The Paladin Read online

  You will wonder who we are. Perhaps you have heard of the warriors who banded together in the time of Charlemagne, the ninth century king of France. Songs and legends celebrate their mission of assisting victims of injustice. They were called The Paladin. The name has survived over many centuries. They were the people’s bandits, fighting for justice.

  If you want to understand where this message comes from, think of this ancient fraternity that seeks to assist decent people who have been threatened by powerful and lawless forces, just as you were, and who stand invisibly behind you now. You have our apologies and respect.

  The Paladin

  * * *

  When Dunne had read the letter, he went to the office of the lawyer who had been recommended by his FBI friend Rick Bogdanovich. It was late in the afternoon, and the lawyer was almost ready to leave work, but Dunne asked him to stay a few more minutes.

  Dunne told the lawyer that he had decided on the name for his little company, the LLC that would serve as the legal shell for his cyber consulting venture. Paladin LLC. The lawyer asked what the name meant, and Dunne said it was a French word for an avenger.

  “Is that like the old television show?” the lawyer asked. “Richard Boone. Have Gun – Will Travel?”

  “No.” Dunne laughed. “I don’t have a gun. I just like the name.” It was more complicated than that, but he didn’t want to talk about it.

  6 Langley – September 2016

  George Strafe, the deputy director for operations, was waiting for Dunne in the secure conference room on the seventh floor, across the hall from the director’s suite and its bank of windows overlooking the Potomac. Sarah Gilroy had accompanied Dunne up the elevator and down the corridor but left him at the door. The general counsel was supposed to attend the meeting, but her office said she wasn’t feeling well that day.

  Dunne hadn’t worn a tie, even to see the boss. He was dressed in gray flannel slacks, a light tweed jacket, loafers, and an open-neck shirt. He’d gotten a haircut that morning on the way to work, and his red curls were, for once, neatly trimmed. He didn’t like being on the seventh floor; this was where trouble began.

  Strafe was seated at the conference table, reading from a file of blue-stripe cables, when Dunne entered the room. He looked up curiously. Strafe had a mottled face, scarred by what people said was a letter bomb he had opened early in his career. His brown hair was in short spikes that might never have seen a comb. A bald spot had emerged at the crown. He was wearing a skinny black knit tie and a rumpled black suit with an incongruous white silk handkerchief monogrammed with the initials GS in the pocket. The room was ringed with maps, digital clocks displaying the time in a dozen stations around the world, and television screens for secure video conferences.

  “Hey, thanks for coming, Mike.” Strafe’s voice was affable and unconvincing. “Have a seat. Want some coffee? I hear you just moved back. Not an ideal time. We appreciate it.”

  “I’m fine, sir,” said Dunne. He took a seat in a leather swivel chair across from his boss. He knew the deputy director from when Strafe had been an ambitious station chief making his way up the ladder and needed technical help on operations. Dunne had supplied some ingenious surveillance devices and Strafe had recommended him for promotion to GS-11. He was transactional that way.

  “Relax,” said Strafe. “This will work out fine. You know what Napoleon said? War is a matter of hiding fear as long as possible.”

  Dunne laughed uneasily. “I’m not afraid, sir. Just confused. I don’t know what this is about.”

  “I can explain,” said Strafe. “Give you a tour of the forest, before we drop you into the trees.” He turned to his executive assistant, who was seated a few seats down, preparing to take notes.

  “Jim, close the door on your way out, please.” The aide exited the room, leaving the two men alone. Strafe removed his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt to the elbows, revealing a tattoo on his right arm that said, in small block letters, IPSO FACTO.

  “We have a problem,” Strafe began, his voice low at first. “What it is, exactly, I don’t know, but it scares the shit out of me.”

  Strafe paused to let that sink in before continuing.

  “Someone is turning off some of our cyber weapons in Europe. In Italy, Austria, and Serbia, for sure. They’re supposed to beacon to us, securely, so we know they’re in place and ready to go. But they’ve stopped beaconing. I don’t like it, my friend. Not at all.”

  Dunne nodded. “Did the Russians do it?”

  “Nope. Some of their malware has been taken down, too. They don’t think we know that, but there’s a lot they don’t know.”

  “The Chinese?”

  “Negative. They’ve also lost their beacons. They think we’re doing it. But we’re not.”

  “Well, it’s a plus that the Russians and Chinese are unplugged, right?”

  “Not so much. We had already turned off their nastiest malware ourselves. But we left the beacons in place, so they wouldn’t know that their software wouldn’t work. Someday they would push the red button and, surprise, nothing would happen. Now they know.”

  “I didn’t realize that.”

  “Nobody does. But it’s bad shit, like I said. Someone out there has a whole lot more technical expertise than we ever realized.”

  “So, who are these geniuses, sir?”

  Strafe crossed his arms over his chest, so that the “Ipso Facto” tattoo was over his heart.

  “That’s what you’re going to find out, my friend. But I’ll get you started.”

  “Fallen Empire.”

  “Correct. We think that thread starts with these supposedly do-gooder hackers who want to purify cyberspace. The leader is named Jason Howe. He pretends to be a journalist, but that’s horseshit. We think the top software engineer is an Italian named Ricci, who runs something he calls the Quark Team. But the rest is fuzzy.”

