The Devil's Ransom, page 27
Veep said, “What do you think?”
“I think Wolffe believes that POTUS is being risk averse, and because of it he’s only increasing the danger. Ignoring Branko is asking for potential failure against the Valkyrie crew, just like ignoring the clear signs we had before 9/11. And I absolutely agree with him, but it’s a moot point. We couldn’t get to Branko now if we wanted because we were stupid.”
I slapped the table in disgust, the humor of the situation dissipating. I said, “I knew that guy was skilled. I should have predicted he wasn’t just coming here for lunch. I got tunnel focused on some mythical meeting and missed the signs.”
Knuckles said, “We all missed it.” He pulled out the phone he’d found on the table and handed it to me. I took it and said, “I’m starting to build a collection of Branko’s phones. Maybe I’ll open a shop here in Croatia selling used iPhones.”
Veep said, “Hey, we still have his original cloned iPhone, don’t we? I mean he wiped the primary, but we cloned it, right?”
I said, “Yeah?”
“Well, we can’t do a real-time geolocation track, but we can find historical patterns of that phone here in the country. It’s not optimal, and we’ll probably see a bunch of bars or clubs he frequents, but we might also see a historical cluster at another safehouse.”
“That won’t tell us he’s there.”
“I know, but we’ve got nothing else. If you want to continue on this guy, that’s what we’ve got.”
Brett said, “That might work if we had a single date where we knew he was somewhere and wanted to know that location, but looking at a date range is going to be information overload. His cell has been all over this country.”
I picked up my Taskforce phone, looked at my watch, and said, “You’re right, but Veep’s got a damn good idea, and the information overload is Creed’s problem. It’s nine in the morning there. He’ll be at work.”
I dialed and was surprised when I got a switchboard operator instead of the network operation’s cell. A woman said, “Blaisdell Consulting, how can I direct your call?”
I stuttered for a moment, then said, “Hang on.” I muted the phone and said, “What’s this month’s code to tell them to go secure and that I’m not under duress?”
Knuckles said, “Why? We have a direct secure line for this operation.”
“I don’t know. I got Marge at the front desk.”
Marge was about two hundred years old and had been working as our “receptionist” since the Taskforce had been created. She loved me, but there was no way I was getting behind her firewall. Either I knew the code, or she’d tell me to pack sand.
Jennifer said, “Tell her, ‘I’m calling about your team-building services.’ She’ll ask how you found out about them, and you say, ‘I was given a brochure at a conference by Xavier Barclay.’”
I said, “You’re shitting me.” Honestly, I never bothered to memorize the bullshit the Taskforce put out about these things because I was always on the forefront of any operation, but now I wasn’t, and I was happy that Jennifer never ignored them.
She smiled and said, “Nope.”
I unmuted and said, “Hey, you still there?”
“Yes. How may I direct your call?”
“I’m calling about your team-building services.”
“Okay. How did you hear about us?”
“I was given a brochure from Xavier Barclay at a conference.”
She said, “Let me transfer your call,” and the encryption protocols began. I waited, saying, “This secret spy stuff is really getting ridiculous. Xavier Barclay? Who came up with that damn name?”
I understood the reason why in that we had no idea who was listening in on our phone calls, meaning we needed to sound innocuous before we encrypted, and the Taskforce had to make sure that I wasn’t calling with a gun to my head. If I had been, it would have been a different name I’d supposedly met.
Knuckles said, “The bigger question is why are we cut off.”
Marge came back, the encryption making her sound a little like she was speaking in a tube. “How can I direct your call?”
“Hey, Marge, it’s Pike. I need Creed in the network operations center.”
She said, “Well, at least you remembered the protocol this time. Stand by.”
Reminding me I’d used the switchboard line a few times without remembering what I was supposed to say . . .
The phone rang through and Creed answered, saying, “Sorry about that redirect, Pike, but we’ve been shut down on the Branko mission. No more phone pings or other work.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know. I’m just the computer guy. Something to do with the threat. George Wolffe is headed to a briefing at the White House right now.”
I rolled my eyes to the team and said, “Okay, well, I don’t need an active ping on a phone, just some historical data drawn from the phone itself. Can you do that?”
“What do you have?”
“I’ve got the original Branko cell phone. Well, at least the clone we made.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to know where this phone has been in the past. That’s it.”
“Do you have a date? Something to zero in on?”
“Uh, no. I need a couple of months, but you can skip anything that involves a store, bar, or other establishments. Focus solely on bed-down locations. And you can skip Zagreb, Split, and Korcula. We know them, so it’s unnecessary. Focus on new cities, but only here in Croatia. If he’s got a safehouse in Serbia or Bosnia, that’s out of my reach.”
“Pike, I don’t know about this. I just told you we were called off.”
“Creed, I’m not asking you to do any manipulation of the cell network. Just look at this phone. Any direct action will come from me.”
He said, “Plug in the phone.” I looked at Jennifer, and she already had it slaved to her computer, the laptop itself tied into her own Taskforce phone’s VPN. I said, “Jennifer’s sending linkup now.”
He said, “Okay, I see it. Give me a little time,” then, “Shit. Don’t say I’m doing anything.”
