Code Zero (3 page)

We would be blind, naked, and bent over a barrel.

Nice.

It would also give anyone with enough computer savvy a real chance at cracking the defense systems of ultra-high-security facilities such as the Locker—the world’s most dangerous bioweapons lab—as well as all of our military bases, and every bank in the world.

Vice President Collins gave us a lot of authority to get that program back, even going as far as calling off his long-standing holy war against Mr. Church and the DMS. Suddenly he was our friend and ally. Couldn’t help us enough. Kind of like having Satan ride shotgun with you while you’re driving a Meals on Wheels truck.

Reggie told me that he was scouted by an Asian woman who called herself Mother Night. She was his liaison to a nine-man team of cyberhackers from China along with day players from North Korea and Iran. Axis of Evil, nerd division. Reggie wasn’t sure if Mother Night was a foreign national or not. Nor did he know if she worked for China or was merely acting as a go-between. He was scared of her, though. He told me that five times, though he couldn’t say exactly why, beyond the fact that she “creeped him out.” Very helpful.

He liked her money, though, and apparently five mil is the going price for a man’s soul. Deposited, of course, into a numbered account in the Caymans. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but better men than Reggie have sold their souls for less.

So, once Reggie got going he tried to buy back his soul by telling me everything he knew. He knew a lot. More than he was supposed to know. He may have been stupid in some areas, but not when it came to computers because Reggie hacked his way into the systems of Mother Night’s crew of cybergeeks. He was, however, too stupid to realize that they’d figure that out.

Hence the closet full of dead guys.

Now here’s the clincher. We found out about all this because our computer geeks at the DMS—Bug and his brain trust—had been using MindReader to silently hack the Iranians. This popped up because it’s the kind of nastiness MindReader is programmed to look for.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

Once Reggie provided me with a probable address for the team of cyberhackers, I juiced him with enough horse tranquilizer to send him off to la-la land and called for a pickup. After that I made calls to assemble a team to kick their door down.

Then I opened my cell, took a breath, and called Junie to tell her that I wouldn’t be able to go to the theater with her tonight.

“Are you all right?” she asked immediately.

“Right as rain,” I said. “But, I, um … have to work tonight.”

Her response was what she always said, and it said it all. “Come home to me when you can.”

Not just come home.

Come home to her.

“Always,” I promised, and that was no lie.

Chapter Four

Conrad Building

North Nineteenth Street

Arlington, Virginia

Friday, April 15, 10:44 p.m.

Mother Night’s cyberteam was in Arlington, and we hit them hard the following day. Thirty men and women in Kevlar, black battle dress uniforms and ballistics helmets. Echo Team was on point, and we had a hodgepodge of shooters from FBI Hostage Rescue, ATF, local SWAT, and some warm bodies from every alphabet group who could get a man to us by the time we kicked in the door. The Veep made sure some of his CTF gunslingers were there, too. Everybody wanted skin in this game because it looked like an easy win but a damn big one.

The prize was so juicy. A joint Iranian-Chinese–North Korean team of cyberterrorists operating inside the United States. That was like crack to political strategists. The guy from the State Department nearly fell on my shoulder and wept. This gave us all kinds of political leverage. If we could prove official sanction on the part of the Chinese or their allies, then it was an act of war, and nobody wanted to go to war with America
and
all of its allies. I know North Korea makes a lot of noise about wanting to nuke us, but saber-rattling isn’t the same thing as wanting to duke it out with a country whose military budget exceeds those of the next twelve largest countries combined.

The ideal outcome would be a bloodless sweep of the splinter cell. It would be okay if they fired some shots, and I know that there are some cynical pricks on our own side who would love to spend the currency of martyred Americans, but that wasn’t the plan. We wanted everyone inside to drop their weapons, raise their hands, and come along like contrite schoolboys.

That was Plan A.

Plan B would be determined by how the hostiles reacted, and in a geeks vs. shooters scenario I liked our odds.

