Threat Vector

FIFTY-NINE

Gavin Biery sat at his desk rubbing his tired eyes. He looked like a beaten man, which he was, and the feeling of loss and hopelessness manifested itself in his slumped shoulders and his hung head.

Two of his top engineers were with him; they stood above him, and both men reached out. One patted him on the back, the other gave him an awkward hug. The men left the room without saying another word.

How? How can this be?

He blew out a long hiss of air and picked up his phone. Pressed a button and shut his eyes as he waited for it to be answered.

“Granger.”

“Sam. It’s Biery. Got a second?”

“You sound like someone died.”

“Can I get a quick meeting with you, Gerry, and the Campus operators?”

“Come up. I’ll get them together.”

Gavin hung up, stood slowly, and left the office, flipping the light off as he left.

Biery addressed the assembled group with solemnity. “This morning one of my engineers came to me to tell me that after a random security check he detected an uptick in outbound network traffic. It began immediately after I returned from Hong Kong, and it did not follow a strict pattern, though each incident of increased activity lasted exactly two minutes and twenty seconds.”

Biery’s announcement was met with a roomful of stares.

He continued: “Our network is targeted with computer attacks tens of thousands of times a day. The vast, vast majority of these attacks are nothing, just stupid phishing schemes that are pervasive on the Internet. Ninety-eight percent of all the world’s e-mail activity is spam, and most of it is hacking attempts. Every network on earth is hit by these things all the time, and moderately competent security measures are sufficient to protect them. But in the midst of all this low-level stuff, our network has been singled out for very serious and smart cyberattacks. It’s gone on for a long time, and only by the admittedly draconian measures I’ve been using have we kept the bad guys outside the wire.”

He sighed again, like a balloon deflating. “After I got back from Hong Kong, the low-level attacks continued, but the high-level attacks just stopped.

“Unfortunately, this uptick in outbound transfer activity means there is something inside our network. Something has been set up to send out data, our data, our secure data.”

Granger asked, “What does that tell us?”

“They are inside. We have been compromised. We have been hacked. The network has a virus. I dug into a couple of locations, and I regret to say I have found the FastByte Twenty-two fingerprint on our network.”

Hendley asked, “How did they do it?”

Biery looked off into space. “There are four threat vectors. Four ways for a network to be compromised.”

“What are the four?”

“A remote threat, like a network attack over the Web, but that didn’t happen. I’m firewalled here, meaning there is no direct line to the Internet that someone can use to access the network.”

Granger said, “Okay. What else?”

“A proximate threat. Like someone hacking into a wireless network from close range. Again, we’re as bulletproofed as we can be against that.”

“Okay,” said Chavez, urging Biery on.

“The third threat vector is the insider threat. That would be someone here in the building, working for the enemy, compromising our system.” Biery shook his head. “I can’t believe anyone here would do that. My hiring and vetting process is as tough as I can possibly make it. Everyone in this building has worked in top-secret—”

Hendley waved away the thought. “No. I don’t believe this was an inside job. What’s the fourth threat vector?”

Biery said, “Supply chain.”

“Meaning?”

“Compromising hardware or software that then makes its way onto the network. But again, I have safeguards against that. We monitor everything that comes in, every peripheral connected to the system, every—”

He stopped talking mid-sentence.

“What is it?” asked Chavez.

Biery stood quickly. “The German hard drive!”

“What?”

“Todd Wicks at Advantage Technology Solutions delivered a drive I ordered. I checked it out myself. It was legit. Clear of known viruses. But maybe there is something new. Something hidden in the master boot record that no one knows how to detect. I did not install it till I got back from HK, and that’s exactly when the virus began reporting back.”

“What do you want to do?”

Biery sat back down. He put his elbows on the table and dropped his head in his hands. “Step one? Shoot the hostage.”

“What?” Hendley exclaimed.

“We call it shooting the hostage. They have my network. That is the advantage they hold on us. But I can shut it all down. The entire network. Just go dark. That removes their advantage. Kill everything.”

Granger nodded. “Okay. Do it. Step two?”

“Step two? You send me down to Richmond.”

“What’s in Richmond?”

“Todd Wicks. If his board had been compromised, he would know about it.”

Hendley asked, “Are you sure he knew?”

Gavin thought back to Todd’s visit to Hendley Associates. He seemed overly friendly, a little nervous, especially when he met Jack Junior.

Biery said, “He knew.”

Chavez stood up quickly. “I’ll drive.”

Todd Wicks watched his kids play on the swing set in the backyard. Even though it was only forty-five degrees, they were enjoying the last of the daylight outside, and he knew they would enjoy the hamburgers he was grilling up even more.

