Chapter 1
Offices of The Barker, Pioneer Square, Seattle
The headline read: Ransomware Attack Threatens Greyson Systems, Inc.
It was one of thirty articles The Barker published before I arrived at work that morning, but it was the only one that got me to click the link. Probably because it made me wonder whether America’s most-wanted hacker had finally come out of hiding. There were only ten people on earth who knew the name Innerva Shah, but that headline had her name ringing in my ears.
I noticed it while scanning our top stories on my laptop and sipping a coffee, as I did every morning when I reached the office. Because The Barker relies on clicks for our survival, our biggest stories are usually a mix of clickbait BS and thinkpiece essays about the topics grabbing headlines across the country.
That morning was no different.
Leaked Audio of Hollywood Hunk Tyler Morgan’s Racial Rant
Tricky Nip Slip Trips Up Hipsters
Inner Peace Through Apps?
Top Executive Fired in Shakeup After Leak of The Atlantis Vision Screener
The Avocado: Scourge of a Generation?
As part of my program of “self-care,” I’d stopped reading most of the stuff we published months ago. Plus, keeping an eye on our content was Bird’s job. He was my number two at The Barker, and I trusted him to find the right balance between stories like the ones I mentioned, and the decent journalism we needed to do so we could sleep at night.
He handled the content, I handled the business, and business had been booming ever since we started doing real journalism from time to time. Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t winning any Pulitzers at The Barker, but we’d expanded our hard news staff and hired a handful of investigative journalists who reminded me of myself fifteen years ago, back when I’d been a real reporter.
Anyway, the article that caught my attention that morning was from the Tech Triune, a three-woman blog based in Silicon Valley. We’d purchased the site in 2010, allowing them to retain their name while acquiring exclusive rights to publish their content on The Barker.
The story in question wasn’t something I would have clicked on four months ago. Even though I run a major website, I’m not much of a tech guy, and I count on Bird to keep me informed about major shakeups in the industry. But ever since my run-in with the dark side of America’s private security forces, I’d had a special interest in large security firms with innocuous-sounding names.
According to the piece, Greyson Systems was the Midwest’s largest network security company, known for providing high-end protection to both government and private contractors working on various aspects of U.S. security. Essentially, Greyson was the company doing network security for the companies doing security.
And, also according to the piece, Greyson’s systems had been taken over by a ransomware attack. The anonymous hacker holding their systems hostage had a single demand: shut down all operations within seventy-two hours.
The demand was absurd on its face. Why would a company shut itself down just because a hacker took its servers hostage? I found out later that things were much more complicated but, at that moment, I was still trying to figure out exactly what a ransomware attack was.
Luckily, the article explained.
A previously unknown hacking outfit calling itself The Freedom Collective has initiated a ransomware attack that is unique in scope and purpose, though unclear in its ultimate goal, Tech Triune has learned.
In general, ransomware is malicious software that takes over and sometimes locks a user’s computer, threatening to delete data or expose private information if the user doesn’t take a specified action. What makes this particular ransomware attack unique is that the threat goes much further.
Using an advanced technique known as cryptoviral extortion, The Freedom Collective has encrypted all of Greyson Systems’s files, making them inaccessible and rendering most of their business inoperable.
In addition to the unique scope and sophistication of this attack—taking control of a major networking company would only be possible by an advanced team of hackers—the hack is peculiar because of its demand.
Whereas ransomware attacks generally demand payoffs via Ukash or Bitcoin, The Freedom Collective has made no financial demands. Instead, they are demanding that Greyson Systems “cease operations within seventy-two hours.”
What is unclear at this time is precisely what actions The Freedom Collective will take against Greyson Systems if their demands aren’t met.
If the headline made me think of Innerva Shah, the final couple paragraphs made me feel like she was in the room. I hadn’t been certain when Innerva would try to exact her revenge, but I’d known for months that, when she did, it would look something like this.
To understand Innerva Shah, you need to know about James Stacy, my old friend and business partner.
James and I started out around the same time at The New York Standard in the early 2000s—back when newspapers were still a thing. After leaping off that sinking ship, we co-founded one of the first investigative journalism sites on the Internet.
