The Devil's Ransom, page 8
“I don’t really care about your woes. The contract was payment after resolution. Go pick some pockets and live in a hostel until I call.”
Branko took a breath, then pressed ahead. “That’s not fair. We’ve done the test. That should get us some payment. Right?”
“You’ll get the payment in two days from the ransomware attack.”
“Maybe, but maybe not. If they refuse to pay and just take the punishment, we get nothing, and in any case, we need to eat today. Not in two days. We’ve worked hard for you on this.”
Andrei sat and stared at him, thinking. He finally said, “You said you had assets all over the country, correct?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘assets,’ but we’ve been up and down the coast.”
“Can you hide something there? Put something in a secure location until I ask for it?”
“Like what? A computer? Or jewelry?”
“It’s nothing like that. It’s a trunk full of printed information that I need protected. Kept well away from any prying eyes. Something from my past that will protect my future. It’s worth nothing except to me. Can you do that?”
Branko thought for a moment, then nodded his head, saying, “Yes. If you give me the cash I need, I can find a place. It won’t be a vault or anything like that. More like an apartment in a small town, or a cave in the countryside, but it’ll be safe. Will that work?”
Andrei said, “That will work, as long as you tell me where you left it, down to the inch of latitude and longitude. You do that, and I’ll keep funding your gypsy lifestyle.”
Branko smiled and said, “I can do that easy. Just show me the trunk and give me a ride back.”
Andrei said, “So we understand each other, I’m putting this case in your care. If it goes missing, so do you. It’s locked, of course. If you try to penetrate that lock, I will know.”
Nikita came into view from his left, towering over the chair, the punishment implicit.
Andrei said, “Stand by for the gateway information and final timeline. Nikita will arrange transportation for you and the case. He’ll also be the one who finds you if you fail me.”
Branko nodded slowly, wondering if the deal he’d made was worth it.
Chapter 15
“We need to go back.”
Knuckles’ face was stone. No emotion. No crying or wailing. Just pure stone. But I knew that behind it was a lava of molten rage. We’d both lost friends in combat over the years, but rarely was it with either of us watching the execution. He felt responsible for Carly’s death, and I knew it was eating at him just like it was eating at me.
Jennifer flicked her eyes to me, and I saw the fear. She had seen me at my worst and knew the horrific violence both Knuckles and I were capable of. She knew where Knuckles was right now. I shook my head, telling her to keep going.
We had failed, but I needed to stay focused on the task at hand. It was terrible to say, but I couldn’t allow us to be compromised even with the disaster. Going back for her body was asking for compromise. We’d be questioned by any number of local forces. She had a backstop with the embassy, and, as much as it pained me, I’d let them handle it. We still had a mission. Jahn Azimi had been captured, and if Carly’s death would mean anything, I was going to bring him home. But I needed Knuckles to do that.
I said, “We can’t go back. We have no way to bring her off that hill and explain what we were doing there.”
I saw his eyes snap open, going wild. He jerked forward, his body rigid, and shouted with spittle coming from his lips like a drunk in Times Square. “You’re leaving one of our own on the battlefield! You want to do that? I’m not doing it!”
In a calm voice, I said, “I hear you, man. I hear you. But we have a mission. Think about the mission.”
Knuckles had been my second-in-command since I’d had a command in the Taskforce. I knew him like I knew myself. And Knuckles surprised me, showing how little I knew about myself. He attacked me.
He leapt up from the back and wrapped an arm around my neck, trapping it against the headrest of the passenger seat, shouting, “We’re going back! Turn around!”
It happened so fast, I reacted out of instinct. I sensed his arm drape over my face a split second before he could sink the hold, putting my hand in between his arm and my neck, then explosively leapt out of my seat, pushing through his control with my feet against the windshield, now parallel to the floor of the vehicle.
Jennifer shouted, the car swerved, and I launched into the back, hammering Knuckles in the face with my elbow. We fell into the well of the vehicle and started fighting, the only noise the grunting from the effort.
He landed two solid blows, which I took because I was going for a submission, and I got it, circling his head in my arms. But it had been too easy. He was letting me win. I almost didn’t want to follow through, but I did. I began to torque, going so far that I thought I’d been wrong and he wasn’t going to quit, wanting the punishment I was providing. A split second later, he tapped my arm, and I relaxed. Letting him sag into the seat next to me.
We both sat for a second, huffing. He said, “Is that what you felt when Heather died?”
I looked at him and said, “A small part. You now have some idea of the pain. But fighting me isn’t going to cleanse it.”
He nodded, his nose running with blood. He said, “Tell me we’re going to find them. Tell me we get some vengeance.”
I said, “Knuckles, we’re going to rescue that man and his niece. That is vengeance. If we get to smoke some guys along the way, then so be it. Carly was working to get him home, to us. That’s what we’re going to do. It’s what she would tell you right now. Given the choice between vengeance for her death or saving Jahn, you know what she would say. Can I count on you?”
He looked at me and I saw the pain I’d lived with for years, but had managed to survive. He was now leaning over the edge.
