The Kraken Project

33

Lansing looked around Moro’s place. Moro, with his unpleasant personal grooming habits, displayed a similar slovenliness when it came to his living quarters. While he didn’t expect the man to hire a celebrity interior decorator, as Lansing did for his Greenwich estate and his Southampton cottage, he felt that Moro could certainly do better than this hipster’s Tribeca loft furnished in street-trash chic, with sofas draped in old fabric fished out of the garbage, metal trash cans stacked and riveted to make cupboards, seedy Salvation Army bookcases, and execrable paintings from Canal Street flea markets. Lansing mentally shrugged. If this was the way Moro wanted to live, so be it.

“Take your coat?”

Lansing handed him his cashmere coat, and Moro tossed it on the unmade bed. He followed Moro to his workspace, a metal-walled, EM-resistant, windowless room in the far corner of the loft, where the programmer kept his computer equipment. They were here instead of in the office because Moro wanted to launch the attack using his own equipment.

The programmer unlocked and opened the metal door to reveal a totally different kind of space — light and airy, sleek, lustrous, Zen-like in its simplicity, with the gleam of finely honed granite, blond wood, and glass. Now, this was more like it. On one wall, brushed steel shelves and racks held a massive amount of computer equipment arranged in precision order, cables neatly bundled and zip-tied, screens flush-mounted. A pair of Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs and a Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesin table completed the picture. A small sign affixed to the wall provided the only decoration. It read:

This was a side of Moro that Lansing had never imagined existed, and he was astonished.

“Come in, have a seat,” Moro said, flipping back his greasy hair and sticking out one bony arm. As Lansing settled himself in one of the Barcelona chairs, Moro passed along the rack of equipment, flipping and poking various On-Off switches. Equipment sprang to life, screens popped on, and hard drives spun up.

Moro sat down at the central workstation, opened the Kraken Project coding manual, pulled a keyboard out of a slot, and began hammering away.

“You really think this is going to work?” Lansing asked.

Moro swiveled around in the chair. His eyes had an unusually bright glow.

“I’m gonna trap that bitch,” he said.

“You seem to be taking it personally.”

“The Dorothy bitch kept me in the elevator all night, puking my guts out, thinking I was going to die.”

Lansing was encouraged to see Moro like this. Nothing motivated a person quite as much as the desire for vengeance. “I hope you’ve thought this through,” he said, “because a program that can break through firewalls and trash a Cray might be difficult to corner.”

“I’ve got a plan, and it’s all prepped,” said Moro. “According to this manual, the program’s vulnerable in one spot — her ID number. That’s our point of entry.”

“Excellent.”

“I’ve written a little program, a virus. Called WickedWitch. It’ll attach itself to one of those invisible registers containing that ID and Dorothy won’t know it’s there. She can’t read those registers. And then, with a quick thrust of code, like a knife, WickedWitch will freeze the Dorothy program.”

“How?”

“It’s complicated. The way the Dorothy program works, there’s a central spine or bus of fundamental code that all the various modules have been hung on. All routines pass through this software bus. Sort of like a human spinal cord. A quick insertion of the right code into this spine will cause the program to halt. Instantly. But the key is, what’s left is intact code. Totally preserved. WickedWitch will then send a message back to me, indicating the location of the hardware in which the Dorothy code has been frozen. I’ll then fetch the dead code and bring it back here. We can study the Dorothy code at our leisure, modify it, and turn her into our slave.”

“And find the gentlemen who stole our money.”

“That’s the first item on the agenda. The new Dorothy’ll be able to trace the proxy chain they used right back to the perps.” Moro’s lean face broke into a wide grin.

“So how are you going to trap her?”

“Johndoe’s got a massive botnet of fifty million zombie computers, of which I am the bot herder.”

“I thought you’d given up Johndoe.”

“I kept a finger in the pie. And you should be glad I did. I’m going to mobilize this botnet to look for Dorothy.”

“Sounds promising.”

“But before I begin, we need to order up some chow.”

