Chapter 31
FBI Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Sunday
9:00 p.m. Eastern Time
Special Agent Tobias “Toby” Matthew Montgomery III had been frustrated by bad guys before. Frustration was good. It meant that there was something that somebody didn’t want him to uncover. He was good at overcoming that frustration and uncovering the details of whatever the situation at hand might be. He was very good at uncovering the uncoverable. He’d worked every type of bad guy from drug lords to gunrunners, from terrorist assassins to organized crime bosses. For the past ten years or so he’d been working weapons proliferation into the U.S. from terror-based sources. He knew what seemed like everyone in law enforcement around the world working similar efforts. And nobody—not a single one of his contacts in the U.K, Australia, South Africa, Japan, New Zealand, Interpol, the NATO teams, or even some of the privately funded organizations—had anything about the stolen Russian nukes. So, there was no need to keep beating that dead horse any further. No, Toby knew that he would have to take a different path that might take him the long way around, but just might in the end lead him to them. Whover that “them” was.
The three men they had captured and the dead body was a path. A very fresh and new path with new clues. Why was Watkins killed? He seemed to be part of the effort—whatever the “effort” was. Killing off your experts suggested that said experts either were no longer needed, or they had turned on you and were going to blow the whistle, or they were stupid and about to get themselves caught, or they weren’t part of the effort and were trying to leverage their way in. And there was also the possibility of any combination of those options.
Which of those choices was Watkins? Toby knew that Watkins was dead for a simple and clear reason. No matter which one of the motivations, or combinations thereof, he matched, there was somebody out there that thought he was going to talk or reveal something they didn’t want revealed. There was absolutely a bigger bad guy out there somewhere who wanted to keep Watkins from talking. And dead men could tell no tales. Maybe.
That brought up a couple more questions as Toby stared blankly at the wall of data he had accumulated. He liked to work old school. There was a whiteboard in his office with sticky notes, taped-up photos, and lines of different colors connecting people and events. It had taken him a couple of hours to put it all there in front of him. He figured that he would snap an image of it with his secure phone and send it to Frank once he had it all there. But there was still a lot to decipher and he was guessing they were running against an already ticking-down clock. And they had gotten to the starting line late.
One thing was for certain: Watkins wouldn’t be talking to anyone. Who didn’t want him talking? And what didn’t they want him talking about? The fact that the assassins were sent to not only kill Watkins but to burn his house and whatever evidence was in it—well, that meant that he had data in his house somewhere that could incriminate someone somewhere.
And as far as the identity of these three men they had apprehended went, well, as far as Toby could determine, they were ghosts. The data that had come back from fingerprints and facial recognition showed that these men were dead defense contractors, each from unrelated small businesses and having supported different overseas defense or intelligence operations within the last decade. The information on the deceased contractors showed that they had been killed in combat support. But here they were in Virginia, killing a CIA analyst. Not bad work for three dead guys.
Fingerprints and facial imagery matched with ninety-seven percent correlation. Therefore, these three men hadn’t died when their records showed. They were alive and in a holding cell in a private facility outside the Beltway. He tracked their economic and tax records, showing that none of them had much of anything before death and they had no families of record still alive. They were individuals who could “die” and then vanish with no loved ones around to ask questions. Toby had seen this before. It was a standard modus operandi for recruiting terrorists and spies. Which category were these men in?
Toby looked at the whiteboard closely. He stared at the printout pictures of the two assailants and their driver. He looked at the picture of Watkins. He looked at pictures of Watkins’s college roommates, Thomas Sing and Keenan Ingersol. He looked at the picture he had of Colonel Lytokov. The only connection was hypothetical. He had nothing tangible. Whoever the big bad was had covered his or her tracks well.
Who or what was tying these people together? Toby looked up because his computer dinged at him with an email alert. He had a new email from forensics. He wasn’t surprised. There was always some overzealous forensics scientist down in the labs that had no life other than the job—the stereotypical nerdy geeky type they always showed in the movies or television shows that practically lived at work in the lab with the dead bodies and such. Well, in this case it would be dead computers and electronics, but Toby laughed at the stereotype. Then it dawned on him that it was sort of like the stereotypical special agent undercover that was always on the job and never had time for a personal life. Those guys were always on those types of shows as well. He actually laughed out loud halfheartedly at that thought. He was just another character in another silly movie or television drama. Or worse yet, he thought, what if he were a nonplayer character in a video game? He laughed again and decided he needed a damned nap.
He swiveled in his chair and opened the email. The content was minimal. It merely requested he come downstairs to the computer lab immediately to see what had been uncovered. That was cryptic enough.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” he said.
* * *
“I didn’t want to say this through email, secure or not.” Vineet Mathur, an FBI computer and electronics forensics engineer, showed Toby to a metal folding chair next to his desk. The desk was covered with a laptop spread open in pieces but wired together with new cables. There were red and blue logic probe wires connected throughout the circuit points on the motherboard, most of them leading into a flat ribbon cable that was in turn connected to a logic analyzer, which in turn was connected to three separate computers that appeared to be randomly located about it. There were several small external boxes that were clearly customized components that looked as if Vineet had put them together from Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, and even IOS- and Android-based tablet devices, each of which appeared to be running and connected directly or wirelessly to something. There was a big red placard above his desk on the wall with a form bearing multiple signatures from various directors stating that THIS AREA IS AUTHORIZED FOR WIRELESS ACTIVITY.
