Zero days, p.8
Zero Days, page 8
‘We do have to make sure it’s the people who benefit,’ said a revived Kreuzberg original, trying to wrench back control from the geeks.
‘It’s got to enable businesses that are shunned by the banks,’ said an academic.
‘People’s finance,’ said another.
The discussion was calmer now and seemed to be winding down.
Drayton had an idea. He raised a hand and said, ‘I think it’s the dog’s bollocks.’
There was silence at first. Most not getting it, giving him looks that said, ‘You what?’
The Labrador stirred, maybe thinking it was about time to stretch down there, but was so stoned it could hardly raise its head.
Only two people laughed. The woman with the red hair said, ‘He means it’s really fantastic.’ She spoke with a broad Scottish accent.
And one of the two guys on Drayton’s radar said, ‘Too right.’
He spoke with a London accent.
Drayton and Norgaard looked at each other. They watched as both paid, using their smartphones, most likely in Bitcoin. It was 8.42 p.m.
‘I’ll follow the guy,’ Drayton said to Norgaard. ‘You take the girl. Let’s see where they end up.’
The guy was clean-shaven, boyish looking, with short curly hair. He was wearing a plain blue T-shirt over faded black jeans, and what looked like a new pair of red and white trainers on oversized feet. He put on a black jacket as he left the bar.
He crossed the road, passing under the overhead railway line and then deeper into Kreuzberg’s graffiti-lined streets. Five minutes later the man that might be Neo entered a building with a contorted metal sculpture out the front and daubed with anti-capitalist slogans. A squat.
Drayton found a small bar opposite, where he ordered a beer, took a stool at the window and phoned Norgaard, telling the Norwegian where he’d ended up and saying he’d hang there for an hour or two and watch the place. Norgaard said he’d followed the woman to some high-end restaurant and she was in there now. He said he doubted she was Neo. ‘So looks like he’s with you.’
Norgaard joined Drayton in the bar. ‘How do they live in those places?’ he asked, eyeing the graffiti with distaste. ‘They call it art. Vandalism, if you ask me.’
Drayton didn’t answer. He was looking at his phone, at missed messages from Anna. Two of them saying, ‘Let’s talk,’ and suggesting they meet at a place close to their apartment.
‘I need to run an errand. Give me half an hour,’ he said to the Norwegian.
He opened the scooter app and found one parked a couple of blocks away. It took him ten minutes to reach the bar, which was attached to one of Anna’s favourite theatres. Wooden floors, big fading leather armchairs. Fans overhead. The server told him he’d just missed her. She said there were still a few tickets left for the late performance of a dance show she described as an ‘interplanetary, post-dystopian, trans-disciplinary cabaret.’ Drayton said thanks, but it sounded too much like his day job.
He drove the scooter to his apartment, where he ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time. He called for Anna, but there was no reply. He walked to the bedroom. The wardrobe doors were open and her clothes were gone. Then he saw the yellow Post-it Note on the pillow, on which she had scrawled, ‘I’m sorry Chuck. I’m moving out. Need time. I can put up with a virus or two in my computer. Maybe even a worm. But not with you. Sorry xx’.
*****
Drayton pushed a grainy photograph across the table. It was from the bar, Wizard’s Brew, taken on his cell phone, and it showed Neo glancing across the room shortly before he left for the squat. He then showed a second photograph to which he’d matched it, the same short curly hair and slightly mischievous face.
‘His name is James Timothy Edwards, a twenty-year-old unemployed Londoner. He arrived two days ago on a flight from Bangkok, Thailand. He left the UK eighteen months ago, skipped probation, which he’d been given for hacking. Sold software for crashing computers. Ran the business out of his parents’ attic. One of the conditions of probation was that he wouldn’t touch a computer.’
Norgaard said he’d spoken to Neo’s mother. ‘She was cautious when I phoned. I told her I was an old friend, who’d met her son travelling. She said he’d gone first to what she called “one of those old communist countries.” The last time he’d been in contact was four months ago from Bangkok, saying he was travelling in the Far East.’
