Page 95 of The Devil's Ransom

“Nothing yet, but I have some things working. I think you should be aware I’m probably going to go kinetic here.”

He said nothing for a moment, then, “We’re running under twenty-four hours until that Valkyrie capsule creates mass murder. And when that happens, someone’s going to pay. It won’t be Dark Star. Hannister is going to be forced to react to whatever proof is presented today. You and I both know how that will work out. No matter who wins the fight, our men will die. If you can prevent that, yeah, you got your day.”

“Don’t let the president do anything stupid until I can prove it isn’t Branko. Don’t let him take the word of a single egghead, no matter how smart he is.”

“Pike, you do what you do, but I can’t prevent the president from doing anything based on Branko, because this conversation never took place.”

“Understood, sir. Before I go, can you put Creed back on the line?”

“What for?”

“Sir...”

“Never mind... I’ll expect a confirmation of your marching orders to come home sometime tonight.”

Chapter54

Wolffe walked into the White House Situation Room with the meeting already in progress. He’d been called forward for this, but clearly it wasn’t because he was needed, as they’d started without him. It didn’t bother him, because the stakes of this mission had clearly eclipsed his mandate. The Taskforce scalpel was no longer the tool to use here.

He softly closed the door and went to the back of the room, taking a seat against the wall next to a scrum of other low-level advisors. The president was at the head of the table—the same one seen in every famous photograph of a president in crisis—with the important people flowing down each side of the table from his location. Behind them, on chairs along the walls, were the aides.

Nobody in this room had any idea what Wolffe did for the nation, and he preferred to keep it that way. At the opposite end of the room was Dylan Hobbes. He stood in front of a PowerPoint presentation, and apparently was in the middle of his briefing. Wolffe surveyed the table and saw a few Oversight Council members, like the SECDEF, the D/CIA, and the SECSTATE, but most were from somewhere else in the behemoth that was the United States government.

Wolffe returned to Hobbes and saw he was sweating profusely. Wolffe thought he looked like a character fromBreaking Bad,the sweat rolling off his face as if he was being interrogated.What’s up with that?

Hobbes was conducting a synopsis of his research, and in so doing spouting off a plethora of cybersecurity terms, showing the depth of his investigation. DNS, malware, Zero Day threat, rootkit, phishing, IP addresses, TOR network, you name it, it was a cornucopia of buzzwords complete with inscrutable graphs that only one or two people in the room could even decipher. The rest just took him at his word.

When he was done, he said, “Given the evidence, I think I’ve managed to locate the origin of this current threat. It’s not a bunch of ransomware guys from Serbia. It’s a nation-state.”

He paused for dramatic effect, and President Hannister rolled his hand forward, saying, “Spare me the theatrics and just give it to us. Do you know where it came from?”

“Yes, sir.”

Everyone took a breath, and he flicked to the next slide, saying, “It’s Iran.”

The room erupted in murmurs of sidebar conversations, and President Hannister held up his hand, quelling the chatter. He said, “How do you know that?”

Hobbes pointed to the next slide, saying, “Honestly, I thought it would be North Korea, but the fingerprints didn’t match. Remember when the Iranians took out the casinos in Las Vegas in 2014? They managed to penetrate Sheldon Adelson’s entire network and cause enormous damage, but in so doing, they left a lot of fingerprints behind in the code and in the contact routing back to the person doing the work. They were good, but not that good.”

“Okay, but is this a guess, or youknow?”

“Sir, I used the fingerprint analogy for a reason. When you do a fingerprint comparison, you’re basically finding points of intersection from one print to another, until the points become so greatthat the fingerprint in question is unlikely to be the fingerprint of someone else. It’s the same way here. I have found multiple points of intersection that lead nowhere else.”

President Hannister sat back and said, “So you don’tknow. You’re just saying in your best estimation, it’s the Iranians. I mean, you didn’t find an Iranian flag embedded in the code or anything.”

“No, sir, but none of this is absolute. The reason they chose a cyberattack is precisely to give them plausible deniability. Short of having a video of someone working a keyboard, or an Iranian attacker going on CNN to brag, we’re never going to have absolute proof. But like a fingerprint, the trace doesn’t lie.”

President Hannister sighed and said, “But it’s not enough to give us a Cuban Missile Crisis moment, either. If I took all this to the United Nations and demanded they turn off the ransomware, would your evidence matter? Is it like Adlai Stevenson showing satellite photos of missiles in Cuba, or like Colin Powell showing hand-drawn pictures of supposed biological weapon vans in Iraq?”

Hobbes said, “To the initiated, it would be a slam dunk, but for the United Nations, it wouldn’t be what you want. There is no way to educate them on the fingerprints, and there is no way to get an actual smoking gun out of cyber. It just doesn’t happen.”

“So what am I supposed to do with that?”

Hobbes said, “Sir, I don’t know. Policy is your realm. I’m just giving you the facts.”

Kerry Bostwick, the CIA director, said, “I’d like to know what the NSA and Cyber Command think of this. What’s your assessment?”

General Franco Baggetti, dual hatted as both the commander of the NSA and of Cyber Command, said, “We’ve looked as well, and while we haven’t gotten nearly as far into our analysis as Dylan, his outcome is something we wouldn’t disagree with at this stage in our investigation.”

---