I[LEARNING TO FLY] A DC23 short story by triple-h Jessie Campbell was flying her new drone. The quadcopter took off and began transmitting video. It flew to four waypoints, and then returned. You should not be able to do this in Washington, D.C., and especially not near the airport! Jessie had flashed a patched version of the quadcopter's firmware that bypasses the "Flight Restricted Zone" restrictions. She willfully broke Title 49, Section 46307 of the U.S. Code, which carries the penalty of a year in prison and huge fines. --- Three weeks earlier, Jessie (better known online as Jeep) was up most of the night working on some stupid Crackme.ÊÊShe is thirty-something, twice almost-married, and works as "cybersecurity consultant" with some big banks in New York.ÊÊThat basically means that she is paid to break into systems and reveal their flaws to an IT team that will hopefully, some day, patch them.ÊÊShe also does some malware reversing and incident response.ÊÊShe is professional, usually serious, and very good at what she does. On a personal note, Jessie is a blonde with pink highlighted streaks of hair. She cleverly leverages the female nontechnical stereotype to her advantage. In a sexy, well put together feminine appearance, she dresses to blend in, not to stand out. She wouldn't be caught dead in the latest fashion, but she also wouldn't show up on "What Not to Wear." She dates occasionally, but is not often presented with anyone who really understands what she does or is sufficiently intellectually stimulating. That's why she hangs out in IRC channels, and she tweets ... A LOT. She was only slightly concerned when she read about an OkCupid survey that revealed twitterati tend to have much shorter relationships. Jessie's head ached as she finally crawled into bed around 5 a.m., fingering through the tiny text on her smartphone before she drifted off to sleep. The Twittersphere was blowing up. Something new had appeared, and it looked a little different. No one had given it the moniker of a Greek god or "One Piece"Êcharacter yet. As near as Jessie could tell, in the spectrum between abject skepticism and outright FUD, there was evidence of a Ken Thompson Hack in several flavors of Debian Linux--which meant that any of its more than 300 derivatives could also be affected. Her tweeps had no doubt that this was another Equation Group hack, or possibly the minions of some other TLA. But what was their endgame? Unable to cogitate on this any further, she fell into the arms of Morpheus. --- In his 1983 TuringÊAward acceptance speech, Ken Thompson, the author of UNIX and one of the original uberhackers, described how he could modify the C compiler (gcc) to plant a Trojan horse intoÊthe UNIX login authentication program so that he could login as root with no password. It could also propagate into the binaries of any debugger and disassembler ever compiled by gcc and thus evade any attempts to detect it. Unless your binary predated the trojanized gcc, or else you wrote a custom compiler on a custom operating system from scratch, you could never shake this issue. In fact, as Thompson pointed out: "As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well-installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect." As Jessie moved into REM sleep, her subconscious mind started to piece things together. Her Kali distro, loaded with all sorts of hacking tools, was based on Debian. If there were millions of Kali users, and all of their systems were backdoored, then any penetration testing data ever collected from those systems could also be exfiltrated to a command & control mother ship. Some months earlier, Jessie had been trying to find the extent of damage to her banking clients from a malware called Regin, which was incredibly flexible and had the ability to deploy highly tailored plugins that could perform specific functions. According to Kaspersky Labs, though, the Equation Group's main platform, dubbed "EquationDrug", was even more dangerous. While Kaspersky didn't directly link Regin to EquationDrug, it noted the latter was a platform designed to load various plugins. While investigating it, they found a code artifact called "BackSnarf", which was also the name of a project linked to a TLA's covert activities. Kaspersky didn't know what it was, exactly. There were still dozens of modules in the EquationDrug framework that had yet to be discovered. Of course, Jessie always took these reports with a grain of salt, since Kaspersky is likely linked with the FSB. These thoughts percolated and swirled around in Jessie's brain. Then, suddenly, she jerked awake. BackSnarf sounded a lot like BackTrack, the predecessor to Kali. Since the EquationDrug platform has been around awhile, it would stand to reason that it used the old name for this module. It would also mean that the TLAs probably had a treasure trove of nearly everyone's vulnerabilities! --- Jeep joined one of her favorite reverse engineering IRC channels and PM'ed a friend about her theory. "I think I have a connection between BackSnarf and BackTrack," Jeep said. "OK, let's play," Grandmoff shot back. Trevor James, aka "Grandmoff," was a federal contractor she'd met years ago at Defcon. They were standing outside Paul