Wild Fyre (12 page)

Harry dissented. “He suggested the application added a filter to the results. On its own. How or why would a program decide to filter the results of a query. If he programmed it to do the query and return the first result, I don’t see any clever application of anything that would reproduce what he showed us.”

“Maybe you misunderstood,” Maco said. “Maybe he misstated. Let’s find out.”

Jim was diving deeper and deeper into the control panel and muttering to himself.

“Jim! Hey, Jim,” Maco said.

The waiter brought in a tray of food, but he was ignored.

“Jim,” Maco said again. Maco rose halfway out of his seat and awareness came back to Jim’s eyes. “Jim, we’ve got a question.”

“Yes,” Jim said.
 

“We follow a lot of your demo, but not about where the filter itself came from,” Maco said.

“Forget that,” Kevin said. “I want proof this is not a Mechanical Turk.”

“A what?” Jim asked. “What’s a Mechanical Turk?”

Harry explained, “It was a fake chess-playing machine in the nineteenth century. There was a guy inside.”

“Eighteenth,” Kevin said.

“Whatever,” Harry said. “There was a guy inside.”

“Oh,” Jim said. “Like I’ve got a partner? In a sense, I do. Fyre is my partner.”

“Come on,” Kevin said. “Prove it—if you can.”

“Let’s see,” Jim said. He looked up at the ceiling.

The waiter snuck around and delivered plates of food. Lister was the only person who seemed interested.

“I could show you the servers—they’re only a few blocks from here—but I can’t isolate them from the network. She relies on the network for operation. It would take forever to review all the code, and it changes all the time. I wasn’t expecting this. I’m not sure what to ask her to do,” Jim said.

“See?” Kevin said. He looked around to the others.

Lister looked up from his food. He stopped his fork halfway to his lips and spoke through a mouthful of rice. “Ask her what’s in his pockets.”

Maco smiled and Dale laughed.

“Nice one, Bilbo,” Dale said.

“No, seriously,” Lister said with a smile. “Use all the past patterns to predict what Kevin has in his pockets.”

“She monitors
me
,” Jim said. “She can probably tell you what’s in my pockets.”

“Nothing, probably,” Lister said. “Ed always picks up the check.”

The group laughed.

“I know it’s extreme, but think it through. Fyre knew you had a demo tonight, right? Fyre clearly knows who is here. Fyre modifies code. Perhaps Fyre has studied Kevin and can make the prediction.”

Behind Jim, the image projected on the wall refreshed. The control panel was gone and the page showed a list:

• Phone
  
• Wallet
  
• Driver’s License
  
• Visa Card
  
• Debit Card
  
• Metro Pass
  
• Receipt
  
• Keys
  
• $54 bills
  
• $1.21 change
  

Lister saw it first. He laughed a bright, child’s laugh and a few bits of rice flew from his mouth. Seeing his smile, the others looked up to the screen. Jim turned around and was the last to see.

“Come on,” Kevin said.

“Empty your pockets,” Maco said. He stood.
 

“Impossible,” Kevin said. He stood as well. Everyone got up and crowded around Kevin. A blush crept to the tips of Kevin’s ears as he jammed his hands down in his pockets.

He pulled out his wallet, keys, and some change.

Dale sorted through the change.
 

“One-twenty,” Dale said.

“Wait,” Kevin said. He dug deeper into his pocket and pulled out penny.
 

“That’s one-twenty-one,” Dale said.
 

They watched Kevin count out his bills—two twenties, a five and nine ones.

“That’s fifty-four,” Dale said. A receipt was jammed in with the bills. Kevin straightened that and set it on the table next to his money.

Ed braced himself on the back of a chair. He felt the hair on the back of his neck go up again and it was joined by goosebumps on his arms. The world felt a little unreal. He wondered if he was dreaming.

“What else is in that wallet?” Maco asked.

Kevin pulled out his license and two cards—credit and debit. Next, he pulled out his Metro card. It was followed by a library card, a laminated birth certificate, and a picture of a dog.

