Insider X (33 page)

74

COLONEL MAUZI WATCHED as the last bus left.  He looked through his goggles and breathed in oxygen from his tank.  He was still awaiting the report.

He didn’t understand how any of this had happened.  Sarin gas?  How was that possible?

The armory had not been breached.  The crates were in their place.  No one had accessed the biochemical weapons inside those crates.  The canisters of Sarin gas were still there.

So where had the gas come from?  Hive was saying it had possibly come from projectiles that had come over the wall.  But that didn’t explain how the gas had infiltrated the buildings.  Those buildings, particularly Duty Building, were hermetically sealed.

It made no sense.

The only explanation was that some enemy had managed to get inside.  This was an inside job.  Had to be.

Whatever it was, he would get to the bottom of it.  If it was determined to have been some members in the Online Blue Army who had carried this out, he would mete out swift punishment on them.  Perhaps make a public demonstration of it.  A lesson for the others.

No… maybe not.  There was still the deception he had to maintain.  The Online Blue Army had to think they were comrades in the cause, and not just disposable commodities.

The cause.

Speaking of which, the colonel hated that the facility was offline.  The other facilities would need to step in, and pick up the slack.  Not an easy task, of course.  But Hive had assured him that they just needed 72 hours.

72 hours and Facility 67096 would be back online.  And the Online Blue Army would be back on duty.  This was but a brief hit of the pause button.  At least the evacuation had gone off without a hitch.

Protocol had been followed.  The Online Blue Army was being treated and held at the nearest military base.  He wondered what the casualty report would end up being.  How many had died?  Not that it really mattered, but he hoped it wasn’t too many.  Because it took time to train new recruits.  It took time before the kids could earn their keep.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, as Colonel Mauzi’s black sedan drove towards Colonel Shun’s base, he made a call.  A thank you was in order.  Irritating.  He was no fan of Colonel Shun, but he had to admit that the colonel’s team had had an excellent response time.  Those buses had been helpful.

Colonel Shun’s secretary answered, and Mauzi waited for the man to be put on the line.  It took an irritatingly long time.

“So what do I owe the pleasure of having a call from my favorite comrade?” Colonel Shun said, when he finally came on the line.

The man had to rub it in.  “Greetings, comrade, and thank you for your magnanimous help.  I owe you, Hua.”

“For what?” Colonel Shun said.

“For the buses, of course.”

“What buses?” Colonel Shun said.

75

Shanghai, China

Two weeks later

OUT THE WINDOW there was a lively scene.  They had nosebleed seats from the twelfth floor of their sparsely furnished apartment.  Way down there, looking tiny as ants, were several policemen doing traffic control.  They were trying to move people along and cordon off the area so that the workers could do their job.  The workers were removing some graffiti from a wall.

Big letters.  Could even see them from here.

We are Tan     !

Some of the letters that completed the phrase had been taken down.

Mei giggled and looked up at Marks.  “We are tan.  All over the city it is like that.  They are having trouble keeping up with us.”

Marks smiled.  He had his arm around her, and his hand was resting on her waist.  “Doesn’t hurt that your numbers keep growing.”

4,223.

Just the latest number to be added to Team Freedom.  Mei’s little outfit of misfits, hackers, true patriots, and “insiders” wasn’t so little.  Their combined force dwarfed the size of the US military.  And he was including all five armed services: Navy, Army, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marines.  The entire US government could be added, as well, and still, Mei’s team had them beat.

Pretty impressive for a little lady that was barely five feet tall and didn’t even weigh a buck.

4,223.

That was the number of new recruits she’d gotten from Facility 67096.  The Online Blue Army was now in Mei’s capable hands.  Every last one of them had switched alliances.  And they were all hungry.  Each of them wanted to make amends and set things right.

They hadn’t liked their duty at the facility, it seemed.  Hadn’t liked suppressing their own people.  Hadn’t liked doing the PLA’s dirty work.  All that propaganda shit.  All that online bullshit.

