Blue Warrior

Johnny pulled away from the hangar and through the fence gate, heading for the road exiting the airport. The boxy German SUV sat tight as Johnny passed by their parking place, just as Pearce instructed.

By the time Johnny cleared the airport, the Mercedes was in his rearview mirror, keeping a discreet distance.

“The driver’s good,” Johnny said.

Pearce tapped keys on his phone screen. “The SVR only sends the best. They won’t try anything until we’ve cleared the city.”

* * *

Thirty minutes outside of Maputo, traffic disappeared. The highway was an empty straight line for miles. The silver Mercedes glinted in Johnny’s rearview mirror a mile back. Couldn’t miss it.

“That G-Class AMG is a sweet ride,” Johnny said. “Hundred thirty grand plus, just to drive it off the lot.”

“It’s an amazing piece of technology. All the latest bells and whistles.”

“Ready?” Pearce asked.

Johnny smiled. “Say the word.”

“Red-line it,” Pearce said.

“God, I love this job.” Johnny mashed the gas pedal to the floorboard.

The Toyota rocketed forward, but the straight-six engine was topping out at 180 kph. Not good enough.

Pearce glanced in the side mirror. “He’s coming on, fast.”

The Mercedes’s thundering 5.5-liter turbocharged V-8 was still accelerating. They were just a quarter mile back.

Shooting distance.

Pearce tapped his phone screen, capturing the Mercedes Distronic Plus radar-controlled cruise control. Ran his finger along a slider. Told the radar unit that an object was just one inch away from the Mercedes’s front bumper.

The power disc brakes locked. Pads and rotors screamed.

The big Mercedes tumbled end over end on the asphalt, glass flying, steel crunching, doors exploding. On the third rotation, a body flew out, cartwheeling on the asphalt. Four more devastating rotations, and the crumpled Mercedes finally landed in a shattered heap on the side of the road.

“How’d you manage that?” Johnny asked. He pulled his foot off of the gas pedal, dropping back down to the legal speed limit.

“Pirated his Bluetooth back at the parking lot.”

Johnny chuckled. “Technology’s a bitch.”

Pearce powered down his smartphone. “Let’s go find your girl.”

2

CIOS Corporate Offices

Rockville, Maryland

1 May

She was there at the beginning, when the U.S. government first weaponized the Internet. In fact, she had loaded some of the first rounds into the cylinder and cocked the hammer.

Jasmine Bath was twenty-four years old when she earned her M.S. in computer science from UC Berkeley, one of the first recruits into the NSA’s Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO) program. They started her at Fort Meade but moved her around, grooming her for bigger things. She was a software specialist but became familiar with hardware operations, too. She helped write some of the first coding for the NSA’s pervasive XKEYSCORE surveillance software before moving up into senior development positions within TAO’s aggressive counterintelligence ANT program. Her coding fingerprints were all over persistent software implants like JETPLOW (firewall firmware), HEADWATER (software backdoors), and SOMBERKNAVE (wireless Internet traffic rerouting). Those successes earned her multiple commendations and promotions, leading to training and supervisory positions in newly developed TAO sites in Hawaii, Texas, Colorado, and even the Dagger Complex in Germany.

That meant the vast resources of the NSA were entirely at her disposal. She now had access to TAO’s shadow networks of servers and routers, used for covertly hijacking or herding unsuspecting Internet traffic through them. It was the Internet equivalent of the CIA opening up a cell phone store in Abbottabad and secretly selling supposedly untraceable burner phones to al-Qaeda terrorists.

With the help of the CIA, FBI, and other national security agencies, TAO also planted hardware and software bugs and malware in electronic devices manufactured around the globe — including memory chips, hard drives, motherboards and cell phone cameras, to name just a few — to gain access to their data.

TAO also remotely implanted software bugs and malware into network firewalls and security software programs, allowing the NSA to back-door more malware into, and harvest data out of, entire computer networks or individual computers, tablets, and phones. They even had their own manufacturing facilities, producing comprised keyboards, monitors, routers, and connector cables that secretly transmitted user data. The NSA also operated mirrored cell phone base stations that acted like legitimate cell phone towers, secretly capturing entire networks of cell phone users without their knowledge.