CypherGhost Read online

  Classes were about to begin and she began to shuffle inside the building. Their history class would be starting in a few minutes. As the door shut behind her, she heard it creak open again.

  Martin smiled sheepishly at her. “Hi. Sorry I’m late. I needed to finish my senior project. But, now it’s done. With any luck, the project might get me a scholarship to Stanford.” Now he was beaming with pride.

  She reached for his hand. “What will we do when you’re thousands of miles away and I still have another year of high-school?”

  He shrugged, then smiled. “Don’t worry. My heart will always belong to you.”

  She nodded trying to quell the warmth his words had spilled though her core. “I don’t understand what your project is about. I mean, why do you think it’s so important?”

  He shrugged again. “It changes some of the ways computers protect themselves from viruses and hackers.”

  She was about to tell him that she found computers boring when, outside the school building, three police cars screeched to a halt, their sirens screaming and lights ablaze. Six officers ran up the concrete stairs, through the door. One of the officers directed the other five, pointing down the hallway past where Charlette and Martin stood.

  Charlette moved closer to the wall of gray metal lockers to let the officers rush past them. The lead officer stopped to press a push-to-talk button and speak into a two-way radio on his shoulder while the others continued down the halls and up the stairs of the building.

  The senior officer asked Charlette, “Where, exactly, is the principal’s office?”

  She pointed down the corridor they were in. “That way. Can’t miss it. Officer, what’s going on?”

  “We’re looking for this person.” He flashed Martin’s photo. Then he saw Martin, standing next to her. “Martin Burns, you are under arrest. Place your hands behind you. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You are—”

  “What are the charges?” Martin’s face had turned an ugly shade of red.

  “You’ll find out, soon enough.” With that, the officer cuffed Charlette’s boyfriend and continued to recite Martin’s rights as he perp-marched Martin to one of the patrol cars and pressed him into the back seat. She heard the officer speak again into his comm and then watched the other officers leave the building and reenter their cars. All drove away, leaving her standing at the door, staring through the window in shock.

  Charlette couldn’t move. Tears ran down her cheeks. She should have done something. But what? It had all happened so fast.

  Another student rant toward her. “What was that all about?”

  Charlette’s lips moved but no sound could express she was thinking.

  It was the last time she ever saw Martin. She read about the trial. He’d been accused of stealing classified documents from an intelligence agency of the United States government and was sentenced to ninety-nine years in a federal maximum-security prison.

  As sad as that made her feel, she felt worse two weeks after his trial, when she received a letter. She walked slowly back to the apartment where she and her mother lived, in an old brick building with little to offer except a roof over their heads. She wasn’t sure what she should do with the envelope. It had no return address except for the words FROM MARTIN printed into its upper-left corner. She walked to the kitchen table and sat, staring at the envelope for almost ten minutes before she could will her hands to tear it open.

  All the envelope contained was a single sheet of yellow lined paper:

  Charlette—

  I was falsely accused of this crime. They have me in a small cell, dark and cold. A guard felt sorry for me, gave me a piece of paper and a pen, and said I could send one letter to anyone. He promised to mail this. If he does and you receive it, know that I still love you and always will.

  Martin

  Charlette saved the letter. She was sure she’d never hear from her boyfriend again.

  She’d always had a hard time talking with her mother, and, evidently, so had her father. They had argued constantly, her mom complaining how he spent too little time with her and Charlette. It was no surprise when, the previous year, they divorced. At that point, her mother began drinking. Charlette vowed that when she turned eighteen and graduated from high school, she would leave home and not look back.

  Three months later, she received another note, also on yellow paper, although this note had nothing printed on the outside of the envelope:

  I was one of the guards at Martin Burns’s prison. This morning, I found him dead in his cell. The previous night, two men wearing business suits visited him. They were his first visitors since his sentencing. Although the death has been ruled a suicide, there were marks all over his body and face. I believe he was tortured to death. If you wish to seek justice for him, you’ll have a hard road to follow. There was no evidence of the identities for the visitors that I could find. Martin seemed a nice guy, and seemed to have no idea of the details of his crime. It’s why I had agreed to mail you the other letter.

  While she read the letter, her mother walked into the room. Her mother peered over Charlette’s shoulder. “Whazzat?” Charlette could smell the alcohol on her mother’s breath.

  Charlette exploded. “Martin’s dead.”

  Her mother slurred her words. “Martin got what he deserved.”

  Charlette raised her voice. “Mother, you have no right to say that. You hated Martin. Just like you hated Daddy. You argued with Daddy all the time until he finally left us. I thought that Dad was nasty. Always interested more in his shitty business exploits than us. But it was your fault he left. You never made an attempt to work things out with him.”

  Her mother swung her hand toward Charlette’s face. Charlette ducked to avoid the slap, then sprang from her seat and landed several punches. Her mother fell to the floor.

  Charlette sighed and paced the room. “You’re responsible for all the crap in my life.” She walked to her bedroom and slammed the door. She pulled a suitcase from her closet and packed it.

