August Snow by Stephen Mack Jones

Author:Stephen Mack Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2016-11-29T18:17:27+00:00

Twenty-three

O’Donnell’s office was on the fourteenth floor of the Federal Building on Michigan Avenue in the city. It was the antithesis of the offices I’d seen at Titan: small and crowded with file cabinets and cardboard boxes, two computer monitor screens flickering and a small flat-screen TV with a continual cable news flow, the sound muted. Still, no SportsCenter.

Mounted on the walls were pictures of felons, critical reports and updates from Washington D.C., Quantico and other field offices. And there were the requisite framed photos of the FBI’s director and the president of the United States.

“Love what you’ve done with the place,” I said, looking around.

“Shut up and sit down.” She edged past a stack of cardboard boxes and sat behind her OfficeMax metal desk.

“Yes, ma’am.”

We sized each other up for a few seconds. I smiled. She, not so much. Then O’Donnell sighed. “You stuck your head into a hornet’s nest and I’m not sure if I like it there.” She took a moment before picking up her phone and punching three buttons. “Dan?” she said. “My office.”

Ten seconds later a young, lanky white guy entered O’Donnell’s office. He was in short sleeves, his shirt collar unbuttoned and tie loosened.

“Mr. Snow, this is Special Agent Dan Cicatello,” O’Donnell said. “Dan, you may have gathered Mr. Snow is the pain-in-my-ass I’ve occasionally referred to in our morning briefings. He’s the one who gave us the head’s up about Titan’s ‘amusement park.’”

Dan thanked me for the tidbit on Titan’s computer system.

“You have access to a guy named Donell Avalon McKinney,” he said. Apparently he saw the blank look on my face. “Skittles.”

I’d never known Skittles by his legal name.

“Hacker legend,” Dan said with no small amount of admiration. “Guy really, truly knows his stuff. Elegant, innovative, insidious. I mean he’s really—God—he’s—”

“Dan,” O’Donnell said calmly. “Focus.”

“Right, right, right,” Dan said quickly. “Sorry.”

O’Donnell asked him to give me a high-level—read as “redacted”—download on Titan’s computer systems and how it related to their investigation.

Because of the information Skittles had provided that I’d passed on to O’Donnell, Dan and two of his cybercrimes cohorts were able to redirect their infiltration efforts and dig deeper into Titan’s IT systems. What they found was what Skittles had suspected: there was seriously encrypted code running deep in the bowels of Titan’s system with Ukrainian and Romanian digital fingerprints all over it. Fingerprints that had been seen in bits and pieces in the IT systems of small private wealth management firms in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Nashville.

“A few of these fingerprints first appeared in 2006 at some of the bigger Wall Street investment firms,” Dan said.

“The 2008 financial collapse wasn’t exclusively tied to an over-leveraged mortgage market, Mr. Snow,” O’Donnell said. “In the wreckage the Bureau started finding bits of coding shrapnel from very organized foreign hacking nests. It took us five years to fit the pieces of shrapnel together. It’s only been this past year we’ve been able to create a partial picture of who, what, when, where and why.

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