Page 22 of The 24th Hour

“Sorry, Bao. Keep talking.”

“Where do you keep the barf bags?”

“Seriously?”

“Nooooo. As I was saying, Thordarson was then recruited by the Secret Service. Wooten graduated Harvard in the top 1 percent; majored in science and technology. He was snapped up by Intel and was on a management track. By thenThordarson had started his new business and offered Wooten a partnership in his cyber threat defense start-up.”

Joe said, “That fits. I see Thordarson as a risk taker. Wooten’s precise. I’d guess an intellectual.”

“Here,” said Bao, reading from her phone. “One of their clients says, ‘Wooten can see threats in five dimensions, in or out of the sandbox.’”

“That fits.”

“Good guess,” Bao teased, bracing against the next curve with her hand on the dashboard.

Joe knew that in tech jargon, a sandbox was an isolated testing environment for trying out code changes and other experimental work. Like tracking cyber threats.

The Tesla pulled up to a ten-story office building on a mixed-use block in the Rincon Hill district. Joe parked behind the CS Inc. company car, and he and Bao joined Sveinn Thordarson and Pete Wooten at the building’s entrance.

Inside, the lobby was fronted with a manned security desk, lined with white stone, and punctuated by a half dozen elevators. One of them was marked with a nameplate inscribedCYBER SECURITY INCORPORATEDand had a biometric palm print reader below it. Thordarson cleared his guests through security, and Wooten put the flat of his hand on the palm reader. There was abuzz,athunk,and the lift doors opened. The four got in and the car sped them directly to the top floor. The doors opened again, this time into a long white room taking up most of the tenth floor.

Joe was temporarily stunned by the pure white light evenly illuminating six long tables, running lengthwise, from back tofront of the room, the SOC, or security operations center. Each of the tables held multiscreen computers from end to end. Behind them sat dozens of technology operators wearing headsets, their chairs pulled up to the tables, their eyes fixed on the screens. There was a soundtrack, the clacking of keyboards and chatter of speech to fellow operators nearby.

Joe and Bao followed Thordarson and Wooten to the office at the rear of the room. Wooten closed the door behind them and Thordarson offered chairs and cold drinks. After all were seated, Joe asked how their process worked.

Thordarson squared the empty space in front of him with his hands. Then he said, “St. Vartan’s wants us to work with the Feds and that’s what I always recommend. We can track the evildoers but have no authority to arrest them.”

Thordarson gave Joe and Bao his full intense attention. He said, “So, our charge is to eject Apocalypto’s payload, reset what’s been damaged or altered in St. Vartan’s network, and set up the next level of protection. In this case, shutter all of the faulty protocols that Apocalypto has put into place in the last weeks or months, malware that is set to drop the instant the two-day extension period expires if the ransom doesn’t drop into their bank. Once we’ve restored their systems, put blocks in place, St. Vartan’s is going to be impermeable, and Apocalypto knows it.”

“Smart of the hospital to have you at the ready,” Bao said.

“Thanks, Director. It’s still impossible to stop attacks before they happen, but our warning system did its job and we’ve been actively working since LaBreche called me three hours ago. Right now we’re collecting indicators of compromise. When we’re done, God willing, we’ll have an impermeablehospital and we’ll turn over the attackers’ names or pseudonyms, IP addresses, a report on the malware, and other types of indicators to you guys.”

“Stupendous,” Bao said with a smile. “Now, I think I’ll take a diet-something with caffeine. Jet lag.”

CHAPTER 25

PETE WOOTEN OPENED the fridge under the table, took out a Diet Coke, held it up.

“Ice?”

“A nice cold can is fine,” said Bao.

Wooten handed off Diet Cokes to Bao and Joe, grabbed a Red Bull for himself and one for Thordarson, then clinked cans with all three.

“To Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity,” Wooten said, quoting the FBI motto. Bao grinned and Wooten returned a grin, then sat back down in his chair.

Thordarson said to the FBI visitors, “We brought you here to see our process in action. Pete and I developed a real-time attack map for locating cyberattacks.”

“Real time how?” Bao asked.

“As you know, the current best practice is to have one person, say FBI or NSA, watching the attackers’ end and the internal security folks watching the target—in this case thehospital. Our dream tracker watches both sides at the same time.”

“Oh, wow,” Bao said. “You’re going to give us a demo?”

“Exactly. This is its actual maiden launch. We’d be interested in your read on CS Inc.’s just-minted attack catcher.

“Created right here.”

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