“Why?”
“Even bad guys can use the Freedom of Information Act. I don’t even want my name connected to this,” Vineet said nervously. “At least yours isn’t real and is classified. I’m hoping that will keep it out of FOIA.”
“Okay, I say again”—Toby shrugged—“why?”
“We’d gotten most of the basic files—Matlab, Open Rocket, a paid subscription to RockSim—and there were some Python programs and the like, a few things in Java and CC++ that were all unencrypted and being used by your dead perp. Really, normal engineer kind of stuff,” Vineet explained. “But once I started digging into the machine, I found a hard drive partition. It was hidden and encrypted.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. And hidden under that partition—hidden from Watkins, mind you—was a keylogging malware. And it was also sending the keystroke log—meaning every single key or button Watkins depressed on his computer—to somewhere. I’ll get to that in a minute,” Vineet said nervously and looked over his shoulder and around the room before he continued. He opened up a file and put it on his biggest monitor for Toby to see. There were rows and rows of letters and symbols together in one big run-on sentence. Toby realized it would be the way any keylogger data file must look without punctuation auto-returns, tabs, and spacing of standard text.
“What are these odd symbols here?” Toby pointed.
“Oh, those represent a mouse right button, that one a left button, scroll wheel and so on. These here are representing his touchscreen. There’s a code for every single pixel,” Vineet explained. “Hang on, I can filter all that and just give you the text. For now, that’s what I need you to see.”
He tapped at his keyboard a few times and then hit the enter key. A busy circle spun on the screen for a moment and then another window opened with a much more readable set of keylogger data. Toby noted how it had better spacing, tabs, paragraph spacing, and separations from one app or email to another.
“Yeah, that is much better.” Toby nodded. “So, what is it that you don’t want to talk about on email?”
“This here.” Vineet typed in something in the FIND command function window and the text scrolled to a yellow highlighted word. The word was “nuke.” The paragraph was dated almost six years prior and read as:
Sing,
It would take at least a Zenit or maybe an Atlas V to do what you are talking about. The orbital mass is much higher than just throw weight of a missile. You can’t just launch a nuke to the orbital height and think you’re gonna dock with an orbital platform there already. The velocity differentials would be like 7km/s. You’d destroy everything. Gotta have a second or third stage to circularize the orbit some, crank the inclination, and then phase to catch the orbital platform. Not as simple as all that.
Phil
“Holy shit! They’ve been planning this for a long time!” Toby exclaimed. “What else is in here?”
“That is just the start of it. Read this one like a year later.” Vineet hit the NEXT button on the screen.
Sing,
It would take burns to deorbit the payload, but aerodynamic bodies with control surfaces could give a lot of control. You could use something like what is on the Satan-2 for reentry vehicles.
Phil
“Then here’s one about two years ago.”
Sing,
You are a crazy sonofabitch! I had no idea you were seriously acting on these crazy notions. I thought you were writing a science fiction book or a theory white paper for DOE or something. This is treason! We could go jail for the rest of our lives if we were caught. I want nothing more of this.
Phil
“So, our guy here wasn’t a willing part of it?” Toby asked rhetorically. “That explains some of it. Do they ever say anything about the details? Like what orbital platform or how many nukes or for what purpose?”
“Never. It is always very vague and generic like a homework problem for a graduate student or something. I did a search through the DOE databases and found no reports ever submitted by these two as official reports. My thoughts were unless they are SAPed and unacknowledged reports, they don’t exist. This wasn’t official government work as far as I can tell without approval to get into the DOE SAP information.” Vineet was talking about the Department of Energy’s Special Access Program.
“Wait, you looked at standard sensitive compartmented information caveats, right?” Toby asked.
“Yes. All of the known and acknowledged SCI caveats have no such study I can find. I did see some similar concept type studies for solar flares and a few nukes detonated by terrorists by the JASONs and one by NSA, but nothing about orbital intercepts and such,” Vineet explained.
“We need access to the DOE SAP databases,” Toby said.
“Above my pay grade.” Vineet shrugged.
“Okay, I’ll work that. What else you got?”
“There must have been some sort of encrypted chat app that he used a lot but I can’t find it. That said, this keylogger malware was top notch and still caught the chat stream from his keyboard. Here, look at this. It looks like keylogs of a live conversation.” Vineet pulled out another set of paragraphs from the large file and highlighted it for Toby to see.
…What do you mean I’m in it? You can have the money back. I didn’t know this was a real plan!
…More money? No, but how is that changing the world for better?
…Same thing. Small group of elites running things.
…I have to admit I could run that better than it has been.
…No way in Hell! That is insane.
…Or else? No choice? What the hell does that mean? No choice?!
…Okay, maybe I did really know all along. But millions of lives?
…The long run? That’s not building back better, that’s destroying and starting over!
…To your point. They do mean the same thing. I guess I never thought of it that way. But I will not do this!