Craig's talk on hacking kiosks and admiring what was evidently a demo the speaker had prepared on the Riviera's hotel kiosk. As several people gawked and chuckled at the Goatse'd display, hotel security showed up, and some of the crowd got nervous and made a run for it. As the rent-a-cops appeared to be chasing and detaining people with impunity, Jeep and Grandmoff found themselves hustling into the elevator. But the fuzz were also on the 12th floor when they arrived, and our intrepid hackers found themselves in a holding room for three hours together. Jeep learned a little more about this guy who had been stopped numerous times in false-positive "Spot the Fed" incidents. He was clean-shaven and had a "high and tight" haircut. Definitely ex-military. He was also a sharp dresser. Not the black t-shirt and jeans type. He usually wore a crisp pressed, almost over-starched shirt and khakis. Some dry cleaner was making a good living off this guy. She learned that he was indeed a signal corps officer during the Iraq War, and had since gotten out and was doing pentesting and reverse engineering for the DoD. While he wasn't exactly an EFF member or Snowden sympathizer, Grandmoff was at least a privacy advocate and worked inside the Beltway. He knew some people. The two would hook up each year at Defcon and play on a Hacker Jeopardy! team together, usually getting humiliated with lots of shaving cream and Sharpies. Last year, they drank of bunch of tequila shots one night, and there might have been some late night thoughts of romance and a trial kiss or two. But it was largely forgotten, and the relationship remained decidedly platonic. --- Grandmoff contacted a couple of spooks he knew inside the Agency, but this time, their complete lack of knowledge about anything he was saying led him to believe Jeep might be onto something. He talked to some others in his DC301 group, and they started working to make the BackSnarf-BackTrack connection. It's interesting, Grandmoff thought, that the Ken Thompson Hack has actually gotten easier over time, because compilers have gotten increasingly complex, giving attackers more places to hide their code. Could a TLA have infected the code base of Debian years ago, anticipating the vast number of offshoots, and knowing they would also "pwn" these as well? BackSnarf was probably just the tip of the iceberg, but even that tip was enough to sink the Titanic. You can identify a Ken Thompson Hack using Wheeler's double-diverse compilation method. You have two compilers: one you trust, and one you suspect is backdoored. You take the source code for the suspect compiler and compile it with both compilers. You now have two different binary versions of the suspect compiler that are functionally equivalent. Now, you compile your suspect compiler's source code again with the two new compilers you generated in the first step. If the new compilers were functionally equivalent, they should produce identical executables. If the two new executables are not bit-wise equivalent, then you know the suspect compiler was indeed trojanized. Grandmoff got in touch with Kali developers Muts and Dookie, and with their aide, obtained some trusted source code to perform the double-diverse compilation. To their dismay, they found the backdoor. Evidently, some earlier commits by contributors who were no longer part of the project had lodged the Trojan into the system and allowed it to conflate the exfiltrated pentest data with normal looking Web traffic. It also backdoored several of the tools in the Kali distro, such as Wireshark, Libpcap, Tcpdump, Airodump-ng, and Aircrack-ng, so that no one would ever see any network connections coming out of the infected box. --- Grandmoff was just about to relay his results to Jeep when there was a knock at his door. He wanted to ignore it, but his car was in the driveway, and his lights were on inside his townhome. He hadn't used very good OPSEC to conceal his presence within. The knocking got more vigorous, and he saw two young, nicely dressed gentlemen outside the door. "Federal agents," the first man said. "We just need to ask you a few questions." Grandmoff was cool, but this was probably not the best timing for his John Cleese-inspired falsetto cockney accent: "Are you an encyclopedia salesman?" "What? No, uh, we're federal agents." "Just want to come in, and ransack the flat, honestly," Grandmoff muttered under his breath. He grinned wryly thinking of the rest of the classic Monty Python bit and reluctantly opened the door. Immediately, the goons were upon him. "We need to bring you in for questioning about a recent incident in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978." "What the ...?" Before Grandmoff could react, he was cuffed, escorted into a van, and driven to a warehouse complex near Reagan National Airport. --- Grandmoff and Jeep had fun at times keeping tabs on each other through a tracking app. "Hey, what are you doing at that strip club, you slut?" Grandmoff would text her. "What? No, I'm ..." Jeep would start to reply, then change it: "I'm with your mom. We're trolling for beefcake." After not hearing back from Grandmoff for 24 hours despite repeated PMs, IMs, SMSs, and everything short of carrier pigeon, Jeep