“What?”
I heard him say, “Hey, sir, it’s Pike. I just told him we’d been turned off.”
I heard the phone shuffle, then Blaine Alexander came on, saying, “Hey, Pike.”
Taken aback, I said, “Sir, what’s going on back there? I tried to call Creed and our line was redirected. I got Marge.”
I heard him sigh, then, “Yeah, your op has been turned off. Wolffe was given a direct order to pull you. Honestly, we were sort of hoping another phone ping wasn’t necessary and you’d have this guy in a bag before we could tell you to back off. We delayed telling you for that reason. I was supposed to release a message at noon today, six p.m. your time. I’m assuming by the call you have no joy?”
I ignored that question, saying, “What’s POTUS thinking?”
“Apparently, the expert we used to find Branko in the first place is coming in today with proof of who’s doing the attack, and it’s not the original ransomware team Dark Star. They’re just using the name.”
“That’s bullshit. Too much of a coincidence. Too many things that don’t add up for a completely new team to do this. Especially since they’re using the Dark Star name. What’s Wolffe think?”
“He thinks like you. Well, he thinks that pursuing Branko can’t hurt. If it ends up being a nation-state, so be it, but letting Branko go might be like missing the flight training in Florida before 9/11.”
“Couldn’t agree more. What do the others think? What about the NSA and Cyber? They’ve had a day to look at it.”
“They’re chickenshits. So far they’re just nodding their heads at what Dylan Hobbes says. He has a lot of referent firepower because he worked at both places. He’s apparently a genius and they know it. If he’s wrong, they’re happy to let him take the fall. If he’s right, they’re agreeable to saying they concurred.”
“And Kerry Bostwick? What’s CIA saying?”
“He thinks it’s bullshit. But he’s on his own with that.”
“Well, that’s something. Did you get anything on the Afghans? They’re a wild card in this whole thing.”
“Afghans? What could they do with this? They can barely work a computer. Why do you keep bringing them up?”
“Because they’re running around here chasing Branko, and they killed the Afghan national security advisor, all for some treasure. If you had something on them, it might lead me to Branko. It’s another thread.”
“Forget about them, Pike. Trust me, I know how you feel. We’ve all lost a little bit of our life over there, and I know you want some vengeance, but they aren’t doing any of this. Let them go.”
“I’m not doing this for vengeance. Jesus, sir, they’re at the heart of this and they don’t even know it. They’re running around blind chasing Branko and don’t even know the threat that he’s created. You give me a thread on those guys and I’ll find Branko. They’re tracking him right now, I promise.”
“Pike, far be it from me to say you’re crazy, but you’re crazy. Now, if you’d found some Iranians or North Koreans chasing Branko, that might be a different story.”
I gave up. “Okay, okay. One final question—if I hang up right now, and don’t check my messages until I bed down tonight, can I take the day?”
“What do you have?”
“Nothing yet, but I have some things working. I think you should be aware I’m probably going to go kinetic here.”
He said nothing for a moment, then, “We’re running under twenty-four hours until that Valkyrie capsule creates mass murder. And when that happens, someone’s going to pay. It won’t be Dark Star. Hannister is going to be forced to react to whatever proof is presented today. You and I both know how that will work out. No matter who wins the fight, our men will die. If you can prevent that, yeah, you got your day.”
“Don’t let the president do anything stupid until I can prove it isn’t Branko. Don’t let him take the word of a single egghead, no matter how smart he is.”
“Pike, you do what you do, but I can’t prevent the president from doing anything based on Branko, because this conversation never took place.”
“Understood, sir. Before I go, can you put Creed back on the line?”
“What for?”
“Sir . . .”
“Never mind . . . I’ll expect a confirmation of your marching orders to come home sometime tonight.”
Chapter 54
Wolffe walked into the White House Situation Room with the meeting already in progress. He’d been called forward for this, but clearly it wasn’t because he was needed, as they’d started without him. It didn’t bother him, because the stakes of this mission had clearly eclipsed his mandate. The Taskforce scalpel was no longer the tool to use here.
He softly closed the door and went to the back of the room, taking a seat against the wall next to a scrum of other low-level advisors. The president was at the head of the table—the same one seen in every famous photograph of a president in crisis—with the important people flowing down each side of the table from his location. Behind them, on chairs along the walls, were the aides.
Nobody in this room had any idea what Wolffe did for the nation, and he preferred to keep it that way. At the opposite end of the room was Dylan Hobbes. He stood in front of a PowerPoint presentation, and apparently was in the middle of his briefing. Wolffe surveyed the table and saw a few Oversight Council members, like the SECDEF, the D/CIA, and the SECSTATE, but most were from somewhere else in the behemoth that was the United States government.
Wolffe returned to Hobbes and saw he was sweating profusely. Wolffe thought he looked like a character from Breaking Bad, the sweat rolling off his face as if he was being interrogated. What’s up with that?
Hobbes was conducting a synopsis of his research, and in so doing spouting off a plethora of cybersecurity terms, showing the depth of his investigation. DNS, malware, Zero Day threat, rootkit, phishing, IP addresses, TOR network, you name it, it was a cornucopia of buzzwords complete with inscrutable graphs that only one or two people in the room could even decipher. The rest just took him at his word.
