The Cyclops Initiative (20 page)

With a whirring of fans and a high-­pitched drone like an entire hive of bees buzzing at once, the network came to life.

Angel got to work instantly. “I'm going to need to write some code, here. The consoles don't want to work as dumb processors. They're designed to prevent that kind of tampering, so I'll need to bypass their built-­in operating systems.” She opened a dozen windows on the laptop screen and started typing. “Luckily I don't need to start from scratch. I can grab a bunch of libraries of code off the Internet and then jerry-­rig everything together.”

“And then you can—­what? Use the hard drive to . . .” Chapel shook his head, trying to remember what Paul Moulton had done. “Build a network analyzer?”

“That's one way, but if I'm right about something, it won't be necessary. I think we caught a lucky break.”

“How so?”

“Whoever framed me took over my system when they hijacked the Predator over New Orleans. They got root access and zombified my servers, but they never bothered to log me out as an admin, so—­”

“Sorry, Angel. My head already hurts. Can you simplify that?”

She looked up at him with a smile. “Considering how often this kind of stuff comes up, you really ought to learn a little about computers.”

“Sure. Maybe when the police aren't chasing us, though.”

She laughed. “Okay, sugar. Let me try to break it down. They took over my computer when they hijacked the Predator. They used my system to send commands to the drone and make it crash, right? It would have been really easy for them to lock me out of my own system at the same time. But they didn't. They wanted to be clever—­too clever—­and so they did it all in such a way I didn't even know it was happening. In fact, they didn't cut me off until hours later, when you and I were on the phone, right?”

“When your call just dropped,” Chapel said, remembering how panicked he'd been when it happened.

“Yeah. Now, if they'd been smart, rather than clever, they would have taken over my system just long enough to crash the drone, then they would have shut me down altogether and severed the connection. But they didn't. They were in my computer for hours.”

The whole time she spoke she kept her fingers moving over her keyboard, her thumb driving the trackpad. “Now, if you really want to hide an Internet connection, your best bet is to do what you need to do very, very fast. Every second their computer and mine were connected my server logs were recording that connection. The records are anonymized with all the packet headers stripped out, but . . . sorry!” She lifted her hands. “Too much computerese, I know. I guess—­think of it like fingerprints. To hijack the drone they had to leave one smudged, partial print on my system. It would be next to impossible to get a match from that. But like a burglar who hangs around the house long after he's grabbed all the silverware, they stayed connected to my system too long. Which means they left hundreds and hundreds of partial fingerprints all over.”

“And while one print on its own is useless,” Chapel said, seeing where this was going, “if you can compare hundreds of them—­”

“Exactly. I can get a little bit of information out of every print and combine it to get one crystal clear print that will give us a good match for our culprit. Well, theoretically.”

“But—­wouldn't they have known they were leaving so many clues?” Chapel asked.

“Maybe. Probably. I mean, whoever this was, they were very, very good. They should have known better.”

Chapel frowned. “So why would they make such a simple mistake?”

“My best bet is that they didn't just hijack the drone. That they were doing something else while they were in there. Given the amount of time it took, I'm guessing they were reading all my drives. Copying them.”

“So they have access to all the information you had stored? What would that give them?”

“A lot. A lot of info about DIA operations, missions, resources. Names, phone numbers, whole dossiers of employees.” Angel shook her head. “It's bad. But at least, if this works,” she said, gesturing at her screen, “we'll know who they were.”

She clicked the trackpad and her screen cleared, windows closing one by one until none remained. Then she opened a new window and hit a single key.

All around her, the video-­game consoles chugged and grumbled, their fans whining as they worked to keep their processors from overheating.

On Angel's screen an endless stream of characters scrolled down so fast Chapel couldn't read them.

She leaned back and rolled her head back and forth, stretching her neck muscles. “From here the program runs on its own,” she said, “but it'll take a while.”

Chapel nodded. “Anything you need? Anything you want me to do?”

