Black Scorpion (39 page)

According to Gregory John Markham, Samuel was a computer hacker extraordinaire forever on the run from the authorities, a man who lived entirely off the grid. If anyone could solve the mystery of what had turned Vegas dark last week, Markham insisted, it was Samuel. And, toward that end, for the past two days he'd been permitted unfettered access to the Seven Sins and the computer systems controlling its day-to-day operations.

“Hear that?” he asked Naomi suddenly, with hand cupped at his ear.

“Hear what?”

“The old days. If you listen hard enough, you can almost hear the magic from them.”

Strange, Naomi thought, coming from a man who'd been born long after Vegas's original golden age. Samuel had his reasons for wanting to meet in a place like this at such an odd hour, and Naomi was in no position to question him.

“The Boneyard is my favorite place in Vegas,” he said, as they continued their stroll. “Actual history served up in the form of all these neon signs around us that once lit the city. Makes you wonder, doesn't it, what Bugsy Siegel or Meyer Lansky would make of Vegas today. Michael Tirrano's old school, just like them.”

“So you think…”

Samuel winked. “You know what they say about walking and talking like a duck. And don't bother denying it either. I'm on your side.”

“Oh,” Naomi said, thinking on the fly, “I wouldn't dare.”

“But something this big, what do you need me for? Why not just call nine-one-one and get the cavalry, better known as the FBI, on the line?”

“Because that door's closed to us,” Naomi said, stopping there to let her point sink in.

Samuel slapped the side of his head. “Of course, sure. I get it.”

Naomi knew the signs around them had been banished here as massive electronic LED and LCD screens usurped them on the Strip and elsewhere, ambient light replacing the glittery glow that had drenched Vegas in a soft haze. Spared the indignity of the junkyard only by the city's devotion to its own history, to the point where the vintage marquees were dumped downtown on the east side of Las Vegas Boulevard. For convenience and practicality, that land became home to the Neon Museum and official Boneyard laid out over a two-acre spread lined with well over a hundred signs.

“Here's the original from the Oasis Café on Fremont Street,” Samuel said to Naomi, beneath the glow of the LED lights spilling light down from overhead. “Erected in 1929 and reputedly the first neon sign ever to go up in Vegas.”

The sign rested on its side with a cartoon character–like woman stretching a hand toward the moonlit sky. Ancient bulbs were still screwed into sockets rimmed by rust and peeling paint.

“I do my best thinking here,” Samuel told her. “Guess history agrees with me.” He walked diagonally across the Boneyard toward the old Sahara Hotel sign, just beyond which lay the original from Binion's Horseshoe. “But the past isn't why we're here,” Samuel said, sweeping his gaze toward her suddenly. “The future is. I think I know what caused that blackout and, if I'm right, somebody might be about to change that future as we speak.”

 

EIGHTY-SIX

L
AS
V
EGAS,
N
EVADA

Naomi hoped Samuel was being melodramatic, but the look on his face lit by the reflection of the pole lighting off the old neon told her otherwise. That reflection made his pudgy cheeks seem as if they'd been pumped full of air.

They stopped before the once glittery, now rusted out, sign for the Moulin Rouge Casino. “First integrated casino in Vegas, you know,” Samuel noted to Naomi. “The city's casino owners gathered there in nineteen-sixty to sign the Moulin Rouge accord that led to the desegregation of all casinos. What do you know about computers, Ms. Burns?” he asked her, abruptly changing the subject.

“I turn mine on and when I'm finished I turn it off.”

Naomi's response drew a smile from him. “How about the fact that they control pretty much everything these days, from the power grid, to the banking industry, the gaming industry here in Vegas, to all manner of travel, and pretty much any communication?”

“That's obvious.”

“Yes, it is. What isn't nearly as obvious, though, is the vulnerabilities that creates.”

“You mean like viruses?”

“What else?”

“Aren't I supposed to be the one asking the questions here?”