He said, “Yes, I can do that. But there is no mercy here. I’m going to kill all of them to free that man.”
I said, “Tilt your head back.” And put a wad of tissues to his nose.
In the front, Jennifer said, “We’re out of the park. Where am I going?”
I looked at her and saw her face ghost white. She was petrified at what had just happened. Had no ability to assimilate it.
I said, “Go back to the hotel. We need to regroup. We need to find that guy’s phone.”
Four hours later, Jennifer turned from the computer and said, “That’s it. First floor is a garage area for the complex, so the phone’s on the second. It’s an Airbnb apartment, but that’s all we know, because Creed can’t do anything from the Taskforce.”
I leaned into the screen and saw a narrow metal stairway leading up to a second-floor landing, a balcony trailing away down from the entrance to a sliding door, two chairs out front, and a small table.
I said, “Creed still can’t do anything more?”
“Not when I talked to him last.”
Shit.
We’d gone straight back to the hotel after Carly’s murder, and I’d pulled up our website VPN, contacting the Taskforce on a channel that was reserved for emergencies, and got the second shock of my night. The VPN failed to work. In fact, every link I had for the Taskforce failed.
I gave the Taskforce duty officer a call on an unencrypted sat phone, my last ability, knowing it was not the thing to do, but at least it went straight into space and didn’t touch the Tajik cell network. I wanted to get a lock on the number we had for Jahn sooner rather than later, because Knuckles was pacing around the room like a caged tiger, and every second we waited meant Jahn might be killed before we could get him.
I knew that didn’t matter to Knuckles, but he also knew that if Jahn was tossed in a dumpster somewhere, it meant he would lose the thread of those who killed Carly. He really wanted that phone lock.
I’d put Brett on him to keep him in check—one of the few men who could—and then dialed the phone. I was given some seriously bad news.
Apparently, Blaisdell Consulting had been hit with some type of ransomware attack, and all of our systems were now shut down and firewalled from the rest of the intelligence community architecture to prevent the spread. It had already infected numerous of our cover organizations, and would have infected my own company, Grolier Recovery Services, except for the fact that we’d been out in the wild with the systems basically turned off.
Knuckles heard the conversation and I saw him getting agitated. I held up a finger and said, “Put George or Blaine on the phone.”
I waited a minute, and then Blaine came on, saying, “Sorry about that, Pike, this just happened, and it’s a disaster. How is the exfil going? You’re conducting exfil tonight, right?”
“No. That’s why I’m calling. Take a seat, because things have gone bad.”
“What?”
I told him what had transpired, from the moment we’d picked up Carly until right now, and he was suitably shocked. When I was done, because he was a good leader, he didn’t question anything I’d said, only driving forward. He said, “Carly? What about her body?”
I said, “The CIA is going to have to deal with that. She was under official cover, right?”
“Yeah, she was. Because of Kerry.”
“Well, I hate to give him that situation, but it is what it is. The reason I’m calling is I need a phone tracked. Jahn’s phone. I have the number, but Creed is saying you guys are worthless now.”
“Jahn’s probably dead.”
“No. No, he’s not. If he was going to be killed, they would have done it when they killed Carly. They wanted him alive, and I’m going to find him.”
“Pike, we have no ability to find that phone. If he’s captured, they’ll have him out of the country in twenty-four hours. He’ll be gone before we can inject something into the traditional intelligence architecture. I’m sorry about Carly’s loss, but you need to get out of the country, and I need to start the chain to get her covered and extracted. I need to talk to Kerry Bostwick.”
I looked at Knuckles and knew that wasn’t going to be enough. I said, “I’m not leaving here without him. And you do need to talk to Kerry Bostwick, because the phone Jahn was using is in the CIA database. Carly told me that, and I need its IMEI. I’ll find the phone myself with my own assets.”
The Rock Star bird had an IMSI grabber built into the nose. Basically, it was a device that pretended to be a cell tower and would suck in every cell phone within range by tricking the phone to establish contact. The IMEI was a select number assigned to every single cell phone on earth, and the grabber would discard all phones until it hit the correct one. Once it was locked, we could triangulate the location, but I needed the IMEI to make it work. A simple phone number wouldn’t cut it, as that was tied to the SIM card and not the phone.
“How are you going to do that over the entire city?”
He had a point. The IMSI grabber wasn’t strong enough to suck in phones at a distance, because it would be competing with local cell towers. The aircraft would have to fly a grid pattern, basically mowing the lawn in the sky in the hopes that it would register.
“It’s all I’ve got, sir. Please.”
He said, “Let me see what I can do. Give me the number.”
I did, and then got our aircraft moving to Dushanbe. It was only about a thirty-minute flight, but with the pilots getting scrambled out of bed, more like an hour. I turned to the room and told them the situation, then said, “I need someone who knows how to work the system in the plane. That’s you, Knuckles.”
I wanted to get him out of the fight, and this was the way to do it. I didn’t need him going full crazy on an assault. And he was qualified on the system in the plane, having used it on several different missions.
He said, “Nope. Not going to happen. We find that phone, and I’m going on the assault. Don’t even ask me that.”
