“Is there a task force on this?” I asked.
“I wish. I pitched that and was shot down by my captain,” Sean complained. “Look… until now, no one has ever really tried to connect the cases and put the pieces together. From any distance they look like isolated instances of junkies freaking out, and there are a lot of cases like that. It wasn’t until Doc looked for incidents involving bites and factors like age and prostitution that he started getting hits. Distant hits, though. I mean, he thinks they’re related and so do I, but we don’t have enough to build a solid case yet. I’m trying to determine disposition of bodies right now, but my guess is they’ve been sent back to families, and that means different jurisdictions and a lot of ‘I don’t give a shit’ on the part of local law, local hospitals, and the families of the kids. You know how it is with the fringe dwellers.”
“Sean,” I said, “you said that Kya was a prostitute. What do you know about her pimp?”
“Not much. There’s a thin lead I’ve been following that seems to be tied to maybe the Russians. They run a lot of girls in this part of Maryland. So far I’ve hit a lot of dead ends.”
“Who all have you told about this?” I asked.
“Just my captain, Dad, and Ali.”
“Keep it that way.”
“But—”
“Dad was right,” I said. “This does sound like my kind of thing. Or, maybe it is. I’ll have to look at it and then make a judgment call. Sean, can you get your hands on samples of the blood and brain tissue with the nanites in them? I mean can you do it without it showing up on the chain of evidence log?”
“I… uh, well, sure. I’d have to tell Doc Jakobs why, though.”
“Don’t call him. No more phones. Assume his place is bugged, too. Go and hand him a note explaining the basics. Burn the note afterward and flush the ashes. Someone will be in touch to collect the samples.”
“Who?”
“No one you know, but he’ll have a message from me. It’ll be the name of the guy who got me to read that book. You know what I mean?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Sure.”
When I was in ninth grade, I was starting to log a lot of hours in detention because of fighting with other kids and making smart-ass comments to teachers. I know, you’re shocked. Joe Ledger fighting and being a smart-ass? Who’d have thought? Anyway, the teacher running detention was big on reading. He made a deal with whoever was on the bench: we could read one of the books he had in his office and then take a quiz based on the chapters we swore we’d read. If we scored well, proving that we’d actually done the reading, we could get out early. While I was there, I grabbed a book called Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. It was a little young for my reading level, but it had a good story. Kid lost in the woods who was fighting for survival and all he had was a hatchet. I ripped through that in five detention sessions. It was my favorite book for a long time, and it engendered within me a love of books. Plus, it was a kick-ass story. I read a lot of other books while polishing that bench with my teenage ass, but I read Hatchet three times. And I gave a new copy to Sean for Christmas that year.
“Don’t ask the pickup guy too many questions, because he’ll stonewall you. Rules of the game,” I said.
“What do I do after that?”
“Sit tight and keep your eyes open. I’ll be there by tomorrow morning.”
“Thanks, Joe.” There was a heartbreaking amount of relief in his voice. He really was scared. So was I.
I was also really fucking pissed off. Five dead kids, someone playing with nanotech, the possibility of some kind of rabies outbreak, and now someone ghosting my brother? Yeah, I was planning on having a meaningful conversation with someone. It would be a chat I’d enjoy more than they would.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sarah Schoeffel didn’t like being grilled by Congress. Not even by a small closed-door panel. She felt very much like a witness giving testimony while already strapped to the electric chair. The subcommittee’s control over funding for her department was the hand on the switch, and the longer these hearings went on the more that hand seemed to twitch.
“You’re telling us,” said Senator Diaz from Florida, “that the cybersecurity of this nation’s largest banks is not secure?”
“That is correct,” said Schoeffel.
“And you’re saying that the banks might not recover the money that has so far been taken from all those accounts?”
“I would say that there is a very small chance any of those funds can be recovered, Senator. The thefts were done quietly by highly skilled computer hackers who were able to disable the alert systems written into the software. The money was gone days before anyone knew about it, and it’s likely that it has since been rerouted to a great many accounts in the Caymans, Panama, and elsewhere. Possibly even laundered electronically and funneled back into domestic banks through falsified income and profit reports of shell companies.”
Schoeffel felt the heat of nine sets of eyes. She knew that she didn’t have a friend in the room. Not the seven members of the cyberterrorism panel and not the two congressmen who were guests from the Banking and the Finance Committee. No one wanted to hear the truth, although they kept asking pointed questions like that one. It was clear that they wanted to be mollified, comforted, maybe even lied to, but Schoeffel was here to tell the truth. Painful and dangerous truths, but truths nonetheless.
“How is this even possible?” asked Albertson, the representative from Ohio.
Schoeffel spread her hands. “Cybersecurity is only as good as the latest upgrade. Once the new security software is in place, it’s only a matter of time before a hacker assesses it and cracks it. It’s like a game, and there are a lot of black hats out there who—”
Goines raised a hand. “I’m a little fuzzy on that. You keep using terms like ‘black hat’ and ‘gray hat.’ What, exactly, does that mean?”
“It’s pretty straightforward,” said Schoeffel. “Black-hat hackers are criminals who violate computer security for personal gain, such as stealing credit-card information, personal-data harvesting, identity theft, corporate espionage, and international espionage. The Chinese Ghost-Net is a black hat because they’re trying to crack the security on our banks as well as the power grids. These black hats run the gamut from simple criminals to terrorists. And their holy grail is what we call a ‘zero day’ vulnerability, which is where they take advantage of a security vulnerability on the same day that the vulnerability becomes generally known. There are zero days between the time the vulnerability is discovered and the first attack, hence the name.”
The congressmen and women nodded.
“White-hat hackers are the good guys,” continued Schoeffel. “Call them ‘ethical hackers,’ if you will. They’re the ones who build our defenses against the black hats and wage a very serious war with them, and it is equal parts attack and defense. We employ many of them to try and hack our own systems so that vulnerabilities can be identified and addressed. Many businesses employ them, too. White-hat hackers use their understanding of complex computer-security programs to compromise the organization’s systems, just as a black-hat hacker would. However, instead of using this access to steal or vandalize these systems the white hats report back to the organization and inform it of how they gained access, allowing the organization to improve its defenses. This is called ‘penetration testing,’ and it’s an extremely valuable tool. Homeland and the Department of Defense employ hundreds of white hats.”