“Humor me, Ms. Burns.”

“Okay,” Naomi said, “hacking. Like the spate of those department stores that had their customer data exposed.”

“Indeed,” Samuel told her, winking as if all too familiar with the subject she had raised. “On point. And the primary solution to enhance cybersecurity is enhanced data encryption.”

“Easier said than done, Samuel.”

“Except it's not. Until three years ago, the problem with the computer chips responsible for the process is no matter how well they did their job of encrypting data to render it safe from bad guys, the smartest of those bad guys, like me, always found a workaround. A way in that left the data exposed and vulnerable. Putty in our hands.”

“What happened three years ago?”

“Well, Ms. Burns, it turns out that up until that point encryption chips only utilized a small portion of their cores at any time to avoid burning out. But then somebody discovered how to enable those chips to utilize virtually their entire cores at any given time without burning out. Allows them to perform far more functions faster than ever before, reducing network vulnerability in the process. Like to hear the specification details?”

“No.”

“It has to do with utilizing—”

“Stick with what's directly relevant to what we're facing
now
, Samuel.”

“Okay, these new encryption chips appear and immediately take control of the market. By now as many as three-quarters of the motherboards of the computer systems and networks controlling our lives have either been fitted, or retrofitted, with Guardian.”

“Guardian?”

“Name of the chip discovered by a relatively small start-up now worth billions. That explains why, in the wake of the Target and Home Depot fiascos, data breaches have fallen off drastically, especially in areas far more vital to everyday life than retail sales. In many cases, Guardian has made them a thing of the past.”

“Where are you going with this?”

Samuel moved to a marquee so old and battered Naomi couldn't even read the words from her vantage point, but she did recognize a cowboy-hatted figure tipping his cap at the top. “In the old days, you flip a switch and these babies would simply turn on. Now when you flip a switch, a relay working off a computer network sends a signal to make that happen. You see the point?”

“Computer networks functioning as middlemen.”

“Exactly, and not the average PC or Mac either.
Networks
, just like you said, where everything is processed through a motherboard. Even the things we take most for granted, like traffic lights and sliding doors and elevators and thermostats, are controlled one way or another by computers rigged to these networks. And Guardian has theoretically made them far more secure than they've ever been.”

“I hate the word theoretically,” Naomi droned.

“Because Guardian created a Janus problem. You know Janus?”

“The Roman God who presided over both war and peace, the best of times and the worst of times.”

“Well,” Samuel picked up, “Guardian functioned even better than advertised, but opened a new vulnerability while closing an old one: Someone able to control all the chips responsible for securing networks through their motherboards could, by connection, take over or shut down those same networks.”

“How?

“Either through a set of coded instructions programmed to activate at a specific point in time, or through a signal sent to the chips at another point in time. What happened in Las Vegas last week had me opting for the latter. And I was right.”

Naomi could see Samuel getting genuinely excited about his findings, ready and eager to please anyone who worked for “old school” Michael Tiranno in the hope word might get back to the man himself.

“You know those vintage slot machines against a lobby wall in the Seven Sins?”

“We retrofitted them to work with our existing payout software.”

“But their ancient technology isn't compatible with the system's motherboard on which Guardian is installed. It's the only subsystem in your entire resort that hasn't been upgraded, and know what? They didn't shut down during the blackout. They continued to function. To those machines, no one was playing. For all others, no one
could
play. See the distinction?”

“Sure, but that doesn't seem to be enough to base a conclusion this big on.”

“And I'm not, not alone anyway. I can tell you that every system in the Seven Sins and beyond with Guardian installed shut down while every system with motherboards without Guardian remained functional. PCs, Macs, and notebooks, too, except nobody could log on to the Internet because the servers of all the local providers had been disabled.”