The splinter cell was in a suite of offices on the seventh floor of a nine-story office building that was still mostly under construction. There were occupied offices on the first two floors and sporadic occupancy above that. The eighth floor was only half finished and the landlord—who was as slimy an example of his profession as I’d ever seen but not actually an enemy of the state—rented it cheap to a group he described as “pencil-dick geeks from some dot-com thing.” The joint team had people in the basement and in the fire towers. Echo Team was on the roof. Bug was poised to cut power, telephone landlines, and cell service to the area. Helos with even more backup were sitting in parking lots or building rooftops a few blocks away, and local police were on standby for traffic control and backup.

Morning dawned with red sunlight burning the underbelly of low-hanging clouds. We had observers and cameras everywhere, and an eye in the sky. As the bad guys arrived we took high-res pictures and ran them through MindReader’s facial recognition program. FBI guys at street level checked tags on their cars, or on cars that dropped them off. Info was shared with local law, which remained poised to hit their residences after we took this nest.

They came in according to no pattern. I guess terrorists don’t fight traffic to clock in on time. So it was midmorning before we decided that no one else was coming. Nine of them were in the building. A nice school of nasty fish.

All nine were men, though. Mother Night never showed.

Top, Bunny, and I drifted down to the eighth floor. Bunny had a breeching tool and Top had a combat shotgun. I drew my Beretta and clicked my tongue to bring Ghost to attack readiness.

I counted down.

On zero we came out of the fire tower and Bunny swung the breeching iron at the door, which exploded inward, half torn from its hinges. Top and I tossed in a couple of flash-bangs. Before the thunder of the explosions faded we were moving inside. Ghost lunged forward ahead of me and cut right. I faded left with Top beside me. Bunny dropped the iron, swung his M4 on its strap, and came in hard and fast.

The rest of Echo Team and two dozen other shooters boiled in through the door.

Everyone was yelling.

Everyone was pointing guns.

Each of us ready to kill if we saw even a glint of gun metal.

And then we all ground to a halt.

The main room was big, an open-plan office with desks and laptops. There were heavy curtains over the windows. And, true to what the landlord had said, the place was still under construction. Exposed brick, unpainted drywall, and no ceiling tiles to hide the pipes.

Maybe it would have been better if the pipes had been hidden.

Or maybe things would have gone a different way. A worse version of Plan B.

As it was, we found that there was a Plan C we hadn’t anticipated.

We all looked up. Bunny stood with his mouth hanging open.

Top said, “Well, fuck me.”

Ghost whined.

Nine bodies hung from the pipes.

Chapter Five

Conrad Building

North Nineteenth Street

Arlington, Virginia

Friday, April 15, 2:09 p.m.

Someone had taken a can of red spray paint and used it to write a message on the wall.

The only action is direct action.

U+24B6

“What’s that supposed to mean?” wondered Top.

“I know that phrase,” said Lydia. “I read it somewhere—”

It was Bug who answered. He could see the image via our helmet cams. “The top line, that’s a catchphrase from the anarcho-punk movement.”

“Punk?” I asked, but Bug had more.

“That’s computer language,” he told us. “Unicode. It’s the codepoint for circle-A.”

We all knew what that was. A capital A surrounded by a letter O. The international symbol for anarchy.

“The hell we into here?” asked Bunny.

I didn’t have an answer for him.

We never found Mother Night.

We sat Reggie down with a police sketch artist and someone who knew how to work an Identikit. The problem was that Reggie never saw Mother Night when she wasn’t wearing big, dark sunglasses and a kind of Betty Page haircut that he thought might have been a wig. She had lots of piercings in her ears, nose, and lower lip, and a couple of scars on her face. Her skin was darker than normal for an Asian, so he speculated that she might be part black. Her accent was European, but Reggie couldn’t pin it down even after many audio samples were played for him.

