Tom Clancy Support and Defend

14

The Economy Inn in Richmond, Virginia, was a locally owned and operated establishment, although it did its best to trick travelers passing under its sign on Interstate 64 into thinking it was part of a well-known and similarly named national two-star chain. Anyone fooled into stopping for the night, thinking they would find some standard of at least minimal quality, would be disappointed as soon as they were buzzed in to the tiny lobby. The bait-and-switch sign over the interstate had clearly been the main marketing focus of the owners, because the property itself was an unapologetic dump. Cheap furniture, old and threadbare carpeting, and a sour smell greeted anyone entering the three-story motor-court-style hotel’s common area, and the rooms themselves were no better.

The inn was less than fifteen percent occupied, but two middle-aged men sat together on a lumpy bed in room 309, anxiously smoking cigarettes and looking at their mobile phones. Both men were big; one was an ex — tight end at Virginia Tech, though that had been twenty-two years earlier, and since then his job at an auto parts retailer required him lifting nothing heavier than the occasional car battery. And the other man was just fat. He’d never done much of anything sports-related. Just a young nerd who’d morphed quite naturally and comfortably into a middle-aged sloth.

The tight end illuminated the screen on his phone for the twentieth time in the past thirty minutes. “Ten-fifty-eight. Where the hell is this mother—”

A soft knock at the door caused both men to bolt upright. The fat nerd stood and took a step back away from it, and the tight end stood and looked through the peephole in the door. He nodded to his cohort, then slowly opened it.

A small, young-looking man stood in the dim of on the third-floor landing. He was alone; his dark eyes seemed wide and terrified as he looked up to the man filling the doorway. “Uh… You are Mr. White?” His accent was French.

Behind the tight end in the doorway, the fat man by the bathroom door said, “That’s me. You are Mr. Black?”

The small man on the landing looked back and forth quickly between the two men. He seemed like he might turn around and run away. Instead he said, “I… I do not understand, Mr. White. We had an agreement. You were to be alone.”

The tight end grabbed him by the collar and led — not quite pulled — him inside the room. He kicked the door behind him.

Mr. White said, “Relax. I brought a friend just in case you brought anyone with you or tried anything funny. He’s going to search you for a wire.”

The tight end had the young man against the wall a second later, and he pulled off the man’s backpack and tossed it on the bed, then felt under his jacket, raking his hands all over.

The young foreign man said, “A… wire? What does this mean?” His voice cracked as he spoke. He looked and acted petrified, and this relaxed the two Americans considerably.

“Just calm down,” White said. “You understand my predicament here. I have to make certain you aren’t a Fed.”

“But you know me. We have been communicating for over a year.”

“And you know me, Black. I’m taking a big fucking risk meeting you like this. I don’t know this isn’t some kind of a sting. My buddy is going to make sure you’re legit, and then we can get down to business.”

The tight end lifted the man’s shirt up, and realized the foreigner couldn’t be one hundred twenty pounds soaking wet. He turned around to face White. “He’s clean.”

“C’mon, man. You forgot to check his bag.”

“Oh, right.” He opened the backpack, pulled out a thin MacBook Air computer, a mobile phone, and some power cables. He turned the bag upside down and shook it over the bed, but nothing else came out.

“Good,” said White. “Have a seat.”

The foreign man sat down at the little chair by the desk and White sat back on the bed. There were less than five feet apart in the tiny room.

The tight end stood by the door, looking down on the both of them.

Mr. Black put his hands on his knees as if to steady himself or to fight off a wave of nausea.

“You okay?” asked White.

“Would it be okay if your friend waited outside while we conduct business? I am sorry, but I am a little nervous about this.”

White just smiled, lit another cigarette, and nodded to his friend. “Eddie, go out and have a smoke.” He looked at the small foreign man in front of him. “I’ll shout if I need something.”

The tight end said, “I’ll be right outside.” The big tight end left through the door, pulling his cigarettes and lighter off the table as he exited.

Mr. White’s name was not White, it was Phillip McKell. He was a systems infrastructure analyst for L-3 Communications Corp., a government contractor that worked, like Booz Allen Hamilton, on the U.S. government’s classified intelligence networks. He was an expert on JWICS infrastructure, and he held a top-secret security clearance. He’d met Black, in the virtual world anyway, in an online technology forum a year earlier. The relationship started with a few comments under each other’s postings, but soon McKell realized the two shared many interests. At first the man he came to know as Black claimed to be a university student interested in all things related to America and computer science, but over time Black revealed during private encrypted chats to McKell that he was, in fact, a French national and, most interestingly to McKell, he was a member of Anonymous, the largest and most infamous worldwide hacktivist group.

