Zero days, p.3
Zero Days, page 3
‘Here, right now, in this beer garden, there’s maybe eight, nine people on laptops. All using the beer garden Wi-Fi. Unsecured Wi-Fi, like all public Wi-Fi. Any of them could be sniffing, harvesting the passwords and logins of all the others. Doesn’t take much skill for that. My money’s on the guy with the beard and the baseball cap on the far side there. Gotta be a hacker.’
Milo wasn’t convinced. ‘He’s too old and in a group. They don’t operate in groups. More likely the woman on the table next to him. The one in the yellow T-shirt. What do you reckon, Chuck? You’re the expert.’
Drayton didn’t reply, since Anna was standing up and slinging a small backpack over one shoulder. ‘Well guys, I could stay all afternoon, but I have things to do. Happy birthday Holger.’ She high-fived Milo and Norgaard, air-kissed Drayton, and then left the beer garden.
‘Sorry,’ Norgaard said, ‘Got a bit carried away.’ He waved to attract the attention of the server and ordered more beer and another plate of sausages. ‘Is she still pissed about the breakfast thing?’
‘No. We’re over the breakfast thing. She just gets a bit bored with all the hacking talk.’
‘What’s the breakfast thing?’ asked Milo.
Norgaard took up the story, enjoying Drayton’s embarrassment.
‘Anna’s been trying to reform our dear friend Chuck. No easy task.’ He leaned across the table, placing a sympathetic hand on Drayton’s shoulder. ‘Their day used to start with a single slice of organic banana bread and a glass of fresh orange juice. Isn’t that right?’
‘Organic, gluten-free and sugar-free banana bread,’ Drayton corrected him.
‘Until one day Drayton here leaves a book in the café. So Anna chases him, catches him as he enters McDonalds, that house of sin. “What are you doing?” she yells as Drayton’s about to place an order. “Just grabbing a coffee,” he says. And you know what the guy behind the counter says? “Hi there Mr Drayton. The usual?” Then he fetches a double sausage and egg McMuffin, hash browns and a large coke.’
They all laughed. Even Drayton. ‘I needed some nutrition,’ he said.
Norgaard raised his glass. ‘Let’s face it, you’re a lost cause, my friend. The sooner Anna figures that out, the better. Prost.’
‘Well, yeah. Maybe she already has. Cheers,’ Drayton replied, making it sound like a joke.
Then Drayton’s phone rang. The smile drained from his face which became serious and alert. He listened in silence for a few moments and then said, ‘Now? Are we sure? The entire network? Crippled? The same image? They’re with me, Milo and Norgaard … We’re on our way.’
He placed his phone back down beside his beer. ‘Herr Schoenberg. He needs to see us now. The U-Bahn’s being hacked. The entire metro system’s down.’
‘Is it them?’ Milo asked.
‘It looks that way. The same calling card. The same image of the dog – the same snarling three-headed dog.’
*****
The image had become the hacker’s signature. The dark, pointed face and narrow eyes. The raised ears, the jagged teeth and a snarl that seemed to say, ‘I’m coming for you’. It was black on a white background, one of the heads looking straight ahead, the other two in ghastly profile. Drayton called it Cerberus, after the grotesque three-headed dog from Greek mythology. The guardian of the gates to the underworld.
The ransom note beside the image was written in broken English. ‘You hacked. ALL data encrypted,’ alongside a demand for US $100,000 in Bitcoin in exchange for a digital key – a passcode – to unlock the files. There was a number, an anonymous Bitcoin address to which the cryptocurrency should be transferred.
‘This is what the U-Bahn ticket agents found when they went to log in this morning. The ransomware froze their payment system and crippled the ticket machines,’ said Schoenberg. ‘At first they kept the network running, opening the gates so people could ride for free. But they became worried about the safety systems and shut down the whole network this afternoon.’
‘Will they pay?’ asked Norgaard.
‘They say they won’t. Though they probably will. They’ve no back up.’
