He still wasn’t moving, but he was regaining his ability to speak. “What…what the fuck? Uhhh, shit. My fuckin’ head,” he said. He closed his eyes and babbled incoherently.
“Thank God. I thought you were dead.”
Sanders opened his eyes again and registered the look of concern on her face. It took him a few seconds to process who she was.
“Fuck,” he said.
Moynihan wore half a smile and motioned to the man secured to the chair. “There’s your buddy.”
The Russian creased his eyebrows in response and barked a muted tirade through the duct tape covering his mouth. Sanders struggled to move his head so he could get a look at his attacker. He could see the man was angry and alert.
“He wouldn’t stop bitching, so I taped his mouth shut,” Moynihan said with a shoulder shrug. “I think he’s Russian or something.”
Sanders offered a brief smile that turned into a wince. “Holy shit, this sucks. The fuckin’ pins and needles, man.” His voice was slurred. “My arms and legs feel like lead.”
She helped him sit up. He was still too disoriented to offer much help.
He rubbed the back of his head. “Jesus, I think he gave me a concussion. I feel like I’m gonna puke.” Sanders finally processed what she’d told him. “Russian?”
A series of muted sounds erupted from the man secured to the chair, and Moynihan shot him an angry look.
“Shut up,” she growled, still annoyed from his earlier taunting. She turned to Sanders and said, “Yeah. He was waiting for you in the trees.”
The muffled babbling continued in the background, but this time it was more insistent.
“Just shut up,” she said, without turning to him. “He’s foul. It’s like he learned English from a gangster.”
Sanders was more coherent now. “I don’t know what to say. Thanks. What did he hit me with? The lights just went out all of a sudden.”
The Russian’s mumbling started to die down in the background.
“He hit you hard at full speed. I didn’t see anything on the ground, so I think he hit you with his hand. You fell back toward him, and he was wrapping his arm around your neck when I knocked him out with a metal pipe.” She shrugged. “It was too risky to use my gun, since he was on top of you.”
She smiled, and he smiled back.
“Good choice,” he said.
“I think you hit your head on the metal step on your way down.”
The trailer was ominously silent now, and they both turned to the prisoner.
“Oh shit!” they said in unison.
Chapter 67
The late hour meant there weren’t many options for picking up food, but Trent Turner managed to round up the essentials. He grabbed caffeine and sugar products that would help to keep them awake through the night. They needed to work as long and hard as they could to try to reverse engineer the code. In the thirty minutes Turner had been gone, there had already been some new developments with the botnet. It didn’t take long for Etzy Millar to prove his worth to the team at The Shop, and he was beginning to feel like he was back in his element again.
Turner entered the hotel room with a bag in each hand and kicked the door shut behind him.
Millar turned around quickly and then relaxed when he saw it was the operative. “Something big is happening within the botnet.”
Turner’s eyes narrowed. “What’s going on?”
“Data was pulled from surgeon bots inside at least some of the targets. It passed through a couple of the machines that Max and I had installed. We lost track once it left the bots we had our module installed on.”
“You haven’t installed your module on all the botnet machines yet?”
He shook his head and said, “Not enough machines to follow the path, but it did help us identify a few more we can propagate it to. Slowly but surely we’re increasing the footprint and getting more coverage. They’re deliberately zigzagging through the Internet. It makes it next to impossible to trace, and we can only increase our footprint one hop at a time.”
“Understood.” He tossed a bag of potato chips to Millar. “So what was it that they sent?”
“We don’t know — the data was encrypted — but it looked like the bot modified the packets as they passed the data between themselves. I guess they just want to eliminate the possibility of finding the needle in a haystack altogether at the ISPs.”
“They’re trying to disguise the payload?”
“Yeah, I think so. Even if you had managed to capture all of the traffic, you still wouldn’t be able to match anything up with known data packets.”
“Smart, especially when they skip over a private wireless network.”
“No kidding. They put a lot of effort into covering their tracks. The Shop analyzed packet captures from each of the bots we set up and correlated the timing to show when they were sent and received. It was like clockwork. The same stream of packets kept transforming itself. The farthest they could get was seven hops from bot to bot,” Millar confirmed. Each hop represented another member machine of the botnet. “The bot transformed the data before it passed the data packet along so you’d never know it was all connected.”
“Did you see anything initiate this?”
“Maybe…we think there was a command set transmitted from the C&C servers less than an hour ago. It was encrypted as well, so we have to assume the bots have some way to decrypt the commands we haven’t found yet.” Miller peeled open the bag of chips and tossed one in his mouth. “The Shop is working on decrypting the data it captured now. Apparently they have some serious supercomputers there.”
Turner smiled to confirm his suspicions. “I guess the big news is that there’s a lot of activity.”
“Exactly. Judging by the amount of traffic, I’d say they’re getting ready for something.”
“How many more compromised systems have you been able to find with all of this traffic?”
“About a hundred machines that we didn’t know about previously. Maybe more since the last time I spoke with someone at The Shop about it.”
“Is it possible any of them had communication with a surgeon bot? We could use a solid lead.”
“They’re going through that now. Maybe. They just told me they’re following up with another lead. It looks like someone contacted you guys the same way I did. Through the boards.”
The operative raised an eyebrow and said, “Really? Do you know where?”
“They didn’t say.”
There was a loud crashing sound outside, and Turner peered through the window shade. “My bet is that all paths lead to the Windy City.”
“They said they’re going to have someone bring him in.”
“Good. I imagine Heckler will reach out to me about it soon.”
Millar’s expression turned serious. “Thanks.”
Turner looked at him questioningly.
“You know, for helping me out. This has been a lot to take in. I think I might have had a nervous breakdown if I wasn’t so damn busy trying to help figure this out.”
Trent smiled and said, “Don’t mention it, Etzy. We’ve got a ways to go before we’re out of the woods, so keep it up.”
Chapter 68
Agent Cathy Moynihan ran over to the slumped figure in the chair and ripped off the duct tape that covered his mouth. His head leaned lifelessly to the side as vomit spilled from his nostrils and mouth over his pallid skin. She grabbed his hair and pulled his head back, and then plunged her hand into his mouth so she could try to clear his airway.
“We’re not going to find out much from him if he stays dead,” she said in a stern but calm tone. “Since I saved your ass, you have mouth duty.”