McKell was disbelieving at first, but when Black told him, again privately, about an upcoming Anonymous computer denial-of-service attack on the websites of the British government, and then the attack actually happened, McKell realized he was in communications with the real deal: an actual Anonymous hacktivist.

McKell knew he shouldn’t have continued the online relationship. He was already violating company regulations by having an online identity and communicating with others on technical forums; if L-3 found out he’d engaged in private chats with an Anonymous member, he’d be fired on the spot and stripped of his security clearance. But McKell saw in Black a potential payday. There was a reward for information leading to the arrest of members of Black’s organization, and McKell knew people collecting the reward could remain nameless. This was an attempt to protect traitors to the Anonymous organization, but McKell thought he might be able to collect a reward for turning Black in to the authorities, so he remained in contact with the Frenchman. Early on he realized he had nothing tangible whatsoever on the man, and attempted to cultivate more of a friendship in the hopes of learning real information about his identity. That, he felt certain, would earn him a big payoff.

Unfortunately for Phillip McKell, however, his priorities changed when he lost his job at L-3 and his coveted security clearance, after a surprise spot audit of his home computer turned up a record of his online forum postings. McKell argued that he did not share classified information about government networks, and all his correspondence online was kept to a general open-source level. But the investigators didn’t see it like that. Sharing any details about his work was a violation of his security clearance and then, with the pulled clearance, came the loss of his job on secure networks.

He was actually told by the chief government investigator on his case, “You’ll never work in this town again.”

After he lost his job he quickly became desperate for money. He tried harder to get Black to reveal his identity so he could collect the reward, he even shared information about himself — it hardly mattered now that his clearance had been yanked. But when Black didn’t budge, McKell decided he’d earn money by working the opposite end of this equation. The out-of-work American actually made a proposal to Black. He told him he could give Anonymous information about the inner workings of U.S. government networks. His thinking was that Black’s organization might pay for technical help in designing its own direct denial-of-service attack on Washington, D.C.

Black promised he’d ask his higher-ups what they thought it was worth, and then, a few days later, he came back to McKell with a shocking counterproposal.

Anonymous wanted to conduct an actual infiltration of JWICS top-secret Intelink-TS network, and they wanted McKell to build the infiltration agent software to do it.

McKell laughed when he read Black’s request, and he quickly typed back it was impossible, since the top-secret network was not accessible via standard Internet access unless one had access to a virtual private network. McKell wasn’t on a VPN when he worked for L-3, and he sure as hell wasn’t now. Someone would have to physically breach the network by sitting at a computer on the system to load the software. Anonymous hackers couldn’t do it from some basement in France or Germany.

Black replied, quite simply, “That’s our problem, not yours. If you build the infiltration agent, we’ll find someone to upload it. For your work you will be paid three million dollars.”

From that second on, McKell thought of nothing but all that money and how he could get his hands on it. He set up an account in Dubai, gave the account and routing numbers to Black, and within hours one hundred thousand dollars had been deposited into the account as earnest money. Satisfied he was dealing with people who could and would fulfill their end of the bargain, Phillip McKell locked himself in his house, ate nothing but pizza delivery for nearly six weeks while he worked on his code for the infiltration agent.

McKell knew the U.S. intelligence infrastructure back to front, and through this knowledge he was aware of the physical drive locations where top-secret information was kept. The key to his infiltrator program was its “crawler” function, which went into the location, then both copied and categorized the data before downloading it.

After his weeks of constant work and never-ending pizza, McKell’s task was complete. He contacted Black, and the delivery date was confirmed.

And now Mr. Black sat in front of him. But just as White’s name was not White, Black’s name was not Black.

His name was Mohammed Mehdi Mobasheri. He’d arrived from Tehran via Beirut the day before for this meeting, after having spent the past year cultivating McKell on the technology forums, while simultaneously confirming his position and access with L-3 Communications.

This was just the first step of Mohammed’s plan, approved by the Supreme Leader, but the rest of the plan hinged on the obese, amoral, and obviously godless American seated on the dirty bed in front of him.

As soon as Eddie left the room to stand on the mezzanine and smoke, Mohammed said, “Thank you. Now, do you have the infiltration drive?”

“Do you have the money ready to wire?”

He tapped his MacBook Air. “I can do it myself instantly as soon as I have the device.”

McKell nodded, crossed the little room and reached behind a lamp on the table next to the TV. From behind it he pulled out a yellow thumb drive and held it up.