“Mu shu pork?” Lansing asked, raising one eyebrow.

“Very funny.”

Lansing declined to break bread with Moro. He did not want to risk disease. He waited while Moro called for his own pizza and went to work.

After a few minutes of staring at Moro’s hunched-over back, Lansing decided that there was nothing more boring than watching a hacker at work. Lansing got up and walked around the loft, tugging on his tie, looking at Moro’s trashy stuff, leafing through various magazines, scanning the books on the bookshelf. He shifted his five-thousand-dollar coat off the bed and hung it on a rack, shuddering with disapprobation at Moro’s filthy unmade mattress lying on the floor with sex stains on it. The least he could do was pull up the covers when he had company. Lansing wondered what sort of girl would have sex with Moro. True, the young man was filthy rich, but he was unwashed, he had no culture, and he was crude. Still, in an odd way, Lansing was fond of him, even if he would never in a million years have him to his house in Greenwich.

As he strolled about, he could hear, coming from the open door of the vault, the rapid tattoo of Moro’s typing. He had never heard anyone type so fast. The pizza arrived, along with a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke, which Lansing collected and paid for, not wishing Moro to be disturbed. He delivered it to Moro. Soon, the smell of garlic and anchovies drifted out, along with the sounds of mastication.

“Okay,” called out Moro, his mouth full. “We’re ready to activate the botnet. You gotta see this.”

Lansing stepped into the vault. “What’s there to see?”

“I’m about to load the latest Opte LGL map of the Internet. Once I activate the botnet, the zombie computers that make up our botnet will unleash millions of bots into the Internet, all looking for Dorothy’s ID. Each bot carries a copy of WickedWitch. They will track her down and chase her like a swarm of bees until she’s cornered and one of them can glom on to her ID registers. And then it’s done — she’s killed.”

“You sure this will work?”

“Pretty sure. There may be side effects. It might slow down parts of the web, maybe even crash portions of it. It’s going to piss some people off. Afterward, they’ll be looking for whoever did it.”

“Will they find you?”

“Not a chance.”

“Can’t they trace it back here, physically?”

“No. I’m actually launching this through a proxy chain out of a zombie computer in Shanghai owned by Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army. The cyberwarfare building.” Moro wheezed with laughter. “The great thing about this is that everyone will assume it’s Chinese monkey business. Nobody’s gonna think, Oh, it must be an American hacker launching attacks from the famous cyberwarfare building owned by the Chinese military.”

“How in the world did you take control of a computer in that building?”

“I didn’t. One of my Johndoe pals did — a Chinese dissident who works there, no doubt. We don’t know each other’s identities.”

Moro swiveled back to his workstation. He raked his fingers through his hair and began to type. Lansing checked his watch: close to midnight. The pizza box sat in a corner along with the empty two-liter Coke bottle. Lansing found the smell offensive but ignored it. He hoped to God this would work. After hearing about what Dorothy had done to Moro in the elevator, he wanted the program more than ever. It had penetrated the most sophisticated firewall on Wall Street and it had manipulated Moro’s psychology, delaying him long enough to escape and then convincing him he’d been poisoned when he hadn’t.

You might rule the world with a program like that.

As Moro rattled away on the keyboard, an image loaded on a forty-inch computer screen. It was a startlingly beautiful graphic, a fantastically complex, multicolored spiderweb rotating slowly in black space.

“That,” said Moro, “is the Internet.”

“I’m astonished.”

“When I press this key,” said Moro, “you’re going to see a whole bunch of yellow lines appearing and nodes lighting up yellow. Those are the WickedWitch bots being sent out and swarming. When they pick up Dorothy’s trail, you’ll see bright white lines and nodes. It’s going to happen in real time and it may happen very fast, or it may take hours. It all depends on what the bitch does when she realizes she’s being pursued.”

Lansing pulled his seat up, looking at the screen showing the Internet map. He felt unbearably tense.

“Three, two, one, blastoff!” Moro smacked a key with his finger.