

### SLEDGE

Book 1

By Erick C

Copyright 2013 Erick C

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

### Dedication

This book is dedicated for freedom fighters around the world

### About This Book

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are used in fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Hack #1 – THE RISE OF THE APOSTLES

Hack #2 – SLEDGE

Hack #3 – FILE 61-398

Hack #4 – PHISHING

Hack #5 – THE CAPTURE

Hack #6 – THE ARCHITECT

Hack #7 – STEGANOGRAPHY

Hack #8 – PROF. BOBBY T. SCOTT A.K.A CRASH

Hack #9 – NO PLAN B

Hack #10 – ANTILOGY

Hack #11 – SECOND WARNING

Hack #12 – 1337 SPEAK

Hack #13 – ZOMBIES WAR

Hack #14 – THE DREAM

Hack #15 – THESTRANGER

Hack #16 – TO HACK A HACKER

Hack #17 – RISE TO STARDOM

Hack #18 – THE APOSTLES

Hack #19 – ALWAYS ABIDE BY TRAFFIC RULES

Hack #20 – A CONDUCTOR'S STORY

Hack #21 – MIDNIGHT TRAIN

Hack #22 – HELL'S STATION

Hack #23 – FUNERAL MARCH

Hack #24 – ORNL

Hack #25 – ENTER THE TITAN

Hack #26 – ANTILOGY VS TITAN

Hack #27 – QUANTUM LEAP

Hack #28 – THE ARCHON

Hack #29 – ROOM 432

Hack #30 – VESUVIUS II

Hack #31 – BLACKNET

Hack #32 – COUNTERATTACK

Hack #33 – THE GATHERING

Hack #34 – FREEDOM FIGHTER

Hack #35 – FORT ZION

Hack #36 – TRAPPED

Hack #37 – I "LIKE" FACEBOOK

Hack #38 – ESCAPE FROM DEATH

Hack #39 – STEGANOGRAPHY REVISITED

Hack #40 – MASTERMIND

Hack #41 – LIKE FATHER LIKE SON

Hack #42 – EPILOGUE

About The Author

NEXT BOOK PREVIEW

ASSEMBLY OF THE GUARDIAN

THE RISE OF THE APOSTLES

"The next war will be fought invisibly...."

0523 hours, Apr 21

JetAirlines Flight 332 was bound for New York from Kansas City. It was a fairly new airlines entering into the already competitive airways business few years back with focus on low cost.

"This is your captain speaking, we are going to arrive in New York, in about twenty minutes time, earlier than our schedule. We will be landing shortly and I hope you have enjoyed your flight with JetAirlines. Cabin crew, please prepare for landing. Thank you," announced Captain Paul Stanley.

There were a lot of movements in the plane as passengers got awaken and the cabin crew performed the necessary landing preparations.

"This is JetAirlines JA 332 to Kennedy Tower, requesting clearance to land," Captain Stanley radioed the JFK Airport traffic controller.

After few seconds, came the reply, "Roger, JA 332, you are number 5, please proceed to hold pattern."

"Affirmative, JA's out," Captain Stanley finished and turned off the radio. "Another smooth flight, eh, Chad?" Captain Stanley nodded to his co-pilot.

"Yes, Paul. We made a good time," Chad added, "Once we reached NYC, first thing I will do is to drop by Ninth Avenue to have a hell of a party."

"Well, it's good to be young, and for you lad, the best advice you will ever get is to have fun while it lasts," said Captain Stanley. He did a quick check on the weather broadcast readings.

"I guess we will need to change the flight direction a bit, there's a heavy cloud directly 5 miles ahead of us," Captain Stanley then instructed the cockpit instrument auto pilot to change to a new heading, "What the..." he tried the operation again, but it was still unsuccessful. He tried something else, like changing altitude, but nothing seemed to work. The plane did not respond to any button or switch presses anymore.

"God, we're losing control of the plane!" the captain exclaimed in realization of the situation.

"What?" Chad tried some switches in the cockpit instruments as well. He could not believe it, but none of the navigation system really worked.

