Dark Secret (DARC Ops Book 1) Page 3

  During Land Warfare training some eight weeks later, he’d opted to spend a second night in the miserable January cold on San Clemente Island, which came after swimming to the island in full gear from their drop-point six miles away, which came after a gagged and hooded mock-hostage helicopter ride, which came after a week of sleep deprivation and psychological stress tests that made even the most muscular and tattooed men sob like toddlers, which came after two months of other various agonies since Hell Week that had already thinned out over half the class.

  The first day’s physical tests completed, it was time to prepare a survival shelter for the night. Jackson hadn’t spoken or made eye contact with anyone. He'd just piled up as many branches and palm fronds as he could before crawling underneath to escape the damp, cold wind off the Pacific. All through the night he’d held his position, tackling any surprises the instructors decided to throw at them in the dark.

  That was Jackson.

  It would be that same man—a SEAL graduation later—whose tenacity had him crawling around Afghanistan in a camouflaged ghillie suit. This time, instead of sleeping under a pile of foliage, he'd been wearing it. It was similar to a Chewbacca costume, except covered in straw, plus a sniper rifle somewhere in there, the whole ensemble slithering along the desert floor. That was Jackson after a botched mission, crawling through three days of scorpions, cacti and camel shit to finally reach safety.

  His checklist of action movie style accomplishments was long and varied, as was the list of locations. Sucked out the poison from his own Fer-de-lance snakebite in Nicaragua? Check. Treading water with a broken leg for three hours after surviving a mid-Atlantic helicopter crash? Check.

  He made meals of near-death experiences. But it was feast or famine, going hungry when the action dried up. When a situation looked insurmountable, when normal humans would curl up in the fetal position, Jackson was at his best. But outside of his military adventures, when he'd become buried in the minutiae of civilian normalcy and the pace of life slowed to a crawl, Jackson would be at his worst. Put an icy-veined Navy SEAL in some unremarkable non-combat role, like shopping for toilet paper or replacing a lawnmower blade, and you'd finally see the human emerge. A hesitant, disengaged human who'd feel himself wasting away while stuck in morning traffic, or when deliberating between the price-points of razor blades, a far cry from choosing which teammate to save from the burning wreckage of a Humvee.

  Anyone could reasonably assume the benefits of a Navy SEAL volunteering his help in a home improvement project, even if it seemed like overkill. Rarely would anyone turn down that kind of assistance. Rarely would anyone fathom the scene of a Navy war hero on his hands and knees on the laminate floor of some utterly ordinary living room, the look of defeat obliterating his handsome face. Who could possibly imagine this shadow of a man, Jackson, tired and withered, defeated by the nuts and bolts and one-page instruction manuals of IKEA furniture?

  He'd spend his off time like that, tied down to the debilitating domesticity of this or that holiday. It was more than a little adjustment, going from firefights and underwater explosives to rhubarb pies and passive aggressive store clerks. Usually, he'd only be able to go a week before the quiet, creeping urges arrived. Urges like sucking on the cold barrel of his 12-gauge Remington. It was just one week of civilian life. It frightened him to imagine an existence after his service. He'd just as well die in the field.

  He definitely felt dead when he got word of his honorable discharge. It was what happened to SEALs who acquired rare ear infections that eroded their ability to hear and to balance themselves with knife-edge precision. It was what happened to Jackson, who, even on the flight home a week later, could scarcely hold back the tears. And it practically forced one flight attendant, thinking Jackson had lost a brother in combat, to compliment him with a copious amount of gin and tonic.

  The drinks continued at home. They were even prepared by the same flight attendant. But as he soon discovered, no amount of gin or casual sex could ever break him out of the gigantic, foreboding lull that was to become his life. What the fuck would he do with himself?

