“How’d you manage that?” Johnny asked. He pulled his foot off of the gas pedal, dropping back down to the legal speed limit.
“Pirated his Bluetooth back at the parking lot.”
Johnny chuckled. “Technology’s a bitch.”
Pearce powered down his smartphone. “Let’s go find your girl.”
2
CIOS Corporate Offices
Rockville, Maryland
1 May
She was there at the beginning, when the U.S. government first weaponized the Internet. In fact, she had loaded some of the first rounds into the cylinder and cocked the hammer.
Jasmine Bath was twenty-four years old when she earned her M.S. in computer science from UC Berkeley, one of the first recruits into the NSA’s Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO) program. They started her at Fort Meade but moved her around, grooming her for bigger things. She was a software specialist but became familiar with hardware operations, too. She helped write some of the first coding for the NSA’s pervasive XKEYSCORE surveillance software before moving up into senior development positions within TAO’s aggressive counterintelligence ANT program. Her coding fingerprints were all over persistent software implants like JETPLOW (firewall firmware), HEADWATER (software backdoors), and SOMBERKNAVE (wireless Internet traffic rerouting). Those successes earned her multiple commendations and promotions, leading to training and supervisory positions in newly developed TAO sites in Hawaii, Texas, Colorado, and even the Dagger Complex in Germany.
That meant the vast resources of the NSA were entirely at her disposal. She now had access to TAO’s shadow networks of servers and routers, used for covertly hijacking or herding unsuspecting Internet traffic through them. It was the Internet equivalent of the CIA opening up a cell phone store in Abbottabad and secretly selling supposedly untraceable burner phones to al-Qaeda terrorists.
With the help of the CIA, FBI, and other national security agencies, TAO also planted hardware and software bugs and malware in electronic devices manufactured around the globe—including memory chips, hard drives, motherboards and cell phone cameras, to name just a few—to gain access to their data.
TAO also remotely implanted software bugs and malware into network firewalls and security software programs, allowing the NSA to back-door more malware into, and harvest data out of, entire computer networks or individual computers, tablets, and phones. They even had their own manufacturing facilities, producing comprised keyboards, monitors, routers, and connector cables that secretly transmitted user data. The NSA also operated mirrored cell phone base stations that acted like legitimate cell phone towers, secretly capturing entire networks of cell phone users without their knowledge.
In short, nearly every kind of commercially produced electronic device had been compromised, infected, and harnessed to TAO purposes, allowing them to hear, see, or read virtually any data-capable device on the planet without the knowledge of either the users or manufacturers. Best of all, these devices, once installed, remained in place, continuously harvesting data for future NSA use—data that Bath still had access to as well.
But that wasn’t all.
The NSA and its sister agencies successfully compromised nearly every social networking site on the planet. They even penetrated the “Dark Web,” where criminal and terrorist activity supposedly occurred without public knowledge or government interference.
The NSA also created hundreds of fake jihadist, anarchist, and terrorist websites, blogs, and Twitter accounts in order to gather data from unsuspecting users, identify new suspects, compromise those individuals and organizations, and plant false data into hostile communities. They operated cybercafés around the world, offering free Internet access to unsuspecting users, not unlike the CIA conduct of fake vaccination campaigns to harvest DNA data on terror suspects. Conservative politicians who supported intrusive surveillance activities never realized that certain security agencies had also created virtual “Honey Pot” websites in order to draw out the most extremist elements within Tea Party, nationalist, constitutionalist, and “prepper” circles.
Jasmine Bath had access to all of these fake portals as well.
With all of these weapons in hand, Jasmine Bath could find out just about anything about anybody, or plant credible false evidence against any person. That gave her the kind of power that state security agencies had sought since the time of the pharaohs but could only dream of.
And that’s when she quit.
Bath’s extensive experience and exposure gave her a big-picture overview of the NSA’s far-reaching capabilities and boundless resources. It also allowed her to secretly pocket a number of keys she would later use to pick her own locks at her former employer, which she would use to form her new company, CIOS. In effect, she used the NSA’s resources against them in order to exploit the NSA as her own spying agency. Who watches the watchers? Jasmine Bath does, she’d joke. She spied on the spies—or, more accurately, spied through the spies—without their even knowing it.
With her top-security clearances, impeccable credentials, and agency contacts, she acquired several legitimate NSA contracts for CIOS just hours after tendering her resignation. But the real money to be made had nothing to do with honest work. She knew her unparalleled ability to find or fake information on virtually anybody, anywhere, would pry open the deepest wallets in Washington.
She felt no guilt. She lost count of the number of “false flag” operations governments around the world—including her own—had used to start wars in the last forty years, or the lies told by politicians, bureaucrats, and advocacy groups to justify radically new domestic policy agendas. Venerable science journals and prestigious research institutions were plagued with falsified data in the scramble for federal grants and venture-capital investments. Bath just wanted her piece of the pie.
All she lacked was the funding to launch the venture. But she didn’t have long to wait. A silent investor approached her and offered her unfettered control of her company. In exchange for no-strings-attached financing came his quid pro quo of no questions asked, and in turn, she was to be available when called upon, which would be both rare and remunerative.
The silent investor’s name, she would discover much later after proving herself to him, was startling. One of the true power brokers in Washington. His connections provided her with all the cover she would ever need should her formidable defenses ever fail. Owing to his preeminence in her corporate life, she always referred to him as The Angel.
3
Lake Massingir
Mozambique
1 May
Pearce scratched his beard with his free hand, wild and woolly the way he wore it back in the war, except now it was flecked with gray, just like his long black hair. The crow’s-feet around his eyes had deepened.
He reached into the bucket for another bottle of Sagres Preta, a local Portuguese dark lager, and worked the black cap off with a knife edge. He’d been drinking too much for the past few months, and his gut showed it. He never drank at work, only after hours, and never got too drunk. Just numb.
Mostly.
The locals told him bloody chicken livers were the next best thing to live bait if he wanted to catch one of the razor-toothed tiger fish lurking in the deep water, a hundred silvery pounds of thrashing mouth full of vicious teeth as long as sixteen-penny nails. They told him to keep the hooks small unless he wanted to catch one of the really big monsters, but then he’d have the fight of his life on his hands—literally.