Qubit, page 12
His cell phone rang, and he pulled it from his jacket, expecting it be Kafka. When he saw the caller, he winced and then answered. “Hi Karen,” he said. He cringed at the sound of his voice, which had broken slightly.
“Lock,” said Karen breathlessly. “I know I keep doing this…but I’m really worried about Sophie. I’m certain this time she said she’d be home. But she’s not here. I called her cell and I called Krista and Krista’s parents. They don’t know where Krista is either. Lock, I’m really worried. I don’t know where she is.”
Lock cleared his throat. He hadn’t thought at all about what he might tell Karen. Why had he answered the damn phone? The obvious question came to his lips unbidden. “Did you call the police?”
“No, not yet. I thought I’d call you. I thought maybe you knew.”
Lock winced again. He could always tell her the truth later, after he’d had time to think it through properly. For now, the best course of action was not to do anything that might endanger Sophie. For all he knew, his lines were tapped. “No. I don’t know where she is either,” he said finally.
“Oh God.”
Neither spoke. Finally, Karen said, “I’m going to call the police.”
No, don’t, Lock wanted to say. But that would just arouse Karen’s suspicions. Surely, Kirin couldn’t blame him for Sophie’s mother calling the police after she’d gone missing? Surely they would have expected that?
“Okay,” said Lock after another long pause and waited for the line to go dead. He set the phone down next to his whiskey and stared at it. He picked up his glass and drained it and then poured himself another.
ψ
Kafka arrived before sunset, waking Lock from a drunken slumber. He sat down in the massaging recliner as Lock collapsed back onto the couch, rubbing his eyes.
“What the fuck is wrong?” pressed Kafka, leaning forward slightly.
Lock struggled to form words, not simply because his tongue was sticking to the roof of his mouth, but because saying them threatened to extinguish the slim hope he still held that, somehow, none of this was really happening.
He looked up at Kafka and could see the worry in his friend’s face. “They took Sophie,” he croaked, his voice nearly as quiet as a whisper.
“What? Who? When?” Kafka shook his head. “Start at the beginning.”
Lock took a breath and stared at his feet. “This morning,” he began. “I get this fucking voice mail. ‘Get back to work,’ you know, and then I heard Sophie’s voice. I freak out. I go see Kirin. Sure enough, he tells me they’ve got her—”
“Who’s they?”
“I don’t fucking know. Somebody Kirin works for or something. Kirin tells me, as long as I go back to work, you know, everything will be fine.”
Kafka sat back in the recliner, his face going pale. “Fuck.”
“Yeah.” Lock leaned back, watching Kafka’s reaction. His gazed trailed over to the dining room window. The light outside was scarlet. He ran his fingers through his hair. “Karen called me a little while ago wondering if I knew where she was. I guess she called the police.”
“Maybe you should too,” suggested Kafka. “Tell them everything.”
“Seriously? And then what happens to Sophie? Kirin made no bones about it. They’ll kill her.”
“Not to mention…”
“I don’t even care about that at this point, man. I’d do life if I thought it would get her back.”
“What do they want you to do?”
“Same shit as before, I guess. Just help them steal passwords or something.” Lock leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees. He looked at Kafka intently. “What the fuck am I going to do?”
Kafka shook his head slowly. His eyes narrowed, and he cocked his head so they met Lock’s. “Do you remember Ray? Works with me at the farm?”
“Ray?”
“Yeah. He does security. I think he used to be Special Forces or some shit.”
“Okay,” encouraged Lock.
“Yeah. Maybe he’ll have some ideas. I mean, if you can’t go to the police, maybe it’s time you had some muscle of your own.”
Lock raised his eyebrows, considering the possibilities. “Yeah.”
“In the meantime…”
“In the meantime, I need them to think I’m their boy.”
“Looks that way.”
Kafka leaned back, glancing over at the kitchen table. The room was beginning to grow dark. “You need to sober the fuck up.”
Lock sat up, his hands on his knees. “I know…I just…I couldn’t breathe.”
The corners of Kafka’s mouth turned down disapprovingly.
Lock looked down. “I know,” he said quietly.
Lock’s phone rang again. “Karen?” he answered as Kafka got up to turn on a light. He heard crying and sniffling. He sat up, rigid, feeling nauseous. “What’s happened?”
“I-I-I…”
“Jesus, Karen,” pleaded Lock, his voice growing louder. “What the fuck happened?”
Lock heard a sharp intake of breath. “I called the police. They found Krista. In Ypsilanti. She said…she said…”
“God dammit, Karen, tell me!”
“She said two men took her and Sophie, and they dropped her off but still had Sophie,” said Karen, her words coming out all at once.
“Does she know where they were going?”
“No, and they put bags over their heads, and she couldn’t remember what they looked like except that they had dark skin and wore sunglasses. Oh my God, Lock.”
Lock could hear her crying and Dennis’s voice in the background. Then Dennis came on. He had a way of always sounding reasonable, which usually infuriated Lock. In this case, though, it was a welcome relief. “Hi, Lock.”
“Hi, Dennis.”
