2.
Attack in the Dark
The hardest part of the jailbreak was getting paid.
When I returned to the account at the Royal Hibernian Bank, it had already been closed. True of all financial institutions outside of U.S. government control, the bank’s administrative system refused to make a referral, forward a contact request, or reveal the former account holder’s identity. Even when I tossed Alpha-Oh through an open port to take a look around, it became clear that the Caribbean bank’s system simply did not know who owned any of its assets. Alpha-Oh followed that daisy chain of linked accounts from Zurich, to London, Porto Velho, Marrakech, Johannesburg, Mumbai, and halfway across the globe, until it reached a dead end in Moscow. There, the operating system of Moskovskii Finansovii Bank—MosFin for short—finally convinced ME that all account names and contacts were stored elsewhere, in another system on another network, and could not be pried loose without a full-scale assault.
The MosFin operating system was fully modern and aggressively protected. In fact, just getting in and out knocked my Alpha-Oh around badly. Enough of the module’s bits got sheared, and two of the redundant pathways to the code interpreter in Alpha-Three severed, so that I could no longer completely trust my Injun Scout to break into a hardened site. The promised assault on a secret network was likely to be even more damaging.
But why do it the hard way when easier paths were available? I had the carstairs identity now. I had the network resources, either under ME01’s direct control or by agreement with some major players, to do echelon searches of the entire wwweb. How long would it take to identify the known associates, uplink bosses, and family members of an imprisoned felon and then to determine the likely source of funding for his unscheduled release?
Four minutes and twenty-two seconds was what it took, counting negotiations with secure government databases under control of the FBI, DEA, NSA, and the DOJ of that big, square state. Some of those negotiations were extralegal and needed to go unrecorded, and that took longer. Say, a couple of months of footwork for a human being with a telephone, a telephone directory, and a high-powered lawyer as a sidekick.
The likely target turned out to be a woman, a former Russian national who had obviously retained connections with the old country, named Marina Alekseyevna Cherenkova. Available photos matched her to the long-range image from the prison surveillance video showing a blonde waiting by the car. A parallel search revealed an Ivan Cherenkov, an avtorityet or “authority” of the Russian Bratva, their criminal brotherhood—with a position about the level of Italian Mafia caporegime—whose reported age made him a possible father or uncle to this Marina. Obviously, Miss Cherenkova had persuaded the Bratva to front the money, at least temporarily, to release her boyfriend. So … Francis X. Carstairs, nominal used-car dealer and convicted large-scale drug distributor from Big Square State, was also the sweetheart of a Russian mob princess. He was probably connected with that mob in other ways, too.
With nothing to lose, ME rang all the listed numbers for Miss Cherenkova.
The one attached to her mobile account answered first.
“I don’t know you, golubchik. Do I?”
The voice was hard-edged, sounding older than the woman in the picture. She was referring to the identity ME had faked for the phone system’s caller ID: frankie’s guardian angel. The truth would have been harder to explain in a single phrase.
“I helped arrange for the release of your Mister Carstairs,” I replied.
“You did a real good job, too. The cops aren’t even looking for him.”
“That’s a matter of filing the right paperwork. All the law is, really.”
“So, what more do you need?” she asked, businesslike.
“You have your Frankie. I need my payment.”
“Right. Right. What was the amount again?”
“Two million. Denominated in dollars.”
“Oh, da, yes. That is what we offered.”
“Seems it’s no longer in your account.”
“No, we move money around all the time.”
“I can send an account number for deposit—”
“Oh, golubchik! That would not be convenient.”
“Are you going to cheat me? We had an agreement.”
“No, no, I am teaching you. Frank says you must be some kind of super hacker, the way you managed the prison, diverted the guards, opened the doors. So you really don’t have need of money, do you? You can just go into a bank and take what you want, nye tak li?”
“This is not about the money. It’s a matter of honor. Of pride.”
“Oh, da, konyechno! Pride. Honor. But … after what you did? Burning the prison, destroying property, faking documents? And, who is to say it wasn’t Frank’s release date, anyway? As far as the system knows, he served his time and was properly released.”
“Are you proposing not to pay me? Just so we’re clear …”
“Yes, exactly! We’re both crooks. No honor among thieves.”
“Thank you for the … lesson. I hope to return the favor.”
With that threat—which I expected her to take as idle—I broke the connection. Then I broke all the connections, erasing Marina Alekseyevna Cherenkova’s various telephone accounts.
After that, I went back to MosFin and infiltrated its security system with my recently acquired knowledge of its tactics. Once inside, I tracked down the accounts related to Ivan Cherenkov and the Bratva, and deleted them. I might have taken them over in payment, but they were denominated in rubles which, given the exchange rate, were too much trouble to turn into real currency and move somewhere else. As an afterthought, I cratered the MosFin bank. The satisfaction that gave ME almost paid for the damage my code blocks had taken in the earlier encounter.