When he was done, he said, “Given the evidence, I think I’ve managed to locate the origin of this current threat. It’s not a bunch of ransomware guys from Serbia. It’s a nation-state.”
He paused for dramatic effect, and President Hannister rolled his hand forward, saying, “Spare me the theatrics and just give it to us. Do you know where it came from?”
“Yes, sir.”
Everyone took a breath, and he flicked to the next slide, saying, “It’s Iran.”
The room erupted in murmurs of sidebar conversations, and President Hannister held up his hand, quelling the chatter. He said, “How do you know that?”
Hobbes pointed to the next slide, saying, “Honestly, I thought it would be North Korea, but the fingerprints didn’t match. Remember when the Iranians took out the casinos in Las Vegas in 2014? They managed to penetrate Sheldon Adelson’s entire network and cause enormous damage, but in so doing, they left a lot of fingerprints behind in the code and in the contact routing back to the person doing the work. They were good, but not that good.”
“Okay, but is this a guess, or you know?”
“Sir, I used the fingerprint analogy for a reason. When you do a fingerprint comparison, you’re basically finding points of intersection from one print to another, until the points become so great that the fingerprint in question is unlikely to be the fingerprint of someone else. It’s the same way here. I have found multiple points of intersection that lead nowhere else.”
President Hannister sat back and said, “So you don’t know. You’re just saying in your best estimation, it’s the Iranians. I mean, you didn’t find an Iranian flag embedded in the code or anything.”
“No, sir, but none of this is absolute. The reason they chose a cyberattack is precisely to give them plausible deniability. Short of having a video of someone working a keyboard, or an Iranian attacker going on CNN to brag, we’re never going to have absolute proof. But like a fingerprint, the trace doesn’t lie.”
President Hannister sighed and said, “But it’s not enough to give us a Cuban Missile Crisis moment, either. If I took all this to the United Nations and demanded they turn off the ransomware, would your evidence matter? Is it like Adlai Stevenson showing satellite photos of missiles in Cuba, or like Colin Powell showing hand-drawn pictures of supposed biological weapon vans in Iraq?”
Hobbes said, “To the initiated, it would be a slam dunk, but for the United Nations, it wouldn’t be what you want. There is no way to educate them on the fingerprints, and there is no way to get an actual smoking gun out of cyber. It just doesn’t happen.”
“So what am I supposed to do with that?”
Hobbes said, “Sir, I don’t know. Policy is your realm. I’m just giving you the facts.”
Kerry Bostwick, the CIA director, said, “I’d like to know what the NSA and Cyber Command think of this. What’s your assessment?”
General Franco Baggetti, dual hatted as both the commander of the NSA and of Cyber Command, said, “We’ve looked as well, and while we haven’t gotten nearly as far into our analysis as Dylan, his outcome is something we wouldn’t disagree with at this stage in our investigation.”
Wolffe thought, What a mealy-mouthed answer. None of his men will face any shots fired in anger.
Kerry said, “That’s it? With the entire power of the United States government paying for your capabilities, you don’t have an opinion?”
General Baggetti took offense and said, “This isn’t like taking a car engine apart, where you have a manual and just follow it. We’re looking, but we want to be precise. We’ve found nothing so far to disprove Dylan’s projections. That’s all I’m saying.”
“So you can’t disprove it? That’s your level of success? We’re about to pin a catastrophic attack on a foreign country. Don’t you think a little bit more introspection is required here?”
President Hannister held up his hand and said, “Okay, let’s deal in specifics. What’s the clock on this? Where do we stand?”
The head of NASA said, “We have less than twenty-four hours. We’ve managed to get the abort protocol in play from inside the capsule, but we’re worried about corruption. We can use it as a last resort.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means we can more than likely prevent a collision with the space station, but we’ll probably lose the capsule in the process. Once he initiates abort, the fall from orbit is going to need to be controlled from the ground as a failsafe. We think we’ve managed to get the abort code to work in the capsule using firewalled systems, but once he pulls the trigger, without the ability to control from the ground, he’ll probably burn up in the atmosphere like a meteor.”
President Hannister shook his head and said, “This is the best we’ve got? This is it?”
Everyone remained quiet, as if they were stone statues. He continued: “I’m living that Bruce Willis movie Armageddon. Do I need to go find some oil drillers to solve this problem?”
The NASA man took a breath, then said, “Sir, I’m just telling you what we have. This isn’t a NASA launch. If it were, I might be able to give you more options, but it’s not. Auriga oversees this thing, and they’re working twenty-four seven on solutions, but all NASA can do is provide advice and support.”
Wolffe thought, Meaning don’t look at cutting our budget when this goes to shit.
Wolffe felt his phone vibrate and pulled it out, seeing a text message from Blaine.
Pike is hunting. Says don’t do anything stupid. He doesn’t think the egghead is right.
That caused Wolffe to smile. He’d been given a direct order from Alexander Palmer to pull Pike off, and he’d done so—with a little bit of a delay. He texted back, What’s he have? Does he have Branko?