I could say we drifted apart after that, but the truth is that he ditched me to become a data-leak journalist, leaving me to run the site on my own. His partner was Innerva Shah, the notorious hacker who was already well known under names like _ni8htmare_ and B1T(1). She left her past behind to partner with James and, together, they became NUM, the Next Underground Media. Before there was Wikileaks, there were James and Innerva—world-class white-hat hackers who had every reporter who mattered on speed dial.
As they were either trying to save the world or destroy it—depending on how you view leakers—I went the other direction. I transformed our little website into The Barker, one of the largest independent media websites on the Internet.
James and I lost touch, and I hadn’t heard from him or Innerva in a year when I learned that he’d been killed in a mass shooting at a Las Vegas newspaper. Along with five others, James died in a storm of bullets at The Las Vegas Gazette, and the media ran with the story of a crazy gunman, killing at random.
But it wasn’t a mass shooting.
And it wasn’t random at all.
I found out—as horrifically as I’ve ever learned anything—that James and the others had been assassinated by one of America’s one million private security contractors, working for a company called Advanced Regional Data Security, or ARDS. Though his actual shooter had been killed days later, the man who ordered it, and the system that supported them all, had escaped unscathed.
Now, every time I thought of ARDS or any other company connected to the web of private security contractors working in the shadows, my whole body went into a panic. Memories flooded me. Memories of being chased, toyed with, and finally tortured. Memories that left me working like hell just to keep breathing and stay upright. I was afraid of water, afraid of redheads, and afraid of ever again becoming entangled in a nightmare like the one I’d lived.
And while I tried to deal with the memories, I often thought of Innerva, of the last message she’d sent me, which promised revenge on the people who killed James.
Alex-
From now on, this app is the only way you’ll hear from me, and the only way I’ll hear from you. Messages are protected by military-grade encryption. They are as untraceable as messages get.
Amand will not bother you again. I’ve uncovered enough dirt on him to keep him quiet for good. And he knows it. That’s why they let you go.
I have left the country, and there will be no funeral for James. But there will be revenge.
Stay safe,
Innerva Shah
Reading the article had me feeling frozen and far away, but the beep from my intercom brought me back into the room.
“Alex, phone call on line two.” Mia’s voice was bright and efficient as usual, and I was happy for the interruption.
Even though I’m only in my mid-forties, I sometimes feel like the decrepit old company founder who wanders around his office looking for something to do, as the young people he surrounds himself with do things that actually matter. Mia was one of those people.
“Hey there,” I said, pressing the ‘talk’ button on the intercom. “How’s things?”
“Seriously, Alex. You have a phone call”
“You know I hate phone calls.”
“I tried to pass it to Bird already. He said he’d only speak with you.”
“Who said?”
“I have no idea why it’s relevant to you, and I couldn’t get a straight answer out of him. Something about…hold on a second.”
I heard the shuffling of papers and pictured Mia at her desk, curly hair pulled back, handing off papers to someone. She was the ultimate multi-tasker. Her hair was naturally red, but she’d dyed it black when she’d picked up on my aversion to redheads after my ordeal.
“Sorry about that. A company called Advanced Regional Data Security.”
I froze, and heard my voice in the room before I was even aware that I’d decided to speak. “Ummm, okay...give me a…give me a sec.”
Staring at the blinking red light on my phone, my first thought was that I should call Greta, my wife of thirteen years. Not too long ago, I would have referred to her as my “soon to be ex-wife.”
She’d kicked me out and we’d lived separately for around eight months, but getting kidnapped and tortured tends to put things in perspective. Both for the one who is tortured and the ones who love them, or used to love them.
Through long talks and several months of counseling, we’d reconciled over the summer and moved back in together a month earlier. In counseling, I’d promised not to get involved in any big, dangerous stories again, and she promised to give me the time and space I needed to process what happened to me.
“Alex, are you going to take the call?”
I stared at the flashing light, promising myself I’d tell Greta about the call as soon as I got home.