checked her tracking app. Evidently, the greenhorn agents who grabbed him did not know to turn off his phone, because he was clearly in this odd location for a long time. --- Jessie had gotten a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter a few weeks ago and had been playing with it sparingly. She was trying to hack up the control link. She wrote a custom app using the DJI Software Development Kit. Because it used a regular 802.11 wireless connection, she could easily DEAUTH the user and take over control of the copter with her app. But now, she had a new mission. She needed to get surveillance on this location and figure out what was going on. She loaded her gear into her 2010 Toyota and drove four hours down to Washington. She did an initial drive-by of the facility and found that it was a nondescript industrial building with a plainclothes guard walking around out front. She slowed down ever so slightly to see if there were any markings whatsoever on the facility. She noticed a small sign that said: "SCRIV." Parking at Gravelly Point along the Potomac, she pulled in and googled on "SCRIV." According to the Kingkiller Chronicle wiki, it's a "student who works under Master Lorren, specifically in The University's Archives." "That's probably not it," she thought. The Urban Dictionary said: "It's one cool m-f'er with immaculate taste in women, clothes, and humor." She laughed ironically. That could be a great definition for Grandmoff, but probably unrelated in this case, she decided. --- Jessie set up the drone with the waypoints to fly above the building and get footage from every angle. She held her breath, and then launched the quadcopter. She watched as it streamed video back to her ground station. Did the guard spot it? She couldn't tell. Ten minutes later, it returned to her. She figured that she ought to bug out quickly in case anyone saw the drone and followed it back to its origin. She placed it in her trunk and took off, not knowing what she would do next. After finding a hotel in nearby Crystal City, she got to her room, uploaded the video from the SD card, and started looking it over. The front appeared to have an armored steel telescoping security door with a digital keypad. But the side door had a CLIQ lock. Jessie remembered a Defcon 17 talk from Marc Weber Tobias, Toby Bluzmanis and Matt Fiddler, where they showed that electro-mechanical high-security locks could be defeated in essentially the same way as a bump key works Ð by inserting a mechanical key cut to the same keyway, and then getting it to vibrate for a few seconds until the mechanical motor in the cylinder turns and lifts the locking element to release the lock. Jessie decided to call a friend from DC301. John, aka Falcone, was another Defcon and Shmoocon buddy. She only saw him a couple times a year, but they chatted often. He was a decent hacker but an awesome lock-picker. "John, this is Jessie. You're not going to believe this, butÐ" she began. "They got Grandmoff," John interrupted. "How did you...?" "Well, some of the guys were trying to help him track down the BackSnarf thing, and they noticed that their systems had been infected. Not your run-of-the-mill rootkit, either. This is some sophisticated sh--. It looks like the Equation Group is after us! When we couldn't get a hold of Grandmoff, we figured something might have happened." "I think they have him at a black site." "No way! Really? Like that Homan Square in Chicago?" "I'm afraid so." "How are we gonna spring him? They don't acknowledge you in any booking database. You get no lawyer. You could rot in one of those places." "I have video footage of the building and a name on the sign: ÔSCRIV.' Maybe on an uninfected system, you guys could help me do some research. And maybe we could get the media involved." "I don't know if the media thing would work. As soon as the bad guys caught wind of it, they could just move him out and clean up the place to leave no trace. Let me figure something out. I'll call you back." After she hung up, Jessie looked at her locator app again. This time, it was unable to find Grandmoff's location. This could mean that his phone died, or that they turned it off. But it could also mean they moved him. One last possibility, she realized, was that they discovered he had a locator app, and were now coming for her! She quickly turned off her GPS, but then got even more paranoid and took the battery and SIM card out of her phone. "I'm gonna end up like Lisa Bonet in 'Enemy of the State,'" she thought. --- Jessie made it through the night without anyone knocking down her door but also without much sleep. Around 7 a.m., she decided to try to reach Falcone through IM on her computer, but it was taking longer than usual to wake up. Every keystroke seemed to take forever. She popped opened the process list and didn't see anything out of the ordinary, yet her CPU and RAM usage seemed higher than usual. She did a "netstat Ðano" and saw no unusual connections. Then, she decided to fire up her other PC. On the first machine, she turned off all services that connected out to the Internet. And on the second, she ran a packet sniffer and started watching the IP address of the first. To her horror, the first PC appeared