Sports had been a healthy distraction, something to help fill the void left by the loss of his son. He donated the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in prize money to charity. Specifically, to the pediatric hospital that tried so desperately to solve his young son’s heart problem. His generosity was championed by all of the major newspapers and sports magazines. Ryan Turner was branded the amateur sensation whose heart was even bigger than his lungs. His race-winning image had been heralded by the press.
She saw how Ryan’s wife, April, was so proud of her husband. The young mother admitted to reporters that the biggest source of his motivation had come from a friend at work. The turn of events was something that brought Cathy Turner a great sense of relief. The couple had their challenges, one of them being the scarce details when it came to what Ryan did for his father’s multibillion-dollar technology company. April knew his work was highly classified, but the late nights and inability to explain wore on the couple. It seemed they had finally developed a mutual understanding, and the feelings of animosity about his job had begun to evaporate.
She knew this because April had told her that even though it wasn’t possible for her to meet the person who had changed Ryan’s life, she was thankful that someone was able to make such a positive impact on their family.
Chapter 8
Etzy Millar waited anxiously behind the trash can for the right moment. He needed to time his break for the train’s doors perfectly. The Metro station’s cavernous tunnels with their futuristic patterns were surreal to him. The artificial light and the shadows it cast throughout the massive space brought on a childlike fear and a sense of vulnerability.
He was at the farthest end of the platform, so he had a clear view of the train headed in the opposite direction across the tracks. The blinking lights on the floor in front of him signaled an arrival. His heart pounded as noise from the approaching train continued to build. He could see the killer was cautiously nearing the last section of the platform. He knew it was a gamble to take the train to Silver Spring, but with less than a minute separating the arrival times of his two choices, he liked the odds with making the unconventional choice.
He was just a few steps away from freedom. Once he heard the chime that signaled the train’s departure, he bolted from behind his cover and through the closing doors. He made eye contact with the assassin on the platform across from him as the train pulled away. The assassin shot him an icy stare that was paralyzing.
Pain came to him in waves as he sat back and contemplated what had just happened. He replayed the events leading up to this night in his head and was certain he had covered his tracks. Even the payments would have been untraceable.
He made twenty-five bucks for each successful installation of the bot malware from his mystery employer. The college scholarship he had been awarded only went so far, so the new gig had provided Etzy Millar with some financial hope for a change. His friend Max had made the initial contact about the job, so he figured that’s where something must have gone wrong. He knew it only took one slipup for a good hacker to trace the way back to you.
Millar had a lot of experience with botnets and knew how powerful they could be. That was something The Collective had consistently demonstrated with their various operations. He thought it was funny how tech jargon came to life. The word “bot” was simply shorthand for “robot,” and it was a form of malware, a term that combined the words “malicious” and “software.” Simple enough, but most people, he thought, were so intimidated by technology they chose to remain clueless.
As he pondered naming conventions on the train, he thought about how things could have gone so horribly wrong. The Collective, a hacktivist group he and Max had both been involved with, was known for using its technology skills to combat censorship and unjust oppression around the globe — at least that was its mantra. Millar had heard rumors about members of the group being sought out by hard-core criminals. Most members of their ranks brushed the warning off as a scare tactic the Feds put out there to get them to stop. Now he knew the rumors were true.
The more he thought about it, the more obvious it became — brute force and cyberwar would prove to be a potent and profitable combination, a new kind of weapon. The world had become a target-rich environment now that technology had woven its way deep into the fabric of society.
The hum from the train was hypnotic as he traveled farther into the city. Millar thought about how the train was controlled by a central system that was programmed to avoid collisions and keep people safe. He guessed it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to use the trains as weapons, just like botnets.
Etzy Millar had grown up in the midst of the Internet revolution, his interest piqued by those first bots, the ones that would combine computer resources to perform massive scientific calculations. Working together they had the processing power to rival that of supercomputers.
He knew the bots he had deployed were different. They wouldn’t be used for something as simple as a distributed denial-of-service attack, which in his world was called a DDoS. He contemplated the value of directing thousands of infected computers to flood a website and make it inoperable. If the people who hired him planned to carry out a DDoS, it would only be done as a distraction for technology teams, while the real threat slipped in the back door. They wouldn’t use the bots he had deployed. The malware he had been installing was much too sophisticated to expose for something as trivial as that. He knew those systems would be a part of their end game.
His mind drifted, and he smiled to himself when he considered the fact that it was porn that saved him from the violence. Porn was the reason his father always paid their Internet bill on time. The connection to cyberspace was what freed Millar from his hell in West Virginia and gave him a new world to learn and explore. The Internet was a place to escape from an abusive alcoholic.
His mood darkened when he considered how fast things had changed. Botnets were once a tool for nonprofits, operated with the computer owner’s consent, but now their application was being exploited. The power and capability of botnets had evolved into something worth killing for.
He was disgusted with himself. He had been distancing himself from The Collective in recent months. The growing number of random actions being carried out in the group’s name was bullshit, and now this. Millar hadn’t really considered the gravity of what he was doing before. For him, hijacking a computer was like borrowing a car when someone was on vacation. As long as you didn’t crash it, nobody was going to notice the extra miles.
It all seemed harmless until now. What if they used the botnet to do something where someone got killed? He felt a weight come down on him like a ton of bricks. Someone had died. Max was dead. He shook his head and thought about how it would be poetic justice if the people who hired him used the bots to crash this train right now. From what he’d seen, they were clearly good enough.
He questioned whether it was possible for things to get better. There was no way to explain away what had just happened. The police would find his laptop and the rest of his stuff in the car. The information on his laptop was safe. He had made sure of that. What really scared him was the realization that the walls had only just begun to close in.
Soller’s father was an extremely powerful man. He would put resources into play with capabilities well beyond that of the local police. On top of that, Millar had never seen a bot as sophisticated as the one he had been paid to deploy. His fascination with how it worked had become an obsession. Its design had piqued his interest. The way it was coded to proactively cover its tracks was nothing short of genius.