An Armageddon Duology (8 page)

“
J
oe
, Jesus, it’s the middle of the trading day. What the hell is this about?”

Two men huddled underneath a pedestrian walkway in a quiet London park. They had both approached the location independently, secretively, without informing anyone of their destination. Both had exercised extreme vigilance in their journey, checking for pursuit or other surveillance, doubling back and changing routes several times, increasing by three-fold the amount of time it would take to reach the rendezvous. One man was dressed in a suit and sported closely cropped gray hair. The other, a younger man by two decades, wore slacks and a button down shirt as well as sunglasses. Both appeared anxious, their British accents cutting like daggers through the conversation.

“I’m taking a huge risk even showing up here,” said the young man.

“And I’m not? Spit it out. Is it this virus you’ve been talking about?”

“Worm,” he corrected.

“Whatever.”

“The difference is important.”

“That’s because you’re a computer programmer.”

He shook his head. “It
matters
. Look, a virus is a file, you have to execute it, infect your computer with it. A worm digs in by itself, and can lay a lot of viral eggs and do other things. But it spreads itself. This worm is spreading
everywhere
.”

“What’s everywhere?”

The programmer’s arms danced through the air. “By now, half the machines on the London exchange are likely infected. By next week, nearly all of them will be.”

The older man straightened slightly. “What will it do?”

“We don’t know!” he shouted, quickly catching himself and lowering his voice. “Look, my division at Interpol got the first information from Singapore a few days ago. Since then, all hell’s broken loose. We’re finding it everywhere, chasing it everywhere. No one has a handle on it, not the Americans, the Chinese, or the Russians. Hell, if the Russians can’t take it down, we’re in a fucking boatload of trouble!”

“Brilliant. Let’s calm down. What do you know?”

The Interpol programmer wiped his brow, sweat glistening and beginning to pool in his eyebrows despite the cool autumn day. “It’s global. Initially we thought that it was only a finance worm, now we’re finding it other places. It actually seems to have used NSA backdoors and code as gateways to infiltrate the machines the damn Americans were already spying on. It hides well. We mainly find what it leaves behind.”

“Which is?”

“Lots of really nasty code. The thing is injecting subroutines and entire programs into existing software or between two pieces of software and handshaking them. Gave itself away when large sums of money started to funnel through the infected systems into offshore accounts.”

“How much money?”

“I don’t know. Billions. Maybe more. But that’s one thing. Billions from the derivative market isn’t going to be missed, really. But recent findings are looking a lot more scary. Your machines, your trading algorithms that run the damn exchanges, they are all compromised.”

The older man narrowed his eyes harshly. “Compromised? How?”

“We’re still trying to figure that out! We’d need full access to your machines,
today
, to get to the meat of it quickly. We can’t lock this down with you running the programs. You’re going to have to halt trading.”

“Out of the question! We aren’t going to shut down the London Exchange so Interpol can go rummaging through our systems.”

“You don’t get it! This is preliminary, but if it’s verified, if what we’re seeing is real or even looks like it might harm the exchanges, Downing will pull the plug on the exchanges anyway! A stop in trading on purpose is better than a system meltdown.”

“There isn’t going to be a system meltdown!”

“We don’t know
what’s
going to happen.”

“Every few years you fools cry wolf over some Millennium bug, Heartbleed this, or Shellshock that, and all manner of bloody apocalypse is about to descend on us. Every time the markets kept going just fine and the only thing hurt has been your reputations.”

“You know, most of the time the money you guys send my way is all I need for motivation to talk to you. And I’ve more than paid for myself in the information I’ve delivered. But this is
different!
I’m scared shitless right now by this thing, and so are half the people in my division. The Americans are scrambling and the Asian markets as well.”

“And I don’t see them shutting down in panic, do you?” The programmer said nothing, but stared toward the other end of the tunnel, exhaling a cloud of vapor. “Look, we’ll do a complete IT sweep, antivirus everything. We’ve handled these types of things before.”

“I’m telling you, this isn’t like—”

“Bring me back something
concrete
, with concrete effects and predictions, and then I can make a financial assessment of how much is to be lost from the thing as compared to the absolutely huge losses that we'll be
sure
to take for shutting down the exchange.
Shut down
is the panic button. The fail-safe. Bring me real data, not doomsday maybes. Understand?” He fired a harsh gaze toward the programmer and stormed off into the park.

The man remaining in the tunnel shook his head and lit a cigarette. He smoked it under the walkway for several minutes before leaving, spacing his exit with that of his contact at the exchange. He also needed to clear his head and calm down. It was always like this, he told himself. Investors had profit on the brain and a foresight of a goldfish. All that mattered were next quarter’s returns.

I could be wrong.
The truth was that they really didn’t know what this thing was yet or what it would do. He
hoped
they were all wrong about the dangers. He dropped the bud on the concrete and crushed it out with his shoe, turning up his lapels and entering the chaos of children’s shouts.

A
boy stared
toward the man as he exited, his gaze focused slightly above him and the bridge under which he had stood for the last half hour. He tugged on his mother’s arm and pointed into the sky. A small, blurred ball danced in the air above the park.

“Look, mummy. It’s a helicopter! It’s remote control!”

His mother nodded her head and tapped onto her smartphone. “Yes, dear, that’s nice.”

The boy continued tracking the object as it moved away from the bridge. “Herman has one. It’s wicked. It can do anything and...oh no!”

“What is it, dear?” his mother asked, her eyes never leaving the screen in her hand.

“It’s just going up and up. It’s too high!” He looked frantically around the park for the child who was trying to control it. His face dropped. “It’s going to be lost.”

