Page 12 of The Devil's Ransom

George Wolffe slapped his keyboard in disgust, his computer not responding to any commands at all. He moved the mouse around on its pad and got nothing. He assumed it was simply the pain of working in a classified organization with a byzantine path of internet protocols to protect the fact that he actually was a cover organization for the National Command Authority. The pipe running through the building was T1, but the layers of TOR cutouts and other things routinely made simple tasks, like checking his email, as slow as a nineties dial-up network.

Headquartered in a nondescript office building in Clarendon, Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington, DC, the only indication of what was inside the brick and glass structure was a sign proclaiming Blaisdell Consulting. To the uninitiated, it was just one more firm circling like a shark for the scraps coming out of DC, but inside it housed everything from an indoor range to a minor surgical suite to team rooms used by the various Taskforce elements for planning prior to executing a mission.

A lean, wiry man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, Wolffe was an old-school paramilitary officer from the Special Activities Division’s Ground Branch, now renamed the Special Activities Center. He was well versed in the black arts of covert operations but had little tolerance for the technology required to maintain cover in the modern world.

He hollered outside his open office door, “Blaine! Get in here!”

A younger man with the body of a linebacker appeared, saying, “What’s up, boss?”

“You get the SITREP from Pike? I can’t get my damn email to work, and he should have linked up with Carly by now.”

“Nope. Mine’s working slow as well, but it’ll be in the comm center. Their distribution is firewalled from ours and works without all the cutouts.”

“You mind checking?”

“Sure. Be right back.” He reached the door and turned around. Wolffe said, “What?”

“Am I going forward if this gets hot? As the Omega Team Chief?”

Every Taskforce operation proceeded through various gates, each phase following the Greek alphabet, with Alpha being phase one—the introduction of forces for exploratory purposes. Omega was the kinetic end of putting some terrorist’s head on a spike. Each phase had to be approved by the Oversight Council, and prior to the previous commander’s death, Blaine Alexander’s job was the leader of all Omega operations, regardless of the team executing. When it came time for direct action, the Oversight Council wanted a semblance of control, and he was it. Right up until Kurt Hale had been killed two years ago. Since then, George Wolffe had been “acting commander” and Lieutenant Colonel Blaine Alexander had become “acting” DCO, or deputy commander, Wolffe’s old role.

Wolffe leaned back in his chair and said, “I don’t know. The Oversight Council has been dragging its feet on appointing a new commander. Since COVID hit, they don’t seem to have any urgency on solving the problem. Or maybe it’s just easier to ignore.”

“COVID’s pretty much gone now. They no longer have anyexcuses. Surely they’ll make you the official commander, right? Then all they’ll need to do is find a new DCO.”

Wolffe laughed and said, “That just may well be you. Who else knows how this circus runs?”

“I don’t want the job. Too political. I want to go back to the sharp end of the spear. Omega operations.”

“I know. Trust me, I know, but we don’t always get what we want. You don’t like it, you can always go back to the Special Mission Unit. Or even a regular Special Forces Group. I’ll help the transfer. You’ve given enough here anyway. It’s going to affect your career if you don’t get back into the regular world of special operations.”

“I don’t want to go back, and I don’t care about my career. I just don’t want to deal with all the political bullshit you do. Omega would be fine with me.”

Wolffe looked at him for a moment, thinking he sounded just like Kurt Hale when he’d been alive.

He said, “One step at a time. Just see if you can track down that SITREP.”

Before Blaine could leave the office, Bartholomew Creedwater came running into the room, his face sweating and red. He exclaimed, “We’ve been hit with a ransomware attack, and it’s spreading. I can’t shut it down.”

Incredulous, Wolffe said, “What? Ransomware? You mean like that Colonial Pipeline attack?”

“Yes. Blaisdell Consulting has been hit just like them, but it’s much worse for us. I don’t know how it got into our systems, but because we’re interconnected with all of our other cover companies, it’s spreading like wildfire. It’s going to shut us down completely.”

“Creed, we pay you to do this sort of thing. Tell me you can stop it.”

Bartholomew Creedwater—Creed—was what was known in polite society as a “network engineer,” meaning he was a master at cyberattacks. A hacker, and one of the best in the world.

“Sir, I could have if I’d caught it in time, but it infiltrated somehow through our network of cutouts, probably through one of those piece-of-shit government service providers we have to use to interface with the National Command Authority. They never patch anything, and once it got into the system, it started shutting everything down. And I mean everything.”

The first thing Wolffe thought about was compromise. “Do you think they hit us on purpose? That they know what this organization represents? Is it a nation-state?”

“I don’t think so. If it was a nation-state, like Russia, they’d just hide and exploit, like the SolarWinds hack a couple of years ago, or the Chinese hack of our Office of Personnel Management. Ransomware is for profit. They hit hospitals and corporations for cash. I don’t think they had any idea of the number of connections they were going to affect, but they do now.”

Wolffe turned to his screen and saw that his web mail was gone. In its place was a large banner saying:

YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN INFECTED

All of your data is now encrypted. To decrypt, you will need our software. You have four days to pay four bitcoin. After four days, the price will double to eight bitcoin. Follow the instructions at the bottom of the screen.

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