Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

“Koschei provides the tools. Resources unlike any I’ve ever had at my disposal.”

“No matter. It is still sorcery to me.”

He shrugged.

“I manipulate data, you manipulate currency. Each in our own way, we trigger events and capitalize. Our skills are complementary.”

She looked into his eyes, nodding. “And here we are in Crimea.”

“You sound unhappy.”

“I am not fond of solitude. The peninsula is dreary and gray. But if I were unhappy, I would be elsewhere.”

Drajan was thoughtful. The breeze flapped his raincoat and whipped his hair around his head. The strands framed his thin, pale face like a dark, fluid crown.

“What is it, Quintessa?” he said. “Talk to me.”

Her gaze wandered. This time her eyes did not go toward the lights but to the rocks beneath her feet. After a moment, she looked back up at him.

“I have done something stupid,” she said at length. “I took you to bed for my pleasure and fell in love.”

Drajan did not speak. A response eluded him.

“You’ve had dreams lately,” she said. “Who is Kali?”

He still did not speak.

She reached a hand out, put a gloved finger to the tattooed wheel on his neck.

“Who is she?” she said. “When you say the name in your sleep, your hand goes to this spot.”

Silence. The waves lapped and gurgled around the stones below them.

At last Quintessa nodded to herself. Her hand slowly retreating to her side.

“Please return to your affairs,” she said. “Rest assured, I won’t fling myself into the sea.”

Drajan stood there looking at her for a long moment. Then he turned without another word, walked the short distance back to the beach atop the rocks, and retraced his steps along the seawall to the edge of the secret city.

PART TWO

TERMINAL INTELLIGENCE

14

Net Force Cybersecurity Boot Camp/

East Harlem, New York City

Six minutes before he got the call, Alex Michaels was on the neatly groomed front lawn of a Sacramento cottage sealed off with yellow crime-scene tape and guarded at the door by uniformed officers. His attention was divided, and that was an unfamiliar, even an alien, feeling to him. As a researcher and educator, he always maintained a perfect focus, cutting himself off from distractions. He was the noggin. The absent-minded professor. Clichés, stereotypes, of course. But he’d understood the subjective perception, and it wasn’t really objectively wrong. He believed at his core that there was a solution to every problem. When working to solve one, he could always home in and make the rest of the world scarce.

It wasn’t like that anymore. Being chairman of Columbia University’s School of Computer Science had been a weighty responsibility. But he was now Director of Net Force, a position he had accepted because he knew he had the essential capabilities it demanded and because President Annemarie Fucillo asked...and because he loved her dearly, although it had been years since they were romantically involved. Michaels had been hoping to grow into the dual roles, but three months along, he felt oddly suspended between them, pulled in two directions at once, neither here nor there. That had never been truer than this morning, with Operation Scalpel underway in radio silence.

But these thoughts were distractions in themselves, and Michaels made an effort to push them away. He needed to see how the new kids handled things.

He faced forward, looking across the lush fescue at the driveway, where two Fair Oaks police cruisers and a county forensics van were parked nose to tail outside the garage. The narrow county road running past the property was blocked off in each direction by another two cruisers with bright red-and-white roof lights. Pulled parallel to the lawn was a long sleek white vehicle with a sliding cargo door on its passenger side. On the outside of the door was Net Force’s departmental logo: a stylized NF , with an integrated circuit pattern inside the N and patriotic stars inside the horizontal bars of the F .

The van was one of a growing fleet of SEEKERs—mobile cyber-triage labs that Net Force Cyber Investigations deployed to assist local law enforcement in cases involving high-level cybercrime or technological threats to national security. The lab allowed for the on-site extraction, processing, and archiving of digital evidence while a mission was in progress. In doing so, it sped up crisis-response times and reduced the possibility that vital clues or evidence might be lost or deliberately purged from seized devices before their transport to a conventional lab facility.

Michaels quietly watched a small group of five Net Force instructors and trainees step from the van onto the grass. All wore black jumpsuits with the organization’s shoulder patch, black boots, and sterile latex gloves. The lead instructor was Natasha Mori, a tall, wisp-like woman of thirty with skin the color of cream and choppy white hair. An albino and tetrachromat with heightened perception of color, she wore dark sunglasses to protect her exceedingly sensitive eyes.

Alex’s brightest student when he arrived at Columbia, Natasha had later become a paid employee of his research lab. Then she left, and came back, and left again, in and out the door for her own reasons. Recently he’d gotten her to return on a provisional basis, convincing her to stay on through Net Force’s first nationwide college recruitment push. Her specialty was predictive modeling, a cutting-edge discipline that used computational data to chart the probability of future outcomes.

Bryan Ferago, her assistant, was the professor’s other best wirehead. With sandy brown hair pulled up in a high, tight bundle, he had the long, lean muscles of a swimmer or track-and-field runner and had in fact been a qualifying Olympic finalist for both sports as a college senior. His field of expertise was forensic systems and network analysis.

The trainees were the first of several groups that Michaels wanted to observe today. Two of them, Chris Way and Jase Hudson, were graduates of his digital forensics program at Columbia. Emily Sherron had recently earned her master’s in cyber defense at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

Outside the mobile triage now, Natasha and Bryan briefly addressed their trainees and then led them up the gravel path toward the cottage. As they neared the spot where Alex waited on the lawn, he began walking alongside them at a steady, easy pace.

Not a single member of the group gave him so much as a passing glance. No one acknowledged his presence.

They reached the front door. There was a cop standing just to its right. An hour ago, the Fair Oaks police had raided it as the home base for an Iranian hacker cell, which had been responsible for penetrating the computerized operations system of Shasta Dam, the largest in the state. When they were caught, they had been days from seizing control of the water levels, flow, reservoir storage, and hydroelectric-power infrastructure for all of Sacramento. Over three million people.

Natasha was first up to the door. The cop reached for the handle and pulled it open.

“You can go right in,” he said.

She nodded and entered. Then the new kids, single file. Last through the door was Bryan Ferago.

Michaels reflexively hung back a few paces. The cop didn’t notice him. After a second, he followed the group into the cottage.

It was now four minutes before he got the call.

The cottage had an open, single-story layout—a living room/dining area just past the door, two bedrooms, kitchen, a bath and a half. County forensic technicians were milling around in their coveralls and gloves, tagging, bagging, dusting, marking, and snapping photographs.