The Ajax Protocol-7 (2 page)

"Harker wants us upstairs," Nick said.

"Where is it this time?" Ronnie said.

"I don't know. Maybe Russia."

"You don't know? How can we have a mission if you don't know where we're going?"

"I guess we'll find out. Are you two about done?"

"As soon I clean my weapon," Selena said.

"Same here," Ronnie said.

"Come up to Harker's office when you're done." He went back upstairs.

Stephanie Willits was talking with Harker when Nick walked into the office. Steph was Harker's deputy and computer guru. The project had a bank of maxed out Crays that rivaled Langley's and Steph could do things with them that bordered on magic. She wore a midnight blue skirt and blouse that set off her dark brown hair. Steph favored big, dangly earrings and gold bracelets on her left wrist. Nick liked her.

From where Elizabeth sat behind her desk, she could look out through a set of French doors at a wide patio paved with gray stone. Beyond the patio, a green lawn and flower beds blazing with summer colors stretched down a gentle slope until they met a line of trees that shielded the back of the property.

A long, leather couch flanked by two chairs faced Elizabeth's desk. Nick took a seat on one end of the couch. Stephanie took a chair. Selena and Ronnie came in and sat on the couch.

Harker began with the riots in Novosibirsk. Then she turned to Stephanie.

"Steph, what have you got for us?" Elizabeth asked.

"Langley doesn't know what happened," Stephanie said. "Moscow ordered a Spetsnaz division into the city. They're deploying through the city as we speak."

"An entire division?" Nick was surprised. "You don't send those guys in without a damn good reason. Things must be completely out of control. "

"There's something else," Stephanie said. "I decided to take a look at satellite activity over Russia and I found an anomaly. It almost slipped by me. It could be a coincidence, but I don't think so."

"I don't like coincidences. Or anomalies either," Elizabeth said. "What is it?"

"Just before the riots started, there was a very high frequency transmission centered on Novosibirsk. It may be connected to what happened. An attack of some kind."

"What sort of transmission?"

"A micro-burst of energy. A signal. It was right before things went south."

"Where did it come from?"

"Well, that's just it," Stephanie said. "There were only three satellites in range at the time. One of those was Russian. I don't think the Russians would attack their own city. One was Chinese, but it's supposed to be a communications satellite."

"You said three. What's the third?" Elizabeth asked.

"A new one of ours that went up six months ago, controlled by the Pentagon. I don't know it's purpose. Probably surveillance."

"Do you think the Pentagon zapped Russia from it?" Ronnie said.

"I didn't say that. As far as I know we don't have anything that could produce that kind of effect. But that electronic burst is a red flag," Stephanie said, "and our satellite was overhead."

"I don't believe we'd do something like this, even if we had the ability," Selena said. "It would mean war. No one wants that."

For a moment, the room was quiet as they thought  about what war would mean.

Then Nick said, "No one in this room wants that. But if Steph is right, someone deliberately started those riots and somehow used a satellite to do it."

Harker sighed. "Steph, there had to be a command transmission from the ground to activate the satellite. See if you can pin down where that signal came from."

"As soon as we're done here. I'll get on the computers and see if I can track the source."

Nick said, "What do you want us to do, Director?"

"Be ready. Until we have more intel, there's not much else we can do."

CHAPTER 4

In the Yasenevo district on the outskirts of Moscow, the hot sun of a humid Russian summer beat down on a gray office building. On the top floor of the building, a tall, athletic man with close cropped blond hair walked toward the office of his boss, the heels of his shoes echoing from the linoleum floor of the hallway. His eyes were the clear blue of an Arctic sky. Two gold stars gleamed on the red and gold shoulder boards of his uniform. His chest bore ribbons honoring secret campaigns and battles that would never find their way into the history books.

Lieutenant Colonel Arkady Korov was Spetsnaz, part of Russia's elite special forces. He carried a thin folder in his left hand. He paused at the door of General Alexei Vysotsky's office to gather his thoughts, knocked twice, and went in.

