Dr. Bert Mathews fastened the antistatic wrist strap around his right wrist, connecting the alligator clip at the other end of the wire to the metal frame that held the laptop, then sat down in the chair beside Eileen Wu, the nineteen-year-old Caltech prodigy known throughout the hacker community as Hex. Fine-boned and slender, the Amerasian teen wore her black hair boyishly short, highlighting the way her throat plunged down into the tight yellow cami that didn’t quite make it down to her ragged jeans.
Hardly appropriate work attire at the NSA, but for Eileen he’d made an exception. Besides, as far as Bert knew, she didn’t own any clothes but jeans and camis. The thing Bert found most startling about her appearance was her complete lack of tattoos or piercings, an indication of just how different Eileen was. Not goth. More like a Celtic high priestess of code.
It was hard to recognize the device on the lab table before her as one of the laptops captured at Jack Gregory’s Bolivian hideout. The case had been disassembled, the motherboard and components mounted into an instrumented metal frame. The laptop monitor had been removed, the wiring routed through a small black box and then to a large flat-panel display. A nest of thin colored wires had been attached to the motherboard, CPU, network cards, memory modules, hard drive, and video card, connecting them to a rack-mounted system to Eileen’s right.
“So, are we ready?” Dr. Mathews asked.
Eileen pressed the power button, waiting for several seconds for the standard Windows login screen to appear. Two user icons appeared, HAL and PickMe.
“Cute,” Eileen muttered. “This shouldn’t take long.”
Spinning her chair ninety degrees to the right, she shifted her attention to the bank of monitors and the keyboard attached to the rack of blade servers. As she entered the commands, Dr. Mathews watched the laptop display reboot to the BIOS screen, cycling to the boot device selection, changing the setting to Boot from USB Device.
Again the laptop rebooted, stopping again at the log-in screen. Eileen turned back to the laptop keyboard, selected the HAL icon, moved her cursor to the password edit box, and hit Enter. A thin smile tweaked the corners of her lips as the Windows desktop appeared.
“So now what?” Bert asked. Normally he would have a set of scripts running every step of the forensic data recovery. But he wanted Eileen to look through the system before he launched the standard scripts, just in case there were any unknown security protocols running on this system. After all, this was one of the Jack Gregory laptops, and the word from cartel intercepts about Jennifer Smythe indicated she might be nearly as talented a hacker as Hex.
“Give me a second. I want to see a list of processes and services running on this machine. We’re mirroring everything on the buses, registers, hard disk reads and writes, data passing through the TCP/IP stack to the network driver interfaces, and everything coming in or out of the NICs. If bits are flipping on this laptop we’re capturing them.”
“You’ve got Wi-Fi enabled?”
“And I’ve hooked the network interfaces up to our LAN. I want to see what data this thing tries to send, if any. Don’t worry, no signal can make it out of this room.”
“We’ve been penetrated before.”
“Those were standard TEMPEST cages. This room is solid steel. No electromagnetic signal is propagating through that. Certainly not from a laptop.”
For six hours Dr. Mathews watched as Eileen worked her way through the laptop, a stretch broken only for coffee and associated bathroom breaks. Despite the way his stomach rumbled, he refused to leave Eileen, and she showed no inclination to go anywhere. It appeared this was going to lead to another straightforward data dump, after which they could turn the encrypted data over to systems designed to crack that protection.
Suddenly Eileen shifted in her chair, rising up over the keyboard like a cougar crouched on a mountain ledge.
“That’s odd.”
“What?”
Eileen continued to work the keyboards, shifting back and forth between the blade rack and the laptop. Just as Bert decided she hadn’t heard him, Eileen pointed at the readout.
“There. We’ve got a significant amount of reads and writes happening across the TCP stack. I almost missed it because we’ve got nothing coming in or out on the wireless network hardware or through the Ethernet cards. But data is definitely coming and going between the network layer and the framing layer.”
“Loopback?”
“No. It has to be going to a custom network driver.”