"JA 332, this is ground tower, you are deviating from your route," the traffic controller radioed in. The flight computer was, in fact, setting a new flight direction for the plane without the pilot's instruction.

"Ground, we're losing control of the plane, FMS not working, over..." said Captain Stanley in response.

"JA 332, try manual override!" suggested the ground tower.

"Negative, tower... manual override ain't working either," Captain Stanley replied, now fully losing control of the plane. Suddenly, the plane automatically changed its direction to head southeast from JFK airport. Some passengers, who had realized that they had changed direction abruptly, had become restless and demanded explanation from the crew.

There was really nothing that the captain could do. He had tried everything and could not regain control at all. The plane continued losing altitude and moving away from its original destination.

"Ladies and gentlemen. This is Captain Stanley speaking. I have a very bad news for all of us. Our plane had been sabotaged. We are losing control of the plane. Currently, we are moving towards the sea south of Long Island. Based on computer's projection, we may be crashing into the sea in 5 minutes. May God..." he was interrupted before he could finish.

There was a brief static noise coming out from the announcement system. The next voice that spoke out was not the captain's voice. This person had an artificial-like voice that modified his sound to be eerier, "Good morning, my dear fellow passengers. This is your new captain speaking. I'm The Conductor. We are going to crash land soon, so ensure that you have fastened your seat belts, written your final wills... Oops, please forget about the last one... nobody will be able to read them anyway once we... CRASH and BURN!!" The Conductor gave an ominous laugh that lasted for a few seconds. A classical instrumental music started playing. It was Pachelbel's Canon in D Major. The music playing in the background made the situation much more dramatic than it already was.

