Buzzworm (A Technology Thriller): Computer virus or serial killer? (27 page)

Standing in the main hallway
at Building 213 on a Sunday night, only made Med feel more and more like her life had somehow skidded off the track.
This wasn’t what she signed up for
she thought. She felt haunted by a malignant force. Like
Buzzworm
was everywhere. That he had permeated the air of the CIA.

Med stepped into the gleaming chrome elevator, struggling to understand
Buzzworm
’s purpose. Why was he attacking the intelligence agency? Was it part of some grand plan or just a simple grudge blown out of sane proportion? She swiped her pass card across the sensing plate and felt the elevator shudder as the doors closed. She knew he was here now, watching her. She felt invaded. How many times had this happened before?

She glanced up at the security camera — its lens as black and lifeless as a shark’s eye. She thought back to the mugger in the street. There was no question in her mind now that
Buzzworm
was behind the attack. Yet Xavier had somehow rescued her. It all seemed so scripted and perfectly timed to keep her off balance. Scare Ms. Duke, then send in the U.S. Rangers to sweep her off her feet. She grimaced. He had swept her off her feet and she was happy to go along. Damn. She felt like such an idiot.

The elevator whined down the several floors to the Avion platform. She could already feel the air growing cooler around her.

The kidnapping of Hyde’s daughter weighed heavily on Med. She couldn’t imagine being responsible for the life of someone’s child. But she also wasn’t sure how she could prevent the agency from shutting down the Avion. And the government would be doing everything it could to stop a major attack on U.S. security coming out of one of their own divisions, once it started. It would be no secret where the attack was originating from.

Roger had been right. No one in history had ever used a super computer to launch a DoS attack. But if it was to happen, the results would be shattering. First, the sheer power of an Avion was hard for most people to imagine. Capable of sending out billions of fake messages per second, the Avion could overrun the entire Internet, bringing all worldwide communication to its knees in a matter of seconds. That meant email, instant messaging, money transfers, intergovernmental communications, everything would be halted. Med couldn’t even guess what the cost would be, but billions was not out of the question. Maybe trillions.

There were other issues.

Because of GIPETTOs unique capability and links to Western satellite resources,
Buzzworm
could halt or scramble a high percentage of US military intel ops as well. Which would mean the U.S. military would be blind and deaf, as long as the Avion was running rogue. For how long? That was the other question. She was certain that the Avion could keep an unstoppable barrage up for as long as
Buzzworm
wanted. Being blind to your enemies for a week or longer was like a lifetime. An open window for terrorist acts of every kind.

The reason this had never been done before was obvious. You don’t play games with a fifty million dollar piece of hardware. At least until now.

Once the world learned that the source of the attack was the CIA, the political ramifications would be impossible to measure. How could anyone trust this kind of technology again?

Med stood in the on-boarding area of sub floor six and studied the sweeping Lexan barrier that protected the Avion. She had spent more than five years of her life, long days and nights, building the code that powered this massive machine. The largest single advance in military security since the guided missile, someone had said. And now that weapon was infected and sick and her one last duty was to keep it alive so that it could attack the very country she designed it to protect.

To Med’s surprise, the elevator door behind her suddenly wheezed open again. Vienna stood there looking harried. They both stared at each other for several seconds.

“Have you heard?” Vienna asked, holding the other HUMMER under her arm.

“Sit down, Jo,” ordered Med.

“I will not sit down. I just heard that the Hong Kong Exchange is down because of an Internet attack and our Avion is the culprit. We’ve also shut down all of China’s government websites. We’ve essentially declared war on them.” She pointed to her military grade PC. “And I’ve been locked out. The director wants to know what is going on.”

Med added. “For your information, there are others. The FBI’s system has just been shuttered. I’ve been monitoring what’s going on for about an hour. This is only the start. This Avion is quite a weapon in the wrong hands.”

Vienna walked up to Med, unable to hide her shock. “Have you gone insane, Duke? You know about this? You did this?”

“I’ve been locked out too. I’m just a bystander at this point.”

“Why haven’t you started the shutdown routine?”

“Because I have orders not to.”

“Orders? From who?”

“Washington police.”

Vienna just stared, then she strode past Med’s workstation and headed for the entry portal. Just as she placed her hand on the scanner, Med stepped up behind her and grabbed her arm away. “I can’t let you go in there.”

Vienna glared, her nostrils flaring and her eyes bulging. Her complexion had turned crimson. “Try and stop me.” She pushed Med away and turned back to the security panel.

Med paused for a second, hardly believing what she was about to do. Then she shoved her manager hard, hitting her in the shoulder with all of her weight. Vienna tumbled sideways, her hands up, trying to grip the smooth sides of the plastic enclosure. She landed awkwardly on her back, her face contorted. Med stood over her.

Vienna looked up, her hair askew. “This is fucking
Buzzworm
, isn’t it?”

“He’s taken over GIPETTO too.”

“And you’re going to let him?”

“I have no choice, Jo. He’s taken Hyde’s daughter. If the Avion stops running for any reason, he kills her.”

Vienna rolled over onto her stomach, grunted and picked herself up slowly. She sat back with her shoulder blades against the transparent shield. Med guessed she could feel the rumble of the Avion through her spine, as if bunker buster bombs were going off somewhere.

Vienna took a deep breath. “Bastard. I wondered what he was leading up to with his nonsense. Would we have guessed he would go this far? There’s got to be something we can do.”

Med looked down at Vienna. “I used our secure line to send out a warning to the President. Hopefully it got through, but I can’t be sure. I tried to prepare him for what’s about to happen. The DoS attack
went after China first because of the time zones. It’s early Monday morning there.”

“Can you take
Buzzworm’s
control away somehow?”

