System Seven (7 page)

“Why, Caldera?”

“He’s gonna need our
help. The more we know...”

The zombie’s search
results appeared on Soldado’s screen.

“Bloody hell. Body
found in Kingston, London, early morning. Police calling it suicide.”

Silence crackled along
the line.

“I bet the noble lord
daddy won’t like that one bit,” Grafter said finally. “Wonder if he’ll have it
looked into?”

“We could put a bug in
his ear,” Caldera suggested. “Give him reason to.”

Soldado and Grafter
both said no, not without more information.

Grafter checked on Zero’s
last entry point. “An artist’s commune in Munich. Before that, Netherlands, so
he’s on the move. Um, shit. He created a sub-account, privileged to Crosstalk’s
file, auto-download.”

“Well he’s got to be
feeling squirrely by now,” Caldera said. “Waitin’ on us to help him, prolly.”

“I wonder if we really
want to get involved with this,” Grafter said.

“What the hell? Just
leave him in a lurch?” Caldera asked.

“Talk to me Grafter,”
Soldado said.

“Anything we do puts
us in their path. One of us is dead already. Murder or not, I think this is too
hot. Tracers are up by forty percent in the last two days so NSA may already be
trying. Even in Alcazar it had a point of entry so theoretically it could be
tracked. I suggest we kill it.”

Files uploaded to
Alcazar went up in random-sized chunks, each chunk uniquely encrypted,
transported via zombies on the net, and stored on hijacked servers around the
world. While in Alcazar’s care, multiple copies of a file’s chunks stayed in
motion, endlessly transferred between hundreds of servers via the zombies. To
retrieve a file required the custom-made client software and a login. Once
requested, the file chunks made their way back to the client, were decrypted
and reassembled into the original. It was like tossing an apple into a meat
grinder and having it spit back out whole upon request. Though sometimes slow,
it served its purpose exceedingly well.

Soldado considered Grafter’s
concerns valid. But killing the file? Not without seeing what it was. He’d
re-tool Alcazar to guard against traces and do the same for Magistrate. To help
SlotZero, he gave download priority for his accounts. In and out, quick. It was
the best he could do at the moment. If need be, it could all be deleted for
damage control. He shared his thoughts with the others.

Caldera was insistent
about reaching out to Zero.

“I don’t know what you
guys are thinking but he’s one of us. He’s on the
run
. Sitting on our ass doing nothing sucks. What are we if we
aren’t brothers by now?”

Silence crackled in
the speakers.

“What do you suggest?”

“Look at the file
Crosstalk uploaded,” Caldera said. “Might give us an idea of who’s chasing Zero.
Maybe we run interference. Maybe get in a few good swipes of our own, ya know?”

Waiting seemed wiser,
but the file was the only quick and accurate means of estimating the threat.
And it satisfied curiosity. The three agreed to initiate a priority retrieval.

Over the span of two
minutes, forty requests went out for data chunks. Processes on over a hundred
computers around the world responded, finishing transfers in progress,
initiating routing programs to satisfy the retrieval requests. In ten minutes
the file was complete, delivered piecemeal by botnets and reassembled on a
server in Cairo, Egypt. The hackers handled it via remote sessions to keep it
isolated on one server. It opened and revealed two files.

“1024 encryption on
the big file. What’s the other one?”

“A doc with the key.
04 marking. Double bolds on the lower text. One sec. Hmmm.... no.” Grafter’s
wheels turned. “Got it. Periods minus one.”

Entering the cipher
key opened the big file to reveal a video file and a readme.

“Crap.”

Their remote sessions
didn’t support video playback or audio.

“What’s the readme
say?”

“Eh, yeah. Somethin’s
pretty whack,” Caldera said. “Check it yourself. He was wiggin’ out.”

Soldado read
Crosstalk’s note several times. “Either it’s a real warning or a real
meltdown.” There was no telling until they viewed the video. “Let’s hold off on
moving it. We’ll open Zero’s profile as well. He may have updated his aliases.”

SlotZero was in some
way linked with Crosstalk’s death, if only by virtue of knowing about it. Grafter
raised the point that the two hackers could have had business gone bad. While
unpleasant and unlikely, the possibility still existed; big money stressed the
best relationships.

They processed the
request.

Caldera had never seen
Zero’s profile. He read aloud. “Peter Brusse. Age 36 now. Independent computer
consultant. Last address an apartment in The Hague. No higher education, only
primary school records. Adopted, no living family, no SO’s, nothing. Guy’s a
lawn gnome. Let’s run the name and see what comes up.”

The zombie chain came
back quickly with the initial results: fugitive wanted for murder in Rotterdam.

“Shit. Maybe he did
kill Crosstalk,” Grafter said.

Soldado’s screen lit
with alerts. “What the shit–?”

In the space of five
seconds, one server was scanned, then three more – all Alcazar servers. He
fired the proximity kill script to drop them from rotation and kicked off
another script to reseed the transport system.

“Close the docs. Out,
quick!” He scrubbed the files on the Cairo server and disconnected. “Holy
shit.” He blinked at the screen. “A quarter of Third Legion just went tits up.”

Caldera saw it too and
whistled. “Seven thousand non-responding bots. That’s NSA stink right there.
This ain’t good. Is
not
.”

Soldado stared at the
screens. Alcazar self-healed, rebuilding lost chunks and distributing them
across the remaining servers.

Grafter cleared his
throat. “Yeah, um, like I was saying. Maybe we don’t want this shit. I’m not
sure Alcazar’s going to hold up. They’re really gunning for this thing.”