Mohammed looked at it closely. On it were several block letters in different colors. He cocked his head. “I’m sorry. What does this mean? NASCAR?”

“Yeah, didn’t figure you Frenchies would know about the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing.”

“No.”

“It’s just a decoy. Somebody sees this dumb-looking thumb drive, and they’re not going to think it’s got anything important on it.” McKell grinned at his own cleverness. “Right? But the truth is, this isn’t some little thumb drive. This is a one-point-two-terabyte HyperX drive. It’s got the infiltrator loaded on it, and the downloaded files are stored right on board. You can get hundreds of thousands of files on a TB of drive space.”

“I see,” replied Mohammed.

McKell said, “Okay. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Truth in advertising and full disclosure and all that shit. With this device you won’t be able to do a damn thing. You’ll need to be on the network. I’m talking physically. This drive needs to go into a port in a node that is already past the firewalls. Then the program will go out, round up and categorize the data, and exfiltrate it.”

“This is not a problem.”

McKell kept talking. He was a computer scientist, precision was paramount to him, even in a situation like this. “Only other thing you could do, theoretically, I guess, would be to find someone with access to a VPN. That’s a virtual private network. If they could get past all the extra security steps to log to Intelink from outside the wire, then you could use this remotely.”

Mohammed took the drive in his hands and looked at it more closely. He ignored what McKell said, and asked a question of his own. “You have been away from your position for several months. How do you know they have not changed things in a manner that will make this program obsolete?” McKell shook his head with another grin. He was supremely sure of himself. “That’s the beauty of the government, kid. The contracts for R-3 and the other companies have been renewed, and they’re a matter of public record. I know what systems are in place, because they are the only systems that can do the job. Sure, they’ll change passwords and access codes and protocols for admittance, but they can’t change the nuts and bolts of data retrieval.”

“And what about encryption? If you pull data off the servers, how can you be certain it is readable?”

“The data is not encrypted at rest, meaning where it is stored. If you have the key to get into the data, then the data is readable. It’s as simple as that.”

“I see.” Mohammed opened his computer and slipped the drive into the port. “I will evaluate your code. If it looks good, I’ll give you the password right here and now. We will conclude our business.”

“Sounds good to me.”

For the next thirty minutes McKell watched while Mr. Black scanned through the directories. Mohammed’s technical know-how was insufficient to create this himself, it would take someone like McKell and his years of experience building and maintaining the architecture. But the Iranian knew logical code when he saw it, and he searched down to the source code level for red flags that would indicate McKell had cut corners or left out necessary bits that would keep his program from actually working.

He asked a few questions of the American, who answered helpfully.

Finally, Mohammed ejected the device from his computer and said, “I am satisfied. Thank you.”

“No, Black. Thank you. It was a hell of a lot of work, but now comes the fun part. Go ahead and wire the rest of the money.”

Mohammed closed his laptop, put everything in his backpack, and he stood from the desk.

“The money,” McKell repeated.

Mohammed held his hands up in apology. “There is no more money.”

The fat man on the bed seemed genuinely confused. “What do you mean there’s no money? There better be a fucking lot of money.”

“I do hope you spent the hundred thousand doing something enjoyable. There will be no further transfer.”

McKell’s eyes went wide now. He did not sense danger, only a double cross. “Look, Black. You seem to forget. I brought backup. Don’t fuck with me or things are going to get ugly.” He turned to the door. “Eddie!”

The door to the room opened quickly, and the big ex — tight end filled the doorway to the landing, but only for a moment. McKell saw the ragged hole in his friend’s forehead just as his head drooped, and then Eddie fell face-first into to the room. The back of his skull was all but gone. Brain matter and blood were matted in the hair around another ragged hole, but this one was ten times larger than the one in his forehead.

McKell looked at the body, then up in the doorway. Eddie had been held up by two men who now stood on the landing. They were much smaller than Eddie, but they were still much larger than Black, who now stood right next to Phillip McKell.

The two new men stepped into the room. While McKell sat on the bed, still disoriented by the quick turn of events, one of the two men reached under his black leather coat and pulled out a long pistol with a silencer on the end of it. He lifted it to McKell’s forehead.

Mohammed did not know the actual names of his four Quds body men. There was no official reason for this; their identities were not above the security clearance of a major in the Revolutionary Guards. Instead, Mohammed had told the men when he met them in Tehran to give him the name of the city of their births, and he would call them by the city. It was easier for him to remember, he explained.

So Mohammed knew the four men only as Shiraz, Kashan, Ormand, and Isfahan. They, in turn, knew him only as Mohammed, which was quite easy for them to remember, as two of the four Quds men were named Mohammed themselves.

