Zero day code, p.4
Zero Day Code, page 4
part #1 of End of Days Series
It had not been that long since James had seen a mechanical credit card slide, one of those old models that took an impression of your card deets on a sheaf of carbon copied receipts. When you spent as much time in fly-over country as he did, you got used to old analogue technology. So he frowned as soon as he heard the unmistakeable ratcheting clack-clunk at the front desk of his hotel.
The NSC guys had sprung for a room in a small, boutique hotel owned by the Marriott, a place called the Courtyard, over near Foggy Bottom. It was clean, modern, a little sterile for his tastes, and probably cost a hundred bucks a night more than federal government regulations allowed for, which told him how much they wanted this briefing. It was also suffering from the same internet glitches that Admiral Holloway had grumbled about and James had experienced first-hand at the Texaco on I-95. Unlike the poor clerks at the gas station, the front desk staff at the Courtyard by Marriott seemed to have the situation well in hand. It helped that there was only one other customer to deal with when James arrived at check-in. A businessman with one small overnight bag.
Clack-clunk.
“Thank you, sir,” said the young woman in Marriott livery at the larger of the two counters. “We do apologise for the internet outage, but your room key will work and AT&T assure us their techs are on it. You can take the elevators over on the left up to your room on the fourth floor.”
The man said something James didn’t catch and snatched up his bag before stalking off. Not a happy customer.
The check-in staff kept glassy smiles fixed in place until he was gone.
“You look like you’re having a great day,” James grinned as he approached the same desk, letting the cheeky glint in his eye assure the two women that he wasn’t going to give them any trouble over something that wasn’t their fault. Their professional masks slipped, just a little, to reveal the stress they’d been bottling up, possibly all day.
“Oh my word, it’s been a day all right,” the older of the women said. “Are you checking in, sir?”
James nodded and gave them his name.
“The booking might be in my name or the National Security Council,” he said. “They made it for me. By phone, this afternoon,” he added quickly. If everyone’s systems were glitching it was possible the only record of his booking was scrawled on a Post-it note stuck to the side of somebody’s frozen computer screen.
The staffer who’d spoken to him took control of his check-in, flipping open an old fashioned hard-copy ledger and running her ink-stained finger down the most recent page. He name tag read ‘Wendi’ with an ‘i’.
“Yes Mr. O’Donnell,” Wendi said. “We do have a booking from the NSC. They’re covering all charges, so we only need to take an imprint of your card for the token holding fee. It’s a dollar. Would you like a newspaper delivered in the morning?”
He almost said, no. But after a moment’s hesitation James answered, “Actually, yes please. Sounds like I might not be able to read the news on my phone.”
Wendi shook her head and let her eyes roll, just a little in exasperation as she stage-whispered, “You would not believe what it’s been like today.”
“Tell me,” he said.
Wendi looked as though she couldn’t quite believe anybody was asking her opinion of anything, but when James smiled and nodded his encouragement she leaned forward a little as if to share a secret.
“It’s not just our booking system,” she said in a voice just above a whisper. “I can’t get on to Facebook to message my kids and Deonie says her phone won’t even make an old-fashioned call anymore.”
The other front desk staffer, presumably Deonie, nodded with eyes wide.
“I think its hackers,” she said.
“Oh you think everything’s hackers,” Wendi scoffed, but not harshly.
A man in a suit and tie appeared from a back-office area, an alcove hidden behind dark wooden panelling and an art installation of bright orange electric batons. His arrival had an instant effect on Wendi and Deonie, wiping out their real personalities, which were replaced by the bright, glassy grins and slightly too wide eyes James had seen when he first arrived.
He thought they both looked like they were screaming inside.
Wendi handed him a small square of folded cardboard holding two plastic room tags.
“Thank you, Mr O’Donnell, and welcome to the Courtyard by Marriott. If there’s anything we can do to make your stay more pleasant, please don’t hesitate to ask. You can take the elevators over to the left up to your room on the sixth floor.”
James smiled as reassuringly as he could.
He did not ask about the Wi-Fi.
He would never use hotel Wi-Fi for anything.
James’ room afforded him a view over a small, triangular shaped park where he could see a few people escaping the heat under the shade trees. A young couple shared ice-cream cones, and a stoop-shouldered man in a black suit and a rather old-fashioned hat fed dozens of pigeons from a brown paper bag. James could feel the heat of the day radiating through the window glass, but it was no match for the hotel’s climate control. He was hungry and a little fatigued after his drive and the meeting with Michele Nguyen, but he took a few minutes to shower and change into a fresh shirt and underwear. James hadn’t expected to stay overnight in the capital but whenever he left home, even for a short road trip, he took at least two day’s clothes with him in a sports bag. You could never be sure if a missed or cancelled flight, or even something as simple a flat tire, might delay your return.