  “Sarah told me the names. She said she’d never heard of them before. What else can these people do, besides turn off malware?”

  “Install it, for Christ’s sakes. They think they have the secret sauce. Remember Ghostbusters? They want to be ‘the Gatekeeper.’”

  “Where are they?”

  “We aren’t sure. I know that sounds pathetic, but we just found out about this two weeks ago. My guess is Italy, because that’s the last fix we had on both Howe and Ricci. But right now all we see is their exhaust.”

  “Are you sure they aren’t fronting for the Russians?”

  “I’m not sure of anything. The Russians may be their customers. The Chinese, too. Before Ricci hooked up with Howe, he was making the market in bad shit. Selling it to anyone. Password dumps. Keystroke logging. Rootkit control. The works.”

  “Do they write their own code?”

  “God knows where they get it. From the Brits, or French, or Israelis, or us. Maybe all of the above. Or maybe they really are that smart. The point is, we want to take them down. Or, hell, maybe own them, I don’t know. But first we need to know who they are. And that’s your job, brother.”

  “I apologize, sir, but tell me again. How do we know it’s not a Russian cutout?”

  “We know the Russians aren’t running it because we know from SIGINT that the GRU is trying to penetrate this outfit, too. Okay? I didn’t tell you that, but that’s the point, Mike. We want you to get there first.”

  “Got it.” Dunne nodded. “Who has this Quark Team recruited? Any ideas?”

  “Nope, but you read the same intel I do. There a lot of smart asshole kids out there. Throw a dart at the map. Russia. Ukraine. Germany. Iran. Saudi Arabia. Britain. America. There are hacker shitheads everywhere the dart lands.”

  Dunne cleared his throat. “And you want me to find this organization and get inside it?”

  “Precisely. We haven’t been tracking them because it’s supposedly ‘illegal’ for us. But that’s changing, starting now.”

  “Uh, these people have cover as journalists, from what yo
u said,” offered Dunne.

  “They claim to be journalists, but that’s bullshit. And you know why? Because they are too good. They pump stuff out faster than we can follow, and they crow about it. People who talk about openness that much must have something to hide.”

  “What do you want me to do that Tailored Access and Information Operations can’t do better?”

  “Penetrate them. Physically. Turn over the rock and shine a flashlight so we can see what’s crawling around. We’ve been going in the front door with these Wiki-nuts and charging them when we catch them doing something illegal. Now we want to follow the little bastards out the back door to where they think nobody is looking. Out among the geeks and hackers and NSA haters. We want to hit the people they think we can’t touch. How does that sound?”

  “Fine, but I still don’t know what you want me to do.”

  “Sarah said she told you a little about Fallen Empire.”

  “She told me about Howe.”

  “They claim to be the global fourth estate. Which is ridiculous. They shit on all the real journalists who refuse to publish the crap they steal. They’ve been off-limits for us.”

  “I gather.”

  “But not anymore. They started working recently with a Serbian illegal in Italy. We have that link solid, stone cold, or at least the Italians do.”

  “Who cares about Serbia?”

  “Nobody. The point is that the guy is an undeclared intelligence officer. That changes the game. Anyone touched by an illegal is fair game. That’s how the lawyers and I read the rules.”

  “Then why do you need me?”

  “Because we want to get inside this so-called free speech underground. Recruit people. Mess with their shit. Take them down. After that, we’ll see what’s next.”

  Dunne lifted his brows. He was game, but he wasn’t stupid.

  “That sounds like covert action against a bunch of civilians.”

  “It’s foreign intelligence collection. If it was covert action, we’d need a finding from the White House. But it isn’t. So, we don’t. You have it in writing, in the order creating your special access program. That’s your get-out-of-jail-free card. Not that you’d ever need one.”

  “But you could never show the SAP authorization to anyone. It’s code-word.”

  “We’ll never need to. Because it’s legal. I thought you were a stand-up guy, Mike. I didn’t know you’d been to law school.”

  “Shit, sir. Give me a break!”

  “Just teasing. I know you’re solid, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So, listen up: These people are dangerous. They have all the tools. They could start pushing this stuff, and not to Human Rights Watch, either. Fallen Empire’s target list doesn’t make sense. They’re omnivores.”

  “You sound almost jealous, sir,” said Dunne.

  “Maybe.” Strafe allowed himself a smile. “I just want to find where they are, see what they’ve got, and own them, one way or another. But first you’ll have to strip away all this free-speech, we’re-just-journalists crap. You need to break their cover.”

  Dunne looked around the conference room at the array of command-and-control systems that connected the agency to everywhere that mattered on the planet. He took a breath, put his hands together, deliberating.

  “There’s one more thing you need to know,” Strafe said quietly in the silence. “Some of this shit that Fallen Empire is putting out doesn’t seem to be true.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. There are voices, pictures, events that look real. But our analysts don’t think they happened. So, it’s like, what the fuck? These are smart bastards, and they’re playing with, forgive the term, ‘reality.’ It’s not fake news, like the Russians. It’s fake events. That’s why we need to get inside.”