  Despite it being his worst fear, Jackson resigned himself to doing absolutely nothing, sometimes even spending whole days locked up in his room, in his bed, in a slow smoldering agony. On some days, the highlight could be walking out behind his house, half-naked, and just sitting on a lawn chair in the middle of the yard. He might be out there for an hour, doing nothing—not even sun tanning. And then, for no reason, he'd stand up and start back toward the house. Moving like a zombie, he'd retreat into the cool darkness of his McMansion home in one of Washington's wealthiest suburbs.

  Inside that home were all the toys of affluence, the embarrassingly large TV screens and home theater speakers, a room full of professional-grade exercise equipment, the hardly used four thousand dollar juicer machine, the never used grand piano, and of course, a garage full of impractical cars. Everywhere Jackson looked, there would be some poor decision staring back at him, an albatross hanging in every room.

  No, money never bought him happiness. It almost bought him a wife, until he realized that fact. Her increasingly cool detachment and her ever-escalating credit card limit moved in unison. Money, however, did provide Jackson with a second chance. He had enough on hand – some from the Navy and some from his highly decorated Vietnam vet father – to fund his own startup company, DARC Ops (Digital Assault and Response Command), a white-hat internet security firm, one of the good guys. His background and recognizable name made the firm an instant hit. And in a few short years, the slightly dulled and cynical Jackson would be leading one of Washington's most successful internet security companies. It was a long walk from that backyard lawn chair.

  * * *

  Although his current workload kept him busy and sometimes even satisfied, it somewhat lacked the entertainment of blowing up dams or jumping out of Black Hawks over Kurdistan at two in the morning. That was a very specific type of rush, one that could never be gained through virus removal and remote IT assistance. Put simply, the more Jackson's life was endangered, the better he performed, which perfectly explained his latest predicament: a fussy internet router.

  “Why can't you work? Huh?... Please?... Please work, you sonofabitch!”

  It was maybe a little ironic that the CEO of a specialized cybersecurity firm found himself inexplicably cut off from the internet. It made him feel like an amateur. Or worse, some average Joe who didn't know shit about hardware. He'd been vexed the whole afternoon, quietly cursing to himself in his home office, becoming increasingly late for a web conference call, and realizing that no amount of blowing things up or treading foreign water would make that fucking router work.

  It was only a matter of time before he gave in and called his employee, Tansy, a former marine and hacker extraordinaire. Maybe the leader of DARC's hack team could fix his little router problem.

  “I hate that I'm calling you.”

  “Me too,” said Tansy.

  “I'm desperate over here with this router.”

  “Okay... So you need my help?” Tansy's voice took on a slight affectation, as if it were passing through a shit-eating grin. “I'm right in the middle of Regency.”

  “That's fine. You won't have any more clients like Regency if I keep missing these sales calls.”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  “N-type router,” said Jackson. “Top Link.”

  “Are the lights on?”

  “Lights on, but no one's home.”

  “What lights are on?”

  “Everything but internet.”

  “Okay. How's your modem doing?”

  “It's passing a signal,” Jackson said while inspecting his modem for the hundredth time. “But the connection stops there.”

  “Does it have a wireless function?”

  “Would I be calling you if it did?”

  Another silence from Tansy.

  “Sorry,” Jackson said quietly. “I
just really, really hate networking problems.”

  “Good thing you started up an internet security company.” Tansy's laughter filled the line.

  “Well that's why I keep people like you around, to fix this stuff. So fix it. Please.”

  “Jack, it's an easy fix. Go grab an ethernet cable and plug it in old-school.”

  “I don't have one.”

  Tansy laughed again. “There's your problem. You don't have one connecting your modem and router?”

  “Tansy, that's not fixing anything. I'm not looking for a band-aid.”

  “Well...”

  “Thank God you're never on client calls.”

  “I'm a hacker. Not your personal router technician.”

  Five minutes later, and with Tansy’s begrudgingly given advice and a quick replug of a vital cable, his router was reconfigured into a switch and voila. Back online, thank God.

  “You'll even get faster speeds with this config,” Tansy said. “Employee of the month, here I come.”