to be transmitting HTTPS packets out to a site. She was pwned! She quickly shut down her PC, threw all of her stuff in a bag, and headed for the door. When she opened it, there was an enormous man standing there. Weighing in at more than 280 pounds, he was probably 6-feet-6 with powerful shoulders, a fierce dark face, and thinning black hair. Jessie immediately threw her arms around him. "Am I glad to see you! But ... how did you find me?" "Vee have our vays," John said in a ridiculous German accent. "Actually, Skeezicks here was able to do it." Trailing behind him was a shy, skinny dude wearing thick, horned-rim glasses. "This is Skeezicks," John said. "We are doing handles, right?" He nodded toward Skeezicks. Skeezicks shrugged. "Okay, well, I'm, uh, Jeep," Jessie said. "I got pwned too. Some sort of rootkit. Pretty stealth. I think we'd better get out of here." Jessie got in her car and followed the two to a restaurant at the corner of 14th and U called Lost Society. A Washington Post food critic once described this place as "a young meat market with as many twists as a French braid." Designed to evoke an underground, Victorian atmosphere, the upstairs lounge was often home to hackerspace meetups during the restaurant's off-hours. The rooftop deck was pretty nice, too, but no one could really see his LCD screen in that direct sunlight. So, the dark booths inside with their padded, pale blue leather and little chandeliers overhead were strewn with a melange of characters all looking at their laptops and occasionally uttering semi-audible noises about "SMT Solvers" and "ROP Gadgets." As John conspicuously cleared his throat, some looked up from their monitors. "Guys, as you know, they grabbed Grandmoff," he began. "This serious. "We don't have much to go on; but we do have the drone video we uploaded to the share site, and we have the name on the building: ÔSCRIV.'" Jessie was no body language expert, but she could sense some involuntary movement, an almost imperceptible twitch, on the part of a couple of the dudes, when he mentioned this word. "Look, we can't go in full urban assault," John said. "But we need to find a way to get into that building, or to get them to come out. And we need to find out what SCRIV means." --- Grandmoff was in a room on the second floor of the SCRIV building. It was a strikingly plain space except for a small, gray metal table and chair. It had a square window of laminated glass Ð the kind that has two hardened panes on either side of polyvinyl butyral. Even if you managed to break it, it would just cause a spider web but not completely crack. The two nicely suited guys came in. Grandmoff could feel another marathon session of futility coming on. He attempted a preemptive strike. "Look, I don't know anything about EquationDrug that everyone on the Internet doesn't already know from the Kaspersky report," he said. "I told you I was working with the Kali guys because we thought the distro was backdoored. That's all I know. This is the most ridiculous thing ever." "Well, you may feel that way, but it is, in fact, an issue of national security," the taller of the two men said. "Did you realize that if you go online and read classified data for which you did not have a need-to-know, you are in violation of your security clearance? Think of this as cleanup after a spillage. You've been here for a couple of days now. You realize we can hold you for as long as we need to. We just need those names and connections. We need to know what you know and who else knows it." --- Back at Lost Society, Jessie was working on the SCRIV plan, but she still had an unsettled feeling. John was the only guy she really knew, and the rest of them seemed so squirrely. "So, really, how did you guys find me?" Jessie asked the twitchy little Skeezicks. "We had your, uh, IP address, and we, uh, did a reverse Whois on it, and we were able to geo-locate to this area, and then, umm, we drove around looking for your car." Jessie mulled this over in her mind, but it was not adding up. After all, she was using Tor. She should have been safe, but... Jessie knew that there were a couple of ways attackers try to gain visibility into Tor traffic Ð either they pwn enough Tor relays, or else they manipulate the underlying network to ensure they're on the forwarding path of Tor traffic. Then, they can observe traffic in both directions (i.e., between the server and the Tor network, and between the Tor network and the client). Recent research has shown that by leveraging a knowledge of network dynamics and analyzing packet sizes and timings, one can actually deanonymize Tor clients. She also knew that the ISPs can eavesdrop on links and observe any unencrypted data, along with packet headers, timings, and sizes. And some of the Snowden documents showed that ISPs are in cahoots with the TLAs. So, this left really only two options Ð either Skeezicks was working with the ISP (or had owned their network), or he was working with a TLA. --- "We've got a possible hit on SCRIV," John said. You're not going to believe this, but SKRIV is Croatian for Ôhidden' or Ôsecret.'" Jessie's mind immediately raced back to an incident in 2013. One of her clients was working with a big Austrian bank in