Ed sat down. Everyone else still stood in a circle around Kevin.

“This is the most elaborate trick I’ve ever seen,” Kevin said. “So you’re in on it too, Lister?”

Lister shook his head.

“What’s the point of this?” Kevin said. He began stuffing things back in his wallet.

The men started to wander back to their seats.

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to do,” Kevin said.

“How come she didn’t know about the library card and the birth certificate?” Dale asked.

“They were old,” Ed said. He sounded out of breath. “Did you see the wear? The three things she missed were very old and not often used. How would she know?”

“You guys are all in on this,” Kevin said. “If this is a joke, then you’re all spectacularly unfunny.”

“It’s no joke, Kev,” Dale said.
 

“Any cameras you’ve got on me, I want them turned off right now. It’s illegal and I don’t consider it to be funny at all. Likewise any microphones or anything else. You guys have gone too far,” Kevin said.
 

When he finished putting his stuff away and giving Jim an evil look, Kevin pushed in his chair and headed for the door.
 

“Wait, you’re my ride,” Harry said. He stuffed a bite of burger into his mouth and grabbed a couple of fries before he chased after Kevin.

On the screen, the list disappeared and the control panel returned.

“That was one hell of a demo,” Lister said. He had returned to his seat and was eating once more.
 

Maco picked at his food and stared up at the screen.

“You were profiled by the FBI?” Maco asked.

Ed had been looking straight ahead, trying to process what he had seen. When he heard the three letters, he looked up at Maco. Ed followed Maco’s eyes to the screen. Under the filter parameters listed next to his name, he saw the fact Maco had read. “Profiled by the FBI.” Under that, it said, “Currently surveilled by MI5.”

“Oh, I get it,” Maco said. “You got a picture of a bulldog because Military Intelligence 5 is currently watching you?”

“It had binoculars around its neck,” Ed said. He picked up his phone and looked at the picture again. The bulldog was wearing a Union Jack top hat and binoculars were hanging from its thick bulldog neck.

“That’s pretty clever,” Maco said. “Why are they watching you?”

“I have no idea,” Ed said.

CH.8.Maco ()
 

{

 
Working();

/*****

J
ULY
, 2013 (1
WEEK
A.J.)

Terrence Macomber, aka Maco, sat at his favorite desk.

His house had five places Maco could comfortably work—six if you counted the toilet, which Maco would never admit to—and this desk was his favorite. It was small and organized. The back of its L shape was lined with high-quality monitors and the surface was clean except for his coffee mug. The keyboards slid out from sturdy trays underneath.
 

When the two detectives, Aster and Ploss, had interrupted him, Maco was rebuilding one of his computers. He used an old operating system DVD from his drawer and disconnected the machine from the network before he started. He also removed the Wi-Fi antenna and used an old keyboard and mouse. On a whim, he even disconnected the DVI cable to the monitor and found a VGA cable to use.
 

Maco powered the computer with a battery-operated power source. He wanted complete isolation. One time, years before, he had read an article about how the cold war Russians had been working on a way to infiltrate enemy computers by modulating the AC power to the machine. They would send different sequences of faulty power to install viruses. This theory was too crazy for even Maco to believe, but somehow he believed it enough to inspire him to keep a few hours worth of batteries around to power a computer, just in case.

Maco was building a submarine—that’s how he thought of it. This one machine, built from code that was compiled before Jim’s invention of Fyre, would be guaranteed to be free from any malignant code.
 

As far as he knew, all the operating system manufacturers had been infiltrated by Fyre. Everywhere he looked he found evidence of tampering. On his Mac he found a system update that supposedly, “Improved System Stability (bug fix), and Enhanced Privacy Settings.” Inside the update, he found a little chunk of code that opened a connection to Fyre and allowed for the remote control of the machine. On his Windows machine, the code was sent as a “Critical System Update.” His Linux and Unix machines received the malicious code as a kernel patch. Even his phone was infested. He suspected—but couldn’t prove—that his television’s firmware had been updated to include Fyre.