  “You'll get that when you can hack past Osprey's air-wall. Which should be soon, since you've been on it for a month. And finish up Regency while you're at it. I'm about to stir up some more work for you with this Quickbids thing.”

  A minute later, Jackson rushed through the web conference login. After another minute, two faces appeared on his laptop screen. His prospective client, a young, doleful-eyed brunette who looked like she'd just swallowed half a bottle of sleeping pills and his own image, dressed in a hastily thrown together suit and tie, reflected back from his webcam. He looked tired, but otherwise still physically fit, having maintained the conditioning required of him when he was still with his team. Jackson would allow himself nothing less. His Native American and Italian roots were evident in thick dark hair, high cheekbones, and golden brown eyes, a set of features that allowed him to go undercover anywhere from the Middle East to the Mediterranean, North Africa to western Russia—just depending on his tan.

  “My apologies for being late. A client just called with an emergency. We're open twenty-four seven, so, you know...” Jackson smiled, trying his best not to sound like a used car salesman. His regular business development manager was on vacation, which left Jackson, who hated making these types of calls, dangling on the hook. Goddamned Sheri, getting married and fleeing to Bermuda...

  “So, okay, Quickbids,” Jackson slogged on. “Cool site by the way. Thumbs up from our UX guy. Not so thumbs up from a vulnerabilities standpoint, though.”

  Quickbids, if it ever clears testing phase, could become a real competitor in the online auction world. After two days of DARC's analysis, the major takeaway was that Quickbids still had a ways to go before even a beta launch. How does one say that without sounding insulting, while still employing enough brutality to instill the required fear? A sale depended on it. Fear. Something Jackson thoroughly understood. He'd played an important role as a SEAL in injecting certain countries with that fear. From marketing to U.S. foreign policy, it was all fear-based.

  “On the surface, the site looks great, as I mentioned about the UX. It's clean, scannable, no extraneous text. Good link framework. It functions well and it's pretty to look at...”

  I am not a used car salesman.

  I am not a used car salesman.

  I am not a used car salesman.

  “...but underneath the surface, in its structure and code, are certain weaknesses that hackers really love to exploit.” Jackson listed, in order of importance, the site's vulnerabilities. Weak session management, cross-site request forgeries, injection vulnerabilities...

  “And we did something fun with your password lockout. It's an easy hack.” Jackson cleared his throat and continued. “As you know, lockouts stop a hacker from breaking into someone's account. With how Quickbids is set up, users only get five attempts, not a million attempts from a password generator. So, that's good. The only drawback is that a user can easily leverage the lockout against rival bettors. Do you know what I mean?”

  After a slight pause came the prospect's sleepy reply. “No.”

  I am not a used car salesman.

  “Okay, well let's say I'm bidding on your site, and I notice that a particular user keeps outbidding me. If I wanted to, if I was frustrated enough, I could easily stop that user from bidding. Do you know how I could do that?”

  “No.”

  “I'll try logging in with that user's screen name. Give five wrong passwords. And just like that, the user is gone for the day and now I can finally win some movie posters.”

  She smiled weakly.

  “I'll give you a free fix for it.”

  Okay, I am a used car salesman.

  “Don't make usernames visible amongst bidders. Simple as that.”

  The other face on the screen smiled in medicated fashion.

  It was often difficult, especially on the first or second conversation with a prospect, to get a sense of who he or she really was. Was she legitimately interested? Was she just daydreaming until Jackson offered his price? How knowledgeable was this person? How many Ambien pills did she pop a half-hour prior? Somewhere out in San Francisco was a Quickbids developer, the doleful-eyed hipster most likely price-shopping at that exact moment, calling other firms for their bottom line. Maybe she'd listen to their pitches. Or maybe she'd just go to bed.