‘Social media?’ asked Schoenberg.
‘Facebook, Twitter accounts. But largely inactive since he left the UK,’ Drayton replied.’
And Milo said, ‘He’s kept most communications anonymous. Mostly through dark web forums and chat rooms, and the pattern fits his travels.’
They were sitting drinking coffee in a spartan café with peeling linoleum floors and table tops, yellow walls and dim fluorescent lighting. It had once been a canteen for Stasi spies, where East Germany’s secret policemen would take a break from their surveillance of the entire population. It was now part of the Stasi Museum, and the museum had retained the café’s drab décor, though Drayton was pleased to see that at least the coffee machine was of a more recent vintage.
Schoenberg sat on one side of a long table; Drayton, Milo and Norgaard on the other. It was the morning after the discovery of the person that might be Neo. Milo had the pale look of a gaming addict after a night in front of the consul; Norgaard, usually so decisive when it came to choosing food, struggled to concentrate on the café’s menu. Drayton was riding a caffeine-induced high, anxiously swinging a foot under the table. They had taken turns to monitor the squat until Schoenberg could arrange what he called a ‘watcher’ through his police contacts. Then they’d been up most of the night following leads, Milo burrowing deeper into the dark web, Norgaard and Drayton working their contacts, crunching the data from police and news archives, trying to pin a real identify on Neo. If Neo was involved with Cerberus, he had to be good, but he was also young and sloppy, leaving the trail to Berlin that Milo had picked up. Drayton was convinced they’d find something in his past. Hackers didn’t just emerge from nowhere. And there it was, Neo on the front page of a London newspaper after his conviction.
If any of them thought there was anything unusual in Schoenberg calling the meeting in the old Stasi headquarters, they kept it to themselves. They knew better than to try and second-guess him. The German said the place was private, said it without a hint of irony, that he liked to come here from time to time ‘to remember’. To remember what, he never said.
He looked fresh and rested. He always did. ‘What else have you got?
‘8.42,’ Drayton said. ‘8.42 is when Neo paid for his drinks in Bitcoin in Wizard’s Brew. Bitcoin is anonymous, but it’s not private, so we were able to pinpoint the transaction, and we now have the address of Neo’s wallet.’
‘But don’t they use multiple wallets, and mix up the Bitcoins?’ Schoenberg asked.
‘They do, and they can. Which makes identifying a wallet harder,’ Milo said. ‘But Neo’s sloppy. He keeps using the same one, the one he used to buy his drinks in the Wizard’s Brew.’
‘Whatever he was doing in the Far East, he was making some very good money,’ Norgaard said. ‘There were a series of six big monthly payments into his wallet, totalling around twenty thousand US dollars a time, almost like a salary.’
‘Six months in the Far East,’ said Schoenberg. ‘One hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Nice work for a twenty-year-old unemployed Londoner.’
‘And he’s cashed out twice, I’m guessing through a cryptocurrency exchange,’ Drayton said.
‘Do we know the owner of the wallet that was paying him or the exchange?’ asked Schoenberg.
‘That’s what we need. That’s what we’re working on. That’s what can lead us to Cerberus,’ Drayton said.
Drayton’s phone rang. ‘Hello Ric, what can I do for you?’
His listened for a while, Ric Cullen on the line, trying to sound friendly. Then Drayton said, ‘Don’t worry about it Ric… We all lose it from time to time… Neo? We’re still looking into that… No, nothing new at this point… Sure, you’ll be the first to know.’
‘Ric Cullen?’ Schoenberg asked.
‘Yeah. Wants to know, “Any more news on Neo?”.’
‘They didn’t sound like they cared the other day,’ said Milo.
‘Oh, the Cardinals care,’ said Norgaard. ‘I’ve had calls from Wang and Strykov asking the same question.’
And you said?’ asked Schoenberg.
‘We’re working on it.’
Then Schoenberg said, ‘It’s very important we keep this information to ourselves.’
He paid the bill, pushing a handful of Euros across the table’s stained linoleum. ‘I think we should perhaps have a conversation with James Timothy Edwards.’