“But if the driver’s not talking to the network cards or loopback, what’s it talking to?”
“The only other piece of hardware is the USB dongle.”
“Can you tell how long the TCP stack has been actively transmitting and receiving data?”
Eileen brought up another Linux xterm, rapidly entering a sequence of commands that launched a new program on one of the blade servers, filling one of the monitors. Framed data graphs filled most of the window and below these a thin blue time line slider extended across the screen. Dragging the glowing current-position widget slowly backward, Eileen watched the data graphs change. As it neared the beginning, Eileen paused, reversing it slightly. She brought up another display, this one a list of processes running at that point in time. She began stepping forward in thirty-second increments, stopped, reversed again, then froze.
“Damn it.”
Dr. Mathews didn’t like the tone of her voice. “Tell me.”
“It looks like some sort of timer process activated shortly after I logged in.”
“Timer? For what?”
“Well, I won’t know for sure until I spend a few more hours going through this data, but if I was guessing, which I am, I’d say we had a certain amount of time to do some sort of validation after log-in. One minute to be exact.”
“One minute?”
“Yeah. Because exactly one minute after the timer activated, it went away. That’s when the data started coming and going on the TCP stack.”
Dr. Mathews ran the fingers of his left hand through his graying hair. “OK. Let’s assume that there was some sort of second log-in we were supposed to do but didn’t. Why not just erase the hard drive?”
“That would be too obvious and to do a military-grade wipe would take way too long. We would have powered down the system, pulled the drive, and handed it over to our hardware guys to recover the data.”
Mathews knew all of this thoroughly, but he was rattled, thinking out loud. He shook his head. “It still doesn’t add up. While that system is messing around with its TCP stack, we’ve duplicated the entire hard drive and mirrored all the data transfers going on in the whole system. Plus, no traffic is going in or out through the network cards. Even if it had been, no signals could make it in or out of this room.”
Dr. Mathews rose from his chair to stand, chin in hand, behind Eileen Wu. “So what’s it doing?”
Eileen spun her chair to stare up at him, her clear black eyes unblinking.
“Beats the shit out of me.”
The secondary log-in timer began its countdown as Windows Explorer displayed the desktop, waiting for the Valid-User event to be posted. When, sixty seconds later, the event had failed to arrive, the timer posted another custom Windows event, this one triggering the Unauthorized-User callback.
On the motherboard, the subspace receiver-transmitter (SRT) came on line, commencing a scan for all computer networks within a one-kilometer radius. Its worm had an initial set of prioritized actions. Infiltrate. Replicate. Hide.
Only after the SRT had transferred the worm to sixteen separate systems did its state machine transition from Initial-Response-Mode to Local-Environment-Analysis-and-Optimization. In this mode it began building a prioritized list of networks and processors within the specified radius, assigning the highest priority to computer systems with the largest processor arrays. Within miliseconds, its attention focused on a system that temporarily shifted the SRT’s state into High Priority Target Mode.
Sampling the Internet protocol packets entering and leaving this new target, the SRT extracted a hostname.
Big-John.
President Jackson looked at the assembled war fighters and intelligence officials seated around the long table in the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center. Covering one of the Emergency Conference Room’s walls, six large-screen monitors displayed various maps of the United States. As the president stared up at the maps, he experienced a moment of Cold War déjà vu, half expecting to see Dr. Strangelove come wheeling around the table to give one of his stiff-armed Nazi salutes.
General McKittrick, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had just concluded the morning situation brief, which had gone about as President Jackson had expected. The situation was bad and would continue to worsen while the military consolidated its hold on key national assets. Aside from the isolated pockets where the US military had been deployed to maintain order, it was every man for himself out there. Worse than that, it was every gang for itself. In cities and towns across the country, where the police found themselves overwhelmed, they had hunkered down protecting key local facilities, waiting for the promised National Guard reinforcements. But National Guard troops were stretched too thin, assigned to protect key localities as designated by the national command authority.