Croatia, when she got called in to help out with something called #OpCroBlackout. She learned that the Croatian Revolution Hackers (CRH) had launched a massive DDoS attack protesting the usual thingsÑthe bad economy, government corruption, lack of cable TV choices, etc. Since 1991, as Eastern European dictatorships have turned into democracies, their centrally planned economies have turned into market-based ones. And along with this, people's expectations have risen slightly that their government officials could possibly be honest and accountable to the electorate. Croatia was especially still tender after a war of independence from Yugoslavia cost 250,000 lives and untold billions in property damage during the 1990s. People were pretty disillusioned when Prime Minister Ivo Sanader got convicted in 2010 of accepting bribes from none other than that same big Austrian bank, dating back to the late nineties Ð not to mention another 10 million euros from the CEO of the Hungarian oil companyÊMOL to secure a dominant position in the Croatian oil company INA. So, led by hackers DiZi, SkOmI, Hunt3r, and Meho1337, the CRH shut down 1000 government and banking sites for more than week. But the timing of the attack was also on the eve of the country joining the European Union. This caused a lot of consternation for the newly elected Social Democrats and threatened to delay or scuttle the EU deal. --- "OK, here's the plan in a nutshell," John began. "We're going to create a diversion, gain entry to the building, find Grandmoff, and then get out Ð hopefully all before any guns come out." The big man smiled a big, broad smile while the rest of the group looked around sheepishly at each other. "Maybe I should clarify a little," Jessie offered. "I think we can get a generic mechanical CLIQ key for the door. But for the diversion, we're going to need some UAVs. Does anyone else have one?" Pretty much every hand went up. "Okay, we're going to need you to get those and meet us at Gravelly Point near Reagan. I assume you know if you have to bypass the flight zone restrictions. Probably not an issue if you don't have a GPS. Falcone will work on the door." --- Within 90 minutes, a gaggle of hackers had gathered in the park with their toys. Many of the UAVs did not have the capability to set waypoints, which meant their operators would have to be within line of sight of the target. Like a school of snapper minnows evading a lionfish, the group found safety in numbers. Despite the danger Ð or perhaps to alleviate the gravity of it Ð there was plenty of predictable humorous banter as the geeks made their way toward the SCRIV facility ... "Hey, I only have to be faster than Falcone. Muhahaha!" ... "I hope I don't have to go to jail because I haven't memorized a phone number since 2001." As they neared the building, they saw the plainclothes guy smoking out front. For this plan to work, they needed to flush him away from the door and hopefully get him to summon forth the other denizens of the building. Jessie instructed everyone to fly their drones up over the back of the building and dive-bomb the guard. Now, you may have seen a murder of crows or a parliament of owls, but there are no words to describe the terror of 24 drones coming down on you! The startled fellow dropped the cigarette from his mouth and tried to run to the front door; however, six or seven menacing looking quadcopters blocked his way. He jumped around frantically, getting clipped by a couple of them. "Ow! Ow!" Then, he took off running down the street. He whipped out his phone. "Help! There's drones! Lots of them!" "Okay, we've got him out of the way," Jessie said. "Now, I need a couple of guys to keep him out there, and everyone else needs to take your drones up to altitude." A few minutes later, the two nicely dressed agents appeared outside. They looked around. "I don't see any...oh, wait. Look way up there." As the two came out into the parking lot, Jessie gave the command: "Okay, now!" Immediately, the drones descended upon them and drove them toward the street. There, they saw the gang of people holding RC controllers. "Hey! What are you guys doing?" The drones continued ducking and diving at the agents, even as they ran toward the group that was now scattering for safety. Meanwhile, Jessie and John stealthily made their way around the side of the building. John got out a small, black key and inserted it into the lock. He rapped it with the end of a screwdriver about 10 times. Deep inside the lock, he had created a small brunt force that jumped the motor in the cylinder and popped open the lock. "Oh man, I can't believe that worked," he said. "They sell these locks for about $900." They slipped inside. "We don't know if anyone else is still in here," Jessie cautioned. "But we need to move fast. You go into that old manufacturing and storage area on the first floor. I'll go upstairs." Once on the second floor, Jessie came upon a locked door with an electronic keypad. A 10-digit keypad with a four-digit entry code could have more than 10,000 possible combinations, but if you knew which four numbers were in the code, then you could narrow it down to a couple dozen combinations Ð but there wasn't even time for this. So, Jessie