Code Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel Read online

  He didn’t answer, but he lay so still that I could tell he was listening.

  “Second option is I bust you through main channels with the NSA. That means you get charged with treason and you’ll spend the next forty years in a supermax prison learning what it means to be a ‘fish.’ It’s not a lesson you want to learn, trust me. If we go that way, I lose control of the situation and less friendly people run your life henceforth.”

  Reggie shook his head, still silent.

  “Third option is the one I like. Yes, it still ends with you in prison—that’s going to stay on the table, no way around it—but in that option it’s a federal country club prison and you don’t spend every Friday night giving blow jobs to tattooed members of the Aryan Brotherhood. I think you’ll admit that it’s a better option.”

  “You’re lying to me,” he mumbled. “You’re going to kill me.”

  “If I’d wanted to kill you, Reggie, I wouldn’t have pulled Ghost off of you.”

  Ghost opened one eye, looked around, closed it. Made a soft whuff sound.

  “We don’t want you dead, Reggie. What we want is for you to become a cooperative person. Totally open, totally willing to share everything you know. That kind of thing opens hearts, Reggie. It earns you Brownie points.”

  Reggie said nothing.

  “Now, I need to make a phone call, Reggie,” I said. “I need to make that call in the next five minutes. I need to tell my boss that you’re going to cooperate with us. I need to tell him that you’re going to help us plug the leak in the Department of Defense. I need to tell him that you’re going to name names and make connections so that we can make a whole bunch of arrests. And, yes, some of them will go to Gitmo and those that don’t will be doing the shower-room boogie-woogie in supermax. You, however, won’t. You’ll be watching American Idol on cable, eating food nobody’s spit in, and sleeping soundly at night with all of your various orifices unviolated. Not sure if that’s a word, but you get my gist.”

  He turned and looked at me, uncertainty and conflict blooming like crabgrass in his eyes. “How do I know I can trust you?” he said in a near-whisper.

  I smiled, then reached behind the chair and dragged out a heavy leather valise, opened it, and spilled the contents onto the rug. Reggie stared at what spilled out and his color, already bad, went from pale to green. The light from the one unbroken lamp glinted from the curves and edges of pliers, bone saws, wood rasps, electrical clamps, scalpels, and rolls of duct tape. “Because I didn’t use these.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I know, right?”

  “But you fucking brought them! You were going to use those … things on me.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I didn’t bring this shit.” Before he could reply I got up and walked over to the small coat closet beside the door. I opened it. Two bodies tumbled out. A third lay twisted inside. “They did.”

  Ghost made his whuffing sound again. It sounded like laughter of a very bad kind.

  Reggie gagged. Even from where he lay he could see bullet holes and bite marks.

  “Two of those guys are North Korean,” I said. “Other guy’s Iranian. They’re working together, which I find interesting as all hell. They came here and began unpacking their party favors. Can you imagine what fun you would have had with them? They’d have had to bury you in separate boxes. Ghost and I dissuaded them.”

  I sat down again and gave him my very best smile. The one that crinkles the corners of my eyes and shows a lot of teeth. The one I never show to Junie.

  “Now,” I said, “how about we have that talk?”

  He licked his lips. “What … what do you want to know?”

  Chapter Three

  1100 Block of North Stuart Street

  Arlington, Virginia

  Thursday, April 14, 2:09 p.m.

  Once he got started I couldn’t shut Reggie Boyd up.

  Seriously.

  At one point I considered clubbing him unconscious long enough to make a Starbucks run, but I think that would have been hard to justify in my after-action report. He talked and talked and talked. He was Mr. Helpful for the rest of the afternoon.

