Standing up and straightening his tie in the mirror, Jameson prepared himself for the biggest meeting of not only his career, but his life. He didn’t really get along that well with Claire Manning to begin with, her father being a much better CEO than the woman could ever even dream to be. But with the added pressure of the President on the line and the things they were going to have to share, he didn’t feel very confident. Between them they had to try and figure out if there was a way to save the country, or at least keep things from completely imploding while they found the solution.
“Okay,” he announced to the intern as he opened his office door fully, the young man – who Jameson doubted was long out of his teenage years – waiting dutifully. “Lead the way.”
“Yes sir.”
The walk was short, and Jameson found himself wishing it could last a little bit longer. He had no idea how he was going to approach the problem ahead of him, but throughout his career he had faced up to many big challenges and always managed to get the better of them. Nodding to the intern and opening the door to the boardroom, Jameson forced himself to feel confident and hopeful about what lay ahead. He knew that without that attitude, hope was already lost.
“Madam President. Ms Manning.” he greeted the two largest faces on the large screen in the boardroom, before nodding to the two physical bodies who sat around the table. “Apologies for the delay.”
“No matter,” the President replied. “Let’s get down to business now, shall we? Where is best to begin?”
There was a moment of silence as everyone tried to work out what to say. President Morgan and Claire Manning weren’t the only faces to occupy the large screen in the boardroom. While they each filled a third of the screen, another segment showed two men from the Trident bank, one of whom Jameson recognized as Jasper Connolly. Jameson found it odd that they hadn’t dialed into the same line as Claire Manning, all of them undoubtedly in the same building, but that was just yet another one of Ms Manning’s traits that made her so disliked within the company. Jasper and his companion – who Jameson couldn’t place – were there to advise on exactly how the hack had taken place and whether there was any possibility at all of tracing it back to the source and the culprits. It was these men that eventually picked up the baton to speak first.
“We’ve got an update ma’am,” the slightly shorter, rounder one of the two that Jameson didn’t recognize offered up. “Although I’m afraid it’s not good news.”
“Go on,” President Morgan replied sternly.
“Well,” the portly man cleared his throat. “We have confirmed that it is not a ransomware attack. This was carefully and meticulously planned out by an extremely talented group of hackers. We can’t see exactly how they wiped the accounts or how they got in and out of them. In fact, there are only one or two tiny breadcrumbs which give us any idea of the details of the attack.”
The President’s face fell, disappointed with the results as she worried how this was going to affect her country. Nonetheless she remained quiet, the two techies from Trident seeing enough from her reaction that she wanted them to continue. Jameson watched on quietly, sharing a nervous look with the other two people he shared the room with. One of them was his deputy finance director, Angela Solomon, a strict woman not too dissimilar to the President herself. Angela was fairly new to the role, but having worked in the private sector most of her life her views and methods were steadfast and confident, her regime had certainly ruffled more than a few feathers when she first came into the job. Jameson trusted her now though, aware that she had the company’s best intentions at heart. The other was Charlie Hatton, the city’s chief of police and someone Jameson had known for nearly fifteen years. Both he and Angela watched the screen with equal devotion as Jameson did, keen to hear what their colleagues from Trident had discovered.
“The first is a calling card ma’am,” Jasper continued, picking up the explanation. “This was naturally left behind on purpose and contains a number of Chinese symbols.” Jasper held a copy of the calling card up for everyone to see as Charlie clicked a button on the laptop beside him to make that window go full screen.
“I’ve seen it,” President Morgan nodded.
“We’ve got a top team working on this to decipher what the symbols mean, but apparently it’s not just one set form of the Chinese language, but a number mixed together to create some sort of code. The question is a big one though: is this legitimate or just a decoy left behind to confuse us?”
At the tap of a button again, the screen returned to three windows, with the two men at Trident ready to continue. “We can’t see how the hackers got in and out of our systems undetected, but we have identified a pattern within the malware they used. Looking back at our records and the information your technical team shared with us, we have matched this pattern to a couple of other hacks which occurred within the last year. This means we’ve got past examples of work conducted by this group or someone within the group, which could help us to identify the perpetrators.”
Now the President’s face lit up. This was clearly new information and good information at that. “Interesting,” she replied, “so will that help you narrow down the location? Determine whether the hack did originate in China or not?”
“It should,” the man in glasses nodded. “We’re going to keep digging
