Kill Process (41 page)

“Fine,” I say. “Go to the store and buy a dozen prepaid cell phones with data plans. Pay cash. I’ll pack up the equipment here and secure us a ride.”

Igloo leaves, and I prep a bunch of laptops, a mobile router, and a slew of chargers and spare batteries. Of course, I call Danger.

My preparations come to a screeching halt when a message from Thomas pops up.

Thomas> You okay? Read some news about you and the company, something about a fake article about you?

I’ve been focused on myself, the company, and our employees. Meanwhile, Thomas and Emily are my family, my support system. That means they’re my vulnerabilities, and Chris Daly will certainly use Thomas and Emily against me.

Angie> I’m surviving. I’ll fill you in a little later.

I need to squirrel them out of town without letting anyone know. I grab a spare hoodie from Igloo’s desk. Even though she’s half my size, the sweatshirt is baggy enough to fit. I stuff the sweatshirt and a random cap from the coatroom in a bag, then take a car-share downtown, which drops me off at a hotel. Once inside, I give my purse, with my cell phone and other electronics to the bellhop. In an empty hallway free of cameras, I don the hoodie and hat, do my best to keep my face covered, and exit the hotel through the service entrance, squeezing my way past a delivery truck. I hoof it over to Thomas’s office.

I sneak into his office and hold a finger to my lips when the receptionist spots me. She smiles and gestures towards his office with a nod. I feel ridiculous pretending everything is normal when I’m on the edge of panic. For the next twenty-four hours, though, there’s going to be a whole lot of pretending.

I enter his office, and Thomas looks up from his computer. I keep my finger to my lips, and stay away from his webcam. I gesture for him to come to me. He’s puzzled, but stands and walks over.

I pull his ear to my lips.

“We need to talk outside your office.”

“What
—
”

I put my finger to his lips. “Shhh.”

I turn and walk out of his office. He’s in a third floor suite in an older mid-rise building. There’s not much tech in the building, so I’m mostly concerned about the computers in his office. Unfortunately, he approaches with his phone in his hand. Careful to stay away from the camera, I take it from him and drop it on the receptionist’s desk, then go back out to join him.

“Okay,” he says, laughing. “Can you be any more mysterious?”

“I wish this was a joke of some kind, but it’s serious. You heard about the article this morning?”

“Yes,” Thomas says. “What is it all about? They retracted the article and said someone hacked their website. It keeps popping up in my feed, though.”

“I know this will sound crazy, but it’s part of a scheme to discredit me. Tomo hired a computer hacker to plant the story.”

“Was that true? Your husband, the car accident?”

“That’s the most insidious kind of lie, one blending truth and fiction. Because anyone who cares to investigate will find out he died in an accident, and once part of the story is confirmed, they’ll believe the rest must be true, too. We’re standing out here in the hallway right now because whoever they hired to do this is still out there, probably spying on our phone conversations, our computers.”

“We aren’t talking on the phone or the computer.”

“It doesn’t matter, a skilled intruder can listen using the microphone whether you think you’re being watched or not.”

Thomas raises an eyebrow, leans back an inch. “That’s
not—”

“It
is
possible,” I say, raising my voice. “I worked in computer security for ten years. I know what can be done.”

“Go to the police,” Thomas says. “Surely they can figure out who is behind this.”

If it was anyone else, I’d roll my eyes. That would be like asking a lawnmower mechanic to build an interstellar spaceship.

“No, I contacted some friends I used to work with in computer forensics, and they’re investigating right now. But they said it was critically important to get you and Emily out of town and off the grid, because I’m close to you and the criminals might go after you next.”

I’ve invented this third party, because it’s a sad fact of life people are more likely to believe experts they don’t know over the people they do. The lies roll off my tongue with ease, leaving behind a taste like burnt petrochemicals.

“I’m not leaving you,” Thomas says. “I’m staying right here with you.”

Here’s the catch-22. If he hadn’t said that, things wouldn’t be right with the world. He loves me, he wants to protect me. Unfortunately, his presence is as much help as a load of bricks in the trunk of a race car. There are a dozen things I could say to distance him, hurt him, and make him leave. I’m not willing to take that approach anymore.