There were shouts of panics from the passengers and the cabin became chaotic. Their voices were drowned in the music as The Conductor increased the volume louder. Some had gone praying, others sending emails and text messages to their loved ones. The music increased the intensity of the passengers' fear. The plane continued its descent and crashed head first into the sea. The ground control tower personnel could only watch each other in horror as they heard the last communication from the plane. And then they lost contact from the plane.

~~~

A hacker group called The APOSTLES immediately claimed responsibility for the crash. They pasted the following message on a popular text sharing web site around one hour after the crash:

Title: The Beginning of The End

We are The APOSTLES

We will punish the government of The United States for crimes against its people

We will also punish the government for war crime against multiple countries

We want the government to stop PRISM, FISA and any other forms of spying on its people

We hacked the JA 332 plane on 21st of April for a start

We identified at least 5 NSA's high-ranking officials in the flight (you know who they are)

We controlled the plane remotely and crashed it into the sea as a warning

We could have crashed it somewhere else in locations with a lot of civilians

We will not stop here

We will continue to exact divine punishments as we see fit

We are unwavering in our efforts

By: The Conductor, Elite, 2nd Order of The APOSTLES, on Apr 21st

The declaration of war had been made. The government of The United States would be fighting a cyber war against an invisible group of hacktivist that nobody heard of before.

There were 76 passengers in flight JA 332. There were zero survivors. The news became the talk of the country immediately in Facebook, Twitter, TV, papers, and almost anywhere in the rest of the world. It was almost like 9/11 all over again.

SLEDGE

2342 hours, Apr 22

Sledge worked in Securite, a network security solution provider company located in the Silicon Valley. Sledge was actually his online nickname, which he used even in real life. People found it funny at first, calling him that way, but as time went by, they got used to it anyway. Sledge was a network security engineer in the company.

Securite became popular overnight, when it became the first company that introduced the Securitor anti malware software that could clean up the W32/Tosh.I worm. The worm was estimated to have caused more than $50 billion damage world wide, even more than the previous record holder, MyDoom worm, at $38 billion. The worm exploited weaknesses in the operating systems that damaged the user's data. Securitor was the first solution that was able to reverse the damage done by the worm, an unexpectedly simple bit-shifting algorithm to the victim's data. Since then, many other security companies had also come out with a similar solution, but not quick enough before Securite earned its bucks.

The group of programmers that were responsible to write Securitor codes were rewarded handsomely. But nobody knew that, Sledge was the one giving those programmers the initial draft of source codes to destroy W32/Tosh.I and recover damaged data at the same time. Sledge was a very skillful programmer. He could code things quickly. But he never got interested to apply for the programming job. He thought that it was too boring for him. The programmers thanked him by sharing portion of the rewards with him.

Sledge had another special skill as well. He had a photographic memory, which allowed him to recall whatever texts and pictures he had recently seen. He could visualize the whole image into his mind, like a photograph. His was not eidetic memory though. He could not recall other kinds of sensory memory, such as what he heard, as good as what he saw. With this ability, Sledge would be able to rewrite a whole page of texts that he had just 'memorized' in less than 5 seconds. On a single page, he could even locate words by specifying the line numbers they were on. His photographic memory would normally last for about 2 to 3 days and after that, those images would become a 'blur' in his mind.

The network security in the company since then had been shaky. There were many hack attempts from across the worlds trying to penetrate the company's Intranet. Most of the hack tried to steal the source codes and documents from the company's knowledge center. Others were just in plain bid to 'deface' the company's website, the activity of changing the appearance of a website illegally.

Sledge worked night shift. Hack attempts from inside the country would normally be very active starting midnight to early morning, just before dawn. On contrary, overseas hackers would be most alive during daytime, due to time zone differences.

_The creator of the Tosh.I worm must have been very unhappy_ , Sledge said to himself. Sledge thought that this was going to be another busy night. He had registered 1,000 over attempts to penetrate the company's firewall tonight. Then there was one that managed to go through the firewall. The hacker managed to go in via a compromised Securite's employee device and managed to jump into the company's internal network. It was currently scanning for any useful data for unknown intention. Sledge was able to detect the malicious machine via the warning from the distributed network system that he wrote himself. His custom distributed malware detection system were part of the custom software he plugged into network devices such as routers and switches. He was a true believer of SDN, Software Defined Networking, and he wrote custom codes for his routers to gain more control of the devices under his care. One of the modules he dumped into the devices was actually the distributed malware detection system.

_Not tonight, not on my watch_ , thought Sledge. Sledge issued a command to redirect the router serving this compromised machine to his 'honeypot', a set of fake network that lure unauthorized machine over. Sledge's honeypot was well made and quite believable. It was designed to replicate realistic systems, databases and services. The hacker continued downloading files from the 'honeypot', all the while unaware that he had been tricked. As a bonus, Sledge also included his own version of Trojan horse inside the honeypot under the convincing name of important files.