Med sat down beside Vienna, her head back against the transparent barrier. “He’s locked everyone out. He and he alone runs the show. The only way to stop him is to pull the plug.”

Vienna closed her eyes. “Division 213 won’t survive this. And no doubt the Marines are outside the building right now, trying to find a way to shut the Avion down. Soon they’ll just cut the power to the whole complex.”

“It won’t help. The building has diesel backups that can run for two weeks.
Buzzworm
has locked those areas down from access. I already tried to get in. The entire building is locked down. You’re lucky to have gotten in when you did. He clearly wants you in here with me.”

“What?”

“He let me in for obvious reasons. I’m his protector. But if he let you in, he did it for a reason. Probably to watch you suffer.” Vienna looked across the room to the security camera mounted above the elevators. She gave the camera the finger. “The Army will blast its way into the backup power if it has to, and just put us in the dark. There won’t be anything you or I can do.”

Med shook her head sadly. “I’ve thought about that. If the Army can’t communicate with their teams, they can’t action an order. I’m guessing the communication systems within the military, right now, are impossibly screwed up. You’ve seen what he could do to a phone network or radio comms?”

Vienna didn’t answer. She just took in a deep breath of air and let it out in a shaky exhalation. “Hyde’s daughter in exchange for World War III, you say?” She turned to Med. “I’m going to give you two hours, that’s all. After that, I’m shutting this system down. And the only way you’re going to stop me is by killing me with your bare hands. Fair warning?“

Med looked over into the tired, dark brown eyes of her division boss. Jo didn’t even blink. This was going to be a long night.

BW made his way quickly
across the narrow gap of cleared bush that separated his farmhouse from the encroaching forest, his head down. He had reluctantly gone back to his truck to retrieve a ranch rifle he had bought the day before, a classic Winchester Model 70, perfect for hunting and for protecting his property. He hated being outside on his land during the day and he always felt a frisson of fear when he looked up at the sky. Were you watching the clouds or were they watching you?

Working for the CIA for all these years had made it abundantly clear to him that there was no escaping the
big birds
anymore. U.S. Intelligence had dozens in orbit. Worldwide there were over fifty spy satellites currently operating with detail capability down to less than a fraction of a meter; they could easily make out the details on a license plate even in bad weather.

BW lived in a small apartment in the city, but he had purchased land near Fredericksburg, paid for with the money flowing into his London bank accounts. The property was mostly oak trees, forested. From the sky, undifferentiated from the surrounding parkland and reserve land. He cleared a very small area one summer, sweating profusely. He wasn’t in great shape. But he needed to be able to grow some subsidence crops and still limit the amount of open space on his land that could be tracked from space. He would look up at the sky and imagine true anonymity one day. Did it still exist? Was it possible to escape the eyes in the sky?

BW became so obsessed he had built a database of satellites from every country. Call it a hobby, like stamp collecting. Some of the old keyhole style birds, the original spy sats of the eighties, were still functioning, the KH-12 and 13 models. Not high resolution at all. The new ones, the stealth sats, were the size of school buses and wrapped in classified material that reduced the reflection of light, so they were harder for the enemy to detect. They still produced black and white imagery, but better quality and an enhanced ability to peer through cloud cover. These were the feeds that Division 213 was proposing to turn into sexy 3D color video for the American military. BW called it
spy porn
. He believed it would totally destabilize geopolitics globally. He wasn’t going to let it happen.

Back on the protective porch that covered two sides of his home, he felt better. But he had no time to admire the scenery. Inside the big house, through the country-style kitchen, he entered a large windowless room he called command central. There he was surrounded with large displays tracking the progress of GIPETTO, the communication activity of every U.S. intelligence organization and major international news feeds.

He propped the Winchester up against the wall near his work pod and began updating himself on the progress of the denial of service attacks being carried out by the Avion.

BW smiled. So far Hyde had kept his word. The Avion had been in full attack mode now for over two hours. The first targets were designed to get the world’s attention, the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges. Under the Avion's blistering attack, neither had been able to open on Monday morning, which was causing early panics in both economic centers.

BW didn’t have access to the actual details, but he could see that comm Traffic between the White House and China had jumped precipitously over the past hour. China was pissed off. They couldn’t access their stock markets and they knew the attack was coming from U.S. soil. The attack had also taken out all of their key government sites. That would send panic through the streets.

Back home, BW had initiated a blanket scrambling program on all U.S. intergovernmental communications. Most secure data such as emails transmitted between intel organizations used encryption for security purposes. BW had made a minor change to the encryption routines garbling all messages. He also scrambled all phone routing in the capital. That would slow down any progress on an intelligent response to the attack for hours. Enough for him to make his point.

BW looked up at the news feed from CNN. All eyes were on China right now. A press conference from the President was planned for Monday morning. By then Dubai would be added to the pile of stricken economies. Every major bank and investment firm on American soil would be added to the attack list as well. It was simple. The Avion was so powerful and so fast, it could easily overrun every major Internet portal on the planet. Most importantly, the GIPETTO launch would be forgotten and the CIA would be shamed, emasculated, hopefully even dismantled for good.

BW momentarily switched over the display on one screen to the security camera in the Avion room. There were his two pawns; Med and Jo, hunched over in defeat, watching their Avion undo everything they had worked for. All this to protect some teenager they didn’t even know.
How pitiful
he thought.

He checked one other app he used to locate people of interest. Hyde was still in Washington, according to the GPS unit in his cell phone. Beating his head against a wall in police HQ, he guessed. He zoomed into the location on the map for more detail, squinting at the large screen in surprise. The Plaza Hotel. Both Hyde and Strange were still at the Plaza Hotel. What useless plans were they making, he thought, so far from where the real action was.