Amid widespread looting and violence that made the president sick to his stomach to think about, armed citizens banded into local militias to protect their communities from roving gangs. Parts of the country with preexisting militia groups or strong NRA organizations had reacted quickly to establish local order, but these tended to be rural areas where gangs were less of a problem to begin with. And the militias were likely to present their own problems as the central government tried to reassert control over those areas. But even the militias had resorted to looting in order to procure additional firearms, ammunition, food, and supplies.
An alliance of Indian tribes from across the country had announced a new federation, issuing a declaration of independence and closing tribal borders. It was just one more thing that would have to be dealt with, but right now it was far down the president’s priority list. So many things needed to be done, but he had to focus, to prioritize.
Washington, DC, was calm, with armored vehicles deployed throughout the city, its streets patrolled by soldiers with orders to shoot looters or curfew violators on sight. All media outlets had been pressed into service, broadcasting the orders for citizens to remain off the streets until order had been reestablished.
Other military units had moved to secure power plants, information centers, port facilities, distribution centers, transportation hubs, and other key assets deemed critical to the future effort to restore regional food and fuel distribution, establishing a network of protected green zones from which the US government could continue to operate.
In the areas outside the green zones, life was going to get very hard, very quickly. Without the heavy military protection of the critical port of New Orleans and the associated barge traffic along the Mississippi River, the nation’s factories would have shut down within a week. Even so, with the exception of large, guarded convoys, the national trucking system had suffered significant disruption. That meant shortages of fuel, produce, and other merchandise.
The national panic had spread like a wind-driven grass fire and President Jackson couldn’t blame anyone for that reaction. In truth, he’d been so clenched up he hadn’t taken a dump in three days. It stunned him to think how quickly public order had disintegrated, as if national stability had been nothing more than an illusion, looking for an excuse to come tumbling down.
The president shifted his attention back to the group around the table, his gaze settling on the army chief of staff. “General Jones, do you agree with General McKittrick’s assessment?”
“Yes, Mr. President, I do.”
“Admiral Falan?”
“Yes, sir.”
President Jackson continued around the table, finding no voices of dissent, something highly unusual given the competitive mix of army, navy, air force, marines, special ops, and intelligence people. In fact, the president couldn’t remember ever having heard them all agree on anything.
“OK then. We agree on where we’re at. I understand there’s no such agreement on our plan going forward. Admiral Falan, would you care to state your objections?”
“Mr. President, as you know, I argued against the widespread imposition of martial law from the beginning. Now, as I predicted, we’ve alienated large segments of the population by our overly heavy-handed approach. A number of congressmen, including several from your own party, are calling for impeachment hearings, undercutting your moral authority to act.”
“And what would you propose we do differently?”
“For one thing, we need to stop shooting our fellow Americans. The rules of engagement you’ve authorized are more aggressive than any we’ve used in our recent wars. We can’t win this thing by killing our countrymen.”
General Jones pounded a large fist on the table. “Nonsense. What Americans are counting on us to do is to restore order so they can go about their daily lives with some sense of safety and security. If that means shooting the gangs of thugs that are doing their best to take that away from them, then by God, that’s what we have to do.”
President Jackson, feeling his irritation bubble up, held up his hand for quiet. “We’ve been through all of this before I made my decision. That decision stands. Gentlemen, these are desperate times, the like of which our world has never seen. I intend to lead America through this. To do that we have to ensure a strong central government continues to function. We have to secure critical infrastructure. Then we must extend the zones under our control and protection until they encompass the entire nation. It’s not going to be easy and there are those who will question the path I’ve chosen. I’ll let history judge me. But first we have to act to ensure there’s a future where that judgment can occur.”
The president’s eyes locked with Admiral Falan’s. “Bill, can you set your reservations aside and support me on this, or do I need to make a change?”
The navy chief of staff paused, and then slowly nodded. “Mr. President, I’ve given you my best counsel. But you’re my president. I’ll do what has to be done.”
The president rose to his feet. “Good, because we’ve got plenty to do. Let’s get to work.”