DEAD BEEF (Our Cyber World Book 1) (10 page)

“So that’s it,” Beloski said. “We let him disappear, the one person that gets it. We let him go, and that’s our best hope.”

Cynthia turned to Stan and said, “You let him find Sasha, that’s what you do. You let them team up again, and you wait until Martin and Sasha kill this thing. Oh, it will wipe out all your investment into Ouroboros, and all the so-called accomplishments you have deceived yourselves into claiming. But the wealth of nations won’t be wiped out when the stock market’s computers go berserk, and the whole world won’t go black.”

“You really expect people to accept that as the best alternative,” Beloski said.

“No. I’m a big girl. Of course no one will accept my advice. That would be so... crazy. Way too honest, actually. But if Martin decides to play any role in this, that’s the way he’s going to play it.” Cynthia paused to rub her neck. “You know, Martin and Sasha, it was the way it was meant to be from the start.”

“How so?” Ochoa asked.

“Back in graduate school, when they were together, they dreamed about coming to Silicon valley and starting their own company. That’s what InfoStream was supposed to be: a Martin Spencer and Sasha Javan company.”

“That would have been a disaster,” Beloski put in.

“Would it? Or was I a poor and all too temporary substitute?” A faint smile parted her lips. “I suppose we’ll soon learn whether Martin plus Sasha equals disaster or salvation, won’t we?”

“Because we will leave them alone,” Ochoa said.

Cynthia stared him down. “Because you have no choice.”

Chapter 14

Martin Spencer completed step 5 of his plan at 8:45 AM, when he arrived at a small camping site just outside the city of Mammoth Lakes, California. There, he found a pay phone, a relic still located there for the convenience of campers who wanted to disconnect from modernity by leaving their cellphones off. When he picked up the receiver, he wondered when it had last seen use.

From the pay phone, Martin dialed a fourteen digit number. When he heard a triple beep, he keyed his cell phone number. He then timed the response with his watch. Exactly 65 seconds later, his cell phone buzzed. Martin answered it, and entered the fourteen digit number in reverse order. Again, he timed the response, measuring 31 seconds.

An instant message panel appeared in his cell phone screen. “Ready to place your order?” it read. Martin typed in “Denver omelet, no bell peppers, double up on the onions, easy on the cheese, with a side of bacon.” He pressed send and waited.

The screen flickered off and on three times, and when it flashed on the last time it read, “Order#7 Thank you. Your order will be ready in 17 minutes. Order#7”

Martin re-checked the math in his head: 64 plus 1 equaled 65; 64 divided by two minus one was 31; and 64 divided by four plus one gave 17. The digits in the number sequence he entered added to 64. The first and last text messages also matched, word for word, and the last message contained exactly 65 characters.

It all checked out, he told himself. Martin figured he would only be in jeopardy of walking into a trap if the person on the other side of the exchange had been compromised. He pushed that thought aside. He had to trust all was working according to plan. He had no other choice.

By his watch, it took him 11 minutes to reach the previously agreed-to contact location at a café in town. He found a seat by a window so that he could watch his Toyota and the front entry way.

When the waitress came to take his order, Martin said, “Denver omelet, no bell peppers, double up on the onions, easy on the cheese, with a side of bacon.”

“Any coffee, juice or milk?”

“No, thank you. Just a glass of water.”

“Coming right up.”

He watched her go back toward the kitchen to place the order. Before she walked into the kitchen she pulled out a cell phone from her apron. Martin heard her say, “Yes” before she hung up the phone.

Martin checked his watch. Fifteen minutes and counting. He kept watching the time now, trading glances between the entry way, his Toyota and the watch. Outside, a dirt bike pulled up. The rider dismounted and took off the helmet. She was dressed in olive green pants and a short sleeve buttoned shirt of the same color.

Martin realized he had stopped breathing and forced himself to regain his composure.

Her entrance, at exactly 17 minutes by his watch, received an immediate greeting when she said, “Good morning, y’all.”

“Hey, if it isn’t Ranger Jane,” one of the patrons said.

“That would be Jeannette,” she replied playfully. “And Ranger Estrada to you.”

“So what brings you to these parts?” the same patron asked.

“Supply run,” she replied. “Last one for the summer.”

“Not much of a fire season this year,” the patron noted. “Must be really nice. Nice and peaceful up there at the lookout.”

“It has its moments,” she said with a broad smile. “But don’t be too quick to call the fire season over. It’s really dry out there, and the worst is yet to come.” She stole a glance at Martin as she said that last part, then went on to greet several patrons with the enthusiasm and gregariousness of the girl whose party everyone is celebrating.