“I can think of a ­couple of things, sweetie,” she said.

Chapel's eyes went wide. He looked down at her, sitting there on the floor, and tried to figure out what she'd meant by that. Her face looked completely innocent, and her eyes wouldn't meet his. He decided he'd misinterpreted her words. After all, with that sultry voice of hers anything she said was going to sound a little suggestive.

“How about something to drink or eat?” he asked. “There were some vending machines in the break room.”

“Caffeine,” she said. “Definitely. Hacker fuel.”

“You got it.” He was surprised how relieved he was to leave the stockroom.

NORTH OF ALTOONA, PA: MARCH 22, 00:31

Wilkes squatted in a dark field, shying rocks at a nearby pond. He could skip them three or four times in a row, but it was hard to see in the dark and he wasn't sure if he'd managed to get five yet.

Behind him, his helicopter sat lightless and silent in the field, like the world's largest dragonfly hunkering down for the night. The pilot would be asleep. The guy had tried to start a conversation with Wilkes once, a ­couple of hours ago. He wasn't going to make that mistake again.

Downtime. Wilkes despised waiting. He had learned to handle it, over the years. It was something they didn't officially teach you in the Marines, but you picked it up. You learned to keep yourself simmering on low heat, never quite managing to relax fully but not letting nerves eat up your focus, either. Wilkes had started his career as a sniper, which had meant long, long hours of lying on his belly on sharp rocks, fighting to stay awake, to keep his eyes open. Because no matter how good his cover was, there was always the chance that somebody had spotted him. That he was going to have to move in a hurry.

Moulton's voice in his ear was like a buzzing insect at first. As the various parts of Wilkes's brain came back online, the noise resolved into meaningful words.

“—­Pittsburgh,” the little geek was saying over and over. “I'm seeing a massive spike in Internet traffic in a place that ought to be dark. Somebody's online in an electronics store that's supposed to be closed this time of night. Somebody who shows three points of similarity to Angel's profile.”

“This solid?” Wilkes asked. “You got a solid lead this time?”

“That's kind of what I just told you,” Moulton said. “Were you listening? We have a saying in the NSA. SIGINT never lies.”

Wilkes didn't answer. He stood up, his knees popping a little because apparently he'd been squatting down by the pond longer than he thought.

Uptime.

He felt the adrenaline kick in. Felt his body come back to life, like he'd been frozen and now he was thawing out.

“Give me coordinates,” Wilkes said.

“I can do better than that—­I've got a floor plan for the store, I've got satellite pictures, I've got—­”

Moulton kept talking. He was good at it.

Wilkes listened with half an ear as he thumped on the canopy of the helicopter. Inside, the pilot looked around him like he didn't know where he was.

“Grab your socks, buddy,” Wilkes said while the pilot just blinked.

PITTSBURGH, PA: MARCH 22, 00:49

“It was definitely an inside job,” Angel said. She slurped cola and pointed at her screen. “Whoever is pulling the strings, they had help.”

“How can you tell?” Chapel asked.

“I keep a pretty serious lock on my stuff,” she told him. “Well, I mean, I used to, I guess. It's all gone now. But if you'd asked me a week ago who could hack into my gear, I would have said nobody. Here,” she said, clicking the trackpad to pause the text scrolling down her screen. “I had a firewall up here that nobody should have been able to get through. I mean, it should have been physically impossible. Considering all the sensitive data I had, it would have been insane to use anything less secure. But when the attack came, my security software didn't even register the intrusion. There's only two ways that could happen. One would be that someone broke into my trailer, actually stormed the place, and ripped the keyboard out of my hands while I was still logged in. I know that didn't happen.”

“So what's the other way?” Chapel asked.

“There's a backdoor. There's always a backdoor. I wasn't working just for myself, see, so there had to be a way in for emergencies. Just in case I dropped dead of a heart attack or got hit on the head and forgot all my passwords or something. There was always a short list of ­people who could override me—­Director Hollingshead, for one.”