“That's why the blackout was so pervasive.…”

“Right you are, Ms. Burns,” Samuel said, starting on through the Boneyard again. “And it even affected the emergency backup systems of yours and the other properties on the Strip because those systems are rigged into a network watched over by Guardian as well. Data transmissions, what powers the world basically, are all about computers communicating with each other. And all incoming data, every single bit of it, goes through these encryption chips installed on the motherboards that run these computers. A single system equipped with Guardian in any network would be enough to put the brakes on any data traveling through that network. So if the estimates of Guardian now being installed in somewhere between half and three-quarters of the country's primary systems responsible for transmitting data across cyberspace are accurate, that would be more than enough to shut the whole country down.”

“Did you say
country
?”

“Did I? I didn't mean to but, yes, that's the point here. In fact, you could just as easily substitute
world.
The information super-highway is just that. The data gets on at one point and gets off at another. From the lights going on when you flip the switch, to your cell phone's ability to communicate with the nearest cell tower, to traffic lights, and airplane landings, bank transactions, the checkout lanes at our favorite supermarket—you name it. One way or another it's all controlled by computers talking to each other. That's how data moves along the information superhighway. And if somebody goes national or worldwide with the kind of signal to Guardian that shut down Las Vegas, it's lights out.”

*   *   *

“For how long?”

“Good question,” Samuel said, shrugging. “And I'd be lying if I told you I had the answer.”

“But these encryption chips can be removed and replaced, right?”

“Sure. But it would take awhile and even longer to get all the systems up and running securely again.”

“How long?” Naomi asked him.

“I'd guess a week, two weeks, three weeks maybe? Hard to know exactly, given that we're in uncharted territory here. Think how bad those five minutes were in Vegas last week, then multiply by a week or two or three, only on a much larger scale.” Samuel had stopped before the Stardust Hotel sign that even today seemed to catch him in its golden glow. “Dismantling and moving this antique cost two hundred thousand dollars, more than three times what it cost to build the sign in the first place.”

“How do we stop it?”

Samuel swung from the Stardust sign with a start. “I'm not sure you can. The problem is we're not looking for anything installed on the chip itself, so much as an embedded signal.”

“Embedded signal?”

“A preprogrammed sequence of letters and numbers that once recognized would trigger Guardian to shut down the system it's supposed to be protecting. Could be something as simple as, ‘Your mother wears army boots.' Flooding the systems with a sequence of characters, a sleeper code, that would not randomly come up otherwise. Whoever's behind this would then send that signal to all the systems Guardian is responsible for monitoring and boom, things go dark.”

“A signal to the chip itself?”

“Far more likely a simple message left on a message board asking for feedback from an airline, a bank, an energy supplier—you name it. All of those pass through the encryption system to to make sure they don't contain viruses or worms. And once Guardian recognizes the embedded code, it flips the switch it was designed to flip.”

“Then lights out.”

“Worse,” Samuel told her, “because these systems send out code to every device on their network and, in turn, every device on the network would be infected. The message would be replicated and spread by every system it comes into contact along the server path is what I'm saying. And so on, and so on. In other words, you end up with exponential expansion of the embedded code's reach, spreading the shutdown signal far and wide, as in farthest and widest.”

Samuel moved on toward the bloodred glow of an ancient sign labeled STARR, the origins of which eluded Naomi. “Your only hope would be to preempt the plot at the source. Stop whoever it is from sending the activation signal in the first place.”

“Easier said than done, Samuel. Is there any way to determine exactly how many Guardian chips have actually been installed?”

“All computer networks that transmit data of any kind have encryption technology built in—that's a given. The average system replaces its encryption chips, sometimes their entire motherboards, no more than every three years, or even less. So if you have reason to believe that this plot has been in the works for those three years it's more than conceivable that whoever's behind it can send a signal that can shut down pretty much anything and everything across the country and other parts of the world where Guardian has achieved a comparable degree of saturation. Comparing it to flipping a switch is a nice metaphor, but the effects wouldn't be felt that way. Over the course of a day or two would be my guess for the spread to reach maximum density.”