The Emperor's Revenge

ELEVEN

Just as Juan and Gretchen reached the bank lobby on their way to Munier’s office, Linda walked through the front door with a grim look on her face.

“Bad?” Juan said.

“The entire garage was gutted,” Linda said. “Munier hit a fuel tank dead-on. He was driving an electric car, and the lithium-ion batteries ignited and cooked it good. The bodies were ash and bones, one in the driver’s seat and two in the trunk. They had already been taken to the morgue, but the car was still there.”

“Did you see anything that stood out?” Juan told her about their suspicion that Munier was being coerced.

Linda thought about it and then her eyes lit up. “I talked to the crime scene investigators and they did mention one odd detail. There was an extra cell phone in the car.”

“You mean one of the men inside had two cell phones on him?” Gretchen asked.

“No, they found the cell phone on the floor of the front seat, like it had fallen there. It seemed to have some plastic residue melted onto it. They thought it might have been in a bag, but I got a gander at it. It looked to me like the plastic from a zip tie was wrapped around it.”

Gretchen gave her a puzzled look. “You mean the phone was lashed to something?”

Juan nodded slowly. “Makes sense. If they were using the camera in a cell phone to observe the interior of the car, they’d have to attach it to the dashboard somehow. It would also allow them to talk to Munier and tell him what to do.”

“It’s odd he would commit suicide in such a public and gruesome way just because someone ordered him to,” Gretchen said.

“It gets stranger,” Linda said. “They found some of the same residue melted onto the face of Munier’s watch and on the steering wheel.”

Juan paced as he imagined how someone might force the bank president to install the virus. Then he stopped and said, “Could his hands have been tied to the steering wheel?”

“Sure,” Linda said. “But why?”

“It doesn’t seem possible,” Gretchen said to Juan. “He wouldn’t be able to make a full rotation of the wheel with his hands lashed to it. From the look of the TV feed, he was making violent turns that would have required free hands.”

“This might sound crazy,” Juan said, “but what if he wasn’t driving? The Tesla is drive-by-wire. It could have been programmed to be remotely driven.”

Linda snapped her fingers. “Just like the PIG.”

“Right.”

“The PIG?” Gretchen asked.

“We have our own remote-controlled truck,” Linda said. “Powered Investigator Ground. It was damaged in a recent mission, but the remote control system worked beautifully. I’ll go take a closer look at the TV feed from his car chase. If we’re lucky, maybe someone got a high-def video of Munier’s hands on the wheel.”

“Good idea. We’re heading to the bank president’s office. Apparently, whoever wrote the virus that Munier installed has left a message for us.”

“Can’t wait to hear that,” Linda said, and she was gone.

They arrived at Munier’s office to see Eric and Murph excitedly talking with a woman in her twenties, a cute blonde wearing horn-rimmed glasses and her hair in a pixie cut. She was at the computer’s keyboard, and Murph and Eric were hunched over her on either side, pointing at the screen. The three of them chattered in dense computer jargon, little of which Juan understood.

“Sounds like you two have made a new friend,” he said.

After Juan and Gretchen identified themselves, Murph and Eric stepped on each other’s words to introduce the seated woman to them.

“This is Marie Marceau,” Murph said at the same time that Eric blurted out, “She’s the Sûreté’s top computer analyst.”

“Let’s take it one at a time,” Gretchen said, obviously amused at their infatuation.

“Pleased to meet you,” Marie said in a silky French accent. “We were stuck… I was stuck about how to break in to the computer system. The virus is a very unusual design that has us locked out. But then Chris and Colt had some fantastic ideas about how to approach the problem.”

“She really just needed a little push in the right direction,” Eric gushed.

Murph jumped in. “Marie was already on the right track. She would have figured it out soon enough—”

“Okay, okay,” Juan said with a gesture of surrender. “You all make a great team and were able to get into the system — got it. You said there was a message?”

“What message?” Rivard said as he burst through the door, breathless, as if he’d run three blocks. “Marie, what is this?”

“Ah bon, you got my text.”

“It just said that you had a breakthrough and to come at once. Now I find you telling these consultants information before you tell me?” He eyed Juan and Gretchen with contempt.

“I haven’t told them anything yet,” Marie said in exasperation. No doubt Rivard was unpopular with his staff. “They arrived only a moment before you did.”

