“So what are you waiting for?” Tomblin asked the analyst. “Take them down. Take them down or just kill the whole damn site.”
“We can’t,” the analyst replied. “That’s not how this thing works.”
“What do you mean, we can’t? It’s running on Tor, isn’t it? We own the damn thing.”
Which was, in some ways, true.
As an anonymity online network, Tor-the name came out of its initial incarnation as The Onion Router-was Shakespearean in its origin. It was a privacy tool, free software that was supposed to shield Internet users from being spied on by the US government’s intelligence agencies-a somewhat unrealistic expectation, given that they were the very people who had created it.
Not that most Tor users were aware of that.
It was developed, funded and built by the US government-specifically, the Office of Naval Research and DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-to allow its agents to work online undercover without leaving a trace of government IP addresses that could unmask them. It was then released as free software and today, millions of people used it. Using “onion routing,” which consisted of bouncing traffic randomly through a parallel peer-to-peer network that was wrapped in layers of encryption to confuse and disconnect its origin and destination, dissidents and activists in countries with restricted Internet reach could use Tor to publish out of their governments’ reach. At the same time, illegal child porn and drug marketplaces could also thrive in its supposedly untraceable cloud.
What most of its users didn’t know, however-not until Edward Snowden’s leaks, that is-was that Tor actually provided the very opposite of anonymity. It helped red-flag targets for NSA and law enforcement surveillance and gave the watchers access to all of those users’ online activity.
“Not in this case,” the analyst said. “It’s not a pure Tor play. Whoever built Erebus knew we had our claws all over Tor, so they built it to use Tor in a way we didn’t foresee. A couple of our guys at Fort Meade and me have been working on it since I spotted the post with your face on it, but we can't find a way into its core. We can see the sketches, but we can't take them down.”
Tomblin was standing by the floor-to-ceiling glass wall of this office on the northwest corner of the sixth floor of the New Headquarters Building, facing the courtyard and the white triple vault that housed the dining rooms beyond it.
“Of course you can,” he said as his eyes roamed across the Kryptos sculpture that sat alone and undisturbed in a quiet corner of the courtyard. A ten-foot tall, curving verdigris scroll that contained an 865-character coded message, it seemed to flow out from a petrified tree near a water-filled basin that was bordered by a stone garden.
“I’m sorry, sir, but right now-we can’t.”
Tomblin stared through the sculpture as he contemplated the analyst’s words. It had taken another Agency analyst more than seven years to crack its code and reveal the hidden message inside it-although one of its sections, consisting of ninety-seven characters, still waited deciphering. He’d done it in his spare time, during his lunch breaks, using nothing more than pencil and paper and a brilliant mind. Over seven hundred hours of quiet contemplation and brain gymnastics to uncover what another inspired mind had created in the privacy of his studio.
Such was the caliber of the analysts Tomblin had got to know at the Agency.
Tomblin wondered if the Erebus darknet site would prove as stubborn in giving up its secrets. He had full confidence in his team’s abilities to break down any barriers that prevented them from achieving what needed to be done. Now, more than ever, he needed that same determination, that same dogged pursuit of a solution-he needed a result, only he needed it fast.
“Shut it down,” he told the analyst. “I need this done quickly. Am I making myself clear?”
“We’re trying, sir. But even when we use the source's login credentials, the most we can do is create a fresh account using our plant as a nominator. Given enough time, we might be able to identify regular users and their locations by analyzing entry and exit patterns, but that will take days-if not longer. And if they're smart, whoever uploaded the sketches will only log in once more when they get the alert-and that's if someone recognizes you and decides to take up that offer to sell you out.”
Tomblin closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “That’s not good enough.”
“I know, sir. I can tell you, whoever built it wasn’t some DoD contractor or a Naval Research brainiac out to make a fast buck. This came from true motivation, one of these crusaders who thinks protecting the Internet from Big Brother is like Orwell going to Spain to fight Franco’s fascists and managed to create a site layer which is as close to artificially intelligent as anyone's come. The site’s servers are totally virtual and self-perpetuating-they behave exactly like a virus. They move around the world from server farm to server farm, over-writing their trail as they move along. The guys over at the Bureau found Silk Road because it was physically hosted somewhere. The their cyber crimes team found the server with a little help from the NSA, they cloned it, they combed through the transaction records and used what they found as evidence to indict the guy who set it up. Whoever built this learned from that-this baby’s a couple of generations up on it. It has no physical location, no owner in law, no administrator logging into it to keep it running. It's the ghost in the machine-literally-though in this case, we didn't kill the victim.”
“Find a way,” Tomblin insisted, his tone, though calm, leaving no doubt about his resolve. “And keep it contained. No one outside your immediate team is to breathe a word of this to anyone. And I mean, anyone.”
“Understood.”
Tomblin hung up and looked up from the sculpture at the bleak December sky hanging over him.
He had a decision to make.
The portraits were good. Anyone who knew him and Roos would easily recognize them. It was as if they were done in a professional sitting, and they looked younger in them. They’d been aged a bit, but Tomblin’s expert eye could tell it had just been layered on. They were from someone from their past. From decades earlier, maybe.
He knew it had to be Reilly. The FBI agent had found a way to get his hands on their likenesses, and given Reilly’s recent collision with Tomblin and Roos’s past, Tomblin knew exactly who Reilly’s benefactor had to be.
Sokolov. The slippery Russian scientist had given them up to Reilly.
Tomblin was seething inside.
This was all Roos’s fault. This whole mess had started after Roos had gone and helped his old buddy at the DEA with his cockamamie scheme to flush out a drug baron by brainwashing Reilly’s son-without consulting with Tomblin. A reckless, unwarranted, unilateral act that had ignited Reilly and turned him into a rabid bloodhound.
A bloodhound who, by the looks of it, had his teeth in them already and wasn’t about to let go.
Tomblin’s discontent intensified further when he thought about Sandman. If their assassin had done his job and finished Reilly off when he’d had the chance, none of them-not Tomblin, not Roos, not Viking-would be in this predicament. But that ship had sailed. Tomblin’s men had recovered Sandman’s body from Gigi Decker’s apartment and spirited it out unnoticed. No one would ever find a trace of the dead assassin. Not the way they’d had it disposed of. Alerts and facial recognition surveillance trawls were quickly put in place for both Gigi Decker and Kurt Jaegers, but so far, nothing had come up.
Tomblin had a tough decision to make, and his mind was already homing in on one of the two options open to him.
He knew Reilly’s family was still off limits to them, due to round-the-clock FBI and police surveillance in case Reilly made contact with them. He couldn’t get to them without attracting attention.