“She’s pretty hysterical, obviously. Understandably. All we know right now is that Sophie was definitely kidnapped. They apparently tricked Krista somehow and took the car and then used her to lure Sophie in as well. They let Krista out in Ypsilanti, so unless they were intentionally trying to throw the police off their trail, they were heading west. The police have put out an APB on the car and for men fitting what description Krista was able to give them, which, unfortunately, is pretty minimal. Unfortunately, this all happened nearly twelve hours ago now, so the police aren’t real optimistic. Bottom line is that we know Sophie has been taken, but that’s about it.”
Lock took in a deep breath. “I thought the way Karen was talking that maybe they’d found her…you know…”
“No, thank God. Nothing like that. With any luck, she’s unharmed. The good news is that Krista was basically okay as far as we can tell. No bruises or anything that indicated violence.” Dennis paused. “Listen, Lock, I’m sorry, but I gotta go. Karen…”
“Sure.”
“We’ll talk later.”
“Yeah.” Lock hung up the phone.
“What happened?” asked Kafka, who hadn’t sat back down.
Lock looked up. “Well, the police know she was kidnapped. That’s about it.”
“Oh,” said Kafka, sitting down limply. “Do they have any clues?”
“Didn’t sound like it.”
“Oh,” said Kafka again, his voice dropping.
Lock turned and faced Kafka. “I need to talk to this guy Ray.”
Singapore Financial District • South China Finance Group
Friday, April 27th
9:00 a.m. SGT (Singapore Time)
Vipul slouched in his chair, tapping his foot. He was in a darkened conference room at one end of a long conference table, seated across from Mohit, who wore a simple button-down dress shirt. That was better than the annoying plaid shirt. Except that it was orange. It reminded Vipul of his late lieutenant, Paresh, whom he’d ordered Sameer to kill, just to make a point. He wondered if perhaps, subconsciously, he’d chosen Paresh because of his penchant for brightly colored shirts.
A projector sat on the table between him and the orange shirt, projecting a simple diagram onto the far wall. Vipul stared at it as though willing it to divulge its secrets.
On the far left of the diagram was a small box labeled “V. Rathod.” In the middle was another, slightly larger box with a thicker outline and placed within a cloud. That one was labeled “Deputy Agent.” On the right were lots of tiny boxes, collectively labeled “recipients.” At the bottom were the letters “SCS” in large, bold type—Secure Communications System.
Mohit was trying once again to explain the details. “You, and only you, can communicate with the deputy agent. You send—”
“And this agent…” interrupted Vipul. “It’s a piece of software, not a person?”
“Right.”
“So there’s no additional person involved. I’m the only one.”
“Technically, I could take control of the agent because I have access to the server. But besides that, yes. The agent only relays messages that are digitally signed by you.”
“Well, obviously you,” agreed Vipul, irritated by the pointless correction. He waved his hand. “Continue.”
“Each recipient, meanwhile, will only act on messages that are digitally signed by the deputy. That way you can send one message to the deputy, and it will be sent to all the agents, while still being completely encrypted.”
Vipul frowned. This stuff was complicated as it was, but he also needed sleep badly. He’d nearly canceled this morning’s presentation. But he was about to hit the road again, and he needed to make sure this part of the project was on track. Four espressos hadn’t even made a dent in his exhaustion—at this point, even the floor looked inviting—and now, to make matters worse, his skin itched.
“And the same is true in—”
“Wait,” interrupted Vipul, waving his hand as though he were flagging down a cab. “Say that last part again.”
“About you sending messages via the deputy?”
“Yeah. Why can’t I just send messages to them directly?”
“Well, you could, but you couldn’t encrypt them. Well, you could encrypt them, but you’d have to have a shared key for all the recipients. And I figured—”
Vipul’s palm slapped the table. “Speak English!”
Mohit jumped back in his seat, his eyes growing wide. The room was silent except for the humming of the fan on the projector.
“Look,” continued Vipul, softening his voice. “I just want to know why we need this deputy system at all. In plain English.”
Mohit furrowed his brow and began speaking very deliberately. “We want the messages to be encrypted. So that no one besides the recipients can read them. Right?”
“Yes, obviously.”
“Okay. And further, if we decide a single recipient is untrustworthy, we want to make it easy to ensure this person can no longer read the messages. Right?”
“Why can’t I just take them off the list of bro—er, recipients?” Vipul cringed inwardly. He didn’t want Mohit to understand the purpose of the system. This was the problem with pushing himself so hard—fatigue led to stupid mistakes.
“You could,” agreed Mohit. “But if they somehow intercepted a message, they’d still have the key to read it. You could change the key, but then you’d have to somehow give the new key to all the recipients in a secure fashion.”
Vipul squeezed his eyes shut and focused his mind. “Okay, I think I see,” he said, his eyes still shut. “It’s a catch-22. It’s kinda paranoid. But that’s the whole point.”
Mohit exhaled audibly. “Yes. We have to assume someone might intercept the messages. Otherwise, it isn’t really a secure system.”
“Yeah, okay. So each recipient has their own key.”