Soldado thought of the
video file, supposedly Crosstalk’s reason for dying. Like a bag holding a big
cat he might not want to let out, it represented layers of complication and
threat, both personal and for the Underground. Still, he couldn’t ignore its potential
value.

“Don’t assemble the
file again. Not a goddamn peep about it either, to anyone. I gotta think about
this. Stay tuned.”

• • •

Austin’s BMW raced
along a downtown off ramp. Thoughts of Kaiya in black lace danced in his head.
He pulled up at the light just as a text message arrived. The ringtone caught
him off guard: it was the house security system sending an alert.

SEC BREACH: YARD ZONE 1, 2

Side and back yards.
The system would ignore anything smaller than a large dog. He’d check the video
log from Kaiya’s place.

Another text message
arrived.

SEC ALERT: PRIMARY POWER OUT.

“Damn it.” He imagined
someone at the main power box and immediately thought to dial 911 but looked at
the laptop and froze.

“No way.” It couldn’t
be related. Could it?

He dialed the VoIP
backline at the house instead. It answered with a double beep. “Voice
authorization. Yankee, golf, tree, niner, whiskey, india.” A triple beep
sounded. He replied, “Process sequence.”

“
Welcome to the Back
Door
,” Sam’s synth voice
announced. “
Code red alerts waiting. Ready.
”

The traffic light
turned green so he turned left under the freeway and stopped at the curb.

“Security: verify
breach.”

“Confirm multiple
intruders on grounds. Ready.”

Confirmation meant
cameras had plotted movements across the yard. He racked memory for the
commands he’d programmed. He hadn’t worked on them in months.

“Security: How many
intruders outside?”

“
Five intruders. Ready
.”

Shit!

“Status: system
batteries.”

“
System
battery power at ninety Five percent. Estimated time remaining is twenty-eight
minutes. Ready.
”

He remembered writing
the battery-saving code. “Command: turn off all emergency lights.”

“All emergency lights
are now off. Ready.”

“End connection.”

“
Goodbye.
”

He punched the
accelerator to the floor and launched back onto highway 50 towards home.
Another message arrived indicating internal security breaches and people moving
around inside the house. That was enough
– he dialed 911 to report a burglary in progress. It took a couple of minutes
to convince the operator of the situation but was finally told deputies were en
route.

“Christ....”

The laptop rested on
the seat, now almost alive: a rare, malevolent species that threatened his
well-being. If he was right, someone wanted to make sure he didn’t get to the
hacker’s file.

Next moves, strategy.
Memories of timed games of chess with his dad
flashed, some of the most stressful games he’d ever played.
If only this were a game.

An idea dawned. At
least part of it could be.

He pulled to the side
of the freeway, far off the shoulder. From the trunk he removed a sleeping bag
from its weatherproof sack and slipped the laptop into it instead. He waited for a gap in traffic and ducked
into the heavy brush nearby and worked his way towards the highway sound
wall. Near the base of a scrub oak he
flicked on a keychain LED light and scraped aside layers of vegetation
sediment. He reached loose soil and dug until his fingertips were sore then set
the bundled laptop in the shallow hole. Replacing dirt and vegetation, he did
his best to make the ground look undisturbed.

Hide and seek.

“Dad?”

Silence. His quick
recount of the attempted download and the subsequent intrusion alarms didn’t go
over well.

“Austin, head back
here to the house.”

“But–”

“Like now, son.”

The speedometer read
eighty-six. “Dad, I
can’t
. I have to
meet the police. What’s going on? What do you know?”

Another longish
silence. “I’ll meet you there.”

“Alright, if you–”

The call ended.

“Sheesh. What the hell?”

He made the turn onto
his street and dread turned to cold, smooth fear. Placer County sheriff’s cars
lined the street in front of his house. A black utility van sat in the
driveway. The whine and thump of an approaching helicopter grew louder. It felt
bad – so bad he thought of turning around and leaving. Instead, he pulled up at
the curb. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Maybe the hackers had, but he hadn’t.
Doubt crept in when he saw a deputy on the porch look at him and speak into a
radio.

His dad arrived,
pulling in just behind him. They both stepped from their cars and the look on
his dad’s face rattled him hard. He’d never seen him afraid of anything, ever.
Officers emerged from the house and spread out as they crossed the lawn. They
each drew their pistols and one called out to put their hands up. His dad shook
his head in disgust but complied.

“Lace your fingers
behind your head.”

The helicopter
arrived, its spotlight bathing the neighborhood to create vivid, flowing
shadows. The deputies approached and patted them down. Once cleared, they were
allowed to stand at ease. A group of men came from the house. Austin counted
five, all wearing blue windbreakers and hats with the letters FBI in yellow.

“What’s this about?”
Brent demanded.

One of the agents came
forward.

“FBI cyber unit,
assisting the State Department. Tracking a group of bad boys. Your son appears
to be one of them.”

Brent straightened,
suddenly towering. “Let’s see some credentials.”

The man produced a
badge. “Agent Morris, Sacramento office.”

“And your warrant?”

“No warrant. Exigent
circumstance. This evidence is real easy to destroy. Now if you’ll come inside
we’ll have a friendly talk about why we’re here and what we’ve already found.
Perhaps we’re mistaken and you’ll be able to enlighten us.”

The agents moved
aside, ready to escort. Shadows flowed around them as the helicopter circled.
It didn’t feel right but there wasn’t really a choice, so they walked.

“Can they do this?
Dad?”

A mixture of fear and
anger played across his dad’s face. “I’ll do the talking. Respond only if I say
to.”

The agents slowed,
trailing behind the entourage. Brent looked back, clearly uneasy. A deputy
stood near the front porch.