After all, this wasn’t a big, dangerous story.
Just a phone call.
Chapter 2
I glanced at my screen and scanned the rest of the story, thinking both that it must be a coincidence and that it couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. There was no mention of ARDS in the piece, which gave me a moment of relief. If Innerva was behind the ransomware attack, surely she would have started with ARDS, the company most closely tied to James’s death. And by “most closely tied,” I mean that they’d actually killed him.
Must be a coincidence, I decided.
I got up and shut the door to my office, then leaned on the desk and tapped the speakerphone button. “Hello, this is Alex Vane.”
“Alex, the esteemed CEO and senior editor of The Barker? It’s been a while. Did you miss me?”
Amand. I should have known it would be Amand.
I walked a slow lap around my desk, trying to decide whether to hang up, or to humor him.
Finally, I said, “Can’t say that I did, Amand. In fact, I hoped I’d never hear from you again.”
“That hurts, Alex. I thought you and I had an understanding.”
“I guess we did, technically, but you must know that the sound of your voice makes my skin crawl, and the thought of you makes me want to punch the wall.”
Amand talked like a used-car salesman, except that instead of trying to sell you a twelve-year-old hatchback, he was trying to sell you on the virtues of an endless web of security forces that operate on the periphery of U.S. law. When I’d discovered that James had been killed by employees of ARDS, the firm Amand managed, he’d met me with a shit-eating grin and a firm handshake, assuring me that it wasn’t his fault.
In fact, it wasn’t anybody’s fault, according to Amand. In the course of doing what’s necessary, sometimes innocent people like James get shot to death for no reason and, technically, nobody is responsible for it. That was his story.
To make matters worse, he’d tried to convince me that he and I had similar interests, and that he might call me from time to time for information. My sense was that he expected me to share information with him, information he could use to cajole or blackmail politicians, business leaders, celebrities, criminals, or anyone else he deemed an enemy of U.S. interests. I hadn’t agreed, but I’d been in no position to decline, either.
After they’d kidnapped Greta to scare me, then tortured me for two days, I’d naturally assumed that our deal was off. Plus, Innerva had assured me that he wouldn’t bother me again, and I hadn’t heard from him since.
“How’s Greta?” Amand asked, his voice even smarmier than usual.
“Go to hell,” I said, leaning on my desk and trying to project my anger into the phone.
“I heard she took you back.”
I said nothing.
“You know, I hear things, Alex.”
I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that his voice made my skin crawl. Little beads of sweat were forming under my grey button-down shirt. My black jeans, which were roomier since I cut down on carbs and started exercising a few weeks before Greta let me come home, felt sticky against my thighs.
“What do you want, Amand?”
“Just to talk.”
“We’re talking, asshole.”
“I mean in person, Alex, and there’s no need for such language. I thought we were friends.”
There was no way in hell I was going to have a face-to-face with this guy. Not after what he did. “You’re delusional.”
“I’m a professional, Alex. I thought you were, too. Won’t take more than an hour.”
“You live a thousand miles from here. I wouldn’t come back to the ARDS offices for anything in the world.”
“You won’t have to, Alex.”
It took me a second to get what he was saying. “You unbelievable bastard—“
“I’m downstairs. Pioneer Square. Everyone says that Seattle is rainy all the time, and maybe that’s true, but today...well, look out your window. Sunny, warm. The air is crisp. Lovely day for a walk.”
Hearing his voice was bad, but knowing that he was in my city, walking around my neighborhood and probably getting coffee from the same place I do, put me over the edge.
I picked up the cordless phone and stabbed the talk button, shifting it from speakerphone. “Look, you miserable piece of shit. We have no reason to talk. No reason to ever see each other again. No reason to—“
“There’s a good reason, Alex. A very good reason. It involves your friend Innerva.”
And there it was.
My legs decided to take five and I flopped into my chair and slid over to the large window. Twenty stories below, the traffic was light and I could see a ferry nearing the dock in downtown Seattle. For a moment, I imagined that I could see Amand below, standing in a camel-hair coat and drinking a latte while screwing with my life. But the people were too small to make out and it was more likely that Amand was sitting in the back of a black SUV with tinted windows.