They were sitting in the spacious living room of Wolfgang Schoenberg’s elegant villa close to Lake Tegel in the north-west of Berlin. It was a large building dating from the 1920s, with white-washed brick walls and a sprawling dark red roof, which looked like an outsize winter hat pulled low over the face of a chubby child. It stood beyond tall bushes and a rusting metal gate at the end of a quiet cobbled street. You’d hardly think you were in the city at all if not for the distant rumble of aircrafts taking off from Berlin’s main airport to the south and ever so slightly shaking a large chandelier hanging from the ceiling above them. The living room had an austere feel to it, like its owner. It was sparsely furnished, mostly dark and antique, a large and musty Persian rug in the middle of the room. The only concession to modernity was the large video screen on which Schoenberg displayed the ransom note with the image of the three-headed dog.
It had taken an hour for Drayton, Norgaard and Milo to reach the place. They struggled to find a taxi, which after the shutdown of the U-Bahn had become as endangered as Milo’s GPS-tagged rhinos. It was a route they knew well, since Schoenberg preferred to hold private meetings at Lake Tegel, no longer trusting the office.
He was in his late sixties, and struck Drayton as more bank manager than cyber sleuth. Even on a Sunday he still had that formal look, though he’d discarded his usual dark suit and tie for a brown checked jacket. He was polished and courteous, carefully weighing his words to the point where it was sometimes hard to know what he was really thinking, though Drayton had learned to recognise the clues. If he massaged his bald head, or pulled at the short tufts of grey hair that remained above each ear, it usually meant he was getting agitated. That your loan was about to be turned down. A thumb and forefinger through his short moustache signalled interest. If he removed his glasses, round with tiny wire rims, then it could go either way.
At that moment, he was polishing his shining crown with big sweeping movements of his hand. Then his fingers moved to the tufts above his ear. ‘Let’s take stock. What do we really know at this point?’
‘It’s spreading, and it’s spreading fast,’ said Drayton. ‘That’s all we can really say for sure. The targets are big, the ones that are supposed to be the most secure. It’s as if they’re showing off, telling us that’s nothing’s immune. And everybody’s being hit, none of the major cyber powers are being spared.’
‘More than twenty countries so far,’ Norgaard said. ‘The biggest attacks have been in the US, Russia, China and Britain. The latest attacks that we know about are on water companies and healthcare in Britain. Four cities without water, fourteen hospitals crippled. In the States, it’s hit banks and air traffic control, ATMs are out of action, and it’s the biggest shutdown of air space since 9/11. And the entire city of Boston, all its servers are frozen. In Russia, the St Petersburg power grid’s down and two nuclear power stations are offline. The Moscow transport management system too, lights all messed up and digital signs spouting nonsense. Satellites targeted, though that’s an unofficial source. In China it’s oilfields and transport, the bullet train network paralysed.’
‘This is just the beginning,’ said Schoenberg, as thoughtfully, slowly, he walked to a small drinks cabinet from which he collected a bottle of wine and four glasses. ‘Red? It’s a Württemberg. Fruity, but light, if you’re good with that.’
They were good with that.
He poured four large ones, draining the bottle. Then Drayton said, ‘At a technical level, we’re dealing with two things here, the ransomware itself and the weapon that gets it into computer systems.’
‘The ransomware is a pretty basic, off-the-shelf piece of kit,’ Norgaard added. ‘No surprises. Hunts down the files, encrypts them, freezes the system. Locks you out. And the price of the key for unscrambling your system is always the same. One hundred thousand dollars, whatever the target. The real mystery still is how it’s getting in and how it’s spreading. We know ransomware usually comes in attachments or links in phishing emails or else it’s on websites you visit. Click and you’re done for. But not this one.’
‘Here’s the thing,’ Drayton said. ‘This bug’s smart. Really smart. Most malware targets a specific operating system or type of software. This one can break into them all and at the same time seems tailored for each target. And it can hide, change its appearance, cover its tracks. It can adapt to its environment. That’s why it’s so difficult to map its behaviour.’
Schoenberg pulled at the hair above his right ear, as if he was trying to pluck the final tufts. ‘And the sewer, anything in the sewer?’
‘The chat rooms, the hacker forums, they’re all buzzing,’ Milo said. ‘It’s a big deal on the dark web. Lots of excitement. Lots of chatter. Boasting. Bullshit. The usual. But I’m not seeing patterns or clues.’
