Radicals, page 2
“Doesn’t matter if they’re ready.” Yemin’s oldest boy was seven and his twin daughters—oops babies—were three. “You make them ready. They grow up in Star Wars, they’ll love it whether they want to or not.”
“Ah, the classic nature versus nurture argument.” Jay flipped to the next page, which detailed how the perps had accessed the server of the clinic and wiped all the billing records, setting the company’s ledger back to zero. That’s unexpected, Jay thought. Hackers always looked for personal information. Patient ID numbers, Social Security numbers, addresses, things that could be used to create false personas. “You’re not showing them the prequels are you?”
“My job as a parent is to protect them from evil, not give them the CGI version of it.” Yemin shook his head, like he was amazed Jay could even ask that. “Besides, in these plans? The bed glows. I got a rope of blue LEDs to string along the bottom. How can they not like it?”
“Kids do like glowing things. Least, I assume they do. Cats do, according to videos.” Jay went further into the report, skimming over the details of two dozen additional clinics that had reported the same issues, minus the break-in. Jay flipped back to the first page and checked the dates. This spread across twenty-some clinics within two days?
“There’s not much difference.” Yemin started to say more but stopped short and stood up, held his hand out. “Sir.”
Jay stood by reflex and turned to face Assistant Special Agent in Charge Brett Dalworth, the man who supervised their squad.
Dalworth looked to Yemin, and said, “Give us a minute?” Yemin grabbed his stained coffee cup and went for a refill.
ASAC Dalworth had lobbied for Jay to be stationed at the Baltimore office when he came out of Quantico after working with the ACLU for a few years. It was an unorthodox move—normally agents would be assigned someplace other than the district they applied through. But Jay had finished near the top of his class and cyber agents with a background in programming were in demand, so Dalworth called in a few favors. Handpicked for the position, Jay felt a strange combination of having a bit of leeway with Dalworth while also needing constantly to impress him and live up to his estimation.
“Everything okay, sir?”
Dalworth pulled Yemin’s chair over, brushed off the bits, nodded for Jay to sit as well. He ran his hand through his thick gray hair, something that, pushing his late sixties, he was inordinately proud of. My grandfather died at ninety-five, he’d told Jay before, could’ve mopped your house with his head. Jay wondered sometimes if that was the eccentricity of living in Baltimore for forty-plus years.
“We missed you this weekend,” he said to Jay. “Annie even made that god-awful Jell-O pudding you like.”
“You know I only ate it because you wouldn’t and I didn’t want her to feel bad. And now she makes it every time.”
“When you’ve been married forty years, you don’t have to eat the shitty dessert. Smart move on your part, though.”
Jay nodded, the compliment a small consolation. Dalworth’s wife was one of the sweetest women Jay had ever met and he sometimes wondered what his life would’ve been like if he’d grown up with a mother like her instead of his own mother, but none of that changed the fact that two scoops of that pudding threatened to throw him into diabetic shock.
Dalworth shrugged. “I put your care package in the fridge next to your lunch.”
“Care package?”
“Jell-O pudding. From Annie.” He said it as if it were the most obvious thing. “Anyway. You have a look at that hack?”
Jay motioned with the folder in hand. “The broad strokes. What are we thinking?”
“That’s what I came to ask you.”
Jay cleared his throat and began to leaf through it once more. “First thought would be a virus, maybe with hyper-specific coding that lets them target only the billing records. I’ve never seen something like this before, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything unique about it. Maybe there’s some kind of AI component to it or something. I’ll have to look at it closer before I can say more.”
“It is strange, isn’t it?”
“Everything’s strange until you’ve seen it a couple times.”
“Jay, these places were hacked and billing records deleted and the only thing we have to go on is a cartoon ghost displayed on the monitors.”
“It’s sixteen-bit animation, not a cartoon,” Jay said. “They’re different.”
“Whatever.” Dalworth crossed his arms. “You see what connects them?”
