“Yes, sir. We could have her make an unscheduled port visit at Subic Bay.”
Ryan liked that. “Just surface right there in the danger zone to show China we aren’t going to lie down and play dead.”
Secretary of Defense Burgess liked it, too. “And show the Filipinos we support them. They will appreciate the gesture.”
Scott Adler held a hand up. Clearly he did not like the idea. “Beijing will see that as a provocative act.”
“Shit, Scott,” Ryan said. “If I eat Italian tonight instead of Chinese, Beijing will see that as a provocative act.”
“Sir—”
Ryan looked to the admiral. “Do it. Make all the typical statements about how the port visit has been scheduled for some time and the timing is in no way meant to signify blah, blah, blah.”
“Of course, sir.”
Ryan sat on the edge of his desk and addressed all his guests now. “We’ve said for some time that the South China Sea was the most likely place for bad stuff to happen. As you can imagine, I am going to want a lot of information from all of you on this one. If you have anything you need to discuss with me personally, just get with Arnie’s office.” Jack looked to Arnie van Damm. “This subject goes to the top of the batting order. If someone in this room wants a few minutes of my time, I don’t want you sending me on a meet-and-greet with the Girl Scout who sold the most Thin Mints last year.”
The room laughed, as did Arnie, but he knew his boss was serious.
TWENTY-ONE
The annual DEF CON Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, is among the largest underground computer hacking conventions in the world. Each year as many as ten thousand computer security professionals, cybercriminals, journalists, federal employees, and other tech enthusiasts come together for several days to learn about new techniques, products, and services and to enjoy speaker presentations and competitions pertaining to all aspects of hacking and code breaking.
It is an annual Woodstock for top-level hackers and tech geeks.
The conference is held at the off-strip Rio Hotel and Casino, and most attendees stay there or at one of the many nearby hotels, but each year a group of old friends pitch in together to rent a house a few miles to the east in Paradise.
Just before eleven p.m. Charlie Levy pulled his rented Nissan Maxima into the driveway of the luxury vacation home at the end of South Hedgeford Court, in a neighborhood of quiet residential streets full of zero-lot vacation rentals. He stopped at the gate, rolled down his window, and pressed the intercom button.
While he waited he looked around him at the high iron fence lined with palm trees and the landscaped driveway that led up to the six-bedroom house. He and a group of longtime DEF CON attendees had rented this same home for ten years now, and it was good to be back.
After a beep from the call box a nasal voice said, “DarkGod? What’s the password, you fat bastard?”
“Open, sez me, you piece of shit.” Levy said it with a laugh, and seconds later the driveway gate silently opened.
Charlie stomped on the gas pedal and burned rubber in the drive, squealing his tires loud enough to be heard by those up in the house.
Charlie “DarkGod” Levy was not a founding member of the DEF CON conference, but he’d been coming since 1994, the year after it started, and as a member of the old guard, he was something of a legend.
Back in ’94 he’d been a freshman at the University of Chicago, as well as a self-taught hacker who cracked passwords for fun and wrote code as a hobby. His first DEF CON had been an eye-opening experience. He found himself a part of a huge group of like-minded enthusiasts who were careful to not ask anyone what they did for a living, but instead treated everyone with equal measures of suspicion and bonhomie. He’d learned a lot that first year, and more than anything, he learned that he had an intense desire to impress his peers with his hacking exploits.
After college Levy was hired by the computer gaming industry as a programmer, but he spent the majority of his downtime on his own computer-related projects: building and configuring computer software and working on new malware and penetration tactics.
He hacked every device with a processor known to man, and each year he took his trip to Vegas to show his friends and “competition” what he had done. He became one of the major presenters at the conference and garnered something of a cult following; his exploits were discussed on Web chat boards for the rest of the year.
Each year Charlie Levy had to outdo himself, so he worked harder and harder in his time away from the office, dug deeper and deeper into operating systems code, and sought bigger and bigger victims to attack.
And after his presentation at this year’s conference, he was sure, the whole world would be talking about Charlie Levy.
He climbed out of the Maxima and greeted five friends whom he hadn’t seen since last year’s meeting. Levy was only thirty-eight, but he looked a lot like Jerry Garcia, short and heavy, with a long gray beard and thinning gray hair. He wore a black T-shirt with the white silhouette of a busty woman and the phrase “Hack Naked” written underneath it. He was known for his funny T-shirts that stretched across his fat frame, but this year he had been careful to pack a few button-down shirts as well, because he knew that after his presentation on day one of the conference, he would be doing a lot of media interviews.
He unpacked his suitcase in his room and then met his friends down at the beautiful backyard swimming pool. He took a Corona from a full ice chest, made a few minutes of small talk about what everyone else had been up to in the past twelve months, and then stood by himself near the rock waterfall so he would not have to answer questions about his own activities or what he had in store for tomorrow.
Looking around him, Charlie Levy saw tech royalty. Two men were Microsoft execs who flew in from Washington state this afternoon. Another guy was a technical director at Google; he was worth more than the Microsoft guys combined. The remaining two were just mere millionaires; one worked the hardware side at AT&T and the other ran the IT department of a French bank.
Charlie was accustomed to feeling a bit like the odd man out at these annual get-togethers.
Charlie was a video-game programmer, and it paid well, but he had turned down a decade’s worth of promotions because he did not want to be rich.
No, Charlie Levy wanted to be a legend.
And this would be his year.
Tomorrow he would reveal during his presentation his discovery of a zero-day vulnerability he had exploited that allowed him to infiltrate JWICS, the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System — known as “Jay- Wicks,” and through it Intelink-TS, the top-secret secure intranet used by the U.S. intelligence community to transfer their most highly classified data.
Charlie “DarkGod” Levy had — and he planned to use this as a punch line during his opening comments — wormed his way inside the CIA’s brain.
Although the CIA’s website had been brought down several times by “denial-of-service attacks,” Levy would be the first to claim, and to prove publicly, that he had hacked into actual top-secret CIA cables, thereby reading classified information sent between CIA Langley and CIA stations and officers abroad.
This would be huge news in the amateur hacking world, that a “garage hacker” had infiltrated America’s spy agency, but this was not the most interesting part of Levy’s discussion, for the very simple reason that Levy would also announce that he had proof that he was not the first to do this.
When Charlie entered Intelink-TS and began poking around he discovered that another entity had beat him to it, and was, at that very moment, reading CIA message traffic via a RAT, a remote-access Trojan.
Charlie had the screen shots of the intrusion, the code, a thumbnail sketch of the entire brilliant RAT itself.
It was clear to Charlie that the malware was brilliant and he had already decided he would not mention that