  The next morning, she moved out of her mother’s house and began using her mother’s maiden name as her last name: “Keegan-Ashbury.”

  She had some cash she’d saved, and it might carry her through until she graduated high school next month, if she was judicious in spending it. She moved into a cheap motel on the town’s main street as her anger built over the coming days.

  Then, she made a plan.

  CHAPTER 2

  March 1, 2:11 p.m.

  Sashakovich-Ainsley home,

  220 East Kirke Street, Chevy Chase, MD

  Ann’s family’s compound filled a city block surrounded by a ten-foot-tall reinforced brick-and-concrete fence topped with razor wire. Inside the wall, a hundred-twenty-year-old eleven-room brick colonial house loomed over a spacious yard and garden.

  Five armed bodyguards patrolled the property’s borders. Cassie had hacked the money to buy the compound years ago, as part of recovering her life from the terrorists that a mole from her own agency had sent after her.

  Ann unpacked her backpack in her bedroom. The trip she’d taken from Russia had taken over a week, scurrying furtively to the border with Georgia and then across the mountains into Turkey. They had driven nonstop, and when they were finally safe in Turkey, Misha’s friend, Chow Sing, dropped Misha and Ann at the airport in Ankara. Their flight home to Washington DC was Ann’s first opportunity to sleep since they had hacked the Russian electric grid.

  The only people who knew her part in preventing the Russians and Chinese from invading the United States had been sworn to secrecy. She tried to convince herself that it would be better that way, kept as a secret.

  Her adopted parents, Lee and Cassie, were in Israel, attending Yigdal Ben-Levy’s funeral. She’d never met the man who had been a director of the Mossad and then Israel’s assistant foreign minister and United Nations ambassador. But, if not for Ben-Levy, the United States would be occupied by Russians west of the Missis
sippi and Chinese east of the Mississippi. The hack she had performed, deep within the bowels of the Lubyanka prison, had set Russia back to the Stone Age for a few days. After that, those within the Russian government who wished to keep the United States from incinerating their country as punishment for its audacity, had set things right.

  Even after sleeping most of the flight home, Ann’s travels had exhausted the teen. She felt hungry, sleepy, and dirty. She thought about forcing herself into the shower first, but her focus kept drifting.

  She lay down on the bed. She hoped for a nap without nightmares.

  She dreamed of the Lubyanka cell she had occupied, and then her hack of the Russian electric grid that stopped Russia’s part in the attempted invasion. She woke up screaming.

  One of the family compound’s guards knocked on her door. “Ms. Sashakovich. Are you okay?”

  Ann was now fully awake. “I’m fine. Just a nightmare.” The guard opened the door and scanned the room. When she smiled at him, the guard nodded and closed the door.

  She looked out her bedroom window. It had become dark. She’d been asleep for over three hours.

  She padded off to the shower, her first in well over a week. She thought about burning the clothes she’d worn for so long, then laughed. The soap and water renewed her as she washed the filth of over a week in Russia from her body.

  As she dressed, she stared at the walls of her room. She had decorated them with posters of musicians she loved listening to, mostly blues singers and guitarists. Soon, she’d be leaving for college, and she thought about taking the posters down. But, as yet, she had no idea what to replace them with. Maybe a poster of Ed Snowden?

  She went downstairs to prepare a bit of dinner. The kitchen had some elaborate appliances, courtesy of Lee, who was a first-order technogeek. She constructed a cheese sandwich and placed it in the toaster oven. In under a minute, the bread caught fire and she pulled the plug. Lee! How the bloody hell am I supposed to use this without creating a disaster?

  While she was pulling the smoking cheese sandwich from the toaster, her cell buzzed in her pocket. She could see the call originated in Israel. “Ann here.”

  “Ann, it’s your mom. Lee and I will be home tomorrow. We’re boarding our flight now. How are you?”

  “Tired, hungry, but otherwise fine. When, exactly, will you be home?”

  “We just woke up about two hours ago. We were just dropped off at Ben Gurion Airport. Looks like at least an hour to get through security, so we should make our flight. We should be at Reagan by the time you get up tomorrow morning. Just in time for breakfast with you. Lee sends his love. Jon and Avram missed you.”

  And then the call was over. Ann stared at the ruined sandwich. Not salvageable. She pulled food from the fridge and constructed a makeshift dinner. Instant barley mushroom soup, leftover fried chicken that was probably a week old, and for desert, a stale doughnut. After the airline food, it tasted delicious.

  She’d have little to do until Monday when she would get back to her senior year in high school. But, thinking about the adventure she had just survived, she now wondered if, in comparison, the rest of her life would be boring.

  She felt her hacking skills now surpassed those possessed by William Wing, her superhacker teacher. But he had the creds, and her best work was a tightly held secret, dangerous even to mention to another hacker. Earning her college degree at Stanford University would give her a chance to begin developing a reputation as a hacker.

  ONE YEAR LATER

  CHAPTER 3

  November 23, 11:41 a.m.

