Exposure (17 page)

“Who is this guy?” Shelton whispered. “Are we in the Matrix?”

“I’m not taking any blue pills,” Hi warned. “Zion sucked.”

“Just be cool.” Ben was about to knock when static poured from a speaker on the camera.

“Who are you?” a voice demanded.

“My name is Ben. My friend Ronnie said you can . . . provide certain services.”

The lens panned left, then right, scanning the group. “Who are they? Why’d you bring them here?”

Ben shrugged. “Our project involves all of us. We have money.”

The camera froze for a moment, then swung back toward the elevator bank.

A full minute passed.

“
Welp.
” Hi stretched. “This was fun. Anyone want to hit that Arby’s on the—”

A series of bangs. The jangle of a large chain. Then the armored door swung inward.

I peered into the apartment. Saw no one.

“This is buggin’ me out,” Shelton whispered. “Let’s bail.”

“C’mon.” Ben strode inside, forcing the rest of us to follow.

The unit was small. Beside the front door was a phone-booth-sized bathroom. Ahead was a modest living room crammed with computer equipment.

And I mean
crammed.
Racks of hardware lined the walls and covered every square inch of the baseboards. The sheer quantity of it put our modest bunker setup to shame. In the far corner, a narrow hallway led to the rear of the apartment, which presumably contained a kitchen and bedroom.

The living room’s only furniture was a sprawling circular workstation, the kind used by fancy corporate receptionists. It held an array of monitors, laptops, modems, and drives, along with other devices and gizmos I couldn’t identify.

Sitting in the center was an Asian man with spiky black hair and blue eyes. I guessed his age at maybe twenty. Chang wore a gray sweatshirt, cargo shorts, and diamond studs in both ears. Mandarin characters tattooed both his forearms.

“You’re Ben?” Chang’s voice was soft.

“I am. You’re Eddie Chang?”

Chang smiled. “For this request, I’m known as Variance. Did you bring the flash drive?”

Ben nodded, then snapped his fingers in my direction.

“You told him?” I hissed, furious. The snap hadn’t helped. “Just like that?”

Ben gave me an exasperated look. “How else was I supposed to explain the job?”

“Relax,” Chang said smoothly. “You’re Tory, I presume?”

He knows my name. Damn it, Ben.

“I am.” Icy. “I take it Ben has already explained what we want?”

“Yes. And don’t worry, I’m a pro. Cracking files is what I do, and I know how to keep my mouth shut.” Chang leaned forward. “A trait I expect
your
party to emulate. Clear?”

“Clear,” I said.

“No problem at all.” Hi stared at our host with something close to awe. “And if you need, like, an assistant on weekends, or something, I’m your man. I know how to brew coffee.”

“True that.” Shelton was eyeballing Chang’s equipment, his prior reservations forgotten. “This is the coolest place I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Chang winked. “Thanks, guys, but I work alone. It’s a hacker thing. Now let’s get down to business, shall we?”

Ben nodded my direction. “She has the drive.”

“We’ll get to that. You said you have the money?”

“Five hundred,” Ben replied. “As agreed.”

“Excellent. Now would be a perfect time to hand it over.”

Ben looked to Shelton, who scrambled for his wallet. He handed Chang a thick wad of twenties we’d withdrawn before leaving Folly Beach.

“Cash is going fast these days,” Shelton muttered. “Better be worth it.”

“Thank you, sir.” Then Chang gave me an expectant look.

I hesitated. The contents of Karsten’s flash drive could potentially devastate our lives.

“We have to show it to someone,” Ben said quietly.

Ben was right. Sighing, I dug the drive from my pocket and extended it to the hacker.

Pulled it back just as his fingers drew near.

“One condition.”

Chang smiled wryly. “Of course.”

“You don’t read the decrypted files. Ever. If you
can
access them, that is.”

“Fine.” He shrugged. “Honestly, I’m not all that interested.”

I dropped the drive into his open palm.

“Much obliged.” Chang popped the data stick into a USB drive and began tapping keys.

“The files are encrypted,” Shelton said. “Commercial grade.”

“I imagine so,” Chang quipped, “or you wouldn’t need me. First step is to determine how tightly the windows are nailed shut.”

Minutes passed as Chang typed, studied the screen, typed, then studied more. Then he swiveled his chair, his fingers hammering a second keyboard. A stream of characters filled the monitor to his right.

Finally, Chang rubbed his chin. “Well, this isn’t the kiddie stuff I expected.”

“Can you explain what you’re doing?” I asked.

Chang spun back to face us. “What do you know about file encryption?”

“Almost nothing,” I admitted. “That’s Shelton’s department.”

I felt Shelton swell beside me, but he didn’t speak. A trainee does not interrupt a master explaining his craft.

“Encryption is the process of encoding information so that only a person with the proper key can read it.” Chang tapped the monitor filled with letters and numbers. “Computer encryption is based on traditional cryptology, which has been around forever. Microchips just give it more juice.”

“So it’s just fancy codes,” I said. “And the ciphers needed to unlock them.”

We had some experience on those counts.

“Exactly. Online, ciphers are called algorithms. They allow a user to craft a message and give a certain range of possible combinations. A key, on the other hand, helps the user figure out the one correct answer on any given occasion.”

I followed so far. “So what’s on this flash drive?”

Chang pointed to a monitor on the opposite side of the workstation. “These files are protected by a simple symmetric-key encryption. To open them, we have to match the key used by the originating system.”

“So you need to crack the code.”

“Of course. But there’s a problem.”

Chang leaned back in his chair. “The strength of any key is determined by the length of its code, which is measured in bits. I can crack any 56-bit DES system with brute force, and that’s working through seventy quadrillion possible combinations.”

Hi whistled. “I take it you don’t type them in, one at a time.”

