Murphy descended the stairs and crossed into the annex part of the building where the SCIF had been built. Along the way, she said hello to a couple of agents and other personnel she knew. She used her ID badge and submitted to an iris scan to gain access. She entered the room, logged in then set up the connection with Washington, DC.
A minute later, a woman in her late thirties appeared on the screen, sporting a shoulder-length bob cut. “Agent Little, good to see you. It’s been a while,” Murphy said as the woman’s audio turned on.
“Yes, it has, Agent Murphy. I believe it was at a cybercrime training seminar I gave at Quantico two years ago.”
“You’re probably right,” Murphy said, nodding in agreement. “So, what’s this all about?”
Agent Little scrunched her brow, looking at the screen. “I don’t know quite how to explain what I’ve found. Let’s say an anomaly in your case got flagged when someone at NOPD tried to access Cynthia Dunning and Daniel Hawthorne’s phone records.”
Little explained that this only came to anyone’s attention because an irregularity was noticed. “We have tower information showing a quick data burst from their phones. But the data burst was not recorded on the cellular hard drives.”
“Data burst? I thought we were tracking down email addresses?”
“Let me guess,” Agent Little said. “You reached out to FreeMail.com and received a litany of IP addresses?”
“Yes,” Murphy said quizzically.
“I’ve run into that problem with them before. It doesn’t matter. The email addresses are dead ends. From what we can tell, a data burst piggybacks on one of the emails as it heads to the intended target’s cell. The emails are immediately deleted from the target’s phone, so the recipient never knows it happened. Even the data burst isn’t noticed by the target. We’ve seen the trick before, but the addition of decoy emails was a new one.”
“How has this happened?”
“Only a handful of times I’m aware of, which is why it’s troublesome. The other times we’ve seen this irregularity, it was detected after someone was assassinated.”
“Which is exactly what it looks like we have here,” Murphy said, finishing Little’s idea.
“Exactly,” Little said. “However, the other assassinations were always high-value targets. I’m not sure how two soap opera stars qualify as high value,” she said with no sense of irony in her voice.
“Hmm…” Murphy started. “You think the people behind these assassinations here in NOLA are linked to previous ones?”
Little nodded. Murphy took a minute to make sense of this extra information. “Let me run a theory I had by you,” Murphy said. She then floated her idea about Ethan Bond’s connection to the Dunning and Hawthorne murders and the Peregrine Airlines Flight 923 explosion. “Now, I say this,” Murphy hedged, “knowing full well the NTSB ruled this an accident.”
Murphy watched as Little rolled her eyes. “Since when does the NTSB do anything quickly?” Little asked, her voice dripping with contempt. “That investigation was a coverup before any investigators hit the ground in New Orleans.”
“This case is leading to more dead ends than answers,” Murphy noted. “I feel like one of those conspiracy nuts who think the US is run by lizard people.”
“But sometimes conspiracies are real and not imagined. To pull off a complete sham investigation of a bombing of an airline flight on US soil, some pretty powerful people had to be involved in the coverup,” Little said. “As for Mr. Ethan Bond, he leads me to another peculiarity in your case.”
“How so?”
“The same data burst sent from Dunning to Hawthorne was sent from Hawthorne to Ethan Bond. More recently, the data was sent from Bond’s phone to Stephanie Anne Mitchell, who lives in New Orleans.”
“Have you tried capturing the data?”
“We’ve tried. The encryption used is unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” Little admitted. A look of intense concentration washed over the woman’s face before she spoke again. “Honestly, it’s lightning years beyond what should exist. It functions like a text message but worms its way into the phone’s internal hard drive. As far as we can tell, it doesn’t do anything after that beyond send it to the next person then wait on the hard drive. I’m betting the recipients don’t even know they’ve received anything.”
“So, you’re telling me we have some strange Internet worm embedding itself into people’s cell phones, and we don’t know what this worm does?”
“We’re not sure what the data is. We’re not even sure why it’s jumping or why the cell companies have no data transfer record. It’s like a worm that fills in the dirt behind it as soon as it’s passed through. Or, maybe the worm burrows into a new hole, clones itself, then digs a new hole. We don’t know—and that’s what worries me. We’ve not seen anything like this—and I mean anything.”
“Okay. What do you need me to do?”
“I need you and your partner to secure Stephanie Anne Mitchell and get her cell phone. I hope to have a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—FISA—warrant for Mitchell’s phone as soon as I can get the warrant. My team is currently figuring out which judge to approach.”
Something about the way Little said this last sentence sent shivers up and down Murphy’s spine. “Back up. What do you mean by figuring out who to approach?”
“I’ll deny what I’m about to say, but I want to be upfront with you,” Little said, narrowing her gaze on Murphy through the screen. “This type of technology could be created domestically or by a foreign adversary. We don’t know who to trust. I can say my boss sanctioned our meeting, but not even your boss or your boss’s boss knows we’re talking.”
“And you’d deny this conversation occurred if asked,” Murphy finished. Murphy didn’t need Little to say ‘yes’, because the look on the woman’s face said everything she needed to know. “Fuck me!”
