It started to wail without warning. “Bad boy,” said Lulu as she rolled to her feet. She rushed over to it.
The dinosaur squatted. It paused for a moment, quite still, and a piece seemed to break off from its hindquarters. Then it jumped, clawed the air. It shrieked and began milling about in tight circles.
“Bad boy,” said Lulu again. “Bad Marty.” She wagged a finger at it. “You stop that right now.”
“Marty?”
“Short for Dean Martin. You know: Dino. It’s a Geo Dino-Bot. I’m helping a friend of mine to refine him.”
“Don’t tell me it… poops,” Decker said, looking down at the piece which had broken off from the rear end of the robot. “Isn’t that taking realism a bit too far?”
Lulu laughed. “Just one of his lithium batteries. I programmed him to eject them whenever capacitance levels drop below ten per cent. He’s got three of them. Normally, he charges himself up with AC while he’s sleeping but there’s a bug in his programming.” Lulu dipped a hand into a nearby desk drawer and removed a fresh battery.
The Dino-Bot kept prancing about. Finally, she scooped it up in her arms, dropped in the fresh battery, and left the robot outside on the balcony.
“Why don’t you just turn it off?” Decker asked.
It kept attempting to claw its way in through the glass door but at least it was quiet now.
“I don’t know. I do sometimes. When I have to. But it just breaks my heart.” She shrugged. “He’ll calm down eventually.” Then she smiled and said, “Besides, Marty’s my watchdog. I can see what he sees through the Net. Have you eaten? I have some roast pork with red peppers and noodles in the fridge. Home made. My ninety-eight year old grandmother taught me the recipe. World-renowned. I could heat up a plate for you. Or did you already have enough finger food?”
Decker looked down at Lulu, at her large black on black eyes. It had been a long time since anyone had worried about his eating habits.
“Thanks, but I grabbed something at the airport. You… you make a good cat,” Decker said. “Your costume, I mean.” But he didn’t know what he meant. In fact, he had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. “Before,” he added, trying to recover. “On the phone. You told me you found something. Something important.”
Lulu sat down on the sofa. “I read your report,” she said. “But I’d rather hear it from you. From the beginning.”
Decker was reluctant to tell Lulu everything, despite her security clearance, but he found himself sitting beside her and delivering a summary of everything that had happened to date: the discovery of the Westlake security breach; the manipulation of DoD software; the attack on his home; the raid against the Crimson Scimitar cell on Seventy-second in Brooklyn.
When he was finished, Lulu nodded and said, “H2O2 used an undocumented feature of the Solaris OS that bound rpcbind, the portmapper, to a port above 32770. Then he went up to the daemon with his NFS request and used nfsshell to mount the file system remotely. The Westlake server, it turned out, was vulnerable to a PHF hole and—”
“I’m not really much of a computer guy,” Decker said, interrupting her. “I’m a cryptanalyst forensic examiner.”
“Oh, I thought…” Lulu shrugged. “In layman’s terms, H2O2 tricked the PHF CGI script to execute specific commands,” she explained. “Westlake was using an Apache server running under the ‘nobody’ account. The box was locked down but the config file was also owned by the ‘nobody’ account, which meant that he was able to overwrite the contents of the httpd.conf file.”
“Those are laymen’s terms?” Decker laughed.
“You need to know what he did in order to understand its significance. Because the system administrator at Westlake had changed the ownership of the file in the conf directory to ‘nobody,’ H2O2 could use the sed command to edit httpd.conf so that the next time the Apache server was started, it would run as root. Then, by using the same PHF vulnerability, he’d be able to gain full control of the system. That’s what he wanted, of course. But he needed to wait until the system rebooted itself to get in. Understand? Conveniently, there was a power outage in Waltham that evening.” Lulu sneered. “That’s where Westlake’s located. Now you tell me a surge in the grid blew a transformer in Brooklyn, exactly outside where Hammel was holed up. And only a few days ago, although it wasn’t much publicized, a couple of workers were electrocuted at the Shannon Nuclear Power Plant in Pottstown, PA, when a faulty generator went haywire. Again, a computer malfunction. Of course, we’ve known about trapdoors in our electrical grid for some time now. Like land mines, just waiting to go off.”
“Planted by whom?”
“The Chinese. The Russians. Who knows? Take your pick.”
“Jihadists?”
“There’s no way of telling. Until they become active, it’s hard to even locate them. How’s your daughter?” she asked out of nowhere.
Decker was taken aback. “What?”
“Your daughter. Wasn’t she in your townhouse in Georgetown when it was bombed. I thought I read that.”
“She’s fine,” Decker answered. It was hard to keep up with her. Lulu was all over the place. “Is this why you called me? To tell me how H2O2 broke into Westlake, about that power outage?”
“No,” Lulu answered. “There’s more.” She looked over at him. “Based on my analysis of the data taken from the hard drives recovered in Brooklyn, I think the Crimson Scimitar cell was set up. Hammel. His whole gang. And I don’t mean from Iran. All those communications, those instructions. They were meant to look like they came from Tehran, from the Brotherhood’s leadership council within the Revolutionary Guard. But they didn’t. They came from someplace quite different.”
“From where?” Decker asked.
“North Korea.”
Lulu stood up. She glided to a table nearby where she picked up a few pieces of paper. “And worse,” she continued. “Although I’m not sure I should be telling you this. They also seem to be communicating with someone at the NCTC. You may have a mole at the Center.” She leaned forward and gave him the papers.
Decker took a moment to scan them — line after line of pure hex code. “What is this?”
“They bounced me about the world pretty good but I was able to trace some communications and financial transactions back to Dandong, in the Liaoning Province of China. The North Koreans run hacking posts all throughout that region since the power and communications grid is more stable there. Certainly better than what they have in their own country. I can’t penetrate their Unit 110 networks remotely but this was embedded in three of the files. It’s an IP address.” She pointed at the paper where she had circled a series of numbers. “I don’t know whose it is. I’d have to hack into your systems to find out the ID of that particular workstation, which I’m not anxious to do. But that’s a Center IP address. That I know.”
Decker stared down at the page. She was right. He read off the digits one by one to be sure.
“Until I find out more information,” he began, “I’d really appreciate it if you’d not say anything about this to anyone.” He could feel his heart flutter. “If you don’t mind. Let me handle it.”
Lulu looked down at him with a cold steady gaze. “You sure that’s how you want to play this, Special Agent Decker? This isn’t the kind of thing you can keep secret. At least, not for very long.”
Decker climbed to his feet. “I won’t need very long.”
Lulu laughed, that same deep-throated sound he’d heard earlier in the hallway, except now that he knew what she looked like, it seemed even more out of sync. “Fine by me,” she replied with a shrug. “I was just doing McCullough a favor. By all means. Keep me out of it.”