…Georgia guide stones? What the hell does that have to do with anything?
…I know they’re nuts! You’re nuts!
…You can trust me, Sing! We’ve known each other for years!
…Okay, okay. I’ll help.
“And here’s the last one he was typing before he was killed. I get the impression he knew he was in trouble.”
“I think that last couple of exchanges tells us that Watkins knew he was a dead man if he didn’t cooperate with them. All his political stuff was just him and not part of this, I guess?”
“Oh, yeah. He was a total eco-Marxist nut job. There are posts and posts in all this about extreme left-leaning politics and changing the world and stuff. But I don’t get the impression they are directly connected to the nukes,” Vineet said. “I do have to admit I haven’t read all the logs yet, though. Would take days or weeks or more.”
“Okay, show me the last conversation with Sing.”
“Here.”
Sing,
I know how you are going to do it. I may not be able to stop you but I can tell some people that can! You can’t do it this way. Too many peophholhpjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj
“The ‘j’ is the last key he ever typed. Was he found on his keyboard?” Vineet asked.
“No. But there was blood on the keys. He probably fell over on it or something and the assassins moved him upright. Not sure on that. The timestamp here, though, was only minutes before we got there.” Toby nodded his head knowingly. “Maybe his hand was on the keys. I don’t recall exactly. There was a lot of shit going on.”
“Right. The forensics team must have cleaned the blood after they recorded all the evidence. It was clean when I got it.”
“Uh, you said something about who was doing the keylogging?” Toby reminded him.
“Oh, yes.” Vineet feverishly tapped keys and dragged his mouse about through various menus until he appeared to have gotten what he was looking for. “I did a search through all of the data, looking for any types of internet protocol addresses, and there was nothing. I scrubbed the entire computer hard drive, all the temp files, the registry, the damaged partitions of the drive, even replicated the malware on another computer to see if there was anything there that would lead me to its point of origin. Nothing.”
“And?”
“Well, while I was setting up my probes, I did an ‘IPconfig’ and found something interesting.”
“Ipconfig?”
“Just tells the IP address of every port connected on the computer.”
“Okay. And?”
“There were more ports there than on the exterior of the computer.” Vineet paused for Toby to understand. Toby didn’t. “Okay, I can tell by the look on your face… Let me see… Okay, you know how a computer has USB ports, Wi-Fi connections, Bluetooth sometimes, and other ports you can connect stuff to right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, this computer had six total ports including the built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. But there was an extra ‘COM’ port I couldn’t identify until I cracked the case open. Look here at the motherboard of this thing. You see this cable leading to the USB port on the exterior case?” Vineet pointed at the motherboard where a cable was pinned in and then traced the cable with his finger to the computer case where it connected to the outside USB connection port. Just on the inside of the case before the cable reached there it formed a Y.
“Yes. I see the split of the cable there. What’s on the end of it?” Toby asked.
“Simplest hack ever.” Vineet pulled at the cable and flipped the dangling other Y end over to reveal a small USB dongle attached. “This is a wireless keyboard dongle. The thing adds a wireless keyboard and/or a mouse to the computer. But there was only one set of such things that came in with this so I’m assuming the user didn’t know this was there.”
“How can a wireless keyboard dongle hack the computer?”
“It’s a transmitter same as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. There just needs to be a receiver somewhere, probably within fifty meters or less to communicate with it. That could have been done from a car, the local router on the cable internet box, or damned near anywhere. You should get a warrant and a team to search the internet boxes nearest his house. But I bet your guys took them.”
“So, somebody put this in his computer, right?”
“Correct.”
“Then they collected the information from his computer and sent it somewhere, right?”
“Correct.”
“Okay, so where did they send it?”
“Good question. And, at first, I thought I wasn’t going to be able to find that information without finding the receiver. But, after connecting to the dongle myself, well, there it was plain as day. An IP address.”
“An IP address to where?”
“I followed it through multiple ghost channels, bad paths, and blind alleys. The only path that was actually somewhere, well, that went directly though to an IP address in Pentagon City. From there, I hit a firewall at a DoD address.”
“Wait, the Pentagon?” Toby started to look over his shoulder now. “You mean whoever was watching our dead guy was from the Pentagon?”
“Somebody at the Pentagon has known about this, whatever it is, for years now. This computer is at least seven years old. From the dust in here and on this dongle, the thing has been going for more than year.”
“How did he not notice it?”
“My guess is that our guy here had so much on this computer and it worked for him that he didn’t want to alter or upgrade. He probably had a newer laptop he used for day-to-day stuff, but this was the one he worked on. Unless he looked in here, I doubt he would have known it was there. Maybe, over time, he might have noticed his hard drive was reducing in size, but these text files, while it is a lot of text, are just text. The file isn’t that big compared to the hard drive size. It would have been years before he caught it. I’m surprised whoever put it there didn’t just send a reformat command in to wipe it clean. Maybe they were planning to, but just didn’t get around to it yet.”
“Maybe we got there before they could.”
“Maybe.”
“Jesus! The Pentagon? Who?”
“Again, above my pay grade. That sounds like special-agent shit to me.”
“Yeah. I guess it does.”