customizing software, and at age fifteen the two friends had become accomplished hackers.
The hacking subculture among intelligent teenage boys was a powerful force for Ken and Lance, and they began working together to break into the computer networks of their high school, local universities, and other targets around the world. They did no great damage, they weren’t involved with credit card fraud or identity theft, nor did they sell data hauls to others — they were more in the game for the excitement and the challenge.
Other than a few graffiti attacks on website homepages for their school, they did not cause any harm.
But the local police didn’t see it that way. Both boys were picked up for computer graffiti that was tracked back to them by their junior-high computer teacher, and Lance and Ken immediately confessed.
After a few weeks of community service they decided to reform their ways before they became adults, when such brushes with the law would stay on their records and could seriously affect their future prospects.
Instead they focused their talents and their energies in the right direction, and gained admittance to Caltech, majored in computer science, and then took jobs for computer software companies in Silicon Valley.
They were model citizens, but they were still hackers at heart, so in their late twenties they left the corporate world to start their own company, specializing in penetration testing, or “pentesting,” known in the computer networking world as “ethical hacking.”
They hired themselves out to the IT departments of banks, retail chains, manufacturers, and others, and then endeavored to break into their clients’ networks and hack their websites.
And soon they boasted a one hundred percent success rate hacking their customers’ systems.
They developed a reputation as some of the best “white hat” hackers in Silicon Valley, and the big antivirus companies, McAfee and Symantec, tried to buy them out several times, but the two young men were determined to grow their company into a powerhouse of its own.
Business grew along with their reputation, and soon they began pentesting networks under government contract, attempting to break into so-called bulletproof systems run by top-secret government contractors, looking for ways in that the black-hats — the malicious hackers — had not yet found. Lance and Ken and their two dozen employees had excelled in this task and, flush with fresh government contracts, ADSC was poised to expand again.
The two owners had come a long way in five years, but Lance and Ken still knew how to work twenty hours a day when a project demanded it.
Like tonight.
They and three more of their staff were working overtime because they had found a new exploit in a Windows server component that could be potentially calamitous for any secure government network. It had revealed itself during penetration testing on the network of a government contractor headquartered in nearby Sunnyvale, California.
Lance and Ken had discovered the vulnerability in the software, then they had built their own Trojan, a malware that leeches on to a legitimate process, and used it to climb into the secure network. From here they were astonished to find they could execute an “upstream attack,” using the company’s connection to the U.S. Department of Defense’s secure network to make their way into the bowels of the U.S. military’s most secure information databases.
Everyone at ADSC knew the implications for what they had found. If a smart and determined hacker discovered the vulnerability before Microsoft patched it, the black-hat could build his own virus to steal, alter, or erase terabytes of crucial data necessary for war fighting.
Lance and Ken had not alerted their customers, the DoD, or their colleagues at Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit yet; they knew they had to be certain about their findings, so they tested through the night.
And this critical project would be going at full steam, even now at four in the morning, if not for one significant snag.
The power had just gone out in the entire office park.
Well… that blows,” Lance said as he looked around the dark office. The glow from the monitors in front of the five men working there was the only light in the room. The computers were still running; the backup battery power supply attached to each machine kept the men from losing their data, although the batteries would keep the devices juiced for only an hour, so the men would need to power down if the electricity did not come back on soon.
Marcus, one of ADSC’s lead data-flow analysts, grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the drawer in his desk and stood up. As he stretched his arms and shoulders over his head he said, “Who forgot to pay PG and E?”
Pacific Gas and Electric was the local utility, and none of the five young men in the room thought for a second the culprit was a missed payment. The office had two dozen workstations, several high-capacity servers in the basement server farm, and dozens of other electronic peripherals, all of which drew power from the grid.
This was not the first time they’d tripped a breaker.
Ken Farmer stood up, then took a quick swig of lukewarm Pepsi from a can. “I’m going to take a leak and then I’ll go down and flip the breaker.”
Lance said, “I’m right behind you.”
Data-flow analysts Tim and Rajesh stayed at their machines, but put their heads in their hands to rest.
A resilient, powerful, and utterly secure computer network was a necessity for a company whose business plan consisted of tracking down computer hackers, and ADSC had the tools and the protocols in place to make sure that any cyberattacks targeting their company did not make it through.
Lance and Ken focused great attention on making certain ADSC had all but bulletproofed its network.
But they did not place the same attention on the physical security of their property.
One hundred twenty yards from where Lance and Ken and their three employees stretched and smoked and pissed, a lone individual walked in the heavy mist hanging between trees alongside dark and quiet Ravenswood Drive, approaching the business park that housed ADSC. Other than the early hour and a slight altering of his path to stay out of the direct light of the streetlamps, the figure in no way appeared out of the ordinary.
He wore a black zip-up raincoat with the hood down, his gloved hands were empty, and his pace was a leisurely stroll.
Some thirty yards behind him, a second man walked the same path, but his pace was faster and he closed on the man ahead of him. He too wore a dark raincoat with the hood down.
And twenty yards behind the second pedestrian, a third man jogged up the path, rapidly gaining on the two ahead of him. He wore dark running clothes.
All three men formed together just a few yards in front of the parking lot of the complex, the jogger slowed to match the pace of the other two, and here the three turned as one and stepped onto the property.
With a continued air of nonchalance the men flipped the hoods of their jackets over their heads. Each man also wore a black fleece gaiter around his neck, and simultaneously they pulled these up with gloved hands until their faces were covered from the bottoms of their eyes down.
They stepped onto the small parking lot that would have been illuminated if not for the power outage.
All three reached under their jackets and pulled Belgian-made semiautomatic pistols, FN Five-seveNs. Each weapon carried twenty-one rounds of 5.7x28-millimeter ammunition, a potent handgun caliber.
Long silencers protruded from the muzzles of their guns.
A man with the call sign of Crane was in charge of the small unit. He had more men — seven in total served under him — but he felt his ingress would not require his full squad, so he brought along only two of his assets for this phase of the mission.
And he was correct. ADSC was not a hard target by any stretch of the imagination.
A single security guard worked on the premises, patrolling the office complex in a golf cart at this time of the early morning. He was cocooned in a zippered plastic weather enclosure to keep the mist off him.
When the lights had not come on after thirty seconds or so, the guard reached to his belt and pulled off his iPhone. He knew that of the six companies with offices here on the property, only a few guys at ADSC were actually on site early this morning. He decided he’d call them to see if they needed him to come over with a flashlight.
As the guard scrolled through his contact list, movement in the dark outside his plastic shell caught his eye.