Schoenberg fetched another bottle of wine. The light was fading fast, and he turned on a pair of small table lamps, which cast an arc of light on the paintings immediately above them. One was a twisting river, a castle above it; another a striking portrait of an older woman, her grey hair meticulously pinned up. She was sitting stiffly to attention and staring into the middle distance, with a look that was difficult to read. Schoenberg’s mother? Grandmother perhaps? There was certainly a likeness in those enigmatic features. A third was of Albert Einstein. Schoenberg said the Nobel Prize winning physicist had lived in the house in the 1920s, when it was owned by the Prussian Academy of Scientists. It was a particularly dour portrait, and Drayton felt the great man’s silent reproach for their lack of progress.
He noticed a photograph beside one of the lamps. It showed two young children, perhaps eight or nine years old, sitting side by side next to a lake. The boy was dark haired and sombre looking; the girl, his sister perhaps, was blonde, with blue eyes and a precocious smile.
Schoenberg walked to the window and for a few moments stood and watched the rustling trees beyond. Then he walked slowly back to the table. ‘That’s not encouraging,’ he said. ‘And right now we have no way of stopping it.’
*****
Anna was working on her laptop when Drayton arrived back at their apartment shortly before midnight. She was sitting at a table beside an open window, below which a passing tram screeched and rattled, the sounds mixed with laughter and shouting from the bars and cafés lining the street. The late night Prenzlauer Berg chorus.
‘You’re late,’ she said. ‘Must have been quite a party.’
‘Work. Something came up.’ He stood behind her and then leaned down and kissed the back of her neck.
She was typing manically, switching between several documents she had on the go and a messaging app. ‘It’s so exciting. It’s happening. He’s coming to Berlin.’
‘Who’s coming?’
‘Efren Bell. He wants to launch the project. At the factory. It’s big. Big. Big. And there’s so much to organise.’
‘I’m sure there is …’ He was going to say more. Starting with the challenge of finding a space big enough to accommodate Bell’s ego. But he stopped himself. He was too tired and had drunk too much to argue. Instead he pushed the straps of her dungarees off her shoulders, which he began to massage. She turned slightly, pushing him away and replacing the straps. He sat on a large fading leather sofa and turned on a television. The midnight news leading on the U-Bahn hack, a caption across the bottom of the screen described it as ‘Berlin’s biggest ever cyber-attack.’ There were images of empty stations, and then the ransom note with the snarling three-headed dog.
Anna joined him on the sofa, looking at the screen, at the dog, and then at Drayton. She watched him, watched his eyes fixed on that snarling image. She hesitated, but all she said was, ‘So that’s why you’re late.’
She pulled him towards her, cupping his cheeks and then tapping gently on his forehead. ‘So when you gonna let me in, Chuck? When you gonna let me in?’
‘When you gonna let me in,’ he said, toying with the straps of her dungarees. This time when he pushed them back she didn’t stop him, nor when he undid the side buttons and slipped his hand inside. They kissed and she climbed on top of him, pinning him to the back of the sofa. ‘Sometimes you can be such as arsehole, Drayton.’ He mumbled an apology as he worked on removing the dungarees, which had always struck him as poorly designed for moments of spontaneous passion.
When they were finished, they both slept, holding each other tight on the sofa.
*****
It was early the following morning that she said to him, ‘By the way, your wife called.’
‘My ex-wife.’
‘She still calls herself your wife.’
‘Debbie called here, to the apartment?’
‘Yes, she said you don’t reply to emails and won’t answer your cell phone when she calls. She says you owe her money, something about repairs to the house.’
‘Great. And who did you say you are?’
‘Your girlfriend. I wasn’t going to lie. She asked me if I was living with you.’
‘And you said?’
‘That I am.’
‘Terrific. And what did she say to that?’
‘She said, “poor you”. She said she enjoyed Berlin when you were here together. When you were a diplomat. Nice town. Before you started screwing the wife of a German minister.’
‘She told you that?’
‘Why not? Is it true?’
‘Like I told you, my last marriage was complicated. Messy.’
‘Like screwing a minister’s wife complicated?’