Rivard was partly mollified and collected himself. “Well, go on. Tell us what you’ve found.”

“I think my new friends are being generous. I wouldn’t have gotten this far without them. But, together, we were able to override the code that had us completely locked out of the system. When we did, a message popped up on the screen. Here it is. ‘To the winner go the spoils, you computer genius, so congratulations! It’s impressive that there’s someone out there worthy of this message. All other hackers may be inferior to you, but don’t bother trying to crack my code. It’s 4096-bit encryption, so you’d need about a hundred years to break it.’”

“Is that true?” Rivard demanded.

“Not at all,” Murph said.

“Good. Then how long will it take?”

Murph and Eric looked at each other and shrugged.

“Maybe ten years,” Eric said.

Rivard looked like he’d blow an artery. “What?”

“A hundred years assumes using current technology. But with computer power doubling every eighteen months, we should be able to solve a cryptographic problem like this in ten years.”

“Maybe even five,” Murph suggested.

Juan didn’t know if they were being serious or just yanking the imperious Rivard’s chain. “Keep reading,” he said.

“Don’t think you have that long, either,” Marie continued. “Every day counts and you’ve got ten left. All of the backups and banks connected to Credit Condamine are infected now. Upon reaching the time limit, if our forthcoming demands aren’t met, you’ll see the economy of Europe plunged into a chaos that will make you long for the good old days of the Great Depression.”

The room quieted at that line.

“Can they really do that?” Juan asked Gretchen.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Without being able to see exactly what they’ve done to the software, it may be impossible to tell. But this bank is connected tightly with many other European banks. Perhaps they found some way of corrupting the transfer files.”

“There’s one final part,” Marie said, and kept reading.

“Go ahead and comb through the code looking for this time bomb, if you dare, but eventually you’ll have to cough up the dough to us. Heaven help you if you don’t. One more major bank will suffer a catastrophic system failure in five days as a signal that we’re not lying. We’ll be in touch.”

“We’re obviously dealing with at least one highly skilled hacker here,” Murph said. “This is top-of-the-line work. And we likely won’t be able to dig down farther without some kind of access key.”

“For all we know,” Eric said, “digging farther may even activate the time bomb that they’re talking about.”

Rivard didn’t seem worried by the threat. “You all are fools. Don’t you see? Munier planted this.”

“What do you mean?” Gretchen asked.

“He knew that we would bring in analysts to check out the system, once he reported the break-in, and the guards were found dead, wherever he dumped them. This message was intended to throw the suspicion off him.”

“A bank president didn’t create this virus himself. It’s possible that the hacker had his own agenda and wrote this message without Munier’s knowledge.”

“There’s another possibility,” Juan said. “We think Munier might have been coerced into planting the virus, that he was framed to make it look like he was trying to cover up an embezzlement scheme.”

“That’s absurd,” Rivard said. “If someone went to the trouble of framing Munier, why would they give themselves away by planting a message?”

That was actually a good question, and Juan thought there were several possible answers.

“The hackers might have thought we wouldn’t crack their code so quickly. Or they wanted us to read it so we’d think Munier was a willing accomplice.”

Rivard gave him a skeptical look. “‘They’?”

“The message refers to ‘our demands.’ We have to assume larger forces are behind this.”

“I think we should take the threat seriously,” Gretchen said.

Rivard took a breath and wiped his brow. “And we will. We take all threats seriously. Thank you for your help in uncovering this message. But we need to concentrate our resources on investigating the most likely possibilities first. If you want to focus your investigation in a different direction, by all means go ahead.”

Gretchen began to object but was rebuffed.

As a cringing Marie looked at them apologetically, Rivard kept talking. “I will not send us on a course that makes the Sûreté Publique look ridiculous and causes an unwarranted economic panic. I will let Interpol decide if they want to issue a warning to the banking community based on this flimsy evidence, but that warning will not be coming from us. If, and when, we find more data to support your theory, I will gladly take that path. Until then, leave us to do our work. I spoke to the commissioner on the way over and he agrees. I will inform you of our findings as they become available.”

Juan knew a firm dismissal when he heard it. They would have to continue their part of the investigation on their own. But if Rivard was wrong and the threat in the message was real, they had only ten days to prevent the world from suffering a disastrous financial meltdown.