4,223.  Not 4,222.  Mei had told him who the extra body was.

It was some kid on the inside named Aiguo.  He’d worn the Type 07 uniform.  Was one of the colonel’s trusted aides.  But he wasn’t on the PLA’s side.  He’d been one of Mei’s insiders since the beginning.  Mei had many “insiders” inside Facility 67096.  You don’t pull off a Houdini trick like they did without inside help. 

Aiguo had helped with logistics—had greased a few wheels at the right time.  He’d been one of the insiders that had made the bus ruse work.  Team Freedom and Johnny Two-cakes had had the phone lines secured, and could redirect all calls from Facility 67096 to their own operators.  But still, there needed to be the right people inside to pull it all off.

Aiguo.  Mei had mentioned what that name meant; she’d thought it a good sign.  ‘Ai’ meant ‘love’ in Chinese, and ‘Guo’ meant ‘country’.

Love Country.  Dude was a country music fan.  Well, not really.  But he was a true patriot.

 As for the girl in pink, Mei had gotten her too.  That mission creep thing was somethin’ else.  Mei was a master at persuasion.  She’d gone from enlisting their help to get one girl to bumping that number up.  Just four thousand, two-hundred and twenty-two more, she’d said, like it was no big deal. 

Mei and her bag of tricks.  She had a way at getting what she wanted.  For that matter, so did Johnny Two-cakes.  They’d gotten the right chip for the EMex device.  Mission accomplished there.  And that chip was already back in the States being reverse engineered.  Plan was to swap all those chips out with their own special chip during customs.  Big operation.  Very complicated.  They had to duplicate all the ‘tampering seals’, packaging, the whole nine yards.  The NSA never did anything simple.

If it was Marks’s call, he’d just do a little arson job at the factory in Chongqing that was making the EMex devices.  But that was against the rules, apparently.  Couldn’t do that on foreign soil.  Might be viewed as an act of war.

Whatever.

So, those EMex devices were still going to find their way into American households.  But the PLA was in for a surprise when they tried to activate those things.  The NSA had some tricky response in place.  Details were classified, of course, and Johnny Two-cakes wasn’t sharing that part.

Least he was chatty about the other stuff, and that had been pretty interesting.  All those fake profiles.  The NSA had already dived into ‘em, and were well into figuring out what the PLA had been up to for the last twenty years.

Sad.

Twenty years of pulling the wool over Uncle Sammy’s eyes (and the rest of the world), and only now was all of that coming out.  Well, not all of it, of course.  Just what the NSA wanted to disseminate to the public.  Anonymous sources had started to leak certain details to all the main news outlets.

One of the big stories of the moment was being met with shock and dismay.  Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, and Katy Perry had tens of millions of fake Twitter followers.  OMG!  The horror!

Like that was freakin’ news?  WTF.  Bing or Google ‘Twitter followers’ and the first thing that came up were ads on buying Twitter followers.

500 real Twitter followers for $5.

500 was chump change, of course, for Facility 67096.  Apparently, they’d monetized their whole operation in a much bigger way.  They were selling Twitter followers in packets of 5K, 10K and 100K.  For repeat customers they even ran some great three-for-one deals from time to time.  Usually on federal holidays.  Want some likes on Facebook and more viewers of your latest video on YouTube?  They’d throw both in for free for each big-baller Twitter order.  Get fifty thousand likes, fifty thousand viewers and fifty thousand followers all at the same time.

Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching!

Were making some real money too. 

Seemed Colonel Mauzi had his own racket going.  Was making a little money on the side.  He had hundreds of shopping emporiums in place on “Deepnet”.

More of that fancy lingo talk there.  Deepnet was the “Invisible Web”.

Lip had put it all in caveman language for him.

The World Wide Web was like an ocean where the fishies swam.  The “Surface Web” was what the general public saw, but beneath the salty spray of foamy waves was Deepnet, the Invisible Web.  The infinite volumetric expanse that was 99.999% of the water content that made up the ocean.  The Surface Web, by comparison, was just a fraction of a fraction.  A decimal point followed by two zeroes and a one.