Sherry was out here on the deck with him, talking on her phone with a client while she reclined on the chaise longue, bundled up in a polar fleece and ski pants but looking beautiful nonetheless.

Todd was feeling good about the day, about his family, about his life.

Through the constant din of the playing children, Wicks heard a new noise, and he looked up, away from the grilling burgers, and saw a black Ford Explorer pull up in his driveway. He didn’t recognize the vehicle. He flipped the four burgers on the grill quickly and called out to his wife.

“Honey, are you expecting anybody?”

She could not see the driveway from where she lay back on the chaise. She pulled the phone away from her ear. “No? Is someone here?”

He did not answer, because now he saw Gavin Biery climbing out of the passenger side of the Explorer, and he did not know what to do.

His knees went weak for a moment, but he fought his panic, put the spatula down, and took off his apron.

“Couple of guys from work, babe. I’ll talk to them inside.”

“Can I meet them?”

“No,” he said, a little more forcefully than he would have liked, but he was worrying about what was going to happen.

Deny, deny, deny, he told himself. You don’t know anything about a virus.

He rushed off the deck and down to the driveway, catching Gavin and the Hispanic-looking man before they made it into the backyard. Play cool, he told himself over and over. He smiled widely. “Gavin? Hey, buddy. How’s it going?”

Gavin Biery did not return the smile. The Hispanic guy stood stone-faced next to him. “Can we go inside and talk for a minute?”

“Sure.” Good. Get them out of the damn driveway and into the house where Sherry can’t hear.

A minute later they were in Wicks’s living room. All three men remained standing. Todd asked his guests to sit down, but neither man complied, so Todd just stood there nervously, looking hot and uncomfortable while telling himself over and over to be cool.

“What’s this about?” he asked, and he thought he hit the right tone.

Biery said, “You know what this is about. We found the virus on the drive.”

“The what?”

“‘The what?’ That’s the best you can do? C’mon, Todd. I remember how you just about shit your pants when I introduced you to Jack Ryan. What must have been going on in your mind at that moment?”

Chavez stared Wicks down.

“Who are you?” Wicks asked.

The Hispanic man did not answer.

Wicks looked at Biery. “Gavin, who the hell is—”

Biery said, “I know the hard drive was infected with malware. In the master boot record.”

“What are you talking—”

Chavez spoke now: “Best you don’t lie. We can see right through you. And if you lie, I will hurt you.”

Wicks’s face went even paler, and his hands began to shake. He said something, but his voice cracked, and Ding and Gavin looked at each other. Chavez said, “Speak up!”

“I didn’t know what was on there.”

“How did you know anything was on there?” asked Chavez.

“It was the… the Chinese. Chinese intelligence.”

Gavin asked, “They gave you the drive?”

“Yes.” Todd started to cry.

The Hispanic man rolled his eyes. “Are you fucking kidding?”

Between sobs, Wicks asked, “Can we please sit down?”

Over the next ten minutes Todd told the two men everything. The girl in Shanghai, the entourage of cops, the detective who said he could help Todd stay out of jail, the agent in the pizza parlor in Richmond, and the hard drive.

Chavez said, “So, you got taken by a dangle.”

“A what?” asked Wicks.

“It’s called a dangle. They dangled this girl, Bao, for you to go after, and then they caught you in a honey trap.”

“Yes. I guess that’s about the size of it.”

Chavez looked at Biery. The doughy computer geek looked like he wanted to kill Todd Wicks. The Hendley/Campus network was Gavin Biery’s great love, and this guy had slipped through the defenses and brought it down. Ding wondered if he would have to pull Gavin off the younger, fitter Wicks, who right now did not look like he would be able to defend himself from a house cat, much less a rage-filled computer geek.

“What are you going to do to me?” Wicks asked.

Chavez looked to the broken man. “Don’t ever say another word about this to anyone as long as you live. I doubt the Chinese will contact you again, but if they do, it might just be to kill you, so you might want to think about grabbing the family and running like hell.”

“Kill me?”

Ding nodded. “You saw what happened in Georgetown?”

Wicks’s eyes widened. “Yeah?”

“Same guys that you’ve been working for, Todd. What happened in Georgetown is just an example of how they go about tying up loose ends. Might want to keep that in mind.”

“Oh my God.”

Chavez looked out the window at Wicks’s wife. She was pushing the children on the swings and looking back into the kitchen window, no doubt wondering who the two men were that her husband did not want her to meet. Chavez gave her a nod and then turned around to Todd Wicks. “You don’t deserve her, Wicks. Maybe you want to spend the rest of your life trying to rectify that obvious fact.”

Chavez and Biery left through the garage door without another word.