  More than once he'd thought about writing a list of all the prospects who blatantly shopped by price alone, the prospects who could afford it but didn’t want to. And then he'd take this list over to one of Tansy's friends and tell them to do their worst. It wouldn’t cost much. And whatever it did cost, he'd recuperate when the targeted companies came crawling back. It was such a coincidence, DARC Ops being the only firm that knew how to reverse the attacks.

  Jackson liked to daydream about his plan, thinking of all the insidious options he had at his disposal. Of course it never progressed past fantasy, his damn ethics getting in the way of yet another good time. Why did his black-hat hacker opponents get to have all the fun?

  The daydream was interrupted by the triumphant horn blasts of a John Philip Sousa ringtone— the same ringtone he'd get dirty looks for in elevators and other decidedly anti-Sousa locations. The reason for the fanfare, another DARC employee, Matthias, who'd just had an interesting conversation with his ex-girlfriend.

  “Do I really need to know?” asked Jackson.

  “You do.”

  “What is it? A restraining order?” Jackson checked the time—9:48—while thinking of a new fantasy, working a nine-to-five, punching in-and-out and having some semblance of personal time.

  “There's someone you need to meet,” Matthias said. “She's a little rattled right now, so she might not call. But you need to talk with her. And fast.”

  “Why?”

  “She might have some dirt on your favorite senator.”

  “Which one?”

  “Langhorne. He might be... might be selling arms to Kenyan rebels.”

  Jackson needed a minute to process that. “Why might be?”

  “One of his staffers, a translator, found some encrypted document on his computer, that she, uh, I guess on the spot, um, decrypted.”

  “Matthias, that sounds completely ridiculous.”

  “I know. But she seems convinced.”

  “Who? Your ex or her friend?”

  “Both,” said Matthias.

  “Are you convinced? Do you think it’s even possible? I'm not.”

  “Well you haven’t talked to her yet.”

  That was true at least. Jackson hadn't talked to some friend of Matthias' ex girlfriend.

  “Her story's very convincing,” said Matthias. “And she's extremely intelligent.”

  “Do you know how intelligent she'd have to be, to real-time decrypt a document? I don't even think intelligent is the word...”

  “The word is savant.”

  “Is that what she is?” He was wasting his time on all this when he could have been heading home to a glass of red, or somethin
g stronger.

  “Jack, I'm telling you. She's... she's special.”

  Jackson tried to say something but was cut off.

  “Not that kind of special, either. Not like Rain Man.”

  “Well,” said Jackson. “She'd have to be like Rain Man. There's no other way. Unless she's just making the whole thing up, which is a hundred percent more likely.”

  “You know the Langhornes own the fifth largest weapons manufacturer in the U.S., right?”

  “So what?”

  Matthias took a deep breath. “Okay, fine. She's like Rain Man, but just without the, y'know, head-slapping stuff.”

  “Are you sure?” Jackson waited for a response, but all he got from Matthias was a long, exasperated sigh. “Does she even really work for Senator Langhorne?”

  “Why am I begging you?” Matthias finally asked.

  “You're not begging me.”

  “I am. It's stupid.”

  “Well then stop. What's her name?”

  “I only know her first name. Mira. She's pretty guarded.”

  “Do you have her number or anything?”

  “I can get it.”

  “Wait. What? How'd you expect me to talk to this person?”

  Another long sigh from Matthias.

  “Alright, alright. Get her number and I'll call her.”

  “Nah, fuck it.”

  Classic Matthias.

  “Aw come on, Matty. Don't be like that. I'll call her.”

  “So how did Quickbids go?”

  “Shitty.” Jackson, caught off-guard, couldn’t help but share his true feelings about his conversation with the Bay Area's sleepiest developer.

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah, it does,” Jackson lied. He suddenly enjoyed the fact that he'd have one less project to worry about. And a little more free time. It might be nice. It was an odd realization, but as the night wore on, Jackson began to relish the idea of sitting in his backyard chair. Just sitting there, doing absolutely nothing. Maybe he'd drink a beer. But that was it. Aside from maybe calling that savant girl. That might be interesting.