The hacker hit the 'jackpot' in less than 10 minutes. "Quite a capable one, to be able to locate this file in such a short time," Sledge was thinking out loud to himself now.

And then, within another minute, the hacker had transferred the entire stolen files from the compromised machine to his/her own machine. "But too bad, not clever enough to check the file contents before opening them..."

By this time, the hacker had opened the file that contained the Trojan horse. It was a reverse hack. Now Sledge, using a piece of controller software, was in full possession of the hacker's machine remotely. He sent the following warning message remotely to the hacker's screen via a pop-up:

Retreat ASAP! Or I will clean up your computer and there will be nothing left before you can figure out what happened...

The element of surprise always scared the shit out of those hackers. But Sledge's threat was not an empty one. Having installed a backdoor inside the hacker's machine, he could pull the plug off the target machine by a single key press on his keyboard. He was aware that doing this might risk lawsuit to the company, but he knew those hackers were in the wrong in the first place anyway. Tonight, this worked as usual. The hacker, surprised by the pop up message and fearing the worst, immediately disconnected from the compromised device without any delay.

Sledge then sent an email message reminding the employee of the compromised device to clean up the machine. He always hated this part, cleaning up the mess.

"Another job well done!" Sledge said to himself. Most of the time, these kinds of events would remain unknown. Nobody would have realized that he had saved the company countless time. He hated publicity, and preferred to work alone. He did not care when everyone called him 'anti-social'. But Sledge got another darker side of his own.

FILE 61-398

1503 hours, Apr 23

Agent Redford was an FBI agent. He was not sure how he got lost inside the building, but he did. He had received a distress call earlier from his 12 years old daughter. She had been kidnapped. The abductor asked him to come alone, unarmed and not to inform the police or anyone else. Agent Redford complied because he did not want to lose his only daughter.

When Agent Redford entered the strange building, he found that it was empty. He called out loud, but nobody replied. He then went up the elevator to the first floor. The whole floor was a maze of walls made of transparent glass-like material. He tried to navigate around, and ended up stuck in a dead end corner. He had the feeling that he was being watched all the time. He checked his phone but it had no line inside here.

Suddenly, the floor below him collapsed. He fell down and landed on all four hands and feet. He told himself that he was lucky to have been trained in parkour for the past 4 years. He checked around his surroundings. He was in a place that looked like a lockup. He was trapped and was behind thick iron bars. The ceiling above him, which had given way earlier, had closed again as if nothing had happened. The door to the cell was locked. It had no keyhole or whatsoever locking mechanism. The place was barely lighted. As far as he could see, there were cells all around.

There was a male body lying face down on the cell's floor he was trapped in. Agent Redford carefully turned him around and was shocked. It was the familiar face of Agent Trevor, one of his ex-FBI partners. He concluded that he had been dead for only about 24 hours.

"Tell me... do you recognize our friend who is sleeping there peacefully?" suddenly a voice came out of nowhere. It was from a loudspeaker hidden somewhere in the cell.

"Where are you?... Where's my daughter?" Agent Redford shouted.

From out of nowhere, in the distance her daughter's screamed out, "Help, daddy...! Please help me, I'm scared..." The voice pierced through Agent Redford's heart like an arrow. She was somewhere nearby, but he could not see her.

"Please... do not harm her... Tell me what do you want?" he shouted in desperation.

He could hear her daughter's sobbing cry but it was drowned by the kidnapper's voice again, "Let's get straight to business, Agent Redford... I need access to File 61-398... and I believe you have the right permission presumably?"

Agent Redford was surprised. Not only this guy knew about the secret File 61-398, but he also knew that he had access.

"That file... Why do you want that file?"

"I'm the one asking questions here... so, what do you say? Agent Trevor here did not want to cooperate, what a pity..."

Agent Redford gave the corpse another look. _Poor Trevor!_ he thought. He was a promising and talented agent, with bright futures ahead of him. "What you are requesting is a highly confidential file. I will need to obtain permission from the Director..."

"My dear Agent Redford... I'm starting to lose my patience... or do you prefer to see you daughter die... prematurely?"

"No... no... please! Not my daughter..." Agent Redford thought hard for a while. If he agreed to the demand of this mad man, he might be losing his job and received severe punishment for his action. But since his wife left him, his daughter was the only direct family he got. The choice was clear to him.

"Do you promise to release her if I give you the access code?"

"Give me the code and I promise that both of you will get to see each other again, otherwise..."

Agent Redford could not trust the guy, "I would like to see my daughter first... and then I'll give you the code."

There was a long silence for another couple of minutes. Her daughter had stopped crying. Then he heard footsteps walking to the direction of his cell. Then the sound of footsteps became faster running sound. And from the door of the cell, there her daughter came into view.

"Daaaaddy...!!" she cried out loudly.

"Honey...!!", he wanted to give her a big hug, but they were separated by the iron bars. He could only held her hands firmly between the bars.

"Now, give me the code quickly..." the voice came out of nowhere again.

Agent Redford inspected her daughter. From the look of her face, she had been crying for a long time, but other than that she looked okay. Agent Redford gave the code. "Now release us... as promised!"

The voice gave out a sarcastic laugh. "My, my... Agent Redford, did I ever promise to release both of you fully? I only said that I would let both of you see each other lovingly. Here in Fort Zion, you can come in, but you can never leave, unfortunately..."

"You!... Son of a..."

