1
COLE
One good thing about being raised by a heartless, conniving con artist of a mother: You recognize a sting before the trap is sprung. Thank you, Shannon Wolf.
The email I’m staring at seems legitimate. It claims to be from a genuine European Union agency. The message is filled with enough legalese to satisfy actual bureaucrats and to confuse everyone else. It’s signed by Carlo Lorenzi, who sent the message from a government building in Monaco.
The pitch is made perfect by its urgency—Lorenzi claims he’s been trying to reach my client for three months. This is the last chance for Banque Wagner Privée—one of the largest banks in Switzerland—to complete its “outstanding government filings.” All transactions will be frozen if my client doesn’t submit its paperwork by close of business today.
There’s only one problem: This is a classic Bait and Switch.
The link in the email leads to an extremely malicious virus. One click, and a user willthinkhe’s creating a proper account—setting a username and designating a password. But in the background, tendrils of code will twine around his entire computer system, hooking in and holding fast as bindweed.
If, that is, bindweed reports back to some underground hacker hundreds of times a minute, transmitting bank account information and confidential passwords, erasing itself after each information packet soars across the internet.
“I click on this now?” Hans Wagner asks for the third time in as many minutes.
“Wait,” I say into my headset, my fingers skating across my keyboard.
“The bank closes in two minutes,” Wagner says, nerves thickening his Swiss German accent.
“Wait,” I say, glancing at the clock counting down in the corner of my nearest monitor. I tap a final command into my intercept, the program I’ve installed to block the theft of Banque Wagner’s data.
“Mr. Wolf?—”
I was Cole when we started this phone call—a hard-won concession from someone as straitlaced as a Swiss banker. “Wait,” I say one last time.
The intercept sends a ping, confirming that it’s rooted into Banque Wagner’s system.
“Mr.—”
“Now.”
Wagner gasps as he clicks on the hacker’s message. I watch from inside the bank’s system as the attacker’s program fires.
The enemy’s approach is gorgeous—clear, elegant code that gets in, wreaks destruction, and gets out. There’s nothing extra, nothing to slow down the rampage, just pure, unadulterated menace.
I’d be proud to put my name to it.
Instead, I’m left wondering who the fuck the Red Cap Raiders are. They signed their work deep inside their package with a single symbol: A Robin Hood hat with a feather set at ajaunty angle, the whole thing sketched in a jumble of ones and zeroes.
“Mr. Wolf…” Wagner sounds like he’s strangling. “Is it… Did it… Are we safe?”
With each incomplete question, the Red Cap code tries to report back to its creator. My program successfully throttles the competition: Threat contained. Threat contained. Threat contained.
“Completely,” I say, which unleashes a stream of German that I might understand if I hadn’t missed the last two years of Frau Schmidt’s class in high school.
I tap a few more keys and my intercept sends a message to Red Cap: “Back to coding school for you.” I sign the tauntLone Wolf Enterprises.
The real work is done then, but it takes another hour to talk Wagner off the ledge of his top-floor Zurich office. I send him the status report he demands, even though we both know his IT department doesn’t have the skill to explain it to him. I wait patiently—or, at least, silently—while he feeds half a dozen dummy transactions through his newly protected system.
Once he’s finally satisfied that Banque Wagner is safe, I send him the number for one of my accounts in the Caymans. He transfers my substantial fee without argument, adding a ten percent tip.
This is the third Red Cap intervention I’ve made in the past year. They’re getting more aggressive. This one would have succeeded if I hadn’t invested years in teaching clients like Wagner how to spot a threat. Most people click on the email first, then hire me to do clean-up. That takes a lot longer and adds at least three zeroes to the bill. And some of Red Cap’s destruction simply can’t be cleaned.
I take off my headset and rub my hands over my face. Once again, I’ve pulled an all-nighter. I stretch my neck, first to the left, then to the right, before I tap the screen on my phone.
“Mr. Wolf.” Lars Nilsson answers before I hear a ring on my end.