Rather than stinging the long-suffering American taxpayer for room service, he ate a protein snack from his overnight bag, and made a cup of instant coffee from the complimentary in-room cafe bar. He set up his laptop and tried unsuccessfully to get online. Neither his phone’s hotspot (AT&T) nor the T-Mobile broadband dongle he carried as a back-up would work. James frowned, but he had expected that might be the case. Any other day his natural inquisitiveness, and sense of responsibility to his subscribers, might have led him down a rabbit hole as he tried to locate the source of what was obviously a critical failure of the national digital infrastructure. But he had a newsletter to get out and the commission from Holloway, and they would have to come first.
All of the files he needed to complete the mail out and get started on Holloway’s job were on his laptop. The shadows in the park outside lengthened and the bright white light of high summer gave way to the softer, golden glow of sunset while he completed the newsletter, including an apology for the delay sending it and a promise to investigate and report on any market inferences from the day’s online disruptions. Problems with Amazon Web Services had caused similar issues just a few months earlier. (And yet AWS just kept on growing as an on-demand cloud platform.) He set up an auto-send command to get the newsletter out the moment his laptop detected a working connection, and moved on to planning out the brief he would write for the NSC.
This was a little more challenging without internet access, but James maintained his own offline archives on both the MacBook Pro and a 256 gig flash drive that hung from his car keys. Using some of the stuff Nguyen had given them during their interview—he was scheduled to get access to classified data on site tomorrow—James prepped a bullet point elevator pitch about US tech firms with supply chains running through China, a fifteen-minute small group presentation, and a much more detailed ten-thousand-word paper. It took a couple of hours. When he was finished, full night had fallen outside.
He hadn’t noticed how hungry he’d been while he was hammering away at the keyboard, but within a few minutes of saving the files and backing up to the thumb drive, James found himself wondering which was worse; his rumbling stomach or the headache that always came on when he forgot to eat during a work binge.
The cure for both was the same.
Dinner.
He thought about walking down to the street and finding a restaurant or bar where he could get a quick meal, but his usual guilt about spending other people’s money had abated a little while he’d worked in his room. The NSC probably owed him at least a room service hamburger and fries, he thought. He ordered a cheeseburger and flicked on the television while he waited for the food to arrive, finding Bloomberg Markets after a few seconds of channel surfing.
The chyron at the bottom of the screen said it all.
MALWARE ATTACK SHUTS DOWN MILLIONS OF SITES.
Cristina Alesci looked as fearsome as ever, but she’d strayed a long way from her usual beat of mergers and acquisitions.
“The Department of Homeland Security is investigating the widespread outages as a massive hack on the backbone of the internet…”
James walked over to his laptop and checked to see whether the newsletter had gone out yet.
Nope.
No connection.
He frowned.
Flicking through all of the cable news channels, even the crazy ones like MSNBC and Fox, he quickly determined that the internet outage was the story of the day, having displaced the unlikely rescue of a boy scout troupe from a collapsed cave in Oregon, and the leaked CCTV video of disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s prison rape.
This had to be a little more serious than Twitter’s fail whale coming out of retirement, James thought.
His burger arrived.
James tipped the room service guy and ate the food without really tasting it.
Everywhere he looked, the news was all about the hack. It quickly became obvious the malware had infected systems throughout Europe and Asia as well, but the US cable news channels weren’t reporting as extensively on those breaches. He flipped around until he found CNN Hong Kong and an Australian news channel.
The malware attack was the main story there too.
It wasn’t just social media and online shopping sites that had gone down. Critical infrastructure like hospitals, airports and even road networks were affected. Every traffic light in Auckland, New Zealand was currently red and had been for hours. James finished his dinner, but he felt nauseous. His skin tingled and his heart was racing. Not from the burger. It was excellent, he finally realised as he finished the last mouthful. He’d eaten it mindlessly.
Perhaps he was being overly sensitive because he’d just spent hours thinking through the worst consequences of the trade war that was already raging across the globe.
Maybe he was freaking out because he’d just prepped the outline of a secret briefing about the vulnerability of US tech firms to catastrophic disruption by hostile state actors.
But to him this looked like the opening shots of a new kind of war.
“No way,” he said quietly.
Given the scale of disruption, it was almost certainly a state-sponsored attack. There were plenty of countries who maintained deniable, arms-length strike capabilities, often disguised as digital security firms. Any of them could be responsible. North Korea earned more money from internet scams and cybercrime than it did from selling weapons on the black market. There were over a dozen ‘private’ companies in Russia, all with deep links back to the state, that routinely broke into western firms to steal data or money. Often as not they just straight up shook down the victims by locking them out of their own networks and demanding payment in crypto-currency for a key to get back in. That’s what this would be, James was almost certain. Hackers fronting for a rogue state, short of cash, or maybe a terror group like ISIS, who were always looking for alternative income streams. Doubtless tomorrow he’d read about some hospital which had quietly paid thousands of dollars to get their patient records back, or an oil company that dropped a couple of million in bitcoin to recover their geological survey data. And there’d be others who paid who were still locked out. And still more who’d spent twice as much as the ransom demanded to pay consultants to tell them the genius conclusion that they needed a new server.
