“The Lamb’s bride would be a queen.”
“Yes.”
“And who is that?” she asked. “Who’s the bride?” I couldn’t tell if she was asking her question rhetorically or not; if she already knew the answer.
“Well, metaphorically, the church, I think, but…” I was no theologian by any stretch of the imagination. “We’ll have to follow up on that.”
Get to the cell phone call. Nail down that location. It’s your best bet at finding Kayla.
“Listen, here’s why I called. Let’s say I wanted to hack into someone’s cell phone, turn on their speaker or camera, and then send that feed back to another computer. What do you know about that?”
“Sure. We do it all the time.” Then she added somewhat hastily, “Whenever we have a warrant.”
“Of course. Well, someone did it with Lien-hua’s phone. I need to back trace the signal, find out where the feed was sent to.”
“A physical location or a device?”
“Physical location, if at all possible.” I relayed Lien-hua’s cell number to Angela, and she tapped it in, then glanced at one of her other computer screens, where a scrolling stream of computer code appeared.
She let her fingers dance across the keys, then gave the screen a fierce look and bit violently through a carrot. “Whoever did this is good. I can locate it, but it’s going to take me some time.”
It didn’t surprise me that Alexei had done a thorough job of covering his tracks. “All right, while you work on that, let me ask you another question. Hypothetically, if I were going to hack into a nuclear submarine, what would I have to do?”
She stopped chewing the carrot, stared directly into her video chat camera at me. “A nuclear submarine?”
“Hypothetically.”
“Whenever someone says ‘hypothetically,’ he’s never talking about something hypothetical.”
“Theoretically, then.”
She looked rebukingly at me over the top of her glasses.
“Same difference, huh?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Can you walk me through it?”
“Which do you want?” She glanced at the screen beside her. “The cell trace or the hacking seminar?”
“Well…”
“Let me guess. Both.”
“And she’s a mind reader too.”
“Mm-hmm.”
She took another carrot, rolled it between her fingers, then crunched into it. “Okay, go to the toolbar, scroll down the View menu, then click on Split Screen/Chalkboard.”
I did as she instructed, and the video chat image on my computer folded in half and fluttered into two windows. The one on the left held Angela’s picture, the one on the right did indeed look like a chalkboard. She picked up a stylus, and as she drew on a data pad beside her, a cloud appeared on the chalkboard window on my screen.
“Here’s the internet.” She added a small arrow pointing to the cloud, then extended a line from it toward the right side of the window and diagramed a series of four boxes separated by short lines. “Here we have external military servers and proxies…” She inserted more lines and boxes to represent additional machines. “And also these are your personal computers, workstations, and so on. At each place where they connect to one of the three Department of Defense intranets, they go through a router that’s supposed to catch malware.”
None of this was new to me, but I let her go on rather than interrupt her train of thought, which I thought might only eat up more time.
“At any point, in any one of these layers, it’s possible to hack in, but it gets harder and harder the closer you move toward the top secret communication channels from the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network-”
“NIPRNET.”
“Yes. Then on to the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNET, and then to JWICS. Especially if…” She swiped her finger across her data pad, erasing the lines that connected the military’s routers and their intranets of computers. “If the military were to find out about a threat, they’d sever the connection between the Cloud and their network.”
“That’s possible? I thought that was one of our biggest vulnerabilities, that our communication infrastructure was too dependent on the web?”
“Well,” she admitted, “it’s not easy, considering the whole purpose of the internet is interconnectivity. The very thing that makes the internet strong-decentralization-is the thing that makes it weak. But USCYBERCOM, the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the Army’s Cyber Command, and the 24th Air Force have been working on ways.”
I already knew that the United States Cyber Command, an attempt within Homeland Security to assess, forestall, and intercept cyber threats to the military and the US infrastructure, was a bureaucratic nightmare and still woefully inefficient, but I wasn’t sure about the military divisions she’d just listed. “Tell me about the 10th Fleet and the 24th.”
“Well, as you know, there are nearly three dozen cyrberwarfare agencies in the US government, but the Air Force’s 24th is probably the best, especially their Computer Emergency Response Team-AFCERT. They’re in another league using algorithms to analyze worldwide trending.”
“Trending?”
“The type and flow of information passing to and from servers worldwide. They work mainly in host-based intrusion prevention systems to locate and block malware or attempts to infiltrate military networks. Then they patch vulnerabilities for pilots and scour all air force networks for forward-facing internet presences.”
That was a mouthful.
“Hackers,” I said.
“Foreign ones. Yes. They also work in space-based comm systems, drones, full-spectrum network defense, and new architectures.”
“So does the 24th track domestic intrusion too?”
“Yes, as does the Navy’s 10th Fleet, USCYBERCOM, but if we’re talking more cybercrime than cyrberwarfare, then it’s me and Lacey. It all depends.”
“On what?”
“Whichever agency happens to stumble onto the threat.”
Her choice of the word stumble was not very reassuring.
“But getting back to your question-even if we cut the connection to the Cloud, we might still be in trouble.”
“How?”
“If the hackers had gotten in before, left malware or back doors that would allow them persistent access. Once you inject the bad code in there, you’re good to go.” She thought for a moment. “Also, it’s possible they could bypass the Cloud altogether and access JWICS physically at one of the computer stations around the world that’s already connected to it. Some sophisticated malware can hop file shares in virtual machines. Or you could’ve implanted a physical transmitting device into the computer, say, before it was shipped out to the military.”
“The more complex a system, the more vulnerable it is.”
“Sure. You can gain access through a Trojan, counter-encrypting, port knocking. Use a covert channel. There are a dozen ways.”
Perhaps what struck me the most was how unfazed she seemed by all this.
She downed some Vitamin Water, then her eyes ghosted toward the screen displaying the cell phone analysis. I could tell she didn’t want to drop that project in the middle, and she must have noticed something pertinent because she silently bowed out of our conversation and went back to work completing the cell trace. Thousands of lines of indecipherable code streamed down the screen beside her. She reminded me of a code reader from one of the Matrix movies.
“Let’s back up for a minute,” I said, “and say we’re trying to hack into that submarine, but that we had no