I grab his hand in mine. “If you could help me by staying here, I would keep you by my side. I need to work with my old coworkers on this. I’m not in any physical danger, but I must be able to concentrate. If you’re here, the hackers will go after you, expose you and your work, for the express purpose of distracting me.”

“I have nothing to hide,” Thomas says.

“Everybody has something they want to keep private. Some website they’ve visited, some photo they’ve taken, some message they sent. Can you honestly say there’s nothing embarrassing you’ve ever done online or that’s been recorded on a computer? Nothing that, if it was suddenly shown in a courtroom in front of a judge, wouldn’t discredit you in some way?”

He pauses, shrugs. “Well . . . Why do I need to leave, exactly?”

“Hackers like to taunt people. If you’re online, if you’re using your phone, if you’re anywhere around your computer, they will know. They will spy on you through your webcam, talk to you through your speakers, and generally act like elementary school bullies. They’ll call the police, claiming someone is being raped in your office. They’ll dump all your case files on the Internet, every confidential file you’ve ever had, for no reason other than knowing it will annoy you and distract me. If you’re not around, on the other hand, if they can’t see the immediate effect, watch and rebroadcast videos of you crying as the police raid your office and take you away in handcuffs, then it takes away half the reason for toying with you.”

Thomas runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t know, Angie. This is all
strange
. I have work I need to bring with me, calls I need to make.”

“No,” I say. “Nothing electronic. No phone. You can bring paper files only.” I give his hand a squeeze. “I’m in no danger, but I need to focus and know you’re safe. I’m giving you the hardest job of all. Grab Emily from work and force her to leave her computer and phone. Stop at an ATM, withdraw the most cash you can, and after that, don’t touch your credit cards again. Then take the train to Seattle with Emily.”

“The train?”

“You won’t need identification. Once there, find a cheap hotel or something where you don’t need ID, and hang out for two days. Then you can call me and find out if everything is okay.”

“There’s no way Emily will go along,” Thomas says. “She crushes mightier men than me.”

“You’ve gone to trial and convinced judges and juries, you can work on Emily. You must do it, to keep her and her family safe.”

He gently holds me by the shoulders, not in a harmful way, but to check in with me.

I flinch, despite my best efforts, and force myself not to pull away, even as my stomach clenches and adrenaline floods my system from his touch. Old habits and fears coming back . . .

“You’re sure?”

I nod.

“Fine. I’ll do it.”

I lean forward, give him a kiss and a hug. “Thank you. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s going to be a huge help for me to know you are both safe.”

*     *     *

By the time everything is prepared, it’s late in the day and I’m exhausted. If I were twenty-five, I might choose to pull an all-nighter. Unfortunately, I’m not, and I need to be in top form. I confer with Danger and Igloo and we agree to start in the morning.

I head back to my place, acutely aware of the dangers surrounding me, and half expect I’ll be swatted during the night: that Daly will call the police, report a violent crime in progress, and I’ll end up spending the night at a police station without ever getting the rest I need. But a good torturer knows there’s an ideal cadence to inflicting pain for maximum effect. Too much, too fast, and your subject goes into shock and isn’t cognitively there to feel the pain. Too little, too slow, and they learn to tune it out. Watch a cat play with a captured mouse. They understand it instinctively. My gut tells me he won’t swat me tonight. He’ll have something planned for tomorrow, right when I think I’m getting a handle on this.

I lie in bed for a long time, alternating between trying to shut my brain off and trying to plan through all the contingencies. Every outside noise sends my pulse racing. I wish I had some magic drug to shut my brain down without any side effects. Finally, I turn onto my side and pull the pillow over my head to shut out any noises. If I die in my sleep, so be it.

“E
VERYBODY
’
S PHONES
off and batteries disconnected?”

They both nod
yes
.

“Full gas tank?”

“Yep,” Danger says from behind the wheel. “We’re good to go.”

“You’ve got all the equipment? Phones? Laptops? Spare batteries?”

“Everything,” Igloo says.

We spent yesterday prepping, raiding the office for equipment, and sanitizing every machine. We’re both sitting in the back for maximum working space, with Danger the designated chauffeur. A rat’s nest of power cables and multi-plug adapters covers the front seat.