I knew we were about to come to a head, dreading the fight. This had become personal, which was bad. Veep came forward and said, “I can work it. Let me do it.”
Veep was a combat controller from the Air Force Special Operations Command, meaning his job, outside of shooting, was controlling multiple different aircraft using everything from a Dixie cup and string to the most cutting-edge radio gear on earth. Truthfully, his expertise was exactly this. And I appreciated him defusing the situation. Although all he’d done was kick the can down the road, because I would still have to control Knuckles.
I nodded and told him it was his mission. Three hours later, after flying a pattern in the sky over the city, he got his first lock. Forty-five minutes after that, he had a grid, and transmitted it to us. Jennifer had pulled up the location on her computer, and we were in business. Except we couldn’t get any information on the target itself like we could in the past through the Taskforce. It would be a cold hit.
I looked at the surrounding area as Brett and Knuckles came around to the screen, saying, “Okay, Jenn, I want you on the building across the circle. See it? Two-story structure? Can you get to the roof?”
She looked at the building and said, “Yeah, I can get up that.”
Jennifer was a little bit of a freak when it came to climbing, and I knew she could use the bricks, copper gutters, and balconies to get to the roof as soon as I saw it, but I wanted to hear her say it, and by the way she did, I could tell she wasn’t sure about the mission.
She turned to me and said, “Pike, all we really have is a lock on a phone. We don’t know if he’s there or not. We don’t know anything about the place. You sure you want to go assault a building in a foreign country with this little bit of intel?”
I looked at Knuckles, and saw him nod. I said, “I’ll explore. You cover me. If it shows promise, we’ll push it. If not, we’ll back off.”
Then I turned to Knuckles, saying with a little bit of force, “And we will back off if it’s nothing.”
Chapter 16
Dylan Hobbes sat in front of his desktop computer and went through his email exchanges on multiple different addresses, using a virtual machine that wasn’t tied to his computer and going down to the IP addresses in the messages themselves, trying to determine if there was any indication of his contact with a group of criminals. He was sure he had no proof in his systems, because he did this for a living, but he completed this check at the end of every day, just to be positive, scrubbing the computer with a program that would literally bleach the system when he found anything that could be construed as incriminating.
He finished the task, seeing nothing, and the speaker on his computer came alive, saying, “Hey, boss. You need to come down here. See what I’ve got. It’s not good.”
Surprised, he pressed a button on his keyboard and said, “What is it?”
“I don’t want to say over the net.”
Meaning, it could be saved for posterity. He’d instilled in his staff never, ever to say anything sensitive on the network, be it verbal, text, or chat, because he knew that once it touched the internet, it was there forever, no matter what anyone said. The only way to prevent that was good ol’ fashioned paper notes or face-to-face conversations. But in this case, there should be no reason to use such security.
He said again, “What is it?”
“You need to see it.”
Exasperated, he said, “Come up here and talk to me. I’m doing other work.”
“Roger that. Will do.”
The man Hobbes had chosen for the security assessment of the strange government organization called Blaisdell Consulting was a prior member of both the NSA and Cyber Command. Someone who would understand the firewalls, nondisclosure statements, and intricacies of what they were dealing with. Someone who wouldn’t talk. The researcher had no idea of the scope of the problem set he had been presented, but would know that no matter what it was, he wasn’t allowed to talk. He was a good man.
Seven minutes later, Hobbes heard the footsteps in the utilitarian hallway. While their business earned millions a year, his company worked out of a two-story warehouse in a nondescript area of Tysons Corner, Virginia. Close enough to do the work with the government cyber agencies as required, but far enough away from the players in DC to protect him. Just like the greater intelligence community. A stone’s throw from Liberty Crossing, the home of the National Counterterrorism Center and the headquarters of the Director of National Intelligence, it was a convenient location. But it still looked like a warehouse from the outside. Like an old storage unit facility that one wouldn’t rent without some references.
His door opened and he saw Kirk in the hallway. He said, “What’s the fire? I have my own issues here.”
Kirk entered and said, “Yeah, you think you have a flame, but it’s nothing like I’m bringing to you.”
Hobbes leaned back in his chair and said, “What’s that mean?”
“I’ve poked around the code used for the penetration of that computer at Blaisdell Consulting, and it looks like ours.”
Hobbes heard the words, but they didn’t assimilate immediately. He thought, What? That can’t be right.
Kirk said, “Did you hear me?”
Hobbes said, “Yeah, yeah, I heard you, but that can’t be accurate. What do you mean, it’s similar to what we were doing with Project Speargun?”
“I mean the code is our own. It is Project Speargun. The one we developed for the zero click. It’s in this ransomware. They have our code. That’s how they did the attack, and now I’m worried that it’s somehow escaped our lab, but I don’t know how.”
Feeling the sweat form on his brow, knowing exactly how, he said, “Surely you’re mistaken. That can’t be right. There’s no way our code got out into the wild. No way. It’s been air-gapped since we started.”
Kirk said, “Come downstairs. I’ll show you. It’s our code. We have a leak somehow. We should have never done the work to develop it.”