  Dunne nodded again. “This is a pretty big deal, I take it.”

  “Yes, indeed, my friend. This is the star gateway. People in the USG have gotten so worried about authorities and technicalities that they don’t realize the world has changed. That’s why we need someone who hasn’t lost his street smarts, who can break into this space and wire it up, get some ground truth so we know what the hell is going on.”

  “And I don’t have to quit my directorate?”

  “Nope. This is TDY.”

  “What if I get caught?”

  “We’ll deny it and pull you out.”

  “Right. But suppose they collect stuff on me. I’m a sitting duck. They’re American ‘journalists.’ They could fry my ass.”

  “Hypothetical, but it won’t happen. Once these people know we’re coming after them, they’ll scatter. These people are chickenshit, basically. Otherwise they wouldn’t be sitting behind machines all day.”

  “Maybe they are machines,” said Dunne.

  Strafe laughed. “You’re losing it, buddy.”

  “Suppose I get prosecuted. This is against the regs, technically.”

  Strafe laughed. “For god’s sake, Mike. Chin up. We’re the CIA. Nobody would bring a case. If they did, the judge would never convict. Don’t be a baby.”

  Strafe checked his watch, unnecessarily, given that there were a dozen clocks on the wall. He stood and put his hand on Dunne’s shoulder.

  “Sorry, but I have another meeting. If you get cold feet, tell Sarah and we’ll find someone else. Otherwise, good luck.”

  He was out the door before Dunne could answer that he was a pro, he would accept the assignment, and he wouldn’t get caught.

  7 Langley – September 2016

  “European Special Collection” was the opaque name given to Michael Dunne’s special access program. It was separate even from the normal review for compartmented work. Access was denied for European station chiefs and the Europe and Eurasia mission center. Because it wasn’t defined as a covert action, it wasn’t briefed to the White House or the congressional oversight committees. The operation was run directly by the deputy director for operations.

  European Special Collection was given a small office in the basement of the Original Headquarters Building, in a restricted area that handled liaison with officers outside the building under non-official cover. Dunne was assigned a codirector named Morris Hoffman, a veteran Europe Division officer who was temporarily reassigned from his post as deputy chief in the Counterintelligence Center. Four support officers were assigned to the group, too, all experienced and read into some of the agency’s most sensitive activities.

  The group held a meeting the day it got office space, sitting on desktops because the chairs hadn’t been unpacked yet. The Office of Security had delivered boxes of computer gear, but they were sitting on the floor, unopened.

  “Welcome to the office that does not exist,” said Dunne when they gathered in the cramped, windowless space. There was nervous laughter; their makeshift office looked like the storage room of a hotel.

  “I’ve asked Mr. Hoffman to lead this first meeting,” Dunne continued. “He’s been around Headquarters for years, unlike me, and he knows how to make the bureaucracy work.”

  Morris Hoffman was bald, with a smooth oval face. He wore a suit with suspenders that accentuated the broad bulge of his stomach. His skin had the pink, slightly puffy tone of a man who preferred steam baths to exercise. He sat in his chair almost motionless, and conveyed an aura of benign, impervious calm.

  Hoffman gave a broad, imprecise explanation of the operational objectives, authorities, classification procedures, and operational security requirements. He talked without modulation, like a flight attendant reviewing pre-takeoff safety procedures. He and Dunne would soon be preparing a detailed operations plan, he said, which they would share with the group when it was approved.

  Hoffman asked for questions, and when there weren’t any, he turned his round Humpty Dumpty frame toward Dunne.

  “Shall we adjourn the larger group, Mr. Dunne? Go over some details?”

  They retreated to the soundproof
cubicle that was their shared office, for a private review of the program.

  Dunne had a perverse admiration for his new partner. Hoffman was one of the exotic florae that still existed in the remoter parts of the agency, far from the hotshots and second-guessers. He was from a family of CIA spooks: His great-uncle Frank had been a legendary station chief in the Middle East, and various other relatives had navigated the secret world abroad, but Morris was the family introvert. He was an orchid that bloomed in the dark. He would be useless on an operation, but that was Dunne’s realm; Hoffman understood the minefield of Headquarters.

  “May I suggest that we take a month to organize our template?” proposed Hoffman.

  “That’s too long,” answered Dunne. “Strafe is itchy. We should move out as soon as we know where our targets are based. Target location is your department.”

  “Indeed it is.” He smiled like a maître d’hotel in a fine restaurant, whose only pleasure is to make the customer happy.

  “We are looking for the obvious indicators,” Hoffman continued. “Cyber operations require a large power supply, so we are looking for changes in local grids in Europe. They require advanced computing capability, so we are looking for shipments of graphical processing units and the most advanced NVIDIA cards. They require smart people, so we are looking for engineers who have been writing significant research papers who have suddenly stopped publishing. We’ll find a location, I assure you. In the meantime, we are collecting all Fallen Empire communications, public and private.”

  “I want to be in Europe in two weeks,” said Dunne.

  “Very well. You are the ‘operator.’ I am your support staff. I gather, then, that as soon as you have a preliminary plan, you’ll want to set up overseas. Am I right?”