  Part of it was that tool bag. There was some nasty shit there, and Reggie had enough imagination to guess how his afternoon might have gone if I hadn’t showed up. Part of it was the presence of a big man and his nasty dog. And part of it was the fact that he believed me when I said I could cut him a deal that he could, in real point of fact, live with. That much was true because the DMS had been given a lot of latitude to strike such a deal courtesy of Vice President William Collins, who was the nominal head of the CTF, the federal Cybercrimes Task Force. Collins was also a major dickhead in many important ways, but he had powerful friends all through the government. Collins had provided me with papers detailing what I was allowed to offer Reggie in return for actionable information.

  Also, I think that part of the reason Reggie cracked was that once he was talking, I think on some level he felt relieved. He was out of it now. Maybe he was of that type who wasn’t suited to be a criminal. Maybe by the time he was fully invested in taking money to sell secrets from DARPA, he realized that this wasn’t a criminal thing, it was a terrorist thing.

  It happens. Greed or idealism kicks you in the direction of bad choices because at first it’s all about the money or the politics. None of it’s quite real. At first it’s just data on a flash drive. No fuss, no muss. But then something makes you step back and look at the bigger picture, at the actual intended use of the information you’re selling, and the abstract becomes so crystal clear that its edges can draw blood. That’s when you realize that you, as a part of a larger conspiracy, will be complicit in acts that could kill people. That almost certainly would kill people. Acts that could lead to war.

  What was it he sold?

  The latest generation of a software package called VaultBreaker.

  It’s the absolute bleeding edge of cybersecurity technology. On the surface it was an advanced counterespionage program to keep China, Iran, and North Korea from hacking into our energy grids and shutting them down. That’s been a real threat for the last few years thanks to superhacker groups like Comment Crew, which sounds like a rap band but isn’t. They’re a group of Chinese operators also known as Advanced Personal Threat 1, or APT1, headquartered in a nondescript twelve-story building inside a military compound in a crowded suburb of China’s financial hub, Shanghai. They’ve intruded into banking, credit card companies, power companies, Internet providers, and other places, and our cyberwarfare people have no doubts that these pricks could do us serious harm. It’s a little scary that they’re not even trying to hide, though the Chinese government officially denies their existence. VaultBreaker is designed to both predict attacks and respond to them, and it has some intrusion capabilities that allow it to fight back in creative ways, either by planting viruses or sneaking into attacking systems to rewrite their operating software.

  The other thing VaultBreaker was designed to do was attack our own security systems. Sounds nuts, I know, but there’s a logic. Once a new ultrasecure facility was designed, VaultBreaker would be used to try to crack its defenses. Each time it found a hole, the designers of the facility would then be able to address that vulnerability. Reset and replay until there were no holes left to find. Smart stuff.

  And from what Bug told me, VaultBreaker was designer to play like a video game. They even hired some top game nerds to play versions of it—in very controlled situations, of course—to see how good it was. What alarmed everyone was that these gamers, most of whom were teenage kids, were better at using VaultBreaker against our best security than most of our security people were. In fact, only two of our geeks were better than the geeks-for-hire. Bug—which surprised no one—and Dr. Artemisia Bliss, a stunningly brilliant computer engineer who’d helped design the system. Bliss was gone now, of course, and VaultBreaker had been revised and upgraded many times since.

  That was what Reggie Boy
d wanted to sell.

  He’d managed to bypass the protections in the system and burn a complete copy. He didn’t have the codes to enable it, but once it was in the hands of hackers like the Comment Crew, VaultBreaker would be broken. Then it could be used for all sorts of fun and games. And by fun and games I mean it could be used to orchestrate a coordinated shut down of more than forty percent of the power grids in the United States, and—and here’s the kicker—neutralize more than half of our missile defense systems. Viruses would be introduced to screw up the rest of the systems, including our satellite early warning systems and all military and civilian air traffic control.

  We would be blind, naked, and bent over a barrel.

  Nice.

  It would also give anyone with enough computer savvy a real chance at cracking the defense systems of ultra-high-security facilities such as the Locker—the world’s most dangerous bioweapons lab—as well as all of our military bases, and every bank in the world.

