DEAD BEEF (Our Cyber World Book 1) (23 page)

“Seems someone leaked that Martin fixed the L.A. outage,” Stan Beloski said.

Then Beloski read from the online article, “Information Technology expert and deposed InfoStream Corp (Milpitas, CA) Chief Scientist Martin Spencer has been credited with formulating and deploying the fix to the computer virus that infected the Los Angeles power grid system last night. According to multiple confirmed anonymous sources, Spencer, who was fired from InfoStream the day prior to the outage, single-handedly developed and launched a network antivirus solution that removed the virus attacking the power grid. Anonymous sources also state that Spencer performed this feat while located at an undisclosed location and without government cooperation or assistance, though the end results have met with preliminary approval by Cyberwarfare and information assurance government agencies.”

“Jesus, Joseph and Mary!” Ochoa said. “That is a massive leak!” He looked at Cynthia.

She looked at Martin, “Nice ghost-writing, Martin.”

Martin shrugged.

“They say three sources,” Beloski noted. “Martin would be only one.”

Martin shrugged. “You know how these things work. Someone sends an email to a blogger, they run with it, a reporter at a major newspaper contacts his source, which answers by email to give him a call, then they meet at a coffee house, and so on, or so on. The source gives the reporter another source to check out, and when confirmation comes it’s off to print they go. Sometimes it all happens with anonymous blog responses, in somewhat veiled but not at all sophisticated messaging. Conceivably, it might be theoretically possible for a hacker to spoof the whole thing.” Martin shrugged again, and Cynthia knew he was holding back a grin.

“The virus part is a little misleading,” Beloski noted.

“Technically,” Cynthia said. “It’s true enough for public comprehension. People get
virus
where they might not totally get the more complex terminology. It also borders on staying away from crossing bad, bad boy classification lines.”

“Who did this?” Ochoa asked, fixing his eyes on Martin.

“I did,” Sasha said. She was sitting up in bed.

Martin was the first one to reach her side. “Please lay down,” he said. “You need to rest.”

Sasha closed her eyes and said, “Whatever drugs you’re giving me, please cut it out. The room is spinning on me.” With Martin’s help she lay down.

“It’s the pain killers,” Ochoa said now also reaching her side. He touched her forehead and added, “Fever is gone.”

“I rather feel the pain, thank you,” Sasha said. “Someone I used to respect once told me pain is God's way of letting you know you're still alive.” Sasha opened her eyes and added, “Looks like I have a few visitors, Martin. Tell them to leave the flowers on the computer table. Then send them home. I need to pee and would love some privacy.”

Martin asked Leticia to stay behind and sent the others out. Sasha said something about the cute nurse outfit, noting that black was way hotter than white.

Martin and Leticia helped Sasha get up slowly. Awkwardly, they somehow managed to help her relieve herself using one of the metal chamber pots. Anticipating what would come next, Leticia had the other pot at the ready, and Sasha used it to throw up.

When the others came back in, Martin asked Beloski to take out the pots and clean them using a water spout behind the cabin. Beloski made a face and said, “It’s dark out there.”

Leticia scowled at Beloski. “Never mind,” she said slinging a semi-auto riffle around her neck and grabbing both pots. In her best sing-songy accent she said, “Let the Mexican maid do it.”

“So yeah, I did it last night,” Sasha said after Leticia stepped out.

“Whatever possessed you to do such a thing?” Cynthia said, smiling, as if she had already figured out the answer.

“I figured Martin needed a few fans,” Sasha said. “I thought maybe a few thousand fan-girls tweeting about his epic awesomeness would cheer him up.”

Martin laughed. Never in his wildest dreams would he have concocted something like this. It was simple. It was perfect.

“Our colleagues in D.C. are in quite a bind now, aren’t they,” Martin said. “Even if they hadn’t lowered my status to S0, they’d be hard-pressed not to do it now.”

“Whoa,” Sasha said. “Need to lay down.”

Martin helped her. She smiled and puckered her lips, and he gave her a quick peck.

Cynthia looked at Ochoa. “You know why she did it, right?”

“It’s an old trick,” Sasha said before Ochoa could answer. “I call it burning down the draw bridge while expanding the mote and building up the walls.” She squeezed Martin's hand and smiled. “They can’t touch you now. The good guys, I mean. We still have to fend off the bad guys, but it’s the good guys that scare us the most, isn’t it?”

Ochoa stared down Martin. “And when exactly did she do this?”

“I could tell you that she did it last night, or this morning,” Martin replied. “Instead I’ll tell you that she did it this evening, while you two were going to the outhouse to have your little chat. She did it when she whispered it in my ear, word for word, and I typed it all into the computer.”