.001%

Not Deepnet, though.  Deepnet was vast.  A veritable black hole of infinite invisible zeroes and ones.  It was that part of the Web that was not indexed, could not be discovered by standard search engines.  It was where the “bad guys” operated.  Where those who wished to remain anonymous regularly trolled and did their worst.

That was where the big sharks played.  That was where the Online Blue Army had been operating.  Wasn’t just ‘Surface Web’ shit they did.  The monetized part of their operation was some heavy shit.  Those shopping emporiums sold everything.

Need a timely data breach on a particular company?  Want to sink the competition right before the Christmas holiday shopping season?  That could be bought.  The emporium that sold that little service was made to look like it was a Russian operation.  Other emporiums were made to look like they were based in Estonia, India, South Korea, Bangladesh, you name it.

Crafty buggers.  Their talent at mimicry was somethin’ else.  They put the “F” in fakery.  And the “U” in bogus.

Middle finger to the world.

The NSA was unraveling all of it.  The four billion fake profiles were playing a support role for so many different operations of the PLA’s other cyber divisions.  The ‘Target’ breach that had been in the news for the last couple months—which was still not all figured out—had a new wrinkle.  The NSA had uncovered thousands of fake tweets, Facebook posts, and other online activity by the Online Blue Army that seemed to bolster that operation.

One of those Facebook posts had made the news right back in the beginning:

Well, that explains the $900 charge in Russia.  How annoying.  I will never shop at Target again.

Well, that post was fake, courtesy of the Online Blue Army.  News source never even checked to see if that profile was legit.  Least not beyond a quick Google check on the name.  Name came up.  Looked legit.  But no one ever knocked on the door to actually ask the person if they really had a $900 charge from “Russia”.

You’d think the verbiage alone: “Russia” and “I will never shop at Target again”, might have clued them in that the post might be fake?  Some of the defenders of freedom weren’t too swift, at times.  Even Marks, who didn’t have a credit card in his name, knew a Visa bill wouldn’t say “Russia’.  It would name a town or a city, or something along those lines.  If that Facebook post had been legit, it’d say “Well, that explains the $900 charge in Belomorsk, RU” (or something like that).

As for that last part: “I will never shop at Target again”, just swap out ‘Target’ and add any other US company in its place, and you could find thousands of those sorts of posts on the Web on any given day.

The NSA was just beginning to mine all the data produced by those fake profiles.  Would probably end up being hundreds of millions of those sorts of posts.  Verbiage, of course, varied.  There would be some nasty post, and the last line would be:

I’ll never buy another product from (insert US company name here) again.

I’ll never patronize (insert US company name here) again.

I’ll never go to (insert US company name here) again.

Or something similar.  Just that last word.  Again.  Again, again, again.  You’d think someone would notice that sort of pattern?

Patterns.

That was Johnny Two-cakes’s world.  He was loving this.

“What’s with the trumpet?” Lip said.

Johnny Two-cakes had picked up a souvenir.  Some French horn, brass trumpet thingy thing.

Lip picked it up and examined it.  “Made in China.”

Johnny Two-cakes double blinked.  “So?”

“They make some good stuff, don’t they?” Lip said.

Mei laughed.  “We do, don’t we.”

LOOSE ENDS.  TAKEN care of.  Mei’s Team Freedom dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s.  Colonel Mauzi got his just due.  Embezzlement.  Off-shore accounts in his name.  His little side racket with those emporiums.  Whole cyber trail was exposed.

The seven on the Standing Committee weren’t too happy when they found out.  Colonel Mauzi disappeared.  He went to see “new horizons”.  His crew, which did his dirty work, were never seen again.

They all learned the hard way.

“Truth” is a bitch.  Tank Man has friends.  And never, ever, not even as a joke, do you fuck around with Team Freedom.