  Vice President Collins gave us a lot of authority to get that program back, even going as far as calling off his long-standing holy war against Mr. Church and the DMS. Suddenly he was our friend and ally. Couldn’t help us enough. Kind of like having Satan ride shotgun with you while you’re driving a Meals on Wheels truck.

  Reggie told me that he was scouted by an Asian woman who called herself Mother Night. She was his liaison to a nine-man team of cyberhackers from China along with day players from North Korea and Iran. Axis of Evil, nerd division. Reggie wasn’t sure if Mother Night was a foreign national or not. Nor did he know if she worked for China or was merely acting as a go-between. He was scared of her, though. He told me that five times, though he couldn’t say exactly why, beyond the fact that she “creeped him out.” Very helpful.

  He liked her money, though, and apparently five mil is the going price for a man’s soul. Deposited, of course, into a numbered account in the Caymans. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but better men than Reggie have sold their souls for less.

  So, once Reggie got going he tried to buy back his soul by telling me everything he knew. He knew a lot. More than he was supposed to know. He may have been stupid in some areas, but not when it came to computers because Reggie hacked his way into the systems of Mother Night’s crew of cybergeeks. He was, however, too stupid to realize that they’d figure that out.

  Hence the closet full of dead guys.

  Now here’s the clincher. We found out about all this because our computer geeks at the DMS—Bug and his brain trust—had been using MindReader to silently hack the Iranians. This popped up because it’s the kind of nastiness MindReader is programmed to look for.

  Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

  Once Reggie provided me with a probable address for the team of cyberhackers, I juiced him with enough horse tranquilizer to send him off to la-la land and called for a pickup. After that I made calls to assemble a team to kick their door down.

  Then I opened my cell, took a breath, and called Junie to tell her that I wouldn’t be able to go to the theater with her tonight.

  “Are you all right?” she asked immediately.

  “Right as rain,” I said. “But, I, um … have to work tonight.”

  Her response was what she always said, and it said it all. “Come home to me when you can.”

  Not just come home.

  Come home to her.

  “Always,” I promised, and that was no lie.

  Chapter Four

  Conrad Building

  North Nineteenth Street

  Arlington, Virginia

  Friday, April 15, 10:44 p.m.

  Mother Night’s cyberteam was in Arlington, and we hit them hard the following day. Thirty men and women in Kevlar, black battle dress uniforms and ballistics helmets. Echo Team was on point, and we had a hodgepodge of shooters from FBI Hostage Rescue, ATF, local SWAT, and some warm bodies from every alphabet group who could get a man to us by the time we kicked in the door. The Veep made sure some of his CTF gunslingers were there, too. Everybody wanted skin in this game because it looked like an easy win but a damn big one.

  The prize was so juicy. A joint Iranian-Chinese–North Korean team of cyberterrorists operating inside the United States. That was like crack to political strategists. The guy from the State Department nearly fell on my shoulder and wept. This gave us all kinds of political leverage. If we could prove official sanction on the part of the Chinese or their allies, then it was an act of war, and nobody wanted to go to war with America and all of its allies. I know North Korea makes a lot of noise about wanting to nuke us, but saber-rattling isn’t the same thing as wanting to duke it out with a country whose military budget exceeds those of the next twelve largest countries combined.

  The ideal outcome would be a bloodless sweep of the splinter cell. It would be okay if they fired some shots, and I know that there are some cynical pricks on our own side who would love to spend the currency of martyred Americans, but that wasn’t the plan. We wanted everyone inside to drop their weapons, raise their hands, and come along like contrite schoolboys.

  That was Plan A.

  Plan B would be determined by how the hostiles reacted, and in a geeks vs. shooters scenario I liked our odds.

