Chen shifted nervously in his chair as the large forms of the bodyguards approached the two hackers. “My God, it is you! All of this!” His voice rose dramatically in pitch. “Are you insane? Do you understand what will happen?” Silence. “That’s not what we were about! No one reboots the fucking world!”
Fawkes stopped and sighed, his fiddling paused. The mask turned back toward them. “I do. And nothing is going to get in the way of that, not even Anonymous. I’m Anonymous now — what you all should have been.” He laughed. “You’d be amazed what you can do with a trillion dollars.”
Fawkes resumed his distracted gait, and headed for the exit. The bodyguards who had entered with him reached into their jackets and removed pistols. Bulging suppressors were attached to the ends.
“Ah, man, no way, no way, no way! This isn’t happening!” cried Dave, his eyes large. He stood up trembling in his chair, looking around the wall of computer cabinets hemming them in. Chen didn’t move, but simply closed his eyes.
A sudden scream ripped through the warehouse, punctuated by a series of sharp spits. The following silence was disrupted only by the echoing clap of shoes on hard concrete.
RIDEOUT Deposition 2
CBD: And so this was the first hard evidence that drones were being used?
MR. RIDEOUT: Right. But we all believed it was drones from the start. Nothing else fit.
[REDACTED]: And yet your division, led by Savas, still refused to share this information with other FBI divisions and national agencies.
MR. RIDEOUT: Refused? We didn't refuse anything. This was all unfolding in real time. Do you understand how that works? We'd barely get a chance to breathe before the next shock wave hit. We had barely just put this together. And the evidence wasn't going to win any court cases. I'm sure John would have been happy to share more. In fact that's what we did!
CBD: When he contacted NSA?
MR. RIDEOUT: Exactly. Angel made a breakthrough.
[REDACTED]: This is when Lightfoote broke numerous cybercrimes laws and released dangerous viral codes into the internet?
Mr. RIDEOUT: Worms. They were worms. Yeah, damn. She sure as hell did. And it worked! But the damned NSA just blew us off, right when the whole thing went to shit.
16
It was past midnight, and the basement at the FBI building was staffed only by three people. Two women and a man hunched over monitors as the steady buzz of computer servers churned around them. The bald woman stared across at the other two, her expression grave.
“Well, John, there was something about ‘explicit permission to go full madwoman.’”
“I didn’t know you were going to turn everything back on us!”
“It’s a logical byproduct of the search algorithms.”
Cohen placed her hand on Savas’ shoulder and yawned. “Can we just have one night without another crisis?”
Lightfoote stood up, a short tank exposing her midriff and rows of chiseled abdominal muscles. She walked over to the banks of servers and ran her hands over them like a nurse would a sick child.
“That meeting at the NYU computer science department spooked me. They weren’t coming clean with how bad things were, and what was said was bad enough. I knew then we couldn’t trust any of the other agencies to handle this. Worst of all was the NSA. They know the most and share the least.” She patted the metal shelving holding the individual units of the server farm. “So, assuming the worst, I let loose some worms of my own.”
“What?” said Savas, his eyes wide.
She turned her green eyes toward them. “Full madwoman, remember?”
“Yeah, breaking Federal law?”
“Well, that’s all not going to matter much longer anyway if we don’t get this under control soon.”
Savas swiveled in his chair to face Lightfoote. “Angel, what are you talking about?”
“My little wigglies reported back. It’s everywhere, John. Gone fucking viral is the phrase. All my babies,” she leaned her head against the machines, “they’re all infected. We’re infected — FBI is infected.”
“Damn.” Savas rubbed his temples. “Okay, so what—”
“The whole goddamned world is infected! This thing has simultaneously exploited every known security whole in the underlying operating systems. It’s like a MIRV missile for the internet with multiple warheads. Each one hits something, somewhere, in every system. And that’s all it needs. One weakness. Then the worm is in.”
Cohen whispered softly. “What is it doing?”
“Nothing yet. Nothing active. Or, whatever it’s done was done before we began monitoring it and it has covered its tracks. There’s a bunch of encrypted code that comes along with the thing in every infestation. That’s got to be the heart of it. Whatever it’s up to, I’d bet it’s contained there.”
“Can you get into it?” asked Cohen.
“Not yet. But I’m worried that when I do, it won’t be straightforward. Whoever did this has made an attack that is sophisticated beyond anything the internet has ever seen. The code isn’t complete or standardized.”
“I don’t understand,” said Savas.
“Those encrypted modules? They’re really diverse. Not one the same size on each system. I think it’s distributed. It’s like a P2P system where pieces of the file to be shared are stored all over the internet in different places. When you download your pirated film, the software at the end assembles a composite file from hundreds, sometimes thousands of independent file elements. That’s what’s going on here. The worm has spread to tens of thousands, probably millions of computers. Each infection is one of a large set of different worms — let's call them strains like for viruses. Each strain carries a different piece of the code.”
“Then if we can kill some of the strains, it can’t put the full program back together and we stop it?” asked Savas.
Cohen shook her head. “If I understand this, then each strain will have thousands of copies of itself all around the world. We’d have to hunt every one of them down.”
Lightfoote nodded. “Exactly. It’s too distributed. It’s like having a million backups on different servers where literally every computer is a potential backup system once infected. We’ll never stop it that way.”
“Then how?” asked Savas.
Lightfoote shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Okay, then what does that code do when assembled?”
“I don’t know that either. I haven’t cracked any of the encryptions, and there are already hundreds of different packages I’ve found with the worms. We need the NSA computers to be working full time on this.”
“You think they know?”
“Yes. Definitely. They’re poking around infected systems, just like I did. So many computers are poorly secured, it’s easy to get into them and find things out. They have to know by now, or they shouldn’t have the keys to their computer arsenal.”