lot and called the police. We’ve got a cruiser a half mile north, coming south on Telegraph.”

“Can you change the report?”

“Give me a minute,” Jen said.

Feeling Heather’s eyes on her, she scanned the police database for the record she wanted. Finding it, she typed in a few modifications, saved it, and fired off an update that would be picked up on every police-vehicle-mounted computer in the area.

“OK. Stolen car is now a red Ford Fiesta heading east on Donaldson Avenue, Virginia license plate EAN-7301, occupants two Latino males.”

“Our cop?”

“Still heading south on Telegraph...wait. He’s making a U-turn.”

“After he turns east on Donaldson, give him some engine trouble.”

Jennifer smiled. “He’s not driving the newest model on the Glen Burnie police force, but it’s got an electronic ignition system. Won’t be a problem.”

Heather settled back in the passenger seat, turning her attention to the road ahead. “Mark, once we pass Donaldson, take Aviation, then I-195 to the BWI parkway. I want to swap cars
downtown. Then we’ll get up on I-83 to Harrisburg. What’s our hotel, Jen?”

“Nothing but the best. Motel Six on Briarsdale Road. In the morning we can swing by the Mail Boxes Etc. and pick up our new IDs. Then we’re going to need some new clothes.”

Mark nodded. “Sounds good.”

Jennifer felt a new round of shivers crawl beneath her skin, and this time she didn’t even try to contain them. She could tell Heather noticed, but to her credit Heather offered no unwanted assistance.

Jennifer knew she was in for a fight with her body’s need for heroin. For her, the NSA torture chamber was just getting warmed up.

Eileen Wu’s eyes hurt, but she didn’t feel tired. She felt like a hunting dog on the scent of a big cat. A really big cat.

She’d sensed something was wrong with the whole Al Qaeda escape scenario the moment she’d noticed that the two USB dongles had been taken from her lab. Those two missing USB devices screamed Jack Gregory’s name. But why take only the dongles? Nothing about them had stood out as special, so how special were they?

Eileen looked forward to reviewing all the recorded data from when she’d first turned on the Gregory laptop, but right now she was hot on the trail of the person or persons who had taken down all the sophisticated security systems within the Ice House.

In Eileen’s mind, it helped to put a face on her opponent. Maybe it was a bit of reverse sexism, but the face that came to her
was a woman’s face, a face very much like her own. An avenging Valkyrie.

Whoever the Valkyrie was, she’d done more than cause the Ice House systems to malfunction. She’d used them as weapons to blind, confuse, even kill her enemies. Eileen had never seen anything like the sophistication of this hack. Even the legendary Stuxnet worm paled in comparison. While that worm had been targeted at very specific systems, this one had compromised every electronic system in the building, from cell phones and tablets to high-end computing systems, exploiting security holes across a wide variety of operating systems. The most impressive thing about this new worm was its ability to genetically adapt and hide itself.

Just when Eileen thought she’d clearly identified the worm’s unique signature, she’d come back to a machine she’d found it on an hour earlier and discovered that it was gone. Not really gone, just hidden in plain sight. She’d wiped an infected computer’s hard drive, only to discover that the worm restored itself to a different part of the drive later, having managed to write its kernel into a programmable keyboard’s random-access memory.

The worm was amazingly aggressive, migrating through any connection to writeable memory. It loved flash memory, as well as anything that let it save off a version of itself.

The time line confused her. So did the infection vector. Clearly the infection had been present for some time prior to the attack. And as adept as the worm was at spreading and hiding itself, this was a TEMPEST facility. Even if she assumed that someone had illegally carried in an infected flash drive or DVD, the worm’s propagation should have been spotty, with areas of high concentration and others that were infection-free. That wasn’t the case here.

It was as if the worm had simultaneously penetrated the entire facility, like a burst of high-energy radiation. One of the worm’s behaviors had brought it to Eileen’s attention. Whenever it found an Internet-capable system, it opened a telnet port, then hid that port from standard sys-admin tools. Eileen had found it with one of her own special security tools, a program that created its own port map in addition to sniffing all Internet protocol packets.

Eileen identified other back doors, but she felt pretty sure the telnet port had been the door the Valkyrie had used to take over the Ice House. The cameras had gone down first, followed by the facility lights. Then all electronically controlled locks were opened, initiating the prisoner escape. All of those first events had been initiated over an internal Wi-Fi link. Eileen hadn’t yet traced the source, but it was only a matter of time.

Of greater interest was the security monitoring room from which the following attacks had come. Someone had killed the two guards with a series of expertly placed, powerful blows. The subsequent events—halon gassing of the primary control room, diversion of camera video to the Valkyrie’s station, initiation of selected fire suppression systems, and selective manipulation of building lockdown mechanisms—were all indicators that pointed to an infiltrator, possibly disguised as a guard. But the fake message redirecting the security teams to defend the building perimeter had been the key. That had been a woman’s voice, and it had been routed over the public address system from the security station laptop. But last night’s personnel logs showed no female staff on the night shift.

That left the two women in the facility at the time of the attack, Heather McFarland and Jennifer Smythe, both captured at Jack Gregory’s Bolivian compound. They and Mark Smythe were people who had an interest in the captured laptops, although Eileen was mystified by how they had known where to look for
them on their way out. And she was pretty sure that they’d made it out alive; at least the medical examiner hadn’t identified their bodies.

Eileen wasn’t an expert on Jack Gregory’s tactics, but the confusion caused by the Fort Meade bombings fit what she imagined his profile to be. Leaning back in her chair, stretching her arms above her head, she cracked her knuckles. She’d leave that to Levi and his team. Right now she had a lot more work to do if she was going to be fully prepared for General Wilson’s eight a.m. meeting. Aside from who had done it, he was going to want to know how they had gotten the worm into every system in the Ice House and how she was going to purge it, two questions Eileen didn’t yet know the answer to.

Eileen wanted those answers.