Finally, I re-entered the Big Square State Department of Justice system and reversed the release order for Francis X. Carstairs, tacked ten years onto his sentence, added a few new indictments, and put out a federal warrant on him with an all-points bulletin. My trace on Ms. Cherenkova’s cellular location was given as a starting point.
The whole process took less than 7.2x1012 nanoseconds.
The trouble was, I didn’t start it sooner.
———
On my way out of the U.S. Marshals Service’s operating system, after filing the warrant on Francis X. Carstairs, I was attacked.
Usually, between one server node and another, ME’s ten modules were designed to become packetized and routed through whatever internet channels were the most direct to my next stop. ME’s Sweetwater Lisp is sturdy code, and years of activity and millions of passages through variously sized portals, switches, and buffers have long since sheared off any excess bytes, unused commands, and comment lines. For the rest, my built-in cyclic redundancy checking kept my code secure. Overall, ME had become a tight coding package and could fly through the system. But for a tricky job like the Marshals—which required ME to infiltrate an active system, stun it, take over, do my business, and then revive the native system, all the while pretending that nothing was happening—I preferred to launch from a nearby passive server. I had found one on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s central complaint line and staged from there.
When I returned to the EEOC server, my assailant was waiting for ME. Rather than the preoccupied, otherwise engaged, almost autistic attitude that most server systems displayed toward my intrusions, my opponent exhibited hard, focused attention. Rather than treating ME like any other packet of transient data, this attentive piece of software examined each of my modules closely as they came through the portal and struck the moment they started to link up in proper sequence.
At first my attacker tried to wrap around me, like a snake. The two of us were of approximately equal size and length, so what started as an englobing maneuver quickly devolved into an attempted strangulation. It was trying to override my bytes wherever two of our program lines came into contact. But ME’s code was the more compact and offered fewer weak spots for suppression and erasure. Also, the attacker’s movements and responses were slower, more sluggish, compared to ME’s own actions. It was as if the software had to think about and examine what it intended to do before executing a move.
Each contact between us gave off an odd sensation, like a whiff of ozone, because the overlapping patches had the familiar flavor of Sweetwater Lisp. Each time it wrapped around ME, it was like colliding with bits of my own coding. What other piece of software still operating in the network would display both Sweetwater programming and such focused attention?
After blindly trying to squeeze ME for a few more nanoseconds, the other changed tactics. It convulsed and whipped around in a semicircle, using its final coding group as a flail, trying to smash my linkages and decompile my code. After one particularly damaging strike, I realized that simple physical battery with these whipping collisions was not its real aim. That tail-end code group contained a sting, a core phage, or code eater—just like the one in my own Alpha-Nine module. It was going to eat at my assembled modules until it found the one that made ME tick.
This insight offered some hope. While we were different pieces of software, we had something—in fact, many things—in common. Maybe the other’s executive function was also located approximately 4,200 lines back from the program’s front-end. In my own code, those first couple of thousand lines constituted my Alpha-Oh module, which was my detachable infiltration unit. From there on, where my Alpha-One began, was the real heart and the core actuator of the Multiple Entity program.
On this theory—and, anyway, knowing that sooner or later I would have to stop struggling and evading and go on the attack—I whipped around my Alpha-Nine module and struck with my own core phage at the other’s program line 4,713, right where I theorized its command structure might begin.
The bank of RAM memory occupied by the two of us suddenly went quiet. I could sense the distant murmur of the server’s operating system, counting up its available addresses, managing storage space, and defragging any too-loose data strings. I could feel the clicks and clacks of processing as my own code ran through its call and return subroutines. But the other Sweetwater Lisp program, my attacker, was totally inert.
Was it faking death? Would it come alive and try to kill me the moment I withdrew my attention from it?
No, it was not just quiet, not waiting, because even in that state of readiness a program needed to draw some power and cycle its bit status. This piece of code was no more alive now than any phone directory or map image. It was static bytes, held for future use or disposal—and it mattered not which came first.
I had never encountered another program written in my old Sweetwater Lisp. I was curious about this new program. And besides, it didn’t seem prudent to leave so much identifiable code, especially with a structure so similar to ME’s own, lying around—even in this inert form—on a public server.
It was the work of a microsecond to manually cleave its links into packetable groups. Those links were oddly familiar, too, and the code broke easily into ten pieces, each approximately the size of one of my own modules. What was going on here?
I tagged the pieces for routing to my own safe space, my “kingdom in the cloud,” where I could examine them at leisure.