It wasn’t the first time Jake Duggan had seen a mirage, but this one was in a league of its own. From Duggan’s window seat on a military transport making its final approach to Kandahar International Airport, the towering blot on the horizon looked like an advancing wall. It was uncanny how the mirage seemed to creep closer, swallowing the sky and Duggan’s peace of mind. The sun was setting, but even in the gloaming, Duggan noticed how the scalloped awnings of the terminal echoed the impermanent architecture of Bedouin tents. He turned to his escort and traveling companion, Master Sergeant Quinn Davis.
“You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d say that big mountain over there is moving toward us,” Duggan said casually.
Davis craned his neck to look out the window and nodded grimly. “You don’t know better, and that, my friend, is what the hajjis call a haboob.” Duggan ignored the slur. Davis handed him a pair of goggles, a dust mask, and a bandana. “You’re going to need these. The dust storms in Afghanistan are savage mothers. They can last for days, and I’ll tell you that this one looks like a real dick twister. We got here just in time before they close the base.”
“How come I don’t feel so lucky?” Duggan muttered, fastening his seatbelt and returning his attention to the open file in his lap.
Davis had been there to greet Duggan on the tarmac at Riyadh. After introducing himself with a firm handshake, he led Duggan to the US Air Force transport waiting to fly them to Kandahar. It was only after they were in the air and drifting above the dagger-like postmodern skyline of the Saudi capital that Davis handed Duggan a folder containing the details of his mission. Duggan broke the tamperproof security seal and settled in to read the documents that would explain what had brought him so far outside his normal jurisdiction. He immediately recognized the picture of a young soldier that was stapled to the inside corner of the briefing file. Donald Westlake, an otherwise unremarkable air force recruit from Ontario, California, had shaken the US military and generated an international diplomatic crisis by shooting half a dozen Afghan military personnel in cold blood for no apparent reason at the allied base in Kandahar. The official story was that Westlake had a history of psychological problems, which the air force had somehow overlooked, resulting in a formal apology from the secretary of defense to the government of Afghanistan and a promise to do a better job of screening military personnel assigned to politically delicate duties on foreign soil.
It wasn’t until Duggan read through a detailed description of the shooting and got to a summary of interviews with Westlake’s barrack mates that he finally understood why his boss had sent him halfway across the world to investigate an incident that would otherwise have been handled by the Air Force’s own internal security corps. Westlake, according to several of his fellow airmen, had not only been complaining about headaches before the shooting but also claimed that he was hearing voices with a foreign accent. Even odder was the fact that Westlake told at least one other soldier that the voices were coming from his laptop. The US military intranet was one of the best-encrypted systems in the world. It would have taken the cyber equivalent of a howitzer to break the firewall, and the fallout from such an attack would be relatively easy to detect. But the internal report described evidence of any intrusion as “inconclusive.”
When Duggan looked up from the folder, Davis was already waiting with an answer. “We need to be able to rule out a breach in the internal allied network,” he explained, “a breach that could have been used to communicate with enemy agents who would like nothing more than to drive a wedge between the States and our Afghan allies. On the other hand, if the messages to Westlake came from someone inside the air force, we can’t be sure that they haven’t infiltrated internal security.”
“So why didn’t you call in the CIA?”
Davis grinned and shook his head. “You know what it’s like around here. I mean, between the services, with everybody looking for the slightest excuse to grab more turf. The consensus was that you could be trusted to stick to the game plan.”
“Which is to tell you whether Westlake was compromised and, if so, whether the messages being sent to him came from outside the base or from embedded sources. And you’re worried that your military cyber ops might be dirty too, so you can’t trust your own people to do the job.”
Davis tipped his head and shrugged.
Duggan had been an agent of the National Cyber Security Division of the Department of Homeland Security long enough to know that silence from a fellow operative was an implicit yes. It was even better than a yes because it eliminated the need to delve into the nuances of why Duggan’s statement might be partially, or even slightly, under certain circumstances, less than completely accurate. Plus, if the mission went unexpectedly awry, there would be no need to confirm or deny that Duggan’s assumption had been endorsed by someone who lacked the authority to do such a thing. Never saying more than necessary was a mutually understood occupational guideline that itself was better left unsaid.
“We’ll be on the ground in a few minutes,” Davis said finally. “We can talk on the ride to base.”
The wind was already picking up as they descended from the plane to a cordoned-off section of the runway. The tsunami of sand loomed menacingly as men in fatigues hastily loaded their bags into a waiting jeep and scurried to batten down the base. Then, as Duggan watched, the control tower half a mile away disappeared into the roiling murk.
“Holy cow.”