With this clean machine that he was building, he could launch back onto the net and see the traffic unfiltered by Fyre. It was his submarine. He would hand-patch all the possible vulnerabilities and set up the strongest firewall possible.
 

Maco finished his install and locked down the parts of the hard drive responsible for running the machine. He wrote a simple application that would run in the background. Its sole responsibility was to keep tabs on the system to see if anything changed. It would constantly scan the memory and drive and show an alert if even a single bit was altered. Maco tested his software and dragged the window off to the side.

The machine was ready.

Maco sat on the floor and picked up the ethernet cable. He had always loved these little square RJ45 jacks, ever since they came out. They were such an improvement to the big loops of coaxial cable that everyone used back in the 1980s. Now, since Fyre had taken over, the little piece of plastic at the end of the blue cable looked dangerous. It contained an infection.

“Oh!” Maco said.

He scrambled back to his chair. He had forgotten to mask his MAC address. All network cards were encoded with a six-byte identifier, and he wanted to alter his so he could mask his machine. Maco typed in the code for a small video appliance. He plugged in the cable. The green light on the back of his machine flashed.

His machine would send no packets over the network—not until Maco instructed. Maco sat down to compose the first communication from his clean machine.

Maco used his new submarine, insulated from the infected sea of machines around him, to connect to an old favorite server. He logged in as the administrator. This machine was a college print server—its only function was to offer network connectivity for the printers attached to it. All of the ports for printing were inside the college firewall, but someone had forwarded the port that Maco connected to.
 

He looked through the machine’s operating system files. It looked fine—all the times and dates of the files were consistent with what Maco remembered. The machine had been set up a decade before and nobody had ever bothered to update it. Why would they? The machine only served one function and, as far as the staff knew, it was invulnerable.
 

Maco was about to move on when he had a thought. He remembered using this machine as a baseline years before. At that time, he had created a checksum of the operating system image. Maco repeated that checksum now. Something had changed. Maco moved through the folders, looking for the root of the difference. He found a change in the networking service. Maco didn’t stop there. He kept looking. He found additional changes in the handlers that would spool print jobs to the attached printers. If he was right, Fyre had infiltrated even this small college server so it could monitor what was sent to the printer.

“Remind me not to print anything,” Maco whispered to himself. “Wait a second. If it changed the binaries and was smart enough to mask the timestamps, why didn’t it pad out the file to fix the checksum?”

He needed another set of eyes. Maco walked into the other room where he had a landline phone. He dialed from memory.

“Hello?” the voice asked.

“Lister—what are you doing?”

“Nothing. Reading. Why?”

“Why don’t you come over and play video games,” Maco said.

“I’m not dressed for that. Let’s play online,” Lister said over the phone.

“Can’t. Lag,” Maco said. Neither of them had experienced network lag in years. Maco listened to the silence as Lister processed Maco’s statement.

“Yeah, okay,” Lister said. “It will be a few.”

“Cool,” Maco said. He disconnected.

He returned to his submarine.

Maco connected through a back door to a bank of military simulators. They weren’t guarded as heavily as machines directly involved in defense, but these servers were well-secured and should be hard to infiltrate. Unless you happened to work inside the building a few times a year as Maco did, that is.

It only took a few minutes for Maco to find evidence of tampering. Something was connected to the physical inputs of the simulators, including the cameras and microphones. Maco saw bursts of encrypted packets transmitted over the network. He traced their destination and found that after a few bounces the packets were redirected back to what Maco considered the address of Fyre. Somewhere in the world a machine was collecting all this information and sorting through it. Perhaps the information was bounced to other units to be analyzed and processed before coming back. Maco suspected that somewhere an enormous cluster of databases was keeping all the information Fyre collected.

Maco pushed away from his desk. Once you knew what to look for, evidence of Fyre was easy to see. How would you eradicate it though? Even if you scrubbed the infected files, Fyre would simply come back and take over again. It clearly knew how to exploit all the open vulnerabilities in the different operating systems.