~~~

Few days later, the FBI launched an investigation to search for Agent Redford who went missing together with his daughter. Nobody found out what really happened to both of them.

PHISHING

1033 hours, Apr 27

Weekend came, and this was the typical Sledge's preferred lifestyle. He did not leave his room the whole day, an apartment located just 5 blocks away from his office, except to do his business in the toilet. And even while in the toilet, he always had his iPad device with him. Sledge was always connected 24 x 7 x 365. On Saturdays and Sundays, he ate pizzas for lunch and dinner, and for breakfast, cereals or reheated leftover pizzas that he could not finish the day before.

Sledge was 30 this year, but he did not look the age. He looked more like the average 20 years old teenagers. Although he led an unhealthy lifestyle, Sledge was not fat at all. In fact, he was thin, weighing no more than 112 pounds. He was 5.7 feet tall, below the average American male's height. His doctor blamed it on his high metabolism. He ate a lot and still managed to get away without exercise. He tried jogging few times in the park near his apartment before. But after 3 miles, he normally would be already out of breath, gave up, and gone back to his room.

Sledge had been wearing glasses since primary schools. His eyes vision started to get worst when he got his first desktop computer at the tender age of 8. His friends had been recommending him to go for vision correction treatment because he just looked a lot better without his glass. He was told that his thick black frame glass made him look 'nerdy' or 'geeky', but he did not care. He still preferred his glasses, wearing contact lenses only when he wanted to go for sports.

Sledge lost his parents at the age of 10. They went missing suddenly and he had been living with Aunt Lucille in Sacramento since then. She was like a mother to him. The best part about Aunt Lucille was that she always gave Sledge a lot of freedom to do whatever he wanted. She would never limit the time Sledge spent with his computer. Since Sledge started working, he had moved out on his own. Aunt Lucille would come and visit him once or twice in a month, and he would bring her out to nearby Japanese restaurants, her favorite. Sledge liked her very much, but he still longed for a real mother and father. He did not even have any photos of his parents with him. When Sledge asked, Aunt Lucille simply mentioned that their parents decided to go away one day and asked her to look after him.

Sledge's room was filled with various devices and gadgets, which he was quite proud of. Most of his devices were either connected wired or wirelessly: very high capacity Network Area Storage (NAS) in multiple disks RAID10 setup served as his personal cloud storage, 2.5 feet tall surround 7.1 speakers that were Bluetooth and Airplay ready, 3 workstations that he used as his gaming machine and various servers, 20+ Arduino devices in various robotic forms, 3 bonded gigabits fiber network connection to Internet, 4 wireless security cameras setup throughout his apartments that monitored his daily life, although his life so far had not been very interesting at all, and many, many other various gadgets big and small.

During weekend, Sledge turned a black hat, which was a term used to identify unethical hackers that use his or her skills for personal gain. This day was just another day, business-as-usual for him. He earned extra money by stealing bank account and credit cards information from a few targets that he selectively identified in Facebook. Normally, his targets were people that he befriended by sending Facebook requests. After a brief introductions, he would usually be able to obtain a few critical details like email addresses, birth date, phone number, work company, etc. that he could use to obtain private information like bank account number. Sometimes, he could even instruct the bank to do password reset of his targeted victim's online accounts. It was not hard. A little bit of 'social engineering' was normally enough to convince people to share the required information.

Sledge activity was generally called 'phishing'. He would send email to his targets that pretended to originate from their banks. The email content normally looked something similar to below:

From: Customer Service <custservice@xxxxx.com>

Received: Apr 27, 10:34:21 UTC-7

Subject: For Your Banking Safety

Dear Mr./Ms./Mrs. [XXXXX],

We are currently upgrading our banking system to improve our security. This is for your benefits and protection. We will require your assistance to verify your password by following the secure link below. Please follow the instructions provided.

Please click here to open the link

If you have any enquiries, please do not hesitate to call us at the following number: [XXX-XXX-XXX]

Thank you very much for your kind attention and being proactive to ensure your account safety.

Best Regards,

[Name]

[Bank] Business Manager

The emails would be decorated with images and logos from the corresponding bank to look genuine. The phone number given was actually the real bank's number, but nobody would actually be bothered to make the clarification calls since he or she would normally be directed to IVR (automated response) system first. And even if someone did make that call, normally the bank customer representatives would not have any clue on what's happening, and occasionally would even instruct the victims to proceed as per what the email said.