Ochoa and Cynthia exchanged a look. “You must admit, Rod, she’s a clever girl. And a Martin-whisperer to boot. Pure love, pure logic personified.”

Sasha fell asleep with a smile. 

Chapter 32

Robert Odehl arrived at the White House and worked his way through security. The purpose of his visit, as listed both in his office calendar and on the visitor’s ledger read “Out-year budget discussion.” He came alone, and looking around, it didn’t seem as if anyone else was coming in at this time. They’d certainly done their best to keep this low key.

Inside, a staffer escorted Odehl to the West Wing and into the Situation Room. Having been here before, he knew that as a visitor he would have to sign in a cleared visitor form.

“That will not be necessary,” the staffer said.

“Opsec?” Odehl asked, figuring they wanted to keep his visit off the books.

“Orders,” the staffer said. “You’ll have a permanent badge by the time you leave, so not necessary.”

Inside, they walked to a side room whose door bore the Department of Homeland Security insignia. The staffer keyed a combination into a cipher lock and waved Odehl inside.

“Good morning, Robert,” the secretary of Homeland Security said.

Odehl returned the greeting and made his way around the crammed conference room shaking the hands of the deputy director of the CIA, the deputy director of the FBI, the head of NSA, and finally, arriving at the only open seat to the right of the secretary of Homeland Security, he also shook his hand.

“If I were you,” the secretary said, “I’d be asking myself why and how I find myself in the presence of such august individuals.”

Odehl did his best to smile.

“But rest assured that you’re not low man on the totem pole here,” the secretary said. Pointing at the staffer, he added, “Brian over there, who will assist us with any audio-visual needs that may arise during our discussion, as you can see from his youth and enthusiasm, is our most junior individual.”

At the opposite side of the room and next to a high definition screen, Brian had somehow managed to wedge his tall and lanky body into the corner behind a keyboard and flat display computer monitor atop what someone had intended to serve as a compact desk. Brian looked back at Odehl with a smile that looked more like a grimace.

“Will the president be joining us tonight?” Odehl asked, since over a secure phone, that’s what he’d been told he was here for, to brief the president and answer any questions he might have.

“The president and his wife are currently enjoying an evening with the Israeli ambassador and his wife at their embassy,” the secretary said. “He will be joining us later this evening, along with key staff with an interest in our... situation.”

The CIA deputy director said, “We thought it would be good to gather our thoughts leading into the meeting and ensure we’re giving the president a consolidated picture.”

Or, as Odehl summed it up in his mind, they wanted to frame the information in a way that didn’t show anyone asleep at the switch. The president, known for a flash-hot temper and an intellect keen on detection of incompetence and spin, would likely ask some sharp, painful questions. Odehl hesitated for a second then decided, why not? He opened the left flap of his jacket and pointed at a white envelope sticking out of the inside pocket.

“These days I travel with my resignation letter at the ready,” he said. “If we should need it during the meeting, just give me the sign.”

“Please, Robert. We all know it won’t come to that,” the secretary said.

Odehl restrained from saying that it wouldn’t come to that now, while things ran hot. The postmortem after everything settled out would be another matter.

The secretary added, “Besides, the president is very aware and appreciative of the innovative work the ITAA has been doing for over a decade. He more than anyone understands the critical nature of what’s at stake, and the protection that your agency’s technology acquisitions have provided the homeland.”

The head of the NSA checked his watch and said, “I recommend you two handle the HR stuff offline. We have a little less than two hours, and we have a good amount of ground to cover.”

“Fair point,” the secretary said, leaning back in his chair. “Why don’t you go first, Phil.”

“Our signals Collections over the last 24 hours have shown some chatter about possible next intended targets. There seems to be some back-and-forth going on among cells and couriers, but the most-discussed target is the New York stock market.”

“We have a team working on the upgrade as we speak,” Odehl replied. “Plan is to start at midnight eastern time and finish no later than 3 AM. Computers will experience very minimal glitches during the transition. We would have preferred the weekend, but we’ve done this before without problems.”

The CIA deputy director said, “And you’re absolutely sure this new code you’re installing is clean. The code that a rogue ex-contractor developed on his own and without supervision.”

“Our staff on both coasts has dissected and reassembled that code,” Odehl said. “Not only is it clean, but it’s brilliant.”

“Brilliant,” the head of NSA said. “Is that your personal assessment?”

“Yes, based on the technical analyses my staff has conducted.”

