the RAT the other hacker used was several orders of magnitude more advanced than the code he had managed to put together to access the zero-day vulnerability.
This was an absolute bombshell, and in the thirty-five days since Levy had made this discovery, he’d told no one about it.
He looked around the pool deck at the glitterati of DEF CON here with him, and he knew that in twenty-four hours they’d have to take a number to talk to him.
This DEF CON would be his coming-out party.
Of course Levy knew it was inevitable that he would catch a lot of grief from the government about not only his successful hacking, but his revelation that he knew good and well that someone else was privy to America’s deepest, darkest secrets, and he had not alerted the authorities. He thought he might get harassed by the Feds for what he had done, but he also pictured tens of thousands of members of his community coming out in support of him and standing up against the government.
Getting harassed by the Feds was a rite of passage.
There was one more chapter to Charlie Levy’s story, and this he would also reveal at tomorrow’s presentation.
The mystery hacker on the CIA network had discovered Levy’s intrusion. His RAT had been so well built it was able to recognize when someone pushed into the network by the same means as had he.
How did Charlie know this? Because the hacker contacted him via instant messaging two weeks ago, offering DarkGod money to work remotely for him on other projects involving JWICS and Intelink-TS systems.
Levy was stunned when he realized he had been identified, but he knew there was no way in hell the mystery hacker had ID’d him through Intelink-TS. Levy was confident in his methods of attack concealment; he performed his digital breach of the CIA network over a complicated series of hops and proxies that would completely mask the machine of origin. The only explanation he came up with for how he was discovered was his research into JWICS, Intelink-TS, and the protocols and architecture used by the networks. Some of this research had been performed on open networks that, theoretically, could have been monitored by the mystery hacker.
Somehow, the mystery hacker was smart enough, and his visibility over the Internet was pervasive enough, that he’d deduced Levy’s involvement.
When Levy declined the offer to work with the other entity — Levy did not want to be someone else’s hired gun — his computer came under heavy persistent attack from a wide variety of sophisticated cyberthreats. The mystery hacker was doing his best to infiltrate Levy’s computer. But DarkGod was no mere mortal when it came to computer security, and he took up the challenge as if he was playing chess with the mystery hacker and he had, for the last two weeks, anyway, managed to keep all malware off his machine.
Charlie Levy fully expected his new nemesis to be present at DEF CON, or else at the Black Hat conference, a more corporate convention for security professionals that would take place the following week here in Vegas.
Charlie hated to think that the son of a bitch might try to steal his thunder.
It took a while for Levy to loosen up with the rest of the guys, but by three a.m. he’d downed close to ten Coronas and he was feeling no pain. It was always like this on the first night, when the booze flowed out at the pool. Although all of the other guys were married with children now, they came to Vegas with the dual objectives of getting as drunk as possible and carrying on and even expanding their legendary exploits around DEF CON.
The Google guy had just stumbled off to bed, but the rest of the crew was still out by the pool, drinks in hand. Levy reclined on a chaise longue with a fresh Corona while the Microsoft guys smoked Cohibas next to him and AT&T and French Bank reclined on pool floats in the water with their drinks and their laptops.
While the party slowly died down at the South Hedgeford Court home, at another vacation rental five doors down on East Quail Avenue the glass patio door slid silently open. The home was pitch black and appeared unoccupied, but out of the darkness eight men stepped into the moonlit backyard, walked around the covered swimming pool, and made their way to a wooden fence.
Each man carried a black backpack on his back and a handgun equipped with a long suppressor in a holster on his hip. One at a time they climbed the fence and dropped down into the next yard, their movements stealthy and quiet.
AT&T looked up from his laptop while he floated on the pool chair. “Hey, DarkGod. We’ve all talked about our presentations, but you haven’t said shit about your topic.”
One of the Microsoft guys blew out Cohiba smoke and said, “That means Charlie’s talk is either really good or really bad.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” replied Charlie, slyly.
French Bank shook his head; he paddled with his hand to turn himself toward the men on the deck. “If it’s anything like two years ago when you cracked into the Bellagio’s physical plant and increased the pressure on the fountain pumps, I’ll pass. Squirting a few dozen tourists is not my idea of— Hi. Can we help you?”
The rest of the men at the pool turned their heads, following the direction French Bank was looking. There, in the moonlight just out of the lights of the pool deck, several men stood in a row, facing the pool.
Charlie sat up. “Who the hell are you guys?”
The Corona in Charlie’s hand exploded with a pop, and he looked down. His “Hack Naked” shirt was ripped, and blood drained from his chest. A second hole next to the first appeared as he watched.
A third round struck him in the forehead, and he flipped back on the chaise, dead.
The two men in the deck chairs were sluggish from the alcohol, but they both managed to stand and turn. One made it a few feet up the deck toward the house, but both were cut down by suppressed handgun rounds to the back.
One of them tumbled into the swimming pool; the other fell back over his chair into a small rock garden.
The two men on the pool floats were helpless. They both screamed out, but they were gunned down where they lay, their dead bodies draining blood into the clear water along with the blood from the Microsoft man floating facedown nearby.
When everyone at the pool was dead, Crane, the leader of the unit, turned to Stint. In Mandarin he said, “There should be one more. Find him.”
Stint ran into the house with his pistol in front of him.
The Google man had slept through it all, but Stint found him in his bed, and put a single round through the back of his head.
Out by the pool, three of the men used small flashlights to pick up the spent shell casings, while three more men went back inside, checking room by room to find DarkGod’s luggage. They went through it and took his laptop and all his peripherals, his papers, thumb drives, DVDs, mobile phone, and anything else other than clothing. In place of all this, they left a handful of DVDs and thumb drives of their own, and a mobile phone spoofed with Levy’s number and data that they downloaded from his device.
All this took more than ten minutes, but Crane had been given several objectives, and he’d been ordered to be perfectly thorough.
Soon all four were back out on the pool deck. The swimming pool water was bright pink now. On Crane’s command, Wigeon unzipped his backpack and took out three small bags of high-quality cocaine. He tossed these in the grass near the fence, with the intention that the drugs would be found with the bodies and this entire event would appear to be a nefarious deal gone bad.
That none of the men had any drugs in their bodies could be explained by the fact that the deal had gone belly-up and the guns came out before anyone had time to partake in the drugs.
Finally Crane ordered everyone but Snipe back to the safe house, and the six men departed.
After they gave them time to get clear, Crane and Snipe stood on the side of the beautiful pool and unscrewed the silencers from their FN Five-seveNs. These they slipped into their backpacks. Then they aimed their weapons high above the horizon to the south, just below the hazy half-moon, and then both men opened fire.
They fired individual rounds and short volleys in a chaotic cadence, until both weapons were empty and the handguns’ slides locked open. They then quickly reloaded, holstered their guns, and kicked the fallen spent shell casings in all directions. Some of the hot brass fell into the bloody pool, where it sank to the bottom; other casings rolled into the grass; and more rolled farther away along the decorative concrete deck.