Jay creased his eyebrows and reexamined the reports. “All part of the Hopkins network. The virus could easily pass through an intranet.”
“Not that.”
A moment later, Jay looked up from the paper. “Each clinic is serviced by Bay State Insurance or Tidewater Mutual?”
Dalworth raised an eyebrow.
“They’re the two largest insurers in Maryland,” Jay said. “That’s not too weird.”
“How many accounts have been affected?”
“Couple hundred at each site.”
“And more than twenty sites—”
“Means thousands of accounts, all with only those two insurers. Not nationwide like Exemplar, not any of the small local places. And all in less than two days.”
Jay chewed on his lip. “That is strange.” His right finger twitched. He lined it up with the edge of the paper, blinked once with his right eye, once with his left. “Has the virus or whatever infected their mainframes?”
Dalworth breathed a laugh. “They’re conducting an ‘internal review’ and will get back to us.”
Jay could hear the air quotes around internal review. “Maybe we could actually figure something out for them if they let us do our job.”
“Your lips, god’s ear,” Dalworth said, standing. “Look into it, will you?”
“I’ll get on it right now.”
Dalworth clapped Jay’s shoulder, then paused a second. “Not to bring up a sore subject, but IT mentioned a few”—he paused, searching for a diplomatic way to say it—“searches with your ID on it.”
Jay swallowed. “I don’t know what they’re talking about but I’m sure it’s not a problem.”
“I get that this is a difficult week. It was seven years on Tuesday, right?”
“Monday, but everything’s fine.” Jay snapped it out before Dalworth could say anymore but realized it sounded more aggressive than he intended. “I’m good, sir.”
Dalworth held his look a long beat before rapping his knuckles on the edge of the cubicle. “Let me know when you find something. And don’t leave that pudding in the fridge. Somehow, she’ll know.”
Jay arranged the piles of papers, saw the invisible line coming off the corners of them and intersecting at a ninety-degree angle in the exact middle of his laptop.
“It’s fine. I’m fine.” Jay fired up his laptop, telling himself to breathe and keep his Tourette’s under control.
As Yemin walked back to his cubicle, he watched Jay correct the angles of the papers while the machine connected to the Bureau’s server. “What’re you doing there, buddy?”
“Logging on.” Jay handed Yemin the incident report. “You want to do me a favor and call an AUSA—try Gutierrez, she’s usually in early—and get them to subpoena every affected clinic and get their server records? Thanks, sweetheart.”
Yemin took the paper without looking at it, kept his eyes on Jay. “Seriously, I got three kids, I recognize evasion when I see it.”
Jay popped in his earbuds and turned on Cock Sparrer—a punk band Sam loved when they were growing up—even though he knew it was probably a poor choice, given it was the anniversary of Sam’s disappearance. Or rather, when she walked out the door, seemingly evaporating into the ether, leaving no information with her girlfriend and few leads for Jay to follow.
He pushed those thoughts aside and got back to navigating through the server, looking for the video investigators had taken of the animated ghost.
He could feel Yemin hovering behind him but knew if he ignored him long enough, he’d eventually give up.
Jay found the file and double-clicked. A graphic appeared on the monitor—a skeleton draped in a deep-red cloak, slightly pixelated like the old sixteen-bit video games. Its jaw opened and closed like it was laughing.
He recognized it immediately.
Jay’s right eye twitched twice. He blinked his left twice.
It was the Crimson Ghost.
3
Twenty-three red dots were scattered across the projection map in the Field Office conference room, like Baltimore had caught chicken pox over the past forty-eight hours. Some spread over the Westside, some on the East, several clumped around the main Hopkins medical campuses. Each dot represented a site whose computer system had been compromised, whose billing records had been completely wiped, whose monitors displayed only a sixteen-bit skeleton wearing a red cloak.