“Not on your life. But that’s not what we’re facing here. These files are protected by an AES key system. A real nasty one, too, with 128-bit keys. That’s more combinations. A
lot
more.”

“How many?” Shelton asked.

Chang grinned. “A brute force attack—trying all possible combinations one at a time—would have to cycle through 3.4 × 10 to the 38th power number of keys. The human mind can’t grasp a number that big.”

I blinked. “That sounds impossible.”

“It
is
impossible. That’s the point. Even with a supercomputer, it’d take a billion billion years to run all those combinations. Exponentially longer than the universe has existed.”

I gave him a flat look. “So how are you going to beat the encryption?”

Chang thumb-tapped the desktop. “I could look for a cheat algorithm, to give me some portion of the key, but even that wouldn’t help much against 128-bit encryption. I’ll have to use a backdoor instead.”

My arms crossed. “Backdoor?”

“Some encryption programs have a weakness,” Chang explained. “A way around the system-key construct. A shortcut, if you will, that bypasses the need for matching keys altogether. Programmers use these backdoors to get into and out of their programs during coding. Many leave one of those secret ways intact, even after they’re finished, in case they want to poke around in the future.”

“Seriously?” I scoffed. “That’s pretty dishonest.”

Chang laughed. “Most programmers grew up as hackers. It’s in the blood, so to speak.”

“That’s
awesome,
” Hi said. “So does this system have a backdoor?”

Chang smiled wide, exposing a row of pearly whites. “It does. I recognize this encryption system, and, more importantly, I know who wrote it. He’s a weird guy, lives in a Soho loft filled with goldfish tanks.”

My pulse began to race. “And you have this backdoor?”

“Yes. For a price.”

“We agreed to five hundred,” Ben growled.

“That was before. Now you’re asking for the crown jewels.”

“How much?” I demanded.

Chang met my eye. “Five thousand. Cash. Non-negotiable.”

Damn it.

“Fine.”

What choice did we have?

• • •

“They’re back.” Chang reached beneath his super-desk and pressed a button.

The door buzzed, then swung open. Shelton and Ben entered.

“Any problems at the bank?” I asked.

Shelton shook his head, handed me two bound stacks of hundred-dollar bills. “We’re getting close to tapped out, though. I hope this is worth it.”

Me too.

I slapped the cash onto the desktop. “Here. Now get to work.”

“Already done.”

Chang handed me an unlabeled CD in a clear plastic case. “All files, decrypted and ready for viewing. Unread, as agreed.”

“The flash drive?”

His blue eyes danced with amusement. “Almost forgot.”

Chang was about to remove the drive when something caught his attention.

“Hold up.” He scooted to the closest monitor, hands searching for a keyboard.

“Yes?” I asked.

“There’s something . . . else on this drive. It’s odd. Here.”

An image flashed onscreen—a scrambled list of folders and subfiles.

I leaned over the desktop for a better view. “Did you miss those?”

Chang shook his head. “This is a shadow file tree. Those files aren’t physically contained on this data stick, but they can be accessed by it.”

Shelton joined me by the monitor. “I don’t understand.”

“This drive
can
access those files,” he explained, “but not remotely. The documents listed here are actually stored on a server located somewhere else. To read them, you’d have to insert this drive into that specific server.”

Chang eyed me curiously. “This is
extremely
sophisticated. Military grade, or something else that’s ultra-secure like medical records, or corporate R and D.
256-bit encryption.
What kind of files are these?”

“That’s not part of our deal,” I replied frostily.

Chang nodded, but the speculative looked didn’t fade.

“So you can’t open them?” Ben said.

“No. No one else can, either. What you see are similar to links, but they won’t work online. To open those files, you’d have to physically connect to their home network. And I’d bet my PlayStation it’s a closed system, which means you’d have to actually be in the server room.”

“Can you tell us anything else?” I pressed.

Chang was silent for several heartbeats. “Maybe. Hold on a minute.”

More like ten.

Chang typed. Grunted. Rotated among his stations. Even consulted a three-ring binder.

“Here’s what I got,” he said finally. “It’s not much. These shadow files were created within the last three months, by a different user from the batch I just decoded for you. But I can’t identify either one. Your drive appears to be a legacy key to another system, in another network. Theoretically, it can still access the servers.”

I straightened. “Three months old? From a different user?”

That made no sense. Karsten obviously didn’t open new files.

Then who did?

And how would
new
files be linked to Karsten’s mothballed parvovirus experiment?

“That’s right.” Chang shrugged. “But I can’t open them. As I said, you’d have to find the server to match the encryption key. What’s strange is that, when I got past the encryption, this file tree downloaded
itself
onto your flash drive. That’s high-tech synchronization, even though you can’t access the content.”

“And there’s no explanation of what the files are, or where they’re from?”

“No. Just a group heading. B-Series.”

B-Series? Why did that send a jolt to my nerves?

“If you let me keep the stick,” Chang said, “I might be able to find the server.”

“No,” I said instantly. Then, “No, thank you. We’ll take it from here. Can I have the drive back please?”

An odd look twisted Chang’s features. Annoyance? Frustration?

Before I could say more, he spun and tapped a few keys. Data streamed across all four monitors, then they all went blank.

Chang removed Karsten’s drive and handed it to me.

“Good luck. Change your mind, and you know where to find me.”

With a series of waves and mumbled thanks, we made our way out.

All the way down to Ben’s car, my thoughts raced.

We had Karsten’s files! Finally.

But what was this B-Series? Who was running active files, ones that magically appeared on Karsten’s old data stick? Who else even
knew
about Karsten’s secret work?

“Success.” Ben clicked on his seat belt. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

I nodded, distracted. Not quite sharing his enthusiasm.

We had what we came for. The mission was a success.

So why did I have a sinking feeling?