It was getting late. His eyes felt itchy and hot from all of the close focus work. He needed to sleep—he was no good without his eight hours—but he had to make a call first. He couldn’t leave it. He had no cell reception and he didn’t want to pay the hotel’s long-distance rate, which he knew without checking would be extortionate. But what choice did he have? Sometimes you just had to take the hit. He picked up the phone by his bed and dialled out.
The phone at the other end of the call, an old rotary dial unit in the kitchen of his parent’s farmhouse on the other side of the continent, rang twice before his mom picked up.
It was always his mom.
“Hey, Mom. It’s me,” James said.
“Jimmy! What a lovely surprise. I didn’t expect you to call until the weekend. Is anything up?” his mom asked.
James smiled. She had travelled directly from unexpected delight to matronly concern without drawing breath. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
“I’m fine, Mom. I’m just fine,” James assured her. “I’m in Washington for work and I just wanted to check you weren’t having any issues with this internet thing? Is Dad there?”
Tom O’Donnell was the designated hitter for any and all technical difficulties at James’s parents’ place; the archivist of old technical manuals, keeper of all the cables, and guardian of the blessed passwords (which were written down and hidden in an old school notebook beneath a pile of tea towels, third drawer down from the old coffee pot by the biscuit barrel). James could picture the scene as vividly as the hotel around him. His mother was calling to the old man, telling him Jimmy was on the phone, and Tom – who would have been deeply embedded within his old TV chair – would be shuffling out to the kitchen in his socks, probably trailing a cloud of blue-grey pipe smoke.
“Jim, is that you?”
“Hi, Dad. Yeah. It’s me.”
“You okay boy? You don’t normally ring at this time?”
“I’m fine, Dad, I just wanted to check you hadn’t been affected by this internet problem? Have you been online today?”
He tried to keep his voice light and free of any anxiety, but his parents knew him better than anyone else. He father chuckled.
“Worried your old man was gonna give his credit card to some sharpie in Moscow, did you?”
“No, Dad, I just…”
“Well don’t you worry, boy. I haven’t even turned on the computer today. Too busy helping Bob Waldrop re-stump the fence line down to Tillet Creek. Dry storm came through last week. Hell of a thing. Lightning bolt fairly blew the hell out of a stretch of fence line. Looked like an artillery shell had struck it. But not a drop of rain o‘course. Still as dry as the devil’s own dirt patch out here. Anyways I only just got in from Bob’s and your Ma was busy late at the library with the little one’s reading classes and…
James didn’t tune out, but he did come off the anxiety high he’d been surfing. He could hear his mother rattling pots and pans in the sink and somewhere behind that, the sound of the TV news in the background. The real news, his Dad called it. Not that crazy cable stuff. When Tom O’Donnell was done telling him about the doings and a-goings-on around the county, James led him back to the reason for his call.
“Okay, it sounds like you got it all stowed away there, Dad. I just wanted you to take care with this internet thing. Don’t click on any email attachments, or visit any websites you don’t regularly go to, or…”
“I’m all over it, boy,” his father said, but gently. “Not gonna get fooled twice by some sharpie.”
“Okay,” James said, just as gently. “Things are pretty messed up out here is all. Didn’t want you getting caught up in it. Did Mom say anything about it? Any trouble in town, at the library, the bank? That sort of thing?”
“Didn’t mention it, no. And your last transfer dropped into the account yesterday. So thanks for that. It all helps.”
James thought he could hear the slightest change in his father’s voice, a hesitant self-consciousness.
“Okay that’s good then,” he said, a little too quickly. “Maybe it’s mostly in the big cities out east.”
“Maybe. You want to talk to your Mom?”
“I’ll say good night, but then I should go. Big day tomorrow. Big week, really.”
“That’s good, James. It’s good you got the work. You made this business for yourself. You need to tend to it.”
“I do,” James agreed, carefully not voicing any of the conversation that went unspoken between them.
Tom O’Donnell said goodnight and handed the receiver back to his wife.
“You still there, Jimmy?” she said.
“I am, Mom. I’m won’t stay on. I have to get to bed.”
“Okay. You keeping well?”
Here it comes.
“You seeing anyone?”
He smiled.
“Yes, Mom. I’m keeping well. No, I’m not seeing anyone.”
“Oh.” A pause. Just long enough for her disappointment to fill the space. “Okay then. It’s good that you’re well, and busy too, but you need to get away from work sometimes too. And not just to the gym. You need to spend some time on yourself.”
She didn’t say ‘You need someone special’, but it was there, coded into the exchange. His parents had married the first summer after graduation, and most of the kids he’d known in high school were hooked up and popping out their own kids now. He was the stranger in town, the one who got away. But this was an old song and he knew she was mostly just humming it to herself.
“I promise the moment I meet someone good enough to give you grandchildren I’ll get caught up on all that straight away.”
“Oh you. Go on, away with you.”
“Goodnight, Mom.”
“Goodnight Jimmy.”
He hung up.
They got the money then. That was a relief.
6
Zero Tolerance Policy
“Boss wants to see you.”
Jonas Murdoch clenched his fists and bit down on the curse he wanted to throw back into Omar’s face. He got a leash on his temper, but it was hard knowing he had options now. Or soon would have.