They left the Stasi canteen down a long, dark corridor to a lobby with a bust of Karl Marx and a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the KGB, the Soviet secret police. Drayton checked his phone as they walked, looking for messages from Anna. He’d heard nothing since last night, since the Post-it. She wasn’t returning his calls or his messages.
A man greeted Schoenberg with an enormous bear hug. Schoenberg introduced him as Heinz and said that if it hadn’t been for Heinz there would be no Stasi museum. ‘This man had done more than anybody to keep these horrible, but necessary memories alive.’
Heinz was a small, compact man of Schoenberg’s age, with thinning grey hair and a laugh that belonged in a bierkeller.
‘It’s certainly been a struggle at times, he said. ‘We’ve always been grateful for what you did for us, Wolfgang.’
Heinz took Schoenberg by the arm. ‘The new exhibition is fantastic. Let me show you, very quickly. Two minutes.’
Norgaard said he had to make a call. The others followed Heinz up a broad staircase at the back of the lobby. Heinz told them that deciding what to display was always tough since there were so may files. ‘If you placed all the Stasi files side by side, they’d stretch for a hundred miles.’
The museum occupied building number one of the sprawling complex that once housed the East German secret police. It was the building where the long-time head of the Stasi, Erich Mielke, had his office and from where he ran the country’s largest employer, with 100,000 full-time staff and nearly 200,000 informers. Drayton studied the old spymaster’s solid old desk with its bank of clunky phones, a quote on the wall saying, ‘Comrades, we must know everything’.
Heinz showed them a series of newly framed documents, pointing at one that looked to Drayton like a deranged game of snakes and ladders.
‘It shows a Stasi investigation.’ Heinz said. ‘In 1985 they decided a computer scientist who’d become a playwright should be investigated. It took them six months to come up with this, with seventeen full-time spies and countless informers, including the man’s then wife, as well as friends and neighbours. This is the result: a map of all his friendships. Every relationship. All his movements. Everything he does and everything he likes. All his connections.’
‘Creepy,’ said Drayton.
‘But you know what?’ said Schoenberg. ‘Today you could learn this, and more, simply by accessing a Facebook profile. Or Instagram. Or even a Google search. The Stasi could only have dreamed about that kind of access to personal information. That sort of power.’
Drayton looked at Schoenberg, still finding it impossible to figure him out, an old spymaster worried about privacy and surveillance. Maybe it was a German thing. The history, the Nazis and then the Stasi. Most of the spooks Drayton had met didn’t give a rat’s arse about privacy.
‘Wow, is this for real,’ said Milo, standing in front of a display cabinet containing cameras hidden in belts, tree trunks, a worker’s hard hat, even in a watering can.
‘All rather quaint, don’t you think? said Heinz. ‘But in their day, the Stasi was considered the most effective and ruthless of East Europe’s secret police. Only they failed, didn’t they Wolfgang? Because for all their power, all their toys, they didn’t foresee their own demise, and the collapse of their own country.’
Drayton guessed that Heinz could have talked all day. He had an almost morbid fascination with the Stasi’s secret world. They left him still musing over how best to display that tyranny. A few minutes later they were in Schoenberg’s black chauffeur-driven Mercedes, driving back along roads lined with soulless communist-era apartment buildings of pre-fabricated concrete. The old East Berlin. The blocks had been given a facelift, maybe several facelifts, since unification, but that still couldn’t disguise their grim monotony.
‘I have a cell phone number for James Timothy Edwards,’ said Norgaard, who was squeezed in the back between Milo and Drayton. Schoenberg in the passenger seat. He explained that Neo had bought a local SIM card when he landed, and registered it using his passport. Norgaard obtained the phone number from the service provider.
He rang the number.
‘Hey James,’ he said, sounding friendly and familiar.
A hesitant voice at the other end didn’t identity itself, just saying, ‘Who is this?’
‘A friend of a friend. I’m told you may have some cryptocurrency to invest and I may be able to help you… Can’t say more on the phone… Where are you staying? There’s a coffee shop… That’s the one… I’ll explain when we meet.’