Opening the link, the victim would be directed to a temporary HTTPS secure URL hosted by Sledge. The bogus website would be designed to look as close as the real website as possible. After user completed the instructions given, the website redirected the unsuspecting victim back to the bank's real website. Some users simply chose to close the browser at this point, or login to the real bank without knowing that his or her password had been compromised.

This phishing activity was just one of the methods of how Sledge earned his extra bonuses outside his paychecks. He also performed a few other illegal activities. He did not like to think of himself as a black hat, justifying himself by carefully selecting his targets from only people that he thought would have made their bucks illegally or unethically. He did not think there was anything wrong with stealing from the bad guys. But he was not Robin Hood either, because he did not give his loots back to the needy. He spent all of it on himself.

Little did he know that he had been trailed for quite a while by the FBI. Sledge was quite a careful guy, never leaving behind any traces of his little crime. The FBI agents had been studying how he operated for the past five months with the help of a team of white hat hackers. Sledge's crime was too minor to be worthy of any FBI agents' attention, but this time the FBI had a different objectives. There was a special reason Sledge was carefully chosen to be monitored.

Sledge had taken the bait. One of the Facebook victims, with the name 'Rick Torres', that he was targeting, was actually devised by government officials from the FBI. The FBI agents, with the help of advisers from DoD and NSA, had spent a lot of efforts in creating this fictitious character. Rick Torres even had Twitter account, #r!ck~torres, with more than 40,000 followers. Of course, the followers were fake ones that the creators purchased from a website that sold such services for $5. The white hat hackers also set up automatic twitter-bot, applications that automatically tweet and re-tweet on your behalf, with posts that were always related to his REIT investments, yachts, gold futures, etc. He did not seem to know much about computer at all.

As usual, after blasting his emails, Sledge would receive a few replies immediately. _These people are damn good obedient on whatever instructions given to them_ , Sledge thought. Usually, 20-25% of his targets would reply, and around half of those would have enough money in the bank account, not to notice the negligible amount of money he would transfer to his ever-changing PayPal account. "Bingo! This Torres guy is quite loaded," and he found that he had done a lot of repeat PayPal transfer every month. Just the right target to create a transfer that might go unnoticeable. He performed a $1,000 transfer to his PayPal account with the password he 'phish'. Proud and happy with his achievements, Sledge went back to his online multiplayer role-playing games without suspecting anything.

THE CAPTURE

???? hours, ?? month ?? day

They were in a forest. It was quite dark even though it was still daytime. The Rotting Shadow forest was twisted and prevented most sunlight to come into it. They were hunting an infamous death troll, an undead of a legendary troll warchief, resurrected by Naldarath, the evil wizard of the Darkland. But they were not well prepared to fight it, having been ambushed by a band of vicious worg earlier. Now they had to face the death troll immediately without any chance to recover first. The death troll seemed to keep those worgs around as pets, and fed his victims to them.

Tyren casted an incantation and a magic fireball appeared in his hand. He threw the flame magic to the direction of the death troll, but it just exploded without a trace when it hit the monster's invisible shield. The death troll was immune to magic. Tyren had tried a few magic spells at his disposal, but none seemed to work. They had to fight it physically. Luckily, besides being a wizard, he was also a warrior. Half warrior, half wizard.

Tyren was accompanied by a female halfling mage, Em'dari, another human warrior, Biltor and a centauress hunter, Cenuli. He equipped his broadsword, and charged in the direction of the death troll. Biltor followed suit. Cenuli unleashed multiple arrow shots from a distance. Her accuracy was amazing, none missed. Arrow attack worked but despite the number of arrows, it caused only slight scratches to the death troll. It became angry and charged into the direction of Tyren and landed a hit with its massive clawed fingers. A single direct blow from a death troll could kill a normal person even when equipped with full armor. Tyren flew a few feet back and landed flat down on the ground. Em'dari was quick to act. She casted a healing spell on Tyren and soon he was back on his feet again.

