The Code Within: A Thriller (Trent Turner Series) (24 page)

Moynihan saw the Russian begin his charge when she was sixty feet away, and what she lacked in size, she more than made up for in speed. The years of passing batons on the track in college had served her well. She snatched up a stray metal pipe in mid-sprint and delivered a devastating blow to the back of the attacker’s head. By that point he had hit Sanders hard but was knocked out cold before he could finish the job.

Jake started to regain consciousness again, so she filled up a cardboard cup from the water cooler and knelt beside him on the floor.

The neglected trailer was small, and it was getting hotter by the minute. “Jake?” She poured a little water on his face to help him come around. “Jake?”

She didn’t know whether he could hear her. He finally managed to open his eyes. They were vacant. His mouth was the first thing to move, but he wasn’t capable of forming words. Sanders tried to speak again, but he could only groan.

“Jake, wake up.”

She shook him, and he groaned again.

“Come on!” she insisted. She dumped the rest of the water on his face, and his eyes snapped wide open.

He still wasn’t moving, but he was regaining his ability to speak. “What…what the fuck? Uhhh, shit. My fuckin’ head,” he said. He closed his eyes and babbled incoherently.

“Thank God. I thought you were dead.”

Sanders opened his eyes again and registered the look of concern on her face. It took him a few seconds to process who she was.

“Fuck,” he said.

Moynihan wore half a smile and motioned to the man secured to the chair. “There’s your buddy.”

The Russian creased his eyebrows in response and barked a muted tirade through the duct tape covering his mouth. Sanders struggled to move his head so he could get a look at his attacker. He could see the man was angry and alert.

“He wouldn’t stop bitching, so I taped his mouth shut,” Moynihan said with a shoulder shrug. “I think he’s Russian or something.”

Sanders offered a brief smile that turned into a wince. “Holy shit, this sucks. The fuckin’ pins and needles, man.” His voice was slurred. “My arms and legs feel like lead.”

She helped him sit up. He was still too disoriented to offer much help.

He rubbed the back of his head. “Jesus, I think he gave me a concussion. I feel like I’m gonna puke.” Sanders finally processed what she’d told him. “Russian?”

A series of muted sounds erupted from the man secured to the chair, and Moynihan shot him an angry look.

“Shut up,” she growled, still annoyed from his earlier taunting. She turned to Sanders and said, “Yeah. He was waiting for you in the trees.”

The muffled babbling continued in the background, but this time it was more insistent.

“Just shut up,” she said, without turning to him. “He’s foul. It’s like he learned English from a gangster.”

Sanders was more coherent now. “I don’t know what to say. Thanks. What did he hit me with? The lights just went out all of a sudden.”

The Russian’s mumbling started to die down in the background.

“He hit you hard at full speed. I didn’t see anything on the ground, so I think he hit you with his hand. You fell back toward him, and he was wrapping his arm around your neck when I knocked him out with a metal pipe.” She shrugged. “It was too risky to use my gun, since he was on top of you.”

She smiled, and he smiled back.

“Good choice,” he said.

“I think you hit your head on the metal step on your way down.”

The trailer was ominously silent now, and they both turned to the prisoner.

“Oh shit!” they said in unison.

Downtown hotel, Chicago, IL

THE LATE HOUR meant there weren’t many options for picking up food, but Trent Turner managed to round up the essentials. He grabbed caffeine and sugar products that would help to keep them awake through the night. They needed to work as long and hard as they could to try to reverse engineer the code. In the thirty minutes Turner had been gone, there had already been some new developments with the botnet. It didn’t take long for Etzy Millar to prove his worth to the team at The Shop, and he was beginning to feel like he was back in his element again.

Turner entered the hotel room with a bag in each hand and kicked the door shut behind him.

Millar turned around quickly and then relaxed when he saw it was the operative. “Something big is happening within the botnet.”

Turner’s eyes narrowed. “What’s going on?”

“Data was pulled from surgeon bots inside at least some of the targets. It passed through a couple of the machines that Max and I had installed. We lost track once it left the bots we had our module installed on.”