“Sort these cables out,” I say to Igloo, “and duct-tape them in place on the back of the seat so we don’t have to fumble for them.”

“Be careful with the upholstery,” Danger says.

My level of concern is with surviving the day, which makes Dan’s concern laughable. If all goes to plan, the worst he’ll experience is getting tape residue off car seats. If it doesn’t, well . . .

I pass a smartphone up to the front seat. I preprogrammed a driving route with wi-fi access points this morning, and all Danger has to do is follow the plan for the rest of the day, or as long as it takes. “Follow these waypoints. Don’t deviate.”

Danger gets the car into gear.

“Now let’s prepare these computers.” Igloo and I plug in USB drives, loading clean virtual machines configured with the tools we’ll need.

“I’m here,” Danger says. “Now it’s telling me 43 degrees.”

“Here,” I say, passing a long-range wi-fi antenna into the front seat. “Aim this at 43 degrees. It’s got a signal strength meter on the display.”

At the first stop, we lay the foundation. I want him cornered, unable to run.

It takes an hour perusing IRC and forums, slowly narrowing in on someone who can deliver what we want. Eventually we find a guy going by Devil’s Snowball who looks like they could deliver.

Halfway through negotiations we need to drop off the net while Danger shifts locations. Devil’s Snowball wants $10,000 in bitcoin. I can barely manage this by tapping, once more, into my emergency fund, but this certainly qualifies as a crisis, and grounding Daly is the foundation of my plan. I find someone I know, and confirm Snowball’s creds via one of my alternate identifies.

Devil’s Snowball promises all of Daly’s aliases and his associated metadata will be on the suspected terrorist no-fly list within an hour. Even if Daly shows up with an unknown fake identity, if he’s carrying a phone with a known IMEI, Department of Homeland Security will pick him up. True, Daly is a government agent, and could eventually unfuck himself, but DHS is notoriously stubborn.

We move again and park outside a funeral home with open wi-fi. While people in dark suits and dresses go inside to pay their respects, we use my Tomo backdoor. Igloo lets out a small whistle.

“You have access to
everything
,” she says.

I peer over at her screen, watch as she pulls up her own profile.

“All my web browsing, my purchases, my dating profile . . . How?”

“It’s all tied together,” I say, trying not to become too distracted by Igloo’s first-timer enthusiasm. “Not everything has a solid one-to-one connection, but between cookies and browser fingerprints, we can build your profile over time.”

“Browser fingerprints?” Igloo asks.

“Every website can query your browser to find out your operating system, screen size, browser version, list of enabled plugins, time zone, and available fonts. In theory, all of that is perfectly anonymous. The data is there so the website can customize your user experience. In practice, most people’s computers suffer from a unique or close to unique fingerprint. The best you can do is try to blend into the crowd by installing the most common fonts and browser plugins, use the most common browser version, and configure it to report the most common screen size.”

“That’s why we’re using these virtual machines,” she says. “Got it. Wait, my sister still has a profile. That’s not possible. She deleted all her online accounts after the kid from Brazil . . .”

I shake my head. “Sorry, no dice. All the profiles are still there. Nobody really deletes anything. Even if she’d never created a single account, we’d still have a shadow profile. Anyhow, you need to focus. Follow these instructions.”

I share a document over our local network outlining what we need to do for the next phase. If we had time, I would have automated it. I never imagined pulling off an exploit of this magnitude.

See, Chris Daly is not going to run the Tomo app on his phone, not if he’s got a shred of common sense around operational security, so I can’t track his location directly. If Nathan was on my side, I’d ask him to track Daly’s phone, as Nathan has back doors into all the cellular networks. I don’t, so Igloo and I will do this the hard way.

He can’t avoid the million other people in Portland who are running Tomo on their smartphones right now.

Step one is subverting Tomo’s monitoring tools for the western coast so everything continues to report statistically normal data. Every Tomo server could drop dead right now, and nobody in Ops would know. This would make an excellent case study in why it’s important to harden monitoring tools, but the truth is it’s difficult to secure against the people who build the system.