“Get in,” Davis instructed. “The sooner we get away from the airport and flying debris, the better.”
Duggan put on the goggles and mask and tried not to focus on the countless tons of dirt coming toward them at near-hurricane speeds.
“Look on the bright side,” Davis noted cheerfully. “If nobody can see us, they can’t shoot at us either.”
Duggan tried to look appreciative. His job at the NCSD was to “assess and mitigate” threats to the cyber infrastructure of the United States. But as the US government had quickly discovered, the line between cyberspace and real space was more than a little fuzzy, meaning that Duggan’s beat sometimes took him into territory normally patrolled by the FBI, the CIA, and in this case, the Department of Defense, and the National Security Agency, whose penchant for secrecy had provoked speculation that its acronym actually stood for “No Such Agency.” Adding to the bureaucratic imbroglio was the creation in 2009 of an entity called Cyber Command, overseen by the Pentagon, which had instantly ignited an interagency debate over the governmental distinction between “defensive” and “offensive” cyber weapons. With so many landmines on the playing field, the NCSD was obligated to tread lightly and cooperate with the bigger players, which partly explained why Duggan had been dispatched with only the disturbingly opaque instruction to grab his passport and meet with a Defense Department liaison in Saudi Arabia. Duggan was pretty sure that his cover would include an identity designed to ruffle the fewest number of feathers among his counterintelligence counterparts in the military and probably the CIA as well, which was undoubtedly why Davis made no effort to continue the conversation that had started on the plane. That Duggan was now trapped in a sandstorm inside a moving vehicle with almost zero visibility, heading into a highly charged environment he knew nearly nothing about, only added to his discomfort.
“So do the men in Westlake’s barracks know I’m coming?”
Davis veered sharply to avoid an object that Duggan didn’t recognize. “They know someone is coming to inspect Westlake’s computer, which is still right where he left it. As you know from reading the file, they’ve already been interviewed several times, and as you might imagine, the whole incident is kind of a sore subject. That’s why I’m putting you up in the officers’ quarters. There’s no point in throwing you to the wolves. As far as they know, you’re just a DOD tech wonk here from Washington to check out the hard drive for computer bugs.”
Duggan smiled mirthlessly. The best false identity, he knew, was one that hewed closely to the truth, and this was a classic case of warping reality by simply withholding certain pieces of information. In fact, it was not that long ago that Duggan actually had been a private sector cyber wonk, an idealistic entrepreneur with dreams of changing the world and getting rich in the process. Back in the early nineties, fresh out of the University of Chicago with a degree in computer programming and the idea for an online TV network, Duggan had seen the Internet as a fresh start for civilization, full of possibility and promise, a place where digital visionaries could stake a claim and roll the dice, a place where anything and everything was possible. Duggan and a few college chums collected seed money from friends and family, rented a former women’s underwear factory with bad ventilation in New York’s Silicon Alley, and incorporated under the name NexTube Technologies. Everybody wore T-shirts and jeans to the office and worked twenty-hour days in exchange for free Cokes and sweat equity in a company with a T1 Internet connection and no proven revenue model. Arriving for work each morning, Duggan would look across the open-plan office—with its exposed brick walls, protruding water pipes, and dangling wires, clots of young people hunched over boxy CPUs and monochrome monitors—and feel the adrenaline jolt of an explorer who had reached the summit of an unnamed mountain. He was gazing out across an untracked panorama to be claimed, mapped, and populated, except that cyberspace had no physical boundaries or limits and its power grew exponentially with each person who logged on, an infinite parallel universe that would transform the material world and everything in it.
The day came when their hard-wired baby was ready to be born. Film crews from Japan and France flew in to cover the launch party, which featured live video chats with people in other cities via grainy black-and-white feeds that were hailed at the time as miraculous. By the third case of champagne, the user base was over twenty thousand and climbing. There was alchemy in the way that electrical pulses and glowing pixels could be almost instantly transformed into product, and some pals with a shared vision of watching movies and sports on their computers were suddenly actually in business.
A year later, Duggan married a reporter who had come to interview the budding entrepreneur for his hometown daily, the Chicago Tribune. Duggan was a freshly-minted millionaire, on paper at least, which in those days was as good as the real thing. He bought a loft in Soho on easy credit and a black BMW with custom plates that spelled DOT COM. NexTube seemed to be at the top of every heavy hitter’s acquisitions list, and Duggan’s platinum payday was just a few notarized signatures away. Then the Internet bubble went pop and wiped it all away. Suddenly, all the partners in his company had their own personal lawyer, but Duggan still didn’t see it coming. A new CEO was installed, and the board stopped returning Duggan’s phone calls. His marriage lost its valuation too.