“You haven’t installed your module on all the botnet machines yet?”

He shook his head and said, “Not enough machines to follow the path, but it did help us identify a few more we can propagate it to. Slowly but surely we’re increasing the footprint and getting more coverage. They’re deliberately zigzagging through the Internet. It makes it next to impossible to trace, and we can only increase our footprint one hop at a time.”

“Understood.” He tossed a bag of potato chips to Millar. “So what was it that they sent?”

“We don’t know—the data was encrypted—but it looked like the bot modified the packets as they passed the data between themselves. I guess they just want to eliminate the possibility of finding the needle in a haystack altogether at the ISPs.”

“They’re trying to disguise the payload?”

“Yeah, I think so. Even if you had managed to capture all of the traffic, you still wouldn’t be able to match anything up with known data packets.”

“Smart, especially when they skip over a private wireless network.”

“No kidding. They put a lot of effort into covering their tracks. The Shop analyzed packet captures from each of the bots we set up and correlated the timing to show when they were sent and received. It was like clockwork. The same stream of packets kept transforming itself. The farthest they could get was seven hops from bot to bot,” Millar confirmed. Each hop represented another member machine of the botnet. “The bot transformed the data before it passed the data packet along so you’d never know it was all connected.”

“Did you see anything initiate this?”

“Maybe…we think there was a command set transmitted from the C&C servers less than an hour ago. It was encrypted as well, so we have to assume the bots have some way to decrypt the commands we haven’t found yet.” Miller peeled open the bag of chips and tossed one in his mouth. “The Shop is working on decrypting the data it captured now. Apparently they have some serious supercomputers there.”

Turner smiled to confirm his suspicions. “I guess the big news is that there’s a lot of activity.”

“Exactly. Judging by the amount of traffic, I’d say they’re getting ready for something.”

“How many more compromised systems have you been able to find with all of this traffic?”

“About a hundred machines that we didn’t know about previously. Maybe more since the last time I spoke with someone at The Shop about it.”

“Is it possible any of them had communication with a surgeon bot? We could use a solid lead.”

“They’re going through that now. Maybe. They just told me they’re following up with another lead. It looks like someone contacted you guys the same way I did. Through the boards.”

The operative raised an eyebrow and said, “Really? Do you know where?”

“They didn’t say.”

There was a loud crashing sound outside, and Turner peered through the window shade. “My bet is that all paths lead to the Windy City.”

“They said they’re going to have someone bring him in.”

“Good. I imagine Heckler will reach out to me about it soon.”

Millar’s expression turned serious. “Thanks.”

Turner looked at him questioningly.

“You know, for helping me out. This has been a lot to take in. I think I might have had a nervous breakdown if I wasn’t so damn busy trying to help figure this out.”

Trent smiled and said, “Don’t mention it, Etzy. We’ve got a ways to go before we’re out of the woods, so keep it up.”

Lucky Stone Quarry, Ashburn, VA

AGENT CATHY MOYNIHAN ran over to the slumped figure in the chair and ripped off the duct tape that covered his mouth. His head leaned lifelessly to the side as vomit spilled from his nostrils and mouth over his pallid skin. She grabbed his hair and pulled his head back, and then plunged her hand into his mouth so she could try to clear his airway.

“We’re not going to find out much from him if he stays dead,” she said in a stern but calm tone. “Since I saved your ass, you have mouth duty.”

Sanders smiled. “I can’t argue with that,” he said. “It might be easier to get that shit out if his mouth if he was facing down.”

She looked over at him and nodded, so he helped her lower the chair to the ground.

“Hold on a sec,” she said.

Moynihan went to the water cooler and quickly filled two cups. The Russian’s head was on its side as she poured the water into his mouth to wash out the vomit, and then she used his shirt to wipe off his mouth.

“Thanks,” Sanders said with a wink.

She began counting out the compressions as she pumped the center of his chest. The rate was relatively fast—more than one per second.

“…twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.”

He pinched the Russian’s nose and covered his mouth with his own. It looked as though his first breath was met with resistance, but she then heard the air push through and saw the man’s chest begin to rise. Sanders blew another breath into his mouth; both were only for a second.

