The Fireman

The Fireman

by Robert James

Published by Robert James at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Robert James

For my wife, Kathleen

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

About the Author

The Fireman

by Robert James

Chapter One

Hacking was a pleasure.

For Mason, it was a very special pleasure to get past sophisticated security measures so that he could own systems that he was not granted access to. Some of his fellows might have called him a cracker, but not anyone in his department. He always thought of himself as a white hat. He even had a six-inch high White Hat Trophy on his desk in his cubicle, one of the few personal items he allowed himself to display. He had picked it up as schwag from a booth at DefCon two years ago. He was sure he was one of the good guys. After all, he worked for the government, helping it to enforce the law of the land against the criminals who ran these data systems that he was hacking. They broke the law. They maintained electronic copies of books and other writings that had been declared illegal and banned. He worked in Division 451. He and his coworkers were called the Firemen.

He was quite adept at his job. He might have been considered a leet, but he never thought of himself so grandly. He was of a quiet nature and not prone to bragging. He expected that the work he did and his accomplishments would speak for themselves. Other than that he was indeed a very sneaky person. Bragging or promoting himself would only result in the kind of exposure he didn't care for. In fact it would make his job harder. After all, you didn't accomplish stealth with fanfare. His style was subtle rather than brash. Also, he was patient. He could take days, weeks, or perhaps months to own your system. Then he could own your system for a year or more without you knowing he even existed or that he was making use of your computing devices. Meanwhile, your computers could have performed thousands of tasks for him without your slightest awareness, even though you thought your systems were perfectly protected. It was just a matter of being able to make what he did seem like things your system was normally supposed to do. Quiet, subtle, sneaky, patient, and cyberly very dangerous described Mason's footprint on the digital world.

Mason had just turned thirty years old. He was fairly good looking. He was six foot one with a thick head of blond hair and in good physical shape. He had a square face with a strong jaw that most girls found attractive, combined with his somewhat muscular physique. He went to the gym a few times a month maybe. He didn't really work out that much; he was just blessed. He was still benefiting from not being too old. People with mostly sedentary jobs like his, when they got to their forties, tended to gain weight and start to bulge at the waist. He wasn't there yet. Also, he didn't drive much. He didn't even own a car at present. He didn't need one. Therefore he walked a lot. That and avoiding too many carbs helped him maintain his body in fairly decent shape for now.

He had two tattoos, rather conservative for most people these days, some of whom seemed to want every inch of their skin inked. One was on the inside of his left arm. It was a Glider Pattern, which many hackers sported. A three by three grid with the lower row of three squares filled in, the middle three empty except for the rightmost box, and the upper row filled in the middle square alone. It represented a pattern in an old mathematical program called The Game of Life. It was the usual mark of a hacker. When you went to DefCon or other hacker conventions there were booths that would give you that tattoo. That was in fact where he got his. Many of his colleagues sported the same mark. The other tattoo was across his back between his shoulder blades. It was 1111 0100 0010 0100 0000, the binary number for one million. There was no particular purpose for it other than that it was an interesting pattern and it would be something mysterious to most people who saw it. If you had to ask what it meant, you didn't need to know.

This day he was working on a worthy challenge. He had found a library site that fit the profile of rogue repositories that were likely to be illegal. That was exactly the target his department was out to find. It was a rich site. He had created a seemingly innocent anonymous user and found that there were more than one hundred thousand ebooks available. He couldn't see all the titles yet, being an anonymous user, but he was working on changing that. If he could crack the site it would easily gain him the win for the department prize that month. There was a little pressure. The deadline for the prize was tomorrow.

His main competition, his nemesis, was Pierre, a French hacker, quite gifted, but insufferably arrogant. Pierre was the closest to him in points, and was gaining on him. No one else was even in the running. Pierre also had a Glider Pattern tattoo on his inner left arm. That just meant he had been to the same conferences. It didn't make him anything more than a colleague at best. Mason had beaten him on the contests more often than not. He felt that Pierre was jealous of him. As if his thoughts had summoned him, Pierre stuck his head into Mason's cube.

You better be going for the goldmine, Mason. With what I tweaked into today you're gonna get your ass kicked if you aren't!

Mason imagined how satisfying it would be to get up, step over to Pierre, and punch him in the face. Only two things stopped him. One, he had never punched anyone in his life. He clenched a fist in front of him where Pierre couldn't see it and looked at his hand. What if he hit someone and broke a finger, perhaps multiple fingers, and couldn't type? He'd surely lose the competition then, and couldn't work well at all in that condition for who knew how long. Two, if he did punch Pierre, besides the obvious consequences to his job situation, it probably wouldn't shut the guy up anyway.

We'll see, mon ami. It's baji naji. Mason wasn't sure where that term came from, but he knew it meant something like ying-yang, a crucial moment in something that was pretty much up for grabs.

Ha! Pierre guffawed as he left. Gee-el.

GL. Good luck. Mason hated that stupid abbrev. Particularly in a situation where luck was not involved, not really, not if it was a game of skill. From the little Pierre had said he figured the guy was going for multiple sites to find a few weak ones he could get into easily. Any script kiddie could get lucky. It was much more difficult to target one particular site and try to crack it. For this site he knew that the firewall they were using had an exploit that could potentially expose the file system if a large number of new user requests collided at the same time. The developers probably knew about it, but didn’t think it could ever happen. He would make it happen. He opened a script template he had for that particular brand of firewall and tailored it for his specific purpose. He saved it and then began to allocate a bot army to run it.

He selected five hundred thousand zomsys, zombie systems, for his army. By his calculations that would be more than sufficient to achieve the desired result. His company, being the government, did not have limits on bot numbers. The family house-sys, Grandma’s lapbook, and her grand kids’ cellpads might all be used while they were just sitting there or stowed in pockets, screens blank but connected online, seemingly doing nothing. They would all run his script, as many as were available, and if they triggered the exploit one or more of them would return information to him that would give him access to all the files on his target by tomorrow. By then all the copies of his script would have eaten themselves. If somehow it didn't work, he would try a larger army. After all, over a billion zombies were potentially available to him.

With that he was done for the day. Or night, or morning. He had put in his hours. His division mainly worked a night shift. It was much easier for their purposes to target systems during hours of low usage. However, global operations were around the clock so the local night was just as good a time as any for some of their purposes. In fact it was early morning outside his cubicled work enclosure. Mason secured his desk-sys and left for home.

Outside it was the twilight of dawn, the sun being close to rising. He liked his schedule. At this time it was not crowded with people. The whole atmosphere was quiet. He walked the silent streets to the subway entrance. As he passed the turnstile, the transport card in his wallet automatically registered his fare. There was no one in the underground station except for the one homeless guy sleeping in mostly rags, wearing a dirty green hooded coat, pillowed on his backpack that was propped against the wall. Mason wondered absently why that man didn't take advantage of the aid that was available to him. The guy could simply walk into the government assistance office and they would give him housing, food, and work training so he wouldn't have to go into the subway station to get some shuteye. It was somewhat strange that he didn't get forced to do just that. He somehow managed to keep living outside the system.

Before Mason could think much more about it, the bullet train hissed out of the tube into the station and halted. The doors whooshed open. No one was getting out. He walked into the nearly empty car and took a seat. He could have plugged music into his ears for the ride, but