I remove the feet warmers and reach to put on my socks and shoes. “What kind of attack? Do you have security?”
“Cyber,” he mutters. “Need your help.” He hangs up.
I stand, grab my coat from the rack, and head out of the office. “Go ahead and have the boys pick up the thermography thing and an ultrasound,” I say as I stride toward the back door. “But no MRI.”
“Come on, Thorn.” Doc shuffles after me. “We could fit one in the basement.”
I look over my shoulder as I open the door. “Could we really fit an MRI machine in the basement?”
“Absolutely,” he says.
I sigh. “All right, go ahead. Figure it out with Justice and you can have it.”
He hops. “Oh, you’ve made me so happy.”
“Yeah, that was my goal today,” I mutter as I head through the rain to my car. What is wrong with me? I’ve never let anybody in my organization speak to me like that. Almost joke with me.
Is Alana mellowing me? It’s unthinkable, and it will stop, if so.
Against all the rules in my organization, I’ve driven myself today with no backup because I didn’t want to deal with anybody. Plus, I enjoy driving. Whenever one of my men is in the car, they act like they need to take the lead and make sure I don’t get shot. I’m a better driver than any of them.
I zip through the city in my Audi A8 L Security that I have tricked out with integrated safety features. This thing is resistant to bullets, explosions, and other types of attacks. I need to find another one and make even more modifications to it for Alana.
I’m slightly irritated she hasn’t decided to return to my home, and soon will take her independent nature in hand. Harshly if necessary. My mind remains on her as I travel through Silicon Valley and drive into the underground parking garage of Malice Media. One of my men instantly opens my door and then I’m covered until I reach the elevator, although there’s no way anybody could have gotten inside this garage.
I leave them and travel down the many stories into the earth, where the door opens and I walk into the server room to see Kaz and Justice at their respective terminals typing furiously. I shrug out of my jacket and drop it as I stalk to my computer and boot it up. “Status,” I bark.
“Multiple attacks,” Justice says grimly, squinting at his monitor. “I’m on the first wave, which was an influx of contradictory data aimed specifically at the quantum memory of the garnet.”
I pause. “That’s a decent attack. What’s your plan?”
“I’m introducing a slight delay into the processing of every garnet core.”
Kaz looks over his shoulder. “That should disrupt the attacker’s data influx. If we can do that, we can slowly shut it down.”
“What are you doing, Kaz?” I ask.
He keeps typing and looks back at his monitor. “Second wave of attack focuses specifically on our users in an attempt to release personal data.”
“Shit,” I mutter.
He pounds the enter key. “Yeah, I’m on this one. I’m creating what I call quantum bubbles to force the requests into along with any loosened data. Once we get it all in one place and stop the attack, I can burst the bubble and our users will be fine.”
That sounds excellent. “Good.” I boot up my computer and rapidly dive deep into the system. “I’m assuming there’s a third wave?”
“Yes,” Justice says. “It’s . . .”
“I’ve got it,” I say, immediately seeing the fractured data. It looks like somebody is attempting to inject malicious scripts into our servers aimed specifically at the resonance and molecular structure of the garnets.
Simultaneously, I see a distributed denial of service attack aimed to slow Malice Media’s response times so users can’t access their accounts. I start to type, hunting the malicious code through the servers, anticipation lighting my blood. Oh, I’m hell in a fight, but put me in front of my computer, and I’m a god.
I find the traffic patterns and instantly deploy network filters that will segregate genuine user requests from these attacks. Quickly finding the bubble sector Kaz has set up, I send the fake bots right into the bubbles. Fighting in real time, I write an AI algorithm that uses advanced heuristics to do so.
“Excellent,” Kaz says. “I see what you’re doing.”
“Keep it up,” I answer, typing faster than he is.
Then I turn toward the DDoS attack and spread out an even use of traffic over every single one of our attached garnets and servers. If I can relieve the pressure in any one area, it’ll render the DDoS ineffective.
“I’ve started system patching,” Justice says, typing rapidly.
I track him in real time while also looking for additional threats. This enemy came at us right now because they know we’re weak. “All right, I’m sending the malware back to its source.” I’ve shut down both of my attacks and it looks like Kaz and Justice are battling as well. “Let’s find out who this is, even though I already have a pretty good idea.”
“Check the honeypots,” Kaz grunts.
“I am.”
We have many honeypots set up throughout our system to track attackers, but I already know without looking that this campaign is too complex to have been sucked into any of those.
Justice grunts. “Shit.”
“What?” I ask, looking over my shoulder.
He shakes his head. “Several more breaches. They’re overwhelming the server. Our garnets can’t keep up.”
“Our diseased garnets can’t keep up,” I mutter, fury igniting my blood. Fine. They want to play? I turn and type in a rapid set of commands.
Kaz spins in his chair, his eyes wild. “Wait a minute.”