Mohammed nodded to Shiraz and Kashan, then moved from his chair at the desk, and he sat next to the fat American on the bed. “Phillip. Yes… I know who you are. Phillip McKell. Age forty-three, unmarried, unemployed. Now is the time for you to realize your situation. You will not be paid, but you can still choose to walk away from this with your life. I truly hope that is the choice you make.”

McKell’s face had gone white.

In Farsi, Mohammed spoke to Shiraz. “We wait a moment and he’ll die on his own.” The men remained stone-faced, not laughing at the quip.

McKell heard the words, then coughed out a hoarse question. “You’re an Arab?”

Mohammed looked at the other two men. In English he said, “Americans. No cultural understanding.” He turned back to McKell. “I am from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Not an Arab. A Persian.”

“You… you are not with Anonymous?”

Mohammed shrugged, smiled in apology. “Sometimes I am. When it is convenient to my work. They, and other groups like them, are… what is the term? Useful idiots.” Mohammed threw another big shoulder shrug, a show of contrition. “Not unlike yourself.”

“What do you want?”

“Oh, actually, I have what I want. You already gave it to me. I only now need to know that it will work. We expect to attempt the breach in the next forty-eight hours. You will be kept right here. My friends will stay with you. If there is any problem with the breach… any problem, they will be ordered to punish you, and to take their time doing it. I hope it doesn’t come to this.”

“Oh my God.”

“I will leave, and when I know if your software worked as described, I will contact my friends here and give them one of two orders. You live on, or you die so very slowly and unpleasantly.”

McKell’s eyes clouded and his lips trembled.

“So you see, I am leaving now with the drive, and this is your last chance to tell me if you left anything out, put anything in, or did anything to it to render it ineffective.”

Now Phillip McKell began crying.

Mohammed looked on uncomfortably for nearly a minute.

Eventually McKell spoke, between sobs and gurgles of mucus in his throat. “It’s not a trap. I swear to God it will work!” He put his head in his hands and began blubbering openly. “Please. Please let me go.”

Mohammed just winced in discomfort, then he glanced to Shiraz. In Farsi he said, “I believe him.”

Shiraz nodded, stepped forward, and pressed the tip of his Glock’s suppressor on the top of the seated man’s head. McKell pulled his hands away from his face quickly and he started to scream, but the Quds Force operative shot him at point-blank range.

He dropped dead onto the floor at the foot of the bed, blood dripped from his mouth and nostrils, and the Iranians began their work. Shiraz and Kashan collected the personal belongings of the two dead Americans, removing anything that could be used to identify them. Then they lifted both men off the floor and laid them on the king-size bed.

While this was going on Mohammed stood close to the wall by the bathroom, his eyes fixed on the bodies. While he gazed at the dead men he used his mobile phone to call in Isfahan, who appeared in the doorway with a pair of two-liter soda bottles in his hands. He opened the first bottle and began pouring gasoline on the bed, and handed off the other bottle to Kashan, who took it and poured it all over the bodies, taking care to thoroughly soak every stitch of clothing.

When they were finished with their work, Shiraz addressed the commander of the operation. “Mohammed, you should go to the car. Ormand is waiting. We will be right behind.” Mohamed shook his head, still looking at the bodies. “Give me the lighter. I want to do it.”

“Sir, there are a lot of fumes. It will go up quickly. Better you—”

Mohammed reached a hand out. “Please. I want to do it.” Shiraz looked at the others. With a shrug he said, “Sure. Of course. But stand in the open doorway and throw it in. The flames can be unpredictable.”

The three Quds Force operatives went out onto the landing and checked the area, then they looked down to make sure Ormand was still there, behind the wheel of the running Chrysler four-door. When they were satisfied everything was in order, Shiraz pulled his Zippo lighter from his pocket and held it out to Mohammed.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Of course. Why not?” Mohammed took the lighter with a quavering hand, and he did as the Quds Force operative suggested, standing in the doorway, then tossing the burning lighter onto the bed. It erupted in flame and light, and Mohammed stood there watching for several seconds, as the bodies were engulfed in the inferno.

“Sir?” Shiraz said from behind. “We must leave immediately!” Mohammed observed the fast-moving fire, the death, and the destruction he had wrought, up until the moment Shiraz put his hand on his arm and pulled him gently out of the doorway. Then the Quds officer shut the door to the room — already fully engulfed from the bathroom at the back to the curtains in the front window — and he pushed the little Revolutionary Guards major toward the stairwell, the other two body men leading the way.