Jay’s initial thought: virus. Of course it was a virus, because viruses spread, and spread rapidly. But viruses also spread randomly. This wave was targeted, methodical, only affecting the billing departments, nothing pertaining to patient care or patient records.
The method of infection also suggested a virus, especially as no other clinics had reported break-ins. They made their way into Community Health, then infected the other places through the intranet. But there was no indication the other locations had downloaded any malignant files.
All that aside, what are they looking for? What’s the point of this? Jay thought as he sat at the conference room table, his eyes flicking among his laptop screen, the projection map, and two tablets running analysis on the skeleton’s code. Beside them were squared-off piles of printed tech specs and logs tracing the user flow from one IP address to another, the top edge of each stack creating a straight line across the table. If he squinted hard enough, the disparate pieces of the case started to track, but he lost focus of the connections when he took a bird’s-eye view.
Jay picked up the locust sitting on his desk and stared at it. Forensics had found it on the security desk at Community Health but got nothing from it, nothing from the site either. Whoever pulled these jobs wanted to send some kind of message with the locust—you wouldn’t leave such a thing behind otherwise—but the message was as inscrutable as what they wanted.
The only thing Jay was sure of was the ghost itself. Growing up, he’d seen it on dozens of his sister’s records and shirts, all for The Misfits, another of her favorite bands. Every time he looked at the image, he felt a quick jab in the soft spot between his ribs, felt a longing to pause this investigation and continue searching for Sam, to find out where she’d gone and what she did. Dalworth’s IT mole could go to Hell.
“You know this is what a serial killer’s garage looks like, right?” Yemin stood in the doorway behind Jay.
“If anyone would know, it’d be you.”
Yemin settled himself into a chair with a long sigh. “So. What do we got now?”
“Where do I start?”
Yemin pointed at the table, three screens filled with various incarnations of the skeleton.
“Image referencing brought back a bunch of stuff, mostly bad tattoos. I’ll get to that in a minute. I tracked the original image to the broadside of a film called The Crimson Ghost, a Republic Pictures serial from 1946 in which a mysterious villain”—Jay lowered his voice—“the eponymous Crimson Ghost, is determined to steal a counter-atomic device known as Cyclotrode X, which can short out any electrical device.”
“Which is exactly what our guys did. Froze computers and servers. So we’re looking for a cell of terrorist film nerds?”
“There are other people who would recognize the ghost’s face.” Jay picked up a tablet and flipped to a new window, displaying multiple photos of a horror-punk band, their faces painted corpse-white and black with long, jet-black hair. “Band called the Misfits. Their logo is the Crimson Ghost skull, hence the plethora of stick-and-poke tattoos in the image search. They do the whole ‘Teenagers from Mars’ meets pop-punk thing with some low-budget fifties sci-fi thrown in.”
“I wrote my first program in C-plus-plus when I was thirteen and I don’t understand anything you just said.”
Jay shook his head. “Typical teenage rebellion stuff. Walk by Hot Topic and half the kids inside will have Misfits or Slayer shirts on. It doesn’t mean anything in this context.”
“That skull would be cool airbrushed on the side of a van,” Yemin said. “Maybe they just like the way it looks.”
Jay figured it was more likely they were drawing on the plot of the movie, but that didn’t explain their ultimate goal. Shorting out electrical devices wasn’t quite analogous with selectively deleting records.
“Yeah, maybe. However”—Jay thumbed through the papers for the ones he wanted, then arranged them in front of Yemin—“this might have legs.”
Jay noticed Yemin watching him adjust the papers to get them straight, but Yemin didn’t press him. “IP address logs?”
“I had the techs get into the various servers and run analysis on the logs, see who’s coming from where, temporal signatures, how long they’re on, all that. At least, as much as two people can do.”
Yemin scanned the list, his lips moving as he talked to himself. “And it’s the usual lot.”
“Right. China, North Korea, Russia, Iran.”
“Aka roll call for terrorism.”