The head of NSA said, “Sounds a bit subjective to me. Given your personal and family connection to Martin Spencer, I’m a little concerned your assessment might be a bit clouded.”

Odehl folded his arms. “I believe that is the sort of HR stuff the secretary and I should be discussing offline.”

The secretary cleared his throat. Gesturing to the CIA deputy director, he asked, “Jim, walk us through what we think they may have by way of a Cyber weapon.”

The deputy director of the CIA leaned forward and rested both arms on the table. “I believe Mr. Odehl is well acquainted with the residue left behind during that Iranian operation a few years back.”

“By residue, you mean the stranded payload?” Odehl asked.

“Yes, the one Martin Spencer, who happened to be on the field at the time, the one he created and somehow couldn’t retrieve.”

Odehl felt himself tensing up. “You weren’t here at the time, so perhaps a re-reading through the reports would tell you full well that Martin Spencer is the last person you ought to be blaming for that screw up. He didn’t want to go in with that Plutonet piece of crap that opened the door with the subtlety of a sledge hammer. And then, when things went south, we had to practically put him on a meat hook to drag him out of there before he could salvage the situation.”

“Yes,” the deputy CIA director. “You did have to go get him out of there. Because he was disobeying orders. Could there be an alternative explanation? That perhaps he had something to do with Plutonet’s detection?”

“As much as you sniffed and dug up, none of you ever produced a single shred of evidence of that!” Odehl said, now letting himself totally lose his cool. “You put him through the ringer, administered multiple polygraphs, tracked and monitored him every which way you could imagine, turned his life upside down and inside out, and all you got was super white, squeaky clean coming back at you.”

Odehl took a breath to gather his composure. “But again, you weren’t here at the time, so perhaps you’ve only heard a limited and spurious subset of the whole story.”

Odehl leaned back in his chair and turned to the secretary. In as even a voice as he could muster, he said, “And if the president happens to ask, I will tell him just like that.” With this Odehl conveyed his intention: if anyone planned to question Martin Spencer’s integrity in front of the president, they might want to consider doing it with Odehl out of the room.

“Getting back on-topic,” the secretary said. “The real concern here is that Iranians and their operatives have this payload. Again, we were chatting about some intel CIA has been collecting, and we think they’re working with Al Qaeda and Hezbollah cells to deploy it against U.S. targets.”

“I can’t help you with the cells,” Odehl said, doing his best to push aside the thought of his work turned into a virtual weapon of mass destruction. “I can tell you that this stranded payload is several versions old. As soon as it became stranded we developed counter-measures against it in newer versions of our code and hardware.”

“What if they’ve modified it?” the head of NSA asked. “What if they’ve sharpened it to get past our defenses?”

“Unlikely,” Odehl said. “Highly unlikely, I’d say. We have the goods and expertise. They don’t.”

The deputies of CIA and FBI exchanged a look, and the CIA deputy shook his head.

“What about this new version Martin Spencer deployed?” the head of NSA asked. “Has it been tested against the payload?”

Odehl hesitated. “Well, no. Not specifically but...” He swallowed. “Well, since it fends off even our latest attack probes, we can say it should handle the stranded payload.” On the other hand, he didn’t say, Martin’s latest version was based on version 1, with modifications, but still, its foundation pre-dated that of the stranded payload. Adding this to the fact that Martin had developed his latest version with Sasha Javan’s help, and given her alleged connections to Iranian intelligence, Odehl realized he’d overlooked an important detail. Why hadn’t he thought about this until now?

“It
should
handle the stranded payload,” the CIA deputy director was saying. “I suggest we have a crisper answer by the time we talk with the president.”

“Do you have secure line in here?” Odehl asked.

Brian the staffer pointed at the other corner in the room. Odehl walked to the phone and dialed Steve Royce’s line. Royce answered, and Odehl said, “Steve, I need you to run a scenario with version 1-prime on defense, and payload I-Q-019 attacking.”

“You mean—.”

“Yes, that payload.”

“We can’t take that one out of the sandbox anymore. Not after ops got taken away during the budget cuts.”

Odehl grimaced. “We got temporary relief on that.”

“Only for discussions, not for actual testing,” Royce said.

“Just do it. My call, my head. You understand?”

On the other side of the line, Steve cleared his throat. “Is everything OK, Robert?”

“I can’t get into it right now. I need that test run and results back within the hour.”

“Stand by. I’ll get you a preliminary in ten minutes. Then we’ll run the full suite.”

“Standing by,” Odehl said. He cupped his hand over the receiver and turned back to the room to say, “I know we’ll need more before we brief the president, but we’ll have a preliminary set of results in 10 to 15 minutes.”