The sketch and the Identikit picture did not resemble each other all that much, which is pretty common with descriptions by people who are not trained observers. Even so, the pictures of Mother Night were sent to every law enforcement and investigative agency in the country, and to a fair number of our friends overseas, including Interpol and Barrier.

All of the laptops at the suicide site were trashed, of course. No surprise there. But when the forensics teams searched the residences of the dead men they struck gold. Reggie’s copy of VaultBreaker was hidden behind a false section of wall in one man’s apartment. And that’s where we caught our first break. The encryption on the software could not be hacked without the attacking hardware being hijacked to leave a signature on the disk. That signature included notations on the number of times the disk was read as well as critical information about the computer being used. It also uploaded a destructive virus to any attacking computer unless a separate piece of decryption software was preinstalled. When Bug analyzed the disk, he announced that the encryption had not been hacked.

Mother Night’s team had not yet accessed the VaultBreaker software.

As lucky breaks go, that one was massive. That’s when my nuts crawled back down from inside my chest cavity.

The second break we caught was that the drives had stuff on them that the bad guys really did not want us to have. Names were named. In North Korea, in Iran. And, we discovered, in China.

And in a few other places whose political stability took a serious kick in the nutsack once Mr. Church turned over the data to the State Department. And, with reluctance, to the Veep and his Cybercrimes team.

The effect of all this was pretty dramatic.

Heads rolled. Literally in North Korea, I believe.

People went to prisons and gulags. Some were disappeared. Governments denied official involvement. All players were disavowed and labeled as rebels, dissidents, enemies of various states. Blah, blah, blah.

What mattered to me was that the power grid stayed on, the missiles remained in their silos, and all of the microscopic monsters slumbered in their test tubes at places like the Locker.

The farther we got from that day in Arlington the less the DMS was involved. It became part of yesterday’s box score. We moved on to other fights, other wars, other horrors.

And in doing so we believed that we had won an easy victory, kicked all kickable asses and put one in the win column for the good guys.

There’s being wrong, and then there’s being wrong.

This was the other kind.

Interlude One

Donleavy Building

Forty-third Street and Fifth Avenue, 58th Floor

New York City

Six Years Ago

The young woman sat on the edge of her seat, knees together, hands in her lap, briefcase open on the other guest chair. She was twenty-three years old but already had a Ph.D. in computer science and masters in cybernetic engineering and software engineering. She’d graduated from high school at thirteen and was courted by scouts from every big-ticket science school from Cal Tech to Harvard.

The interviewer read her name off the top of her resume.

“Artemisia Bliss,” he said, pronouncing it slowly, savoring it. “Real name?”

“Real name,” she agreed. “My father is a professor of genetics, specializing in the hybridization of ultrarare plant species. My mother is an assistant curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Baroque art. She discovered two lost paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi, the seventeenth-century Italian who was—”

“—the eldest child of the Tuscan painter Orazio Gentileschi,” finished the interviewer.

Miss Bliss blinked, confused. “Did you look that up after I scheduled this interview?”

“No, I happen to know something about art.”

The interviewer left it there. Left it for her to ponder whether that statement was true or not.

He sat back in his expensive leather chair and pretended to study the psychological evaluation on this woman that had just been hand-delivered to him. In point of fact he was looking past the pages at Miss Bliss. She was, he was quite sure, the most beautiful woman with whom he had ever had a conversation. Possibly with the exception of Dr. Circe O’Tree, who was a young but brilliant counterterrorism analyst he occasionally consulted. Dr. O’Tree was a mix of European ethnicities, with some emphasis on Irish, Scottish, and Greek. Artemisia Bliss, unlike the scholarly couple that had adopted her, was pure Asian. Vietnamese and Chinese. She was slender, but not skinny. Not like many of the Asian women the interviewer had known. Miss Bliss was in no way a stick figure. Excellent nutrition had given her height and curves. Exercise toned her and gave her the posture of a dancer. And a lottery-winning set of genes gave her an IQ of 192 and the ambition to use it.