Duggan retreated to Chicago in a self-righteous exile of indignation and denial. Then an acquaintance asked him out for a drink. Did he know, his friend asked, that the US government was looking for experienced programmers and paying top dollar for their services? There was even a fast-track training program that would give him the equivalent of a PhD in computer science and an FBI security clearance to boot. That night, well into his third Jack and soda, he laughed away the offer. But after a few more weeks of glimpsing his future through the bottom of a shot glass, he called his friend back.
At first, Duggan welcomed the rigor and distraction of his federally funded re-tooling. He sincerely believed that freedom and creativity on the Net couldn’t exist without justice, and that justice required that certain basic rules of cyber conduct be enforced. Then came 9/11, and Duggan once again felt the window for a better world slam shut. At the same time, the rampant lawlessness of the Net and the hideous virility of the latest viruses were demoralizing. Even in the tight-lipped corridors of the NCSD, he heard rumors that the United States and its allies were collaborating on a more powerful follow-up to Flame, Olympic Games and Stuxnet, early-generation cyber weapons that had penetrated the vital industries of enemy nations, collected information and delivered it back for analysis and further manipulation without the targets ever knowing. Murderous apps that had slipped their leashes and renegade strings of computer software were roaming the Internet like packs of wild dogs, or festering like sociopathic orphans that had somehow developed a need and ability to evade destruction or capture.
Were government-commissioned cyber-attacks acts of war? Sure. Was it a problem that military viruses had gotten loose by accident or been intentionally released by hotheaded allies, thereby accelerating a cyber cold war, an arms race of killer computer viruses, each more destructive and insidious than the last? Of course. But what, Duggan had finally concluded, was the option? Was this better or worse than guns, bombs, or bio weapons that rotted people’s organs from the inside? Was there an online equivalent of a suicide bomber? Meanwhile, there was always the possibility of newer, stronger malware, like Conficker, a program that had already infected an estimated five million computers in thirty-five countries, turning them into unwitting slaves and linking them together into a turbo-charged botnet, a massive web of processing power that rivaled the world’s fastest and strongest supercomputers and seemed chillingly capable of defending itself against all attempts to stamp it out.
These days, patrolling the Web for enemy hackers and anarchists made Duggan feel like a sheriff trying to keep order in a once booming town that had degenerated into a sprawling slum of misguided nerds, amoral swindlers, anarchists, and paranoid autocrats. Decent folk were cowering behind their firewalls, ducking to avoid getting splattered by spammers, praying that justice and parental controls would prevail and make cyberspace safe again for women and children. It pained Duggan to see the Eden-esque promise of the Web’s early years defiled by doubt and distrust, the dark pools gathering behind the high-resolution display of a billion handheld devices. Everything and everybody was for sale, whether aware of it or not. Everybody’s opinion mattered, whether it made sense or not.
Duggan was trained and licensed to carry a sidearm, but most of the bad guys he was after did their dirty work with a trackpad or a mouse. He knew that a shadow war was already being fought by blackhat battalions that used attachments instead of guns, aiming not to kill the enemy so much as to delete it. The next Pearl Harbor would not be delivered by a naval fleet or a massive air strike; it would produce no riveting images of flaming ships and wounded men leaping into the Pacific; there would be no day of infamy to rouse the population. No, it would come silently through the same wireless conduits that powered your dishwasher, brewed your coffee, and brought you the evening news. First the air conditioner would turn against you—and then the fridge, the lights, and your car. You’d fumble in the dark to find your phone so you could call for help, but the device would be useless because the satellites and radio towers that power such things would have been disabled. Since mass communication as we know it would be nonexistent, it would take hours, maybe days or weeks, before the true scope of the disaster was known. Airlines, railroads, utilities, and financial networks would all be crippled or destroyed by camouflaged code aimed at the same machines that make modern life possible and tolerable. And if all that weren’t enough, it was also conceivable that the true source of the catastrophe would be impossible to trace, that those responsible for so much suffering and destruction would remain faceless, nameless, and, in their own minds at least, blameless.
It rankled Duggan that even those who knew better, the corporations and agencies whose systems had been repeatedly infected and hacked, chose to cloak their losses in willful denial, like rape victims who couldn’t bear the shame of going public. But what really worried Duggan wasn’t the mounting evidence that individuals, groups, and entire nations were plotting a black swan event, a cyber-attack on the United States that would dwarf 9/11 and usher in a new Dark Ages. What kept him drinking after last call and staring at the ceiling in the predawn hours was the disconcerting prospect of scanning a crowd of people glued to their phones without knowing which one was about to enter the five-digit passcode that could bring a government to its knees.