“Who’s Innerva?” I asked, playing dumb in a way I knew he wouldn’t buy.
“Please, Alex. Have some respect. You may hate me for whatever reason, but you know I’m not stupid.”
“Fine, what about her?”
“I have reason to believe you’ve been in touch with her, and I’d like to chat with you about that.”
“I haven’t been in touch with her.” I didn’t need a reason to lie to Amand—I’d lie to him on principle alone—but this was the truth. After Innerva helped me get to the bottom of James’s death, she disappeared, leaving me only a simple app on my laptop called Collude. I couldn’t contact her on it, but she could contact me. But after her initial message, vowing revenge on James’s killers, I hadn’t heard from her.
“Well, either way,” Amand said, “we’re going to need to speak.”
“You haven’t given me a single reason to speak to you, Amand. You have ten seconds before I hang up.”
“That would be a mistake, Alex. You know we can monitor your servers at The Barker, right?”
“Bull. We have software that protects against that.”
Amand let out a long sigh, followed by a chuckle. I knew that, theoretically, someone could hack our servers, but I didn’t imagine anyone would. And certainly not Amand. “Even if you could get into our servers, we—“
“We’re in your servers, Alex. Every piece of internal communication, every draft of every story you’ve ever published, and, most importantly, everything you haven’t published.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Nude photos of underage girls, Alex.”
“What the hell are you—“ I stopped halfway through the sentence, wracking my brain. We’d never done any stories on child pornography, and, even if we had, we never would have allowed any images to touch our hard drives, even for research purposes.
“Melinda Garcia ring a bell, Alex?”
It did, but I wasn’t going to admit it. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do, Alex. You killed the story yourself. We know all about it, and if you’re not out front of your building in fifteen minutes, the FBI is going to know about it, too.”
“You son of a—“
“Alex, please. I don’t have time for your self-righteous rage. This isn’t about you, and it’s not about me. I don’t want to tell the FBI about those photos. But you know I will.” He paused and sighed again. “Be downstairs in fifteen minutes.”
With that, the line went silent, and I was left to fume.
Melinda Garcia was a doe-eyed sixteen-year-old who lost in the final round of The Voice a few seasons ago. She’d been all over the news leading up to the final round of voting, and our music writers had been covering her religiously, along with all the other finalists. Garcia was a fan favorite, a religious girl with a stunning soprano voice and just enough edge to keep people interested. I didn’t watch the show, but I was already familiar with her name when the photos showed up in our inbox at The Barker.
There were six of them altogether, showing Melinda in progressive states of undress, probably in her bedroom because there were posters of pop stars on the wall behind her. The photos were the type most likely taken by a boyfriend—or ex-boyfriend—on a cellphone. The quality was fairly low, but they were, unmistakably, Melinda Garcia. And she was, unmistakably, nude and underage.
Of course, we didn’t publish them or respond to the anonymous email. We’d run some terrible stories to generate clicks, but even if we’d been able to get around the fact that publishing them was wildly illegal, we never would have stooped that low. Despite a brief objection from one of our music writers—who argued that they were newsworthy because they contrasted with Garcia’s wholesome image—Bird and I shut down the story before the first word had been written. We never even mentioned their existence on our site.
We’d notified the police, but they hadn’t been any help. After a failed attempt to trace the email, they gave up and wrote off the whole thing as a prank. And since the photos never surfaced online from another outlet, we were left wondering who’d sent them, and why.
Now it was making more sense. If Amand knew about the Garcia photos, maybe he really did have access to our server. Just as I started to wonder how he’d done that and what we could do about it, it hit me. It was equally likely—maybe more so—that he was lying about the server access, and that he’d sent the photos himself to set us up.
To gain leverage.
I pressed the intercom to dial Mia, but hung up before it rang. Again, I thought of calling Greta, and I picked up the phone. Dialing her, I looked down at the street below, trying to think my way out of a problem without a solution. Before the phone could start ringing, I hung up and threw on my blazer.
I had to meet with Amand.
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