And soon enough it was. The small object disappeared from view as it ascended into the sky. It did not return. The boy continued to look around the park, but there were no children in distress or racing after an out-of-control toy. His shoulders sank and he dug into the soil with his shoe.

The woman looked up from her phone. “What was that you said, dear?”

“
S
o it seems
the internet is going to blow up.”

Savas sat in front of a table in the computer science department at NYU. The academic setting was made all the more surreal by the presence of NSA staff, Interpol officers, and members of the Secret Service alongside several professors and students.

The NSA man tried again to assume command of the conversation. “That’s a rather dramatic way to put it, Agent Savas.” The representative of the agency was stiff in his gray suit, looking down his nose at the students and especially Lightfoote. However galling, Savas had to admit, she looked the part of a freedom fighter from some post-apocalyptic dystopian teen film. Eyes tended to wander toward her.

Savas was still trying to parse the odd collection of people around him. The NYU students had stumbled upon something. Fine. They had called, of all places, specific
NSA branches
. Why? Because along with Homeland Security, the NSA was funding their research. They were a “National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance and Cyber Defense.”
Information Assurance.
He liked that.

Then there was the presence of the Secret Service which had been explained by the financial end of this story. Yes, Agent Savas
was
aware that the Secret Service was responsible for investigations into financial fraud, in addition to its protective function for governmental VIPs.
But still
.

Finally,
Interpol!
But that is where things really got interesting and expanded from a local to a distinctly global problem. In fact, it was the Interpol officer who cut in on the NSA suit.

“Drama, Mr. Teller, may in fact be warranted here.” His thick Scottish brogue worked as an aural spotlight. “Our offices in Singapore have this worm penetrating systems all over the world, including major financial institutions and governmental entities. We believe upwards of ninety percent of machines exposed to it are vulnerable.”

The NSA man cut in quickly. “There hasn’t been time to ascertain how widespread it is.”

“With all due respect, I think the NSA has a lot of reasons to minimize the threat of this code.” The Interpol and NSA representatives stared each other down.

Savas leaned forward toward the European. “Why is that?”

“Because the worm has gotten the most mileage out of piggy-backing on the NSA’s own spyware—
their
worms—used for hacking and stealing the secrets of everyone from the UN to foreign leaders. And don’t even try to deny your agency’s actions,” he said, cutting off an attempted protest by Teller. “Snowden let that cat out of the bag a while ago.”

The Secret Service agent spoke. “It’s a financial instrument,” she said. “Once into the system, there are a set of specific programs it looks for. When it finds them, it adds modules of code that relate to options trading on the derivative market.”

“What does this code do?” asked Savas.

The Interpol officer spoke. “From what we can tell, it’s funneling enormous sums of money from the off-market derivatives trading.”

“Off-market?”

“Yes,” he continued. “Contracts,
bets
if you will, that do not show up on any exchanges and are poorly regulated. In fact, we don’t even know how much money is tied up in those deals. But it dwarfs the imagination. Estimates are in the hundreds of trillions of dollars.”

Savas tried not to let his jaw drop. “I didn’t know that much money even existed in the world.”

“It’s all in bits and bytes, not in gold or cash,” said Lightfoote.

“Virtual money that isn’t so virtual.” Savas leaned back in his chair. “And how much money is being stolen?”

A white-haired professor from the computer science group flipped pages on a notepad. “We’ve been following the thing for three days now. There’s no way to know how much was siphoned before that, but our estimates are in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

“That’s a hell of a lot.”

“Per
day
.”

A silence filled the room. Savas looked at Lightfoote, who just laughed.

“Does you intern think something is funny, agent Savas?” asked Teller.

Lightfoote spoke for herself. “You
idiots
. Did you ever stop to think that if it was so easy for you to tear through the world’s firewalls that others couldn’t? Did you stop to think how fragile everything is now, everything online, everything in bytes—money, electricity, nuclear power systems? And now someone is using your own black hat code to leech from an underground financial market that should have been shut down after 2008? You’re like a bunch of fucking twelve-year-olds wandering around an arms factory and pushing buttons.”

“Your division has been included in this briefing because of your track record, Agent Savas,” said the NSA official, “but the disrespect and frankly treasonous attitude of your staff cannot be tolerated.”

“Are you insane?” asked the Interpol officer. “This is not a US governmental matter only. You aren’t in authority here, whatever God-complex your organization has developed. The lady is right. This is
big
. This is a disaster!”

“Look, people,” said Savas, standing up. “I’m inclined to agree with that assessment, and I thank you for including us in this briefing. Our team will get to it immediately. Anything we find with we’ll pass your way. But, you may have noticed that we have our plate full right now. Matters of life and death, not just money and taxes. Our resources are stretched to the breaking point.” He turned to the Scot. “This is a big threat. We’ll help, but we’re going put out the fire in our house, first.” He turned to leave.

“We need countermeasures,” said Lightfoote. Eyes turned toward her. “This is something new. Something truly dangerous. You can’t just rely on the software companies to develop and issue patches. There isn’t time.”

“What do you mean there isn’t time?” said Teller.

“I mean that whoever is behind this is not playing for a criminal unit or nation-state. Those groups have long-term ends in mind, stability of the system. You can’t make a living off the system as a criminal if you bring it down.”

“The
system
, whatever that might be, isn’t going down!” Teller looked incredulous.

“That’s where you’re wrong.” Her green eyes burned. “This is major artery damage. You can’t wait to patch it. The patient will bleed to death. Organ systems will malfunction. You’ve got to go in aggressively and root the damn thing out. If you don’t, at the rates the professor mentions, come November you’re going to have an economic
catastrophe
on your hands.”