Moynihan quickly checked for a pulse and began counting out the compressions again. They continued to perform CPR on the Russian for several minutes. It was sweltering hot in the small trailer. Sweat poured from Moynihan’s face when she checked his pulse one final time.

“Dammit,” she said. “I can’t believe he drowned in his own vomit.” She looked at Sanders. “Do you think he was the new drummer for Spinal Tap?” She knew the joke was in poor taste, but she couldn’t help herself.

She doubted he’d seen the movie, but then Sanders replied, “Well, it’s pretty much an open-and-shut case here. Good thing because…”

“You can’t really dust for vomit!” they said in unison.

Both of them laughed, and once the laughter subsided it turned uncomfortably silent. She looked down at the dead body and tried to take it all in.

“Your first?” he asked.

“Yeah. I guess so.”

“Well, he wouldn’t have extended the courtesy to either one of us, that’s pretty obvious,” Sanders said, referring to the CPR. “It was him or us.”

She looked up at him. “Sure, but it doesn’t make me feel any better about it.”

“He had a concussion. That can make you nauseous. I nearly tossed my cookies too—he gave me a hard knock. Hell, I might puke my brains out yet.”

He returned her look of guilt with a caring smile before putting his arm around her.

She pulled him closer. Moynihan pondered the possibilities, the chances of a relationship, until the vibration from Sanders’s phone stole the moment. He pulled the phone out, and they both looked down at the display to see FBI Director Frank Culder was calling.

“I have to take this outside,” Sanders said.

She could sense that there was something wrong. They both headed outside as Sanders answered the call. She stayed by the door to the trailer and watched him continue to walk until he was out of earshot.

“Yeah,” she heard him answer.

Moynihan observed Sanders from a distance as he paced back and forth gesticulating, tugging up his pants at the small of his back on occasion. The electricity between the two of them had just been shorted out, and intuition was telling her it had nothing to do with the man she had just killed. He ended the call and stopped pacing before looking up to the sky. Sanders stayed that way for a long moment, looked down to the ground and then strode purposefully toward her. His eyes were somehow increasingly distant the closer he got, but they narrowed as he reached back to adjust his pants again.

Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC

THE LIGHTS WERE off. Senator Soller had been steaming in silence at his desk since the call with his wife. His eyes were closed when he raised the tulip-shaped glass to his lips. The darkness enhanced the familiar smell that greeted his nose. It was the only sense that hadn’t been overcome by anger. Scotch, Macallan, 1939. Its peaty taste and potency wiped away his thoughts once again.

There was a rhythm to his drinking. Pour, swill, close eyes, sip, and repeat. It was a sacred habit, a ritual he had developed over the years. Even in darkness, nothing changed. This was his escape, his paradise. He would take another drink when there wasn’t enough taste for him to savor.

A ring destroyed his fleeting tranquility. He didn’t recognize the number.

“Yes?” Soller answered.

“Max?” The voice sounded unsure.

“Who is this?” Soller barked impatiently.

“It’s Bart.”

There was a short pause while Soller connected the voice to Bart Stapleton. He had already spoken to the Federal Reserve chairman once today. As he tried to gather his thoughts, he realized the scotch was having its intended effect.

“Bart?”

“Did I wake you up?” Stapleton asked. “You sound distracted.”

Soller rubbed the bridge of his nose and said, “No, no. What do you need?”

“It’s that president of yours. He’s trying to dig into our business.”

The two men forever lamented the fact that Vincent Cross couldn’t be bought, and referring to him in that manner had become commonplace.

“What? How do you mean?”

“He said he wants access to everything. He wants me to let some geek squad into the Fed’s computer systems to”—his voice switched to a mocking tone—“check things out.” The chairman let out an exaggerated sigh. “He says it has to do with national security. Convenient, wouldn’t you say?”

Soller’s brow creased. “You’re kidding?”

“I would never joke about something like this. I’m not sure if he’ll try to apply some pressure on you in the morning, so I wanted to give you a heads up.”