Norgaard ended the call. ‘That was surprisingly straightforward,’ he said.
They drove to Kreuzberg, the car stopping a couple of blocks from the squat where Neo was staying, and around the corner from the coffee shop in which Norgaard had arranged to meet him.
The Norwegian left the car. ‘Let me talk to him alone. At least initially.’
‘The more we learn the less sense it makes,’ Drayton said to Schoenberg. ‘Let’s assume Cerberus has found a flaw in the fabric of computer chips that we don’t know about. That’s a big deal. That’s the mother of all zero days. But he’s just using it to deliver ransomware. Basic ransomware. And as far we know only a fraction of the targets are paying up. If you had that capability, surely you’d do more? Once you’ve broken in, a system is wide open, everything’s possible. Theft, spying, sabotage. Take the banks, they have some of the best cyber defences outside the military. If you break in there, you can manipulate the markets. Make a lot of money that way. Plunder ATMs, empty their vaults. It’s like you develop a super-sophisticated nuclear missile and use it to deliver balloons.’
He paused. Looking for a reaction from Schoenberg. There was none, or at least none the German was showing.
‘It makes no sense,’ Drayton continued. ‘Unless this isn’t about extortion at all. Unless it’s all a show. A performance. A sales pitch. Unless Cerberus is just demonstrating a weapon. Showing what it’s capable of.’
‘Showcasing it for potential buyers,’ Schoenberg said, running a thumb and forefinger through his short moustache. ‘I’m hoping that perhaps James Timothy Edwards can provide us with some answers.’
But Neo never showed up at the coffee shop, and Norgaard returned to the car looking agitated. There was urgency in his voice. ‘The squat,’ he said. ‘Let’s get to the squat.’
First they saw the flashing lights. Then two police cars. An ambulance. A police woman telling people to move back as she taped off an area in front of Neo’s squat.
‘What happened?’ asked Drayton.
‘Who knows what goes on in there,’ said the police woman.
An older man standing nearby pointed towards the top of the building. ‘Somebody jumped. From up top there.’
It was then they saw the body on the sidewalk. It had been covered by a blanket, but blood was oozing from underneath. One foot was sticking out from the bottom of the blanket. It was wearing a bright red and white trainer.
Chapter Three
Digital Futures
Yangon, Myanmar
He checked his cell phone. First the battery, which was almost full. That was good, though he’d brought along a portable charger, just in case. The camera was hungry on power, especially when he was shooting video, and he needed plenty of video.
He looked at his Facebook news feed and Twitter. The latest photographs were spreading fast: grisly images of burned and mutilated bodies, burning homes, the head of a dog superimposed on the body of a Muslim cleric. A pig’s head on another. Alongside the photographs were the denunciations: Rapists! Murderers! Animals! A rising tide of poison, each hate-filled post seemingly trying to outdo the last. And most ending with the time and place for revenge.
He smiled as he scrolled.
He took the train. It was slow, but probably still the quickest way of reaching Thaketa Township in the east of the city. The police would close roads to help smooth the passage of the main convoy of trucks from the Organisation for the Protection of Race and Religion, but he wanted to be there ahead of them. To see them arrive.
His home was in Insein Township on the other side of the city, a scruffy first floor apartment in a run-down tenement block he shared with his parents and two sisters. The block was close to Insein Prison, its watchtowers visible beyond a wasteland strewn with smouldering rubbish and patrolled by scrawny dogs, rummaging for scraps.
His father had once told him it was a place of immense cruelty. But mostly, those living in its shadow preferred not to acknowledge its existence. It was something dark and unspeakable. For the older people especially. They wouldn’t even look at it. Wouldn’t walk anywhere near it. It seemed to have a curse-like hold on them. He could sense the fear inside his father if he was forced to pass anywhere within sight of those watchtowers.
He was twenty-one years old and too young to remember those days, at least not in any detail. The military had run the country for five decades, but The Lady was now in charge. She’d spent time inside that prison. And she was a patriot, building a new Burma for the Burmese and defending Buddhism.