Alexei Vysotsky commanded Department S of the
Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki
,
Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service. SVR was Moscow's equivalent of CIA, the latest in a long line of Russian secret police and intelligence organizations that had begun with the Czars. Department S included the secretive Spetsnaz unit called Zaslon. The Kremlin refused to admit that Zaslon existed, but it was Zaslon that took care of the black ops assignments, the ones that needed to be officially denied. Everyone in Zaslon had gone through the rigorous Spetsnaz training, had seen serious combat, and spoke at least three languages. Korov was one of Vysotsky's senior commanders in Zaslon.

Vysotsky sat behind an old-fashioned wooden desk rescued from a Kremlin storeroom. The desk had belonged to Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police during the reign of Stalin. It amused Vysotsky to use Beria's desk. It appealed to his sense of history. Vysotsky even looked a bit like Beria. His black hair showed signs of gray and had started to recede from a large, rounded forehead. His eyes were unreadable, but they sent a message that it would not be wise to offend him.

The nature of Vysotsky's job meant that he dealt with rumors, stories, false leads, disinformation and lies. He had assigned Korov to sort out what was useful and what was not in the mass of conflicting data accumulating in the aftermath of the riots in Novosibirsk.

"Colonel. Tell me you have good news inside that folder."

Vysotsky leaned over and pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk. He took out a bottle of vodka and two glasses, fairly clean. He poured the drinks and pushed a glass across to Korov. 

"Sit down, Arkady." He raised his glass. "
Na zdrovnya."

"Na zdrovnya."

They downed the drinks. Vysotsky refilled the glasses. Five days had passed since the riots and he'd slept little during that time. Russia's domestic security agency, the FSB, had failed to produce anything except reams of useless paperwork that led nowhere. The Kremlin suspected that foreign sabotage had somehow caused the events in Siberia. The problem had been given to Vysotsky to solve, with the unspoken certainty that failure would terminate his chances of promotion.

"Tell me what you have learned," Vysotsky said.

"The riots have stopped and order has been imposed on the city," Korov said. "The sequence of events is clear but confusing."

"What do you mean? How can it be both?"

"Not long before the trouble started, a bomb exploded in the factory district on the edge of the city. It drew all available police and fire units. They were engaged when the riots started. The epicenter of the riot was near the city center. By the time police got to the scene, everything was out of control. The riot had already spread over a wide area."

"How could it spread so fast? What triggered it?" Vysotsky asked.

"At first glance there seems to be no specific cause for what happened. However, questioning of survivors reveals a consistent pattern."

"Go on."

Korov twirled his empty glass between his fingers.

"People report that before the trouble started they heard a high pitched sound, more like a vibration than an actual sound, and felt a sensation of heat. Immediately after that, most said they felt angry, enraged. In many cases they attacked anyone nearby."

"Most? What about the others?"

"Some became nauseous and vomited, followed by a blinding headache. They were incapacitated. All the survivors report headaches, to a greater or lesser degree."

"Continue."

"It appears that everyone within a radius of about eight square kilometers was severely affected, with lesser degrees of affect farther away from city center. The riots spread out from the center and people got caught up in them."

"Casualties?"

"Still unknown," Korov said. "Estimates are over 4000 dead and injured. People were murdering each other for no apparent reason. There are countless injuries, many severe. Property and infrastructure damage is extensive."

"What is your assessment?"

"Of the cause?"

Vysotsky nodded and downed his drink.

"I can't say. We don't know enough."

"Speculate."

Korov chose his words with care. "I think it's an attack. At first I thought perhaps the water supply had been poisoned or drugged. Analysis shows nothing. Besides, if the water was the problem there wouldn't be a sudden, simultaneous explosion of rage like that. Everyone would have to drink at the same time."

"Some kind of electronic weapon, then? We have beams that can make people sick or kill them with microwaves."