“Any plans for the winter?” another patron was asking her.

“I think I'm all skied out,” she replied. “I might find a billionaire and convince him to take me sailing, maybe all the way down to South America.”

She made it around all the tables and greeted everyone with a joy Martin found himself wanting. Eventually, she came over and sat at a table next to his.

“Good morning,” Martin said.

“Good morning,” she replied with a smile. “Have you ordered already?”

“Yes, the Denver omelet.”

Her smile broadened. “My favorite, though I'll skip it today. Watching my figure,” she said tapping her abdomen.

“If you don’t mind me asking, how long have you been a ranger?” Martin asked.

“I came into the service after I finished graduate school,” she replied. “You know how it goes. Finish school, boy breaks your heart, and you have to really sort out where you want to go in life.”

The waitress brought Martin’s plate and glass of water, and the conversation stopped. Ranger Estrada had her usual, a bowl of fruit, one piece of toast, and tall coffee to go.

When she got up to leave, she came over to him and said, “Is that Jeep there yours?” she asked.

“A Toyota, actually.”

“I wouldn’t know the difference, but it doesn't look like any Toyota you see these days.”

“One of the best off-road rigs ever made,” he said.

She pulled out a card out of her shirt pocket and set it by his plate. “I can recommend some cool trails. Just give me a ring if you're interested. There’s one trail in particular that only the locals know about. I think you’d enjoy it.”

“Thanks,” he replied, and she was already walking out.

Martin forced a few more bites of the omelet down, all the while looking around to assess how many of the patrons had seen the exchange. While he’d gotten a few looks when she first came his way, by now all patrons were minding their own business, working down their breakfast plates or reading their newspapers.

He flipped the business card over to discover hand-written GPS coordinates and a time, 1:00 PM. Contact made, he told himself. Step 6 complete.

Chapter 15

Back in D.C., in close coordination with InfoStream's technical staff, team Ouroboros was frantically diagnosing what had been designated as the “L.A. Circular Flicker Event.” Several forensic runs of networked power grid and software converged on one conclusion: the condition that led to the event would occur again this evening and the next. As for root cause, the technical team required more time to isolate the issue. A full solution, some estimated, was days away.

A formal failure review panel convened at 1 PM Eastern time to status the investigation and agree on next steps. Robert Odehl ran the meeting from a crowded war room, with teleconferencing connections to the fish bowl and InfoStream.

“It seems to me,” Odehl said after the briefing ended, “that we're doing little more than observing. Isn't there anything more active that we can do to stop this from happening?”

An InfoStream engineer answered over the phone. “Doing something at this point would be a bit of a shot in the dark. We could very easily make things worse.”

Odehl shook his head. “I don't get it. Isn't this our software, our hardware? How can we say we can't at least Band-Aid it or work around it?”

The answer came from the phone again. “Sir, you know how this system works. It's too intertwined and too adaptive to simply take it offline to retrofit it.”

“And this is definitely our code, either back-firing or being manipulated to misbehave,” another engineer said. “A Band-Aid isn't going to cut it.”

“We're sure of that? That it's our code?” Odehl asked.

“Yup. The dead code sequence matches, DEAD BEEF seven times, followed by one instance of 1D0A BABE, repeated over and over in a 32 Kilobyte chunk. Payloads are programmed to self-replicate with it, and a hacker messing around would probably either miss the sequence or corrupt it.”

“So we're back at the back-morph theory,” Odehl said. “In the brief I heard that we don't know whether deleterious morphing has taken place. Now I hear we can't act because of it.”

“We have to be cautious,” the InfoStream engineer replied. “We have to account for it until we rule it out or confirm it. As I see it we risk blacking out all of L.A. if we step on the wrong code. That's why we recommend gathering more data tonight, when we'll be prepared to monitor and know where to watch.”

Odehl sat back in his chair and thought how Martin would have already popped the hood to stop the malfunction. Heck, even Julian would have known what to do.

After sailing for 6 hours, Julian lowered the sails to take a break. A sleepless night combined with physical exertion had him on the brink of exhaustion. The seas were fairly calm, and he opted to let the boat drift while he ate a lunch of power bars and Gatorade.

He scanned the seas and saw nothing but water. In his journey west, rather than fight wind and current, he'd allowed a more southerly direction than he initially intended, and the islands to the north were not yet visible.

Julian considered briefly whether to take a short nap. Instead, he opted to take a closer look at what happened in Los Angeles. A few minutes later he was scanning the power grid, and capturing a promising avenue of investigation.

Getting a sudden inspiration, with a keystroke flurry he scripted and compiled a probe. He looked over the simple code, elegant really, he thought with a grin. “Code review, passed,” he said.