“You think he did this?” Chapel asked.

“No.” Angel shook her head. “Absolutely not.”

Chapel frowned. “In an investigation like this, sometimes it's valuable to consider everybody a suspect, even if you know they're innocent. Just—­as a hypothetical.”

She looked up at him and he knew instantly that she was holding something back. “It wasn't him,” she said. “Just trust me on this.”

“Somebody could have gotten to him. Blackmailed him or found a way to persuade him they needed access—­”

“It wasn't him,” she repeated. “I've got my reasons for knowing that. Please, don't push me on this. Just accept it. It wasn't Hollingshead. Anyway—­it wouldn't need to be. There are other ­people on the list. ­People who might need to get into my systems without having to ask for permission. I mean, obviously the president could have done it. Or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they would have clearance.”

Chapel nodded. One of the first things you learned in the army was that everybody had a boss. Everybody. Your commanding officer answered to a major or a colonel somewhere. They answered to generals, who answered to generals with more stars. Everybody answered to the president, and even he had to answer to Congress or the Supreme Court, sometimes. Which meant that any order you got could be countermanded. “I would like to assume that the commander in chief isn't attacking his own country,” Chapel said.

“We'll keep that one as a hypothetical,” Angel said. She clicked her trackpad, and the text started scrolling again. “Anyway, even if it was somebody on that list, they could have been hacked and not know it, just like I was. But it would take somebody in the intelligence community to pull that off. Even the Chinese don't have the technology to break 256-­bit encryption; that's something that our side just figured out, and—­”

The cell phone in Chapel's pocket squawked at him. He shot a look at Angel. She suddenly looked very frightened. Well, maybe he looked the same way.

He lifted the phone to his ear. “Julia?” he said. “Did you see something?”

Her voice was just a tinny whisper when she replied. “I thought so. I guess—­no. I saw something moving in the trees, but it was just a raccoon. It was—­yeah. That was definitely a raccoon. Sorry. I shouldn't have bothered you.”

“That's all right,” Chapel said. “I'd rather have a false alarm than not get a real one. You okay out there?”

“Fine. A little chilly. How's it going inside?”

“We're making progress. Okay. Signing off,” Chapel said.

He put the phone back in his pocket.

Angel laughed, though not because anything was funny. She was just relieved. “Unless the drone hijackers have figured out a way to weaponize raccoons, I guess we're okay.”

Chapel nodded. “Good to keep on our toes, though. What else can you tell me about the ­people who hacked you?”

Angel shrugged her slim shoulders. “They're good. Really good. Even if they had backdoor access to my system, I was online at the time. I should have been able to tell there were two users active. I would have noticed a lag—­the computer would have slowed down as it tried to serve two users at once. I would have felt there was something wrong.”

“But you didn't? Is that possible?”

“This is kind of genius. They actually overclocked my processor. Made it run faster, just to compensate for any apparent lag. I would never have thought of that. But it tells me two things. One, that whoever did this knows computers inside and out. They aren't just good at hacking, they're legendary.”

“What's the other thing?”

“They knew me, too. They anticipated what I would do, how I would react, while they were inside my system. I don't think this was anybody I know personally, but they've studied me. Watched me, probably for a long time. Chapel, that just sends chills down my spine. It means—­”

Chapel's cell phone squawked again. Angel fell silent instantly as she stared at his pants pocket.

“Just another raccoon,” Chapel said, because he didn't want to panic her. He took out the phone and lifted it to his ear. “Julia?” he said.

There was no response. The phone didn't even hiss or crackle in his ear. Which meant that Julia had switched off her phone altogether.

Or somebody else had done it for her.

PITTSBURGH, PA: MARCH 23, 01:32

Chapel leaned gently on the bar that opened the fire door at the back of the store. He peered out into the gloom of the loading dock but he couldn't see anything. He definitely couldn't see Julia.