  The splinter cell was in a suite of offices on the seventh floor of a nine-story office building that was still mostly under construction. There were occupied offices on the first two floors and sporadic occupancy above that. The eighth floor was only half finished and the landlord—who was as slimy an example of his profession as I’d ever seen but not actually an enemy of the state—rented it cheap to a group he described as “pencil-dick geeks from some dot-com thing.” The joint team had people in the basement and in the fire towers. Echo Team was on the roof. Bug was poised to cut power, telephone landlines, and cell service to the area. Helos with even more backup were sitting in parking lots or building rooftops a few blocks away, and local police were on standby for traffic control and backup.

  Morning dawned with red sunlight burning the underbelly of low-hanging clouds. We had observers and cameras everywhere, and an eye in the sky. As the bad guys arrived we took high-res pictures and ran them through MindReader’s facial recognition program. FBI guys at street level checked tags on their cars, or on cars that dropped them off. Info was shared with local law, which remained poised to hit their residences after we took this nest.

  They came in according to no pattern. I guess terrorists don’t fight traffic to clock in on time. So it was midmorning before we decided that no one else was coming. Nine of them were in the building. A nice school of nasty fish.

  All nine were men, though. Mother Night never showed.

  Top, Bunny, and I drifted down to the eighth floor. Bunny had a breeching tool and Top had a combat shotgun. I drew my Beretta and clicked my tongue to bring Ghost to attack readiness.

  I counted down.

  On zero we came out of the fire tower and Bunny swung the breeching iron at the door, which exploded inward, half torn from its hinges. Top and I tossed in a couple of flash-bangs. Before the thunder of the explosions faded we were moving inside. Ghost lunged forward ahead of me and cut right. I faded left with Top beside me. Bunny dropped the iron, swung his M4 on its strap, and came in hard and fast.

  The rest of Echo Team and two dozen other shooters boiled in through the door.

  Everyone was yelling.

  Everyone was pointing guns.

  Each of us ready to kill if we saw even a glint of gun metal.

  And then we all ground to a halt.

  The main room was big, an open-plan office with desks and laptops. There were heavy curtains over the windows. And, true to what the landlord had said, the place was still under construction. Exposed brick, unpainted drywall, and no ceiling tiles to hide the pipes.

  Maybe it would have been better if the pipes had been hidden.

  Or maybe things would have gone a different way. A worse version of Plan B.

  As it was, we found that ther
e was a Plan C we hadn’t anticipated.

  We all looked up. Bunny stood with his mouth hanging open.

  Top said, “Well, fuck me.”

  Ghost whined.

  Nine bodies hung from the pipes.

  Chapter Five

  Conrad Building

  North Nineteenth Street

  Arlington, Virginia

  Friday, April 15, 2:09 p.m.

  Someone had taken a can of red spray paint and used it to write a message on the wall.

  The only action is direct action.

  U+24B6

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” wondered Top.

  “I know that phrase,” said Lydia. “I read it somewhere—”

  It was Bug who answered. He could see the image via our helmet cams. “The top line, that’s a catchphrase from the anarcho-punk movement.”

  “Punk?” I asked, but Bug had more.

  “That’s computer language,” he told us. “Unicode. It’s the codepoint for circle-A.”

  We all knew what that was. A capital A surrounded by a letter O. The international symbol for anarchy.

  “The hell we into here?” asked Bunny.

  I didn’t have an answer for him.

  We never found Mother Night.

  We sat Reggie down with a police sketch artist and someone who knew how to work an Identikit. The problem was that Reggie never saw Mother Night when she wasn’t wearing big, dark sunglasses and a kind of Betty Page haircut that he thought might have been a wig. She had lots of piercings in her ears, nose, and lower lip, and a couple of scars on her face. Her skin was darker than normal for an Asian, so he speculated that she might be part black. Her accent was European, but Reggie couldn’t pin it down even after many audio samples were played for him.

  The sketch and the Identikit picture did not resemble each other all that much, which is pretty common with descriptions by people who are not trained observers. Even so, the pictures of Mother Night were sent to every law enforcement and investigative agency in the country, and to a fair number of our friends overseas, including Interpol and Barrier.