With one key stroke he launched it.

Though discussions rambled on, Odehl was done with the meeting. “OK, that's enough problem admiration for one day,” he said. “We'll observe tonight. Anomaly council adjourns. Let's get back to—”

“Sir, Steve here in the fishbowl,” a voice on the phone broke in. “We just picked up something. A probe.”

Odehl leaned in. “What kind of probe?”

“Still looking into it. It’s not one of ours.”

“Robert, this is Stan Beloski here in InfoStream. We see it, too. By not ours, Steve means not sent by us. Hold on a second.” Faint, unintelligible conversation came through the phone speaker. “OK, we just have confirmation that the signature is ours, but we didn’t send it out from here. Can you guys confirm?”

“Didn’t send it from here either,” Steve replied. “It is working its way through the L.A. power grid.”

“Are you sure it’s just a probe?” Odehl asked.

“Yes,” Beloski said. “Lots of data transmissions, definitely scanning and gathering diagnostics.”

“Can we trace where the data is going?” Odehl asked.

“Looks like it’s bouncing through every node in the grid,” Beloski said. “Output vectors going out to... You sure about that?” A pause followed by, “OK, spoof and reroute job. Output vectors going to St. Petersburg, Rio de Janeiro and somewhere in Kenya.”

Odehl took a deep breath. “Let’s block it, then.”

“As we speak,” Beloski replied.

“Roger,” Steve added.

As he expected, Julian saw them trying to block his probe. It was no use. He had designed the blockers they were sending in, and he had built in anti-measures to ensure it would take the blockers hours to adapt a response and quell the data flow. He only needed about five more minutes of data to have the answers he needed. He waited the required time and terminated the probe with his own pre-keyed blocker.

Julian broke all connections and went offline to analyze the data. It didn’t take him long to figure out the flaw that led to the anomaly. Yeah, the dead code sequence matched, but this wasn’t his design. It was either an intentionally modified design, or the code had back-morphed. Figuring out one vs. the other would take at least a day’s work, and lots more probing, and Julian didn’t want to risk the possibility of a back-trace, nor did he want to spend the effort to prevent it.

He set out to see if he could come up with a patch. Much to his surprise, the solution turned out to be rather obvious. In a few minutes he modified existing code for a blocker to make the monitors at each node react by self-arresting its morphing capabilities. Would the code do just that? He had no time to test thoroughly, but in a quick run inside a sandbox he set up in his laptop it seemed to do the trick.

He scanned through the lines of code he had modified one more time to make sure the logic was sound. It looked good, he was thinking, when he heard what sounded like a loud mechanical bee coming from the east.

Julian stood up to scan his surroundings, and in daylight, it was easy to spot. Not one, but two black hovercrafts, each probably just a tad larger than a football, were approaching from the east. As they flew closer, one swung north and circled back toward the boat, while the other hovered to the east.

He watched them hover and had an idea. He hesitated for a moment on whether to go into the cabin to get his other laptop, but decided that would take too long.

With his prime laptop, he scanned the surroundings for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections. Sure enough, there they were: two wide open, unsecured Wi-Fi connections, one from each of the hovercraft. Pulling up windows and typing furiously, he prepared an interceptor. Without checking anything, he transmitted it to the first Wi-Fi connection.

The northern hovercraft’s engine revved up into a shrill pitch. Then, Julian heard a click, the hovercraft’s engine stopped, and the whole thing splashed into the ocean.

“One down,” he said as he issued a barrage of keystrokes. He pressed enter to transmit the second interceptor. Nothing happened. The eastern hovercraft remained unaffected.

It was then that Julian realized his mistake. He had not opened another window. Instead, he had sent the interceptor through the Window where he’d been monitoring L.A. activity.

“Ooops!” he said.

Back in D.C. and at InfoStream they would be saying more colorful things. The Los Angeles power grid had gone completely black.

The hovercraft edged closer until finally it came to float directly overhead. An instant messaging window opened in his laptop screen. A message appeared. “We would like to talk to you. Interested in knowing how you did that.”

Julian instinctively typed, “Who is this?”

He had to wait for a few seconds before the response came back. “Remember how Aces beat Queens?”

Julian sat down and closed his eyes. He recalled a poker game he’d lost, and a debt he could never fully pay off. He recalled the duffel bag holding $200K, but he suspected that was not the type of payment they wanted.

He grabbed the laptop and tossed it into the ocean. Next went the satellite phone. He ran inside the cabin, grabbed the second laptop and came on deck. With a loud splash it too went in the ocean. Last, he snatched his cellphone and pitched it into the ocean.