‘Debbie’s got a vivid imagination.’
‘Well, whatever. I’ve got to go.’ She kissed him, the inkling of a smile on her face. Then she put her hand on his head and ruffled his thick hair. To Drayton they seemed like gestures of pity rather than anger. ‘I have a tonne of stuff to do.’
She left the apartment, blowing him a kiss from the door, smiling. He watched her from the window, opening it slightly, wanting to shout after her, but not quite sure what to say. He sat for a while, watching, listening. A clanging tram, the rumble of a delivery truck on the cobbled streets, a brush cleaning the sidewalk as the café below prepared to open, a local anarchist launching his morning anti-capitalist sermon from a window of a graffiti-covered squat across the street.
He’d found Anna’s smile infectious from the moment they’d met. That was shortly after he moved back to Berlin. He laughed when she called herself an artist, because so did half of Berlin. She cringed when he told her he worked in computers. That he was a cybercrime investigator. When she told him he was ‘fascinating,’ he wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or concerned. ‘You’re a mess, but there may still be hope,’ she said, only half joking, studying him like one of her paintings.
She was ten years younger than him, bubbly and enthusiastic. ‘You’ve got potential,’ she’d laughed, but that potential was hard to spot in the forty-four year old face that now stared back at him from the bathroom mirror, pale and hungover, streaks of grey accelerating through his thick black hair. His dog-eared toothbrush lay on a shelf beneath the mirror, its brush splayed as if it had been crushed under foot. Anna’s pristine electric toothbrush looked down from its charging cradle nearby in silent disapproval.
The living room was hung with large splodgy paintings. Anna’s modern art replacing what she’d called the dreary old photographs that had come with the apartment. Drayton let her have her way, though he liked the photographs because he liked the history. It was why he’d chosen to live in Prenzlauer Berg. Last time, as a US diplomat he’d had to live where he was told; charmless modern places bristling with the latest security. Now he could choose for himself. The Prenzlauer Berg tenements had largely survived the war. It had been part of old East Berlin, home to dissidents and artists, writers and intellectuals, and their legions of watchers from the secret police, the Stasi. He often sat by his open window, beer in hand, imagining what it would have been like to live in that Orwellian world amid the run-down tenements. When the wall came down the developers moved in. It was now one of most hip places in the city to live.
His cell phone rang. The Mission Impossible ringtone, the one he’d set for his ex-wife. It must be the middle of the night over there. He ignored the call, and then for a while sat on the old sofa, thinking about Debbie’s conversation with Anna. Anna had a right to be angry. He had screwed the wife of a German government minister. It had been four years ago while he was stationed at the US Embassy in Berlin. As a result, he’d lost his job and been sent back to Washington DC in disgrace. It had ended their marriage. He hadn’t been frank with Anna, but he felt he had a good reason for that.
The woman’s name was Maria Schoenberg. She was the bored wife of the Energy Minister, who was twenty-nine years older than her. The minster’s name was Wolfgang. And Wolfgang Schoenberg was now Drayton’s boss.
*****
The offer of the Berlin job had come as a surprise to Drayton, though the bigger shock was that the phone call came from Schoenberg himself. It was three months earlier, and Drayton was angry and surprised that he’d been found. The call came through on an old landline he never knew existed, buried behind a dusty bookshelf in the corner of the remote cottage he was renting, and where he had tried to take himself offline. No internet, no cell phone. He needed time alone, time to think.
‘I need you,’ Schoenberg said.
Drayton demanded to know how Schoenberg had found him, told him to get the fuck off the line and leave him alone, but the German cut him short. ‘It’s hard to go off the grid these days, but then I guess you know that better than most.’
When Drayton didn’t respond he said, ‘The attacks, they’re like nothing we’ve seen before. I need answers – and so do you.’
Drayton slammed down the phone and pulled the lead from the wall, but he knew Schoenberg was right. And three days later he was on a flight to Germany, the Atlantic Ocean 36,000 cloudless feet below, a third glass of champagne in his hand, laptop open in front of him. He’d spent weeks without looking at a computer, trying to escape that world, but the images from the hospital haunted him, and deep down he’d known all along that it would be impossible to stay away.