“And so you’d have to send a message individually to each one. Which is basically what the deputy system does for you. And since it’s on a secured server in the cloud, we don’t have to worry too much if, say, your laptop is stolen. We can simply give you a new key-pair and update the agent. What’s also nice is that…”
Vipul could sense the pride in Mohit’s voice. The kid had been a prodigy back in India. Vipul had heard about him through his contacts there. After he’d graduated from ITT, Vipul offered him a job. It was not the sort of offer you refused, especially if you hailed from the same neighborhoods as one of the Rathod gangs. “Don’t worry,” Vipul had told him, “if you do good work for me, you and your family will be well taken care of.” He didn’t have to explain to him what would happen if he didn’t do good work. And although Vipul was still struggling to understand the details, the SCS seemed well thought-out.
Meanwhile, the broker partnerships were coming together—they’d inked several hundred so far. With the communication system in place, all that remained was to put the Wave Nine clone into action. The engineer had apparently caused some trouble, but now his daughter was en route to Bihar, so that would hopefully keep him in line the rest of the way. If not, they could always rough him up, or maybe maim the daughter, until he got the message. But that was so…distasteful. So inelegant.
“…with SSH, so it can’t be compromised without access to the key for the server itself, and I’m the only one with a copy…”
Christ, the kid was still talking. And wearing that ridiculous shirt. Didn’t he have a wife to help him dress? He couldn’t recall. Engineers were a funny bunch, Vipul decided. Completely lacking in common sense. It was a little disconcerting when you realized they were the ones effectively deciding the future of the human race.
12
* * *
East Detroit • The Lab
Friday, April 27th
8:00 a.m. EDT (Eastern Daylight Time)
Lock’s truck rattled to a stop in front of the dilapidated brick building that housed the lab. The early morning sunlight brought out unfamiliar hues in the red bricks. Lock got out squinting and trudged to the door. He ran his keycard through the scanner and waited for the click. He’d barely slept, and his eyeballs were burning. He tried to massage them as he entered the building.
He walked down the hallway and turned at what was now the first door on the right—the original door had been covered over. He absently scanned his keycard again and entered the lab, surprised to find that the lights were already on.
“Good morning, Lock,” said Raj cheerfully. Sanjay echoed the greeting.
Lock wondered if they knew about Sophie. Didn’t look like it. “Morning,” he grunted. “How early do you guys get here every morning, anyway?”
“Mr. Patel told us to be here every morning by 8 a.m.,” said Sanjay.
“Wait. So all this time, you guys have been coming in at eight?”
“Yes,” agreed Raj. “Except of course when we were still here from the night before.”
Lock frowned. “You should have told me.”
“I am sorry,” said Sanjay.
Lock waved his hand and grunted again. He collapsed into his chair and slapped the keyboard of his laptop to wake the machine up. “All right. So I guess the first thing I’m supposed to do—we’re supposed to do—is steal all these brokerage accounts?”
“Yes,” said Raj. “Mr. Patel gave me very specific instructions.”
“I’ll bet.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing.” Lock wheeled around in his chair. “Anything else?”
“We are to write a program that will take selected stocks, log in to the brokerage accounts, and sell shares in those stocks until the stock reaches a certain price.”
Lock nodded. “Now we’re getting down to brass tacks.”
“Pardon me?”
“Nothing. Never mind. Okay. Do we have a list of the brokerages we’re supposed to target?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. The most reliable thing to do is just find vulnerable routers that are sending traffic to IPs for those brokerages. Then we can record all the SSL traffic and decrypt it with the help of the Wave Nine. I can handle that part. We’re also going to need to spoof each of the brokerage Web sites. Unless they have APIs. Raj, can you take a look at the brokerage sites to see if they have APIs we can use? Actually, never mind. It will be easier just to write scrapers. You ever written a scraper, Raj?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“All right. We’ll pair on the first few and then hopefully you can take it from there.”
“Excellent.”
Lock began typing and clicking. Several terminal windows appeared on the oversized monitor, followed by a large, empty screen that slowly began filling with characters. “Sanjay,” barked Lock.
“Yes.”
“Get us some fucking cappuccinos.”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, Raj. Pay attention. So what I’m doing here is making a ‘get’ request to the E-Trade log-in page. We’ll do the same with all the brokerage sites—”
“Before we do that, sir, do you mind if I ask you something?”
“I suppose.”
“Was this the entire purpose of building the Wave Nine?”
Lock sighed and turned to face Raj, who’d pulled up his chair behind him. “Probably.”
“You use Shor’s algorithm to find the keys?”
“Yes. Maybe. Well, no. Probably not. Not for AES anyway. That would take too long. But there’s another, newer attack based on Schur transforms.”
Raj was silent for a moment, eyeing the aluminum housing against the far wall. Lock’s eyebrows arched. He suddenly realized Raj had been as much in the dark as he had. “How will you get the accounts?” Raj asked plaintively.
“Like I said, we’ll hack into the routers.”
“No, I mean, specifically.”
Lock understood that Raj wanted to be a part of actually making use of the Wave Nine and rocked back in his chair. Anything to keep his mind off Sophie. “Let’s see. Where to begin? The first thing is running traceroutes to all the brokerages.”
“Yes.”
“I probe the routers to find those that are vulnerable.”