"Those weapons are narrow in their focus and limited in range," Korov said. "They couldn't affect a large area. We don't have anything that can produce an effect like this."

"I agree," Vysotsky said. "We should assume it was an attack. Why Novosibirsk? It doesn't make sense. Who would risk war for such an insignificant result?"

Vysotsky refilled the glasses. Korov didn't drink like his boss, but it would be insulting to refuse. The men drank.

Vysotsky continued. "There aren't many who would have the kind of technological resources to do something like this. The Americans, perhaps. Or Beijing."

"It doesn't make sense," Korov said. "Why would either the Chinese or the Americans do this? Why risk war for no strategic gain? The Chinese are preoccupied with their economy. They can't afford a war. The American President would never sanction such an attack. And how was it done?"

"If it is a beam weapon of some kind, it had to come from a satellite."

Korov nodded. "We can look for anything that was in range."

"Find out what was up there."

"Yes, sir."

CHAPTER 5

Phil Abingdon was bored. He reached into a large jar of jelly beans he kept on his desk and chose a green one, popped it in his mouth and chewed. Abingdon was the chief programmer at the underground command center that controlled Ajax. Part of his job was maintaining computer security. The system of firewalls and hacker traps he'd created on the Ajax computers was as good as it got, better than Langley's. Phil knew that was true because he was able to hack into the CIA servers with relative ease.

Hackers across the world formed a loosely knit internet community, the members known only by their screen names. Abingdon was one of the elite, a recognized master of the art.

He'd discovered his gift for programming as a teenager. He loved the challenge of hacking into places he wasn't supposed to go. One of those places had been the Pentagon and when the military cops showed up at his door seven years ago, he'd thought he was headed for Guantanamo. Instead, General Westlake had offered him a job.

Abingdon's screen handle was Apocalypse. He thought it had a nice ring to it. It conveyed his message:
You have no future. I bring the end of your world.

When the computers signaled an intruder on the system, his first thought was that it was a false alarm. Someone would have to get through the outer rings of his defenses for the alert to go off. It had never happened. Routine probes were dismissed and answered with a malicious worm that corrupted the hacker's files. No one ever tried more than once.

The hacker had gotten past the automatic blocking programs, past the anti-virus and spyware programs, past the secondary defenses.

Phil smiled to himself in silent admiration of the skill of the attacker.
You're good, whoever you are.
Of course, it couldn't be tolerated. He activated a program that diverted the incoming code to a meaningless file that appeared important but contained nothing. He entered another command and the screen filled with lines of code the intruder was using to gain access. There was something familiar about it. He'd seen this style before, he was sure of it.

There were very few hackers at Phil's level. Each had a distinctive touch, what the old radio code operators had called a "fist", an identifying pattern as unique as a fingerprint. Then it clicked.

Butterfly.

It had been at least two years since he'd seen that signature style. He thought it was probably a woman, but he didn't know for sure. It was only a hunch, a feeling. He thought of Butterfly as her, not him.

Well, hello, Butterfly. I'm about to ruin your day.

Phil entered a new string of commands. The incoming code flickered, paused, then resumed.

Son of a bitch. She must be on something with a lot of horsepower. Maybe a Cray. She picked it up and countered.

He sent a vicious virus that would wipe out everything in her files. She went offline. Phil stared at the empty screen.
That ought to do it,
he thought.
I'd like to meet her someday.

Where had the attack come from? He pulled up another program designed to trace unauthorized attempts to access the Ajax files. The screen showed that the attack had come from the Ukraine, after bouncing around the globe to various IP servers. Phil didn't believe that for a moment. Butterfly had been clever, but Phil had written a program that reverse engineered attempts to conceal the source by diverting the servers. In less than a minute, he had it. The server was in Virginia, outside of Washington.

This isn't good,
he thought.
The General isn't going to like this
.

He picked up the secured line and called Westlake.