and gave a tired wave to William, the night security officer behind the front desk.
“Morning, Mr. Ryan. Mr. Biery said you’d be staggering in looking like you just woke up. I’ve got to say you look a lot better than Mr. Biery does during normal business hours.”
“He’s going to look even worse after I kick his ass for dragging me out of bed.”
William laughed.
Jack found Gavin Biery in his office. He fought his mild anger over Biery’s intrusion into his personal life and asked, “What’s up?”
“I know who put the virus on the Libyan’s machine.”
This woke Jack up more than the drive from Columbia. “You know the identity of Center?”
Biery shrugged dramatically. “That I can’t be sure of. But if it’s not Center, it’s somebody working for or with him.”
Jack looked over at Biery’s coffeemaker, hoping to pour himself a cup. But the machine was off and the pot was empty.
“You haven’t been here all night?”
“No. I was working from home. I did not want to expose the Campus network to what I was doing, so I did it from one of my personal machines. I just got here.”
Jack sat down. It was sounding more and more like Biery had had a very good reason to call him in after all.
“What have you been doing from home?”
“I’ve been hanging out in the digital underground.”
Jack was still tired. Too tired to play twenty questions with Gavin. “Can you just fill me in while I sit here quietly with my eyes closed?”
Biery had mercy on Ryan. “There are websites one can visit to conduct illegal business in cyberspace. You can go to these sort of online bazaars and buy fake IDs, recipes to build bombs, stolen credit card information, and even access to networks of previously hacked computers.”
“You mean botnets.”
“Right. You can rent or buy access to infected machines around the world.”
“You can just put in your credit card number and rent a botnet?”
Biery shook his head. “Not your credit card number. Bitcoin. It’s an online currency that is not traceable. Just like cash but better. It’s all about anonymity out there.”
“So are you telling me you rented a botnet?”
“Several botnets.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“It’s illegal if you do something illegal with them. I did not.”
“What did you do?” Jack found himself playing twenty questions with Biery again.
“I had this theory. You know how I told you the string of machine code left on the Istanbul Drive could lead us to whoever the culprit was?”
“Sure.”
“I decided I would reach out in the cyberunderground, looking for other infected machines that also have the same lines of machine code that I found on the Libyan’s machine.”
“That sounds like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“Well, I figured there would be many machines out there with this virus. So it’s more like looking for any one of a bushel of needles in a haystack, and I did what I could to make the haystack smaller.”
“How so?”
“There are a billion networked computers in the world, but the subset of hackable machines is much smaller, maybe a hundred million. And the subset of machines that have been hacked is probably a third of that.”
“But still, you had to check thirty million computers to—”
“No Jack, because malware that good isn’t going to just be used on a couple of machines. No, I figured there were thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of nodes out there with this same remote- access Trojan on them. And I narrowed it down further by only renting botnets of machines using the same operating system as the Libyan machines and high-quality processors and components, because I figured Center wouldn’t fool around with any old machine. He’d want to break into the machines of important people, companies, networks, et cetera. So I just grabbed botnets of high-caliber players.”
“They rent out botnets of different quality?”
“Absolutely. You can order a botnet that is fifty machines at AT&T, or one that is two hundred fifty machines from offices of the Canadian Parliament, or a ten-thousand-node botnet of Europeans who have at least one thousand friends each on Facebook, twenty-five thousand computers that have industrial-quality security cameras attached to them. Pretty much any variable can be purchased or rented.”
“I had no idea,” admitted Jack.
“When I found botnets for sale possessing all the attributes I wanted, I just cast as wide a net as I could afford, rented them, and then ran some diagnostics on the hacked machines to pare them down further. Then I wrote a multithreaded program that took a peek at that location in each machine to see if that line of code was present.”
“And you found a computer with the Istanbul Drive code on it?”
The IT man’s smile widened. “Not
Jack leaned forward. “Oh my God. All with the identical piece of malware you found on the Libyan’s drive?”
“Yes.”
“Where are these machines? What physical locations are we talking about?”
“Center is… I don’t want to sound too dramatic, but Center is
Jack asked, “So how did you find out who he is?”
“One of the infected machines was being used as a relay to the command server. It was pushing traffic from the botnet to a network in Kharkov, Ukraine. I penetrated the network servers and saw that they hosted dozens of illegal or questionable websites. The sickest porn imaginable, online marketplaces for buying and selling fake passports, card skimmers, stuff like that. I hacked into each of these sites easily. But there was one location I could not get into. All I got was the name of the administrator.”
“What’s the name of the administrator?”
“FastByte Twenty-two.”
Jack Ryan deflated. “Gavin, that’s not a name.”
“It’s his computer handle. No, it’s not his Social Security number and home address, but we can use it to find him.”
“Anybody can make up a handle.”
“Trust me, Jack. There are people out there who know the identity of FastByte Twenty-two. You just have to find them.”
Jack nodded slowly, and then he looked at the clock on the wall.
It was not even three a.m.
“I hope you’re right, Gavin.”
TWENTY-FIVE
CIA nonofficial cover operative Adam Yao leaned against the entrance of a shuttered shoe store on Nelson Street, in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district, eating dumplings and noodles with chopsticks from a cardboard bowl. It was nearly nine o’clock in the evening, the last of the day’s light had long left the sliver of sky between the tall buildings that ran down both sides of the street, and Adam’s dark clothing made him all but invisible under the