whipped out a Zac Franken style Gecko Ð a small, programmable PIC chip with a wire connector on either side. Once connected to the wires behind the card reader, she could use a blank "replay" card to read the code and get through the door. Beep ... the door swung open. Grandmoff looked up, then blinked in disbelief. "Aren't you a little short for a storm trooper?" he asked. "Maybe you'd like it back in your cell, your highness," she replied. They hugged briefly. It felt really, really good; but clearly a rain check was in order. "Let's grab Falcone and get out the side door," Jessie said, as she quickly texted the others: "Got him!" "Wait, do you have a thumb drive?" Grandmoff said. "I heard them talking. I really think we need to grab stuff off their system before we go." Weighing the wisdom of this delay for only an instant, Jessie replied, "I have something better." Grandmoff led her to the adjacent room, where there was a little cell of routers, switches, PCs, and printers. Jessie got out her Rubber Ducky Deluxe, inserted it into a USB slot, dropped a mimikatz payload, and within a minute had IPs, passwords, logs, and a few other interesting-looking files. A text appeared on her phone: "Get out. They're coming back." They met Falcone downstairs and raced for the side door. They peered out, and the coast looked clear. They hustled back toward Gravelly Point and Jessie's car. Everyone else had scattered, but there were a few smashed drones here and there Ð a small price to pay for such a dramatic rescue. --- "Now, what?" Grandmoff asked. "I think we need to get out of town," Falcone said. "We probably can't go back to my place in New York," Jessie said. "And they will be looking for us at airports. This is so nuts. We haven't done anything. I'm sorry I dragged you guys into this." "Don't be," Falcone said. "Sorry Grandmoff, but this is personally the most awesome thing I've ever done in my life." "Umm, I have a slightly different viewpoint," Grandmoff said. "But you guys are amazing. I think we really need to look at that data from their system if we're going to get out of this mess. From what I could gather, these guys are working with some other guys who infiltrate foreign hacker groups. I have no idea what agency they're with, but they have been up to some sketchy stuff." Jessie drove north of Baltimore and stopped at a chill coffee shop near Towson. Grandmoff voraciously gobbled a sandwich while Jessie inserted the Rubber Ducky into her uninfected laptop. After a few minutes, her eyes got squinty, and her nose wrinkled. Grandmoff had seen that face before. She was figuring something out. Her right brain was kicking in. "I think we have them," she said. --- There is this conspiracy that the CIA is trying to undermine the success of the EU and the euro to keep the dollar strong and protect US banks' interests. Slowing or derailing the former Eastern Bloc countries from entering the EU has been part of that strategy. The ultimate end game would be to keep Russia from uniting with the rest of Europe and creating a single, powerful economy. Imagine being able to drive from Lisbon to Kamchatka and using the same currency in Nice or Novosibirsk. Fortunately, with Putin being a douche, that's not much of an issue now; but ultimately, if that scenario came to fruition, Russia would essentially annex the rest of Europe and form an economic powerhouse that would spell serious trouble for the US economy. Jessie explained that she had found some forensic evidence of connections to sites in Croatia and activity by accounts supposedly belonging to CRH members. "Remember the Croatian Revolution Hackers? Well, I'm pretty sure DiZi, SkOmI, Hunt3r, and Meho1337 are all acting on behalf of the federal agency that grabbed Grandmoff," Jessie said. "These guys probably aren't Croats at all. They're Equation Group guys that were DDoS'ing the whole country and trying to block Croatia's entry to the EU." --- A few hours later, as one of the well-dressed gentlemen was furiously typing an incident report, an instant message window popped up on his screen: "Unless you want us to release the Croatian Revolution Hacker data to all news outlets, you need to leave Trevor James and the rest of us alone. Do we have an accord?" After what seemed to be an eternity on the other end, as Jessie and her companions started to wonder if their thrice-proxied connection could be traced back, they saw a reply: "DEAL." They all exhaled simultaneously. Was it really over? --- August 6, 2015. Jessie and Trevor are enjoying a libation at Gustav's Casino Bar in the Paris Hotel. They are holding hands and whispering things to each other, snickering surreptitiously about an interesting guy with a new Mohawk haircut. Suddenly, the taller of the two well-dressed guys appears. But this time, he is wearing a black t-shirt and jeans. Skeezicks is with him. Trevor and Jessie turn ashen. "Just, umm, relax," Skeezicks says. "We...uh, just want to talk." "You Ð were you with them all along?" Jessie asks. Skeezicks nods. "But, why didn't you give us away when we rescued Trevor?" "It was an, umm, audition," Skeezicks says. "We had to know if you were the right one for the job. Now we know. We, uhh, have a proposition for you..." [END]