  A studio apartment,

  somewhere in Pennsylvania

  The apartment building was an aging brick tenement, and most of the residents were working-class and poor. Charlette Keegan-Ashbury felt she could identify with them. She watched single mothers, holding down two jobs with their children in daycare, as they returned in the evenings with their little ones. She had little in common with them, and they left her alone, which suited her. She had moved into the building because it was cheap and surprisingly quiet.

  When Charlette graduated from high school, she was accepted into a local community college on a full scholarship. She started during their summer semester, the month after her high-school graduation.

  She had decided to study computer forensics as the first part of her plan. At first it was her intention to see what Martin had done and, if she could, prove his innocence. She had expected computers to bore her. But in high school, she had learned French and Spanish, and found she had an affinity for languages. She found, to her surprise, that computer languages were another natural skill for her. Sort of a combination of foreign language combined with logic. She aced classes in C++, C#, CSS, HTML, Java, and Python. She followed these with more classes in computer forensics, debugging programs as an art form, and everything else the school had to offer. Soon, she had expertise in microcode and peripheral binary controls, packet headers, and pointer-linked lists. She understood how TCP/IP stacks and parallel line packet traffic functioned.

  Within a few weeks, she bluffed her way into a job as a computer programmer at a small computer gaming startup, where she learned a host of new computer skills from her coworkers. One of her peers, a grungy, unkempt technogeek, became her friend and was obviously interested in bedding her. To gain his trust and earn his attention, she agreed to have sex with him. She asked him, as they lay beside each other, “Milton, how can I learn how to hack a website?”

  Milton gave her a tutorial. And when she had learned all he had to offer, she stopped sleeping with him. In her evenings, she sat in the hotel room and tried her hand at computer hacking. Slowly, she was able to breach firewalls at the library, a local hospital, and then she tried to hack the Akron Police Department. This took her several tries.

  She asked Milton, “Can you control anything that has a computer chip in it?”

  “Well, duh!”

  “A car?”

  “Yeah, easy. Why do you want to know?”

  She thought of asking Milton for help on hacking medical devices and commercial aircraft, but didn’t want anyone to know what she really intended.

  Later that evening, in Milton’s apartment she offered him sex. After he finished, she waited for him to fall asleep. Using his computer, she searched the internet, including the Dark Web, for hackers she could communicate with anonymously.

  Charlette was surprised to find there were millions of hackers who spoke English, and many more who spoke foreign languages. She could easily understand Spanish and French hackers, and set about learning German to complement her skillset.

  She was in walking distance from her evening classes and worked as a programmer during the days. Her job wasn’t bringing in enough cash, and she thought of jumping ship from the startup, but then she would lose access to the other programmers from whom she might still learn.

  Instead, Charlette was able to rob one of the regional banks of small amounts of cash. She stole only what she needed—not enough to signal that a fraud was underway in their computer security systems.

  When she was alone, Charlette had stopped referring to herself as a person. Now, she thought of herself as the “CypherGhost.” When Martin was arrested and convicted of stealing sensitive documents from a government database, she’d no idea what any of it meant. All she knew was he’d be gone decades. Now, she knew better.

  She completed her special project to prove Martin had been set up. It turned out to be a relatively easy task, but when she anonymously published the evidence, it was totally ignored. Now, she no longer desired merely to prove his innocence. What she wanted was relief from the anger that welled within her.

  At first, her skills were no match for the firewalls and traps placed within some of the networks of her bureaucratic targets. Gradually, her skills improved to include tricks and stratagems to evade and bypass. Soon, she was able to hack into almost any data network.

  She knew that the more she hacked, the larger the pr
obability that people would begin hunting her. Some would be like-minded hackers. Black hats. Most would be computer security analysts working for the world’s governments. White hats.

  She took a leave from the college and hacked a substantial amount of cash from banks to pay for tools she could use to further her objective of finding and punishing Martin’s killers. She began limiting the length of her stay in any one motel. No more than two nights in any location, and she rotated among the identities she hacked. She thought, even paranoids have real enemies.

  She wondered how difficult it would be to wreak revenge on those who had wrongly punished Martin. She decided to try anything she thought had a chance of working, even if there were side casualties. They all deserved to die. But that wasn’t enough. She also wanted to make it impossible for the government ever to do to anyone else what they’d done to Martin. Ever.

  She had just arrived in the little hamlet in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The motel she booked herself into had seen better days. No one would expect to find a skilled hacker in a place like this, shoddy and run down as it was.

  Today, her target was the flight control system of Skylark Airlines Flight 982 flying from the San Francisco airport to Reagan National. The woman she tracked had booked a first-class seat on that flight. She had discovered the identities of every juror and the judge of Martin’s case. Her target was court judge Margaret O’Brien. She’d given Martin his life sentence. Charlette planned to let the aircraft take off, and when it reached an altitude of 35,000 feet, she’d turn off the engines. One hundred and sixty-seven people were on board, but she didn’t care.

  Margaret O’Brien must pay for Martin’s death.