“I think you know that all of you are fucking screwed,” he began. “Basically anyone connected to Anonymous right now likely goes straight to jail without their $200. Not to mention, as you surely saw inside, the real problem is still out there on the loose turning you folks into corpses.”
He could tell the last remark struck a raw nerve as several bodies jerked and heads turned toward him. He hoped to God he could reach the sane part of someone in the group.
“Now, we have a global catastrophe looming. We know about the worm.” More heads turned. “We know about Fawkes. But we don’t know where he is or what the endgame is. But I think it’s clear it’s going to be ugly. As in civilization-ending ugly. We’re going to get you all back to lockup to question you there, but time is not our friend. So I’m going to give you the opportunity to talk right here, right now. Right now there’s no Miranda. There’s just me and you and getting us all out of this mess.”
“Fuck you, pigs!” yelled one of the group, a longhaired man across the circle. He spat at Savas.
“Anyone else? Anyone else with parents? Friends? Kids? Anyone who wants to help us stop this before it’s too late? Right now I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about you, your amateur cybercrimes, or the Anonymous Manifesto, or whatever you have. I need answers now! I need to stop this. Help me.”
There was only silence. Police red and blue flickered over them like washed out club lights, the setting sun beginning to dip below the taller buildings in midtown across the river. Officers in heavy gear shifted weight, the friction of thick Kevlar on rubber popping around them. Savas looked up into the sky with his hands on his hips. A crimson scab ran down the left side of his face.
“No one?” He shook his head and turned to the SWAT team. “Okay. Load them up. We’ll try again back home.”
“Wait!” A female voice. Savas turned to his right. A black-haired woman with deep black eyeliner stared back at him, the goth makeup running down her face as her eyes watered.
“Yes?”
“Shut up, Poison! Don’t make this personal!” said the longhaired man.
“Up yours, Protos. Fawkes is into some fucked up shit. Pig’s right. Somebody has to end this.”
Savas crouched down beside her, several agents stepping forward with weapons at the ready.
“You know Fawkes?”
She laughed. “Yeah, you might say. Better than all these losers here, anyway. Better than you Protos and your group of ass-wipes.”
“Fuck you, Poison. We’ll remember this.”
She laughed. “Remember this? You gonna remember Dave and Chen? Yeah? You don’t get it. He’s burning everything to the ground. Us, too! There ain’t gonna be nothing to remember, you dumb fuck!”
Savas tried to control his voice. “How do you know Fawkes? What can you tell me about him?”
She looked Savas in the eye and smiled. “What do you need to know? His favorite food? Fetishes? Size of his dick?”
Several members of Anonymous laughed. Some of the police officers smirked as well.
“Look, if you want to help, I need you to be serious. What can you tell me about his whereabouts? How do you know him?”
“Whereabouts? I don’t know jack. He’s too careful. But how do I know him? That I can tell you. I was his lover.”
“His lover?”
“Yeah, you know, Anonymous cock. Hackers do it through the back door. Fawkes’ fuck buddy. On top, underneath, sideways.” She angled her head to the side and ran her tongue over her teeth, leering at him. “Fucking yoga position. I was his right hand girl, you know what I mean? That answer your question?”
Savas stood up. “Yeah.”
“Then let them go, and I’ll tell you more than you want to know.”
34
Lightfoote and Poison were hitting it off charmingly.
Savas had agreed to release the other prisoners if and when she responded to their questions back in Manhattan. They had carted the entire crew back into the city, once again subjected to the delays and authority conflicts from the declaration of martial law. However, having claimed to have bagged key members of Anonymous opened the gates more quickly, and they soon had Poison isolated in an interrogation room. The rest were being held in lockup.
Poison was actually Tabitha Ivy, ‘Poison’ her own hacker handle used from the time she was fourteen. A quick database search revealed that she was now nineteen, a repeat offender having been busted for several hacks of corporate websites, having served nine months behind bars for one job on Pepsi. There was an additional list of minor infractions from possession to vandalizing a parking meter.
It was no wonder she hit it off so well with Angel.
“From what I can tell,” said Lightfoote, “about half the code is just to execute this biological like replication and camouflage system.” She sat next to Poison at the table, Savas and Miller across in a more standard adversarial position. “Another quarter is still just a black box. Finally about another quarter for ending the world as we know it.”
Poison sounded impressed. “How the hell did you get all that? We couldn’t even get near the thing.”
Lightfoote looked at the battered visage of Savas and smiled. “Mr. I-tried-to- shave-during-an-earthquake over there trapped a live worm for me.”
Poison’s eyes grew wide. “How the fuck did he do that? I’m surprised he can log into his own computer.”
“An unusual technique, but it worked. I have an activated worm trapped on a hard drive. The hardest part was dissecting it without it sending everything to hell and back. That’s when I thought, oh, VMS.”
“VMS? Like your great-grandfather’s OS?” The hacker looked confused.
“It’s 1970s stuff, for sure, but it kicks serious ass. It’s a hacker’s worst nightmare. Amazon uses it for shipping. Some stock exchanges. Pretty rare and pretty secure.”
“And the worm wasn’t designed to hack those machines?”
“Bingo!” Lightfoote beamed.
The two men stared at each other in confusion.
“I don’t get it,” said Miller.
Poison scowled at him as Lightfoote elaborated. “Fawkes found hacks into a bunch of the world’s computer operating systems: Microsoft, all the flavors of UNIX including Apple. The worm bundles all the tools to hit each of them. But he didn’t waste his time finding security holes in something so rare and hard to hack as VMS.”
Miller shrugged his shoulders. “And?”
“So it’s fucking immune, you thug,” spat Poison.
“Wait," said Savas. "So you could use it to look at the worm? The worm can't operate in this VMS machine?”
Lightfoote clapped her hands together. “Correct! But interfacing with the hard drive was a nightmare. We only had a few 1990s era VMS machines left around here. They weren’t designed to handle modern hard drives. I practically had to solder half the spare parts we owned, and cannibalize several perfectly functional computers, to rig something to read the data. Piece by piece. The older machine doesn’t have a lot of memory. But we’re doing it. JP is down there now with some of the rest of the unit. Active worm, but frozen on my lab table!”
“What else have you learned from it?”
Lightfoote’s face fell. “Nothing good. Names. Important names. Politicians. More CEOs. I think they’re targets.”
“Jesus, here we go,” said Miller.
“We need those names now, Angel,” said Savas.