“Haven’t you read any William Gibson?”
Ryan confessed that he had not, and Biery gave him a look of utter bewilderment.
Jack did his best to get Biery back on the task at hand. “Can you tell who he used the attack tool kit on?”
Biery looked it over for a moment more. “Actually, nobody.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, but he never launched any of this stuff. He downloaded it one week to the day before you whacked him, but he never used it.”
“Where did he get it?”
Biery considered this for a moment, and then he opened the drive’s Web browser. Quickly he scanned through the history of the webpages Kartal visited, going back several weeks. Finally he said, “Script kiddies can buy these tool kits on the Internet on special underground economy sites. But I don’t think that’s where he got it. I’d bet money that this Center character sent it to him via Cryptogram. He got it after the e-mails between them ceased and Cryptogram was launched, and the Libyan didn’t go anywhere on the Internet that would have these tools for sale.”
“Interesting,” Jack said, but he wasn’t sure what that meant. “If Center sent it to him, maybe it was part of a bigger plan. Something that never got off the ground.”
“Maybe. Even though this stuff isn’t the highest-level hacking known to man, it can still be pretty damaging. Last year the computer network of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland was hacked. The FBI spent months and millions on the investigation, only to find out that their culprit was a seventeen-year-old operating out of a karaoke bar and cybercafe in Malaysia.”
“Damn. And he used a tool kit like this?”
“Yep. The vast majority of hacks are done by some flunky who only knows how to click his mouse. The real malicious code is written by what are called black-hat hackers. They are the bad guys. Kartal may have the attack tool kit on his machine, but I have a feeling Center is the black-hat who sent it to him.”
After all the documents were mined by Jack for intelligence value, Gavin Biery began hunting through the device’s software, looking for any clues as to how Center had been able to remotely operate the camera. There was no obvious application to do this present on the drive, and no e-mails between Kartal and Center discussing Center’s access, so Biery concluded that the mysterious Center had probably hacked the Libyan’s computer without his knowledge. Biery decided he would take as long as required to ferret out the hacking tools Center used in order to learn more about Center’s identity.
In this endeavor Jack Junior was out of his element; he could no more pull intel out of raw software code than he could read Sanskrit.
Ryan rejoined his fellow analysts and went to work looking into the Libyan cell and their mysterious benefactor via other means, while Biery spent virtually every waking minute when he was not working on other Hendley/Campus IT duties huddled in his lonely but secure conference room with the Istanbul Drive.
It took Gavin weeks to open and test and retest every one of the hundreds of executable files on the drive in order to see what it did and how it affected the rest of the machine, and when this task yielded nothing of value he then drilled down into the source code, the text-based instructions of each program, tens of thousands of lines of data that, ultimately, revealed nothing more than the executables.
Then, after he’d expended weeks of effort, he began digging into the machine code. This was the computer language sequence, long strings of 1’s and 0’s that
While the source code was high-tech and arcane, the machine code was nigh on indecipherable to anyone but an expert in computer programming.
It was mind-numbingly boring, even for a guy who lived for computer code, but despite suggestions from his fellow computer geeks that he was chasing ghosts in the machine, and nudges from the top brass at Hendley to hurry up or declare the exercise fruitless, Gavin kept working at his slow, methodical pace.
Jack had been thinking about the night in Istanbul and the subsequent monthlong investigation while he waited for his computer to boot up. He realized he’d lost track of time for a moment, snapping out of it to find himself staring at the camera above his computer monitor. It was a built-in device that was sometimes used for Web chat communications with other departments around the building. Even though Gavin had pronounced the company network impregnable, Jack still spent a lot of time with that twitchy feeling that he was being watched.
He looked deeply into the camera, still thinking of that night in Istanbul.
With a shake of his head he said, “You’re too young to be paranoid.”
He stood to head over to the break room for a cup of coffee, but before he walked off he grabbed a Post-it note from a pad next to his keyboard, then stuck the gummed portion of the paper over the camera lens.
A low-tech solution to a high-tech problem, more for his own peace of mind than anything else.
As Jack turned he took one step toward the hallway before he stopped suddenly, heaving in surprise.
In front of him stood Gavin Biery.
Jack saw Biery virtually every workday, and the guy never exactly appeared to be the epitome of good health, but today he looked like death warmed over. Here at eight-thirty a.m. his clothes were wrinkled, his thinning gray- brown hair was askew, and dark baggy circles hung pronounced above his fleshy cheeks.
On the best of days Gavin was a guy whose face looked like the only light it ever saw was the glow of his LCD monitor, but today he looked like a vampire in his coffin.
“Holy shit, Gav. Did you spend the night here?”
“The weekend, actually,” answered Biery in a tired but excited voice.
“You need some coffee?”
“Ryan… at this point, I
Jack chuckled at this. “Well, at least tell me your shitty weekend was worth it.”
Now Biery’s soft face tightened into a smile. “I found it. I freaking found it!”
“You found what?”
“I found remnants of the malware on the Istanbul Drive. It’s not much, but it’s a clue.”
Jack pumped his fist into the air. “Awesome!” he said, but internally he could not help but think,
NINE
While Ryan and Biery headed together down to the technology department, John Clark sat in his office, drumming the fingers of his good hand on his desk. It was just past eight-thirty; the director of operations of The Campus, Sam Granger, would have been in his office and working for more than an hour already, and the director of The Campus and the “white side” operation, Hendley Associates, Gerry Hendley, would just now be settling into his office.
“Granger.”
“Hey, Sam, it’s John.”
“Morning. Good weekend?”
“You bet. Gerry just walked in the door. We’re free right now. Come on.”
“Roger.”
Five minutes later Clark stepped into the office of Gerry Hendley on the ninth floor of the building. Gerry