“Right. But we’re not seeing any activity from Yemen, Syria, Nigeria. However—” Jay said, his tone implying wait for it.
Yemin tapped his finger on a line of code. “But then there’s a few hits from Venezuela, Ukraine, Cuba.” He leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers together and set them against his lips. “It’s the same people who are always trying to get in, probing for soft spots.”
“Or maybe they’re trying to look like they’re the same people to throw us off. See these hits? It’s evenings and weekends, US time.”
“Which means it’s daytime in China.”
“Right, but they’re only on for two or three hours at a pop, then longer on weekends. If it was China trying to get in, they’d be banging on the door for eight, nine hours straight during the week and quiet the other days, because even state-sanctioned hackers get the weekends off. And if this was coming from the Middle East, there wouldn’t be so much activity on Friday and Saturday because of the holy days. And that aside, what kind of terrorist organization—state sanctioned or lone wolf—breaks into Community Health in Sandtown?”
Yemin arched an eyebrow. “Some kid in Caracas—one who might crib the skull logo of an American punk band because it looks cool—accidentally showing up on our list doesn’t mean it’s not someone else trying to get in.”
“Exactly,” Jay said. “If they were using Tor or another kind of onion routing—which, ostensibly, any decent hacker or cyber operative would be—they could bury their location through thousands of reroutes and we wouldn’t pick up their original location in the first place. All of them would dead-end in Zimbabwe, Bolivia, Tibet, Sri Lanka, someplace random with no interest in hacking the US.”
Sometimes Jay wondered what it would have been like thirty years ago, collecting intelligence without having to sift through hundreds of thousands of entries from programs like Tor, which allowed someone to bounce their signal off communication satellites around the world to hide their location.
“Next question,” Jay said. “Most hackers want to make a point, even if it’s just that things need to be destroyed. So what are they trying to say? Why target billing records?”
Jay looked up at the room’s drop-ceiling. It was a midnight sky in reverse, depthless points of darkness amid a field of blinding white. At times, Jay thought it was an apt metaphor for the Bureau itself.
“Health care is a lot of money. Maybe they want to disrupt the economy,” Yemin said. “Or shake the public’s faith in their cyber security. You know how upset everyone gets when there’s a breach.”
“Yeah. For two days. Before they change all their accounts to password2 instead of password1. There’s a reason they’re attacking billing records.” Jay stood and stretched his back. Breathe, be aware, count. “What if they think they’re creating goodwill? Like, they’re helping wipe out debt to show they’re on the people’s side so that…no one complains? Give them extra money to buy stuff? I don’t know.”
Yemin sighed. “Me neither. Something doesn’t add up.”
“Right. So what’s their next move?” Jay cupped his chin, ran his fingers over his cheeks while staring at the map. “What if it actually is creating goodwill for their cause, so that when they attack—”
“They have public support.” Yemin pressed his fingers against his eyelids. “We should run this by Dalworth. Not that these people are going nuclear or anything, but with that plotline?”
“Yeah, I know, I know.”
Someone knocked on the conference room door. Jay and Yemin turned in their chairs to find Jeanie standing there, her face dappled with sweat. She was the new tech they’d finally been able to hire, after months of pleading and cajoling, and even then only because she was fresh out of college and the department could pay her nothing.
“Agent Brodsky,” she said, her breath rushing in and out. “You need to hear this.”
4
Jay and Yemin followed Jeanie down the hallway, weaving around slow-moving packs of suited agents, dodging a mop bucket sitting in the middle of the tile floor with no attendant around. She impressed Jay with how quickly and nimbly she moved, especially given the heels she wore. He would break his neck five times a day if he had to wear them.
Just past the kitchen, they banked right and stopped at the second door, a cramped room filled with servers, corkboards, and a computer for each analyst. Algorithms were scribbled on a digital wipe-board, next to a crude drawing that could have been an alien or one of the techs with elephantiasis. Numbers and something like a heartbeat flashed on a few screens.