Biltor had engaged the death troll straight on, exchanging blows left and right. Biltor could withstand more punishments, but it was clear that the death troll was on the upper hand. Em'dari was quick to act again, this time she casted a few supporting spells on Tyren: Angel's Blessing, Crystal Shell, and Divine Attack. All improved Tyren's defensive and offensive power tremendously. Tyren then run ahead to hit the death troll with his broadsword. The Divine Attack spell increased both his attack power and speed, and the death troll was injured deeply. But that was still not enough to bring it down. The death troll countered with a heavy blow of its fist. The Crystal Shell spell softened the blow and damage to Tyren's body. This gave Biltor some time to withdraw. Tyren knew the protective spells would not last forever, so he countered the next blow with his shield.

Meanwhile, Em'dari did not waste any time. While the death troll was busy with Tyren, she had casted some healing spells and the same enhancement spells for Biltor. Recovered, Biltor marched back and joined Tyren in the battle. Cenuli continued shooting arrows from the distance. Combined, both warriors dealt the killing blow to the death troll. Before it died, the death troll let out a ghastly wailing sound that was deafening. Then it exploded with a purple lightning flash and disintegrated into ashes. There was nothing left behind but an artifact that looked like a white bone. Tyren retrieved it. The artifact was radiating a green magical aura around it.

And all of them received a lot of experience points and leveled up.

~~~

"Good job, team! We've got the legendary Bone of Nystga. We will need to decide how to share this loot," Sledge shouted on his headsets. They congratulated each other. They had defeated one of the most difficult boss monsters in the multiplayer online game that he was playing. Sledge was Tyren. He reached a level 38 half warrior, half wizard human after they defeated the death troll. He had been adventuring together with this group for a while now. He never knew who they were in reality. Sledge did not really bother to know anyway. He thought that real gamers might not be as cool as their alternate persona.

"Hey, we're needed at a PvP event. Some startup guild called Hand of God was challenging ours. Let's own their asses!" said Biltor. They were communicating via headsets using the VoIP, Voice-over-IP, service provided by the game. Biltor was their self-appointed group leader. The rest of them agreed and they sent their characters to depart for the event location in the game.

Twenty five minutes later, after almost winning the PvP event, an online Player-versus-Player event, pushing the other guild to the brink of complete defeat, he felt a bit nervous without reasons. Sledge had been doing so much phishing he never even bothered to check if there was anyone tapping him anymore. He continued with his game for few more minutes, but his worry still did not leave him. He left the game, causing angers from his teammates, and turned on one of his workstation's LCD monitor to check if there were anything out of place. Workstation 3 run all his firewalls and other security services. Tracing the log, he found the following:

[04-27-13 10:42:08] NetMond> [WARNING] Possible traces of remote interception detected...

[04-27-13 10:42:09] NetMond> [WARNING] Unrecoverable IP or MAC host address...

"BANG! BANG!" There was a loud knock on his apartment's front door, and followed by, "FBI! Please open the door, we know you are inside!"

_Shit! Who the hell will open that door ..._ Sledge thought, but he was currently staying on the 10th floor of his apartment, and the only exit was via his front door. He pulled out the rope that he had kept for fire emergency, and tied one end to the window curtain hook quickly. He then pushed the window open and threw the rope down. Sledge looked down and hesitated for a while. It was a really long way down.

Before he could decide what to do next, two FBI agents had smashed his room's door open and stormed into the room. Both had guns pointed at Sledge. Both wore black suits, neatly pressed.

"FBI! Freeze!" said the first agent. He had a good build, blond hair which was neatly combed, and, although Sledge could not see his face clearly because he wore sunglasses, he was quite good looking. The second agent was much bigger and taller. His suit was barely able to hide his muscular body. He had a dark hair with military haircut. "Put your hands up where I can see it, and no funny movement!" the first agent added.

This was the first time Sledge had real guns pointed at him. He complied.

"Mr. James Allen?" asked the first FBI agent. No reply. That was Sledge's real name.

"My name is Jeremy Davis, I'm with the FBI. This is Agent Vasiliev," Agent Jeremy nodded his head to the second FBI agent while holding his ID with another hand. "Please calm down and we'll make this easy for you," said Agent Jeremy while still pointing his gun at Sledge. This situation was a lot like the scenes from the movies he downloaded illegally, but when he really experienced it, it was real scary.

"How... how do you know my name?" asked Sledge although he already