They’re sure listening now.
Trouble was, they weren’t the only ones. Some hacker had taken him down exactly at 11:00 a.m. this morning. The eleventh hour. Were they sending him a warning? Had they identified him? The hacking had sure shocked the shit out of Vinko. Four years of computer engineering at Boise State, another sixteen studying the Dark Web’s deepest secrets, then setting up alternating proxy servers and running the most sophisticated cyberdefenses — only to have some son-of-a-bitch knock him down like he was no more formidable than a bowling pin.
But that wasn’t the real shocker. Before he could even begin a digital forensics operation, his website had come back to life. He would have liked to take credit for the quick comeback, but he couldn’t. The help had come from elsewhere. A powerful force had put him back in business with a private message that had been haunting his evening walk with Biko:
You have a guardian angel, Steel Fist. I am here to keep your message online. You are doing the Lord’s work. Your enemies are crude. They don’t know who you are or where you’re based. But I do.
Those words still gnawed at him as he closed the barn door and strode back to his big log house and stepped inside.
But I do.
A religious type, a real believer, had identified him, claimed to know where he lived. Not a little ironic because Vinko didn’t share any hope for a heavenly presence. But a guardian angel? If some hacker wanted to call himself that and fight back on his behalf, Vinko wasn’t going to protest. But an urgency was now upon him. The walk had finally crystallized one major concern about the day’s disturbances: if his so-called guardian angel could put him back online, he could also have been the hacker who’d taken him down. Someone who might be toying with him for reasons Vinko could not yet imagine.
He now paused only long enough to drink a cold glass of goat milk before heading back to his office, a room that looked as sleek and pristine as any clean room in Silicon Valley.
He needed the latest and most sophisticated gear. Cyberchaos was taking down America. He’d been spared till eleven o’clock this morning, but for weeks hackers had taken aim at rescue efforts trying to save cities and coastlines from the flooding. Dams, bridges, pumping stations, and large-scale sanitation plants had been caught in the crosshairs of America’s most dedicated enemies. But one development Vinko could not accept — and never would — was that almost two months ago the government had “accidentally” released almost a thousand pages of documents online that demonstrated how simple it would be to cyberattack a long list of power and water industrial control systems. They showed that if a cybersaboteur disconnected a generator from the grid, it would immediately speed up because it no longer had any load. Then, if it were reconnected to the grid, tremendous damaging force would be exerted on the generator as it tried to bring it back into sync. A blueprint for all that had quickly followed.
We’re supposed to believe that bullshit was a mistake? When it made it easier for terrorists to come in and kill us?
You’d have to be a madman to accept that excuse at face value. Vinko had been called a lot, but never a madman. Possessed by the importance of his mission, yes. But not mad.
With his website back online, he planned to conduct a thorough disk and memory analysis to determine who his guardian angel was. Just one critical task had to take precedence: the prime-time posting of files packed with data he’d obtained from penetrating the NSA — unless he were taken offline again before he could deliver his priceless trove. He’d feared the files had been destroyed by the hacker, but the takedown had been the crudest form of cybersabotage and it left those files fully intact. Every page showing the secretive U.S. agency was still mining and amassing private information on millions of Americans.
He started uploading the files in seconds, working his keyboard like a pianist tickling the ivories, the tap-tap-tapping soothing and reassuring — with data that would enrage his followers.
With those files in motion, he began sending out teasers to his faithfuclass="underline" “Are you ready? Tell me you’re ready to see your government’s latest crimes.” Most of his readers had signed up for alerts when he went live.
Vinko sat back and waited, scratching Biko’s ear. The dog leaned into his master’s ranch-hardened fingers. Even the pinky that wouldn’t straighten could exert strong pressure, the sole injury that the six-foot-four-inch Vinko had sustained while quarterbacking the Boise State Broncos for four years.
Thousands, then tens of thousands of encouraging messages started pouring into Hayden Lake. Vinko’s entire operation was powered by solar panels that harvested bright mountain sunshine from every square inch of the roofs of his large home and barn. Each kilowatt counted now with power outages afflicting so many other Americans.
He checked to make sure the files were live, then turned serious: “Go ahead, look for yourself,” he told his subscribers. “You’ll probably find that you’ve been spied on, too. Ed Snowden was a creep, a criminal leftist and a turncoat, but he was right about government surveillance. That’s where the political right and left come together, folks. Not to kiss and make up, but to kick the government’s sneaky ass.”
He let those words sink in, imagining the NSA files cascading down across the country like the braided sparkling streams that ran into the lake. He felt as if he’d just thrown another touchdown pass to “Bones” Jackson, his tight end his senior year. They’d tolerated each other. Bones, a junior college transfer, had shaken his head when he’d learned the white quarterback hailed from Aryan Nations country. But business was business, and big-time college football was nothing if not business. Vinko slid his chair forward and resumed his tap-tap-tapping. “If I can access this info, America’s enemies can, too. Your government can’t protect your borders and they can’t protect your most private information. Enemies could target any one of you, and every one of you is important to them. They have your home address, where you work, the schools your children attend. The NSA has it all. Your bank records, data on your phone calls. They’ve cracked your encryption codes, scooped up your text messages, IP addresses, webcam images, and even your online games. THEY KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU. And now they’re targeting me. The NSA took me down this morning.” He hadn’t confirmed that yet, but blaming the agency was too easy to pass up. “But they couldn’t keep me down, and they can’t keep you down, either. Not if we stay strong and fight back. They have plenty to answer for.”
He uploaded more video of bombings already familiar to his followers. “Look at Liberty Square. Look at Turner Field in Atlanta, King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania. Those surveillance cameras tell the whole sorry story, don’t they?
“It’s time your friends and family and neighbors opened their eyes just like you. They’ll see that the dark-skinned hordes we’ve been trying to cull for years just keep coming.
“Ammo up, America! Ammo up!”
Three minutes later, just as he was about to begin his forensic study of this morning’s cyberattack, his guardian angel hacked into a highly encrypted communications channel that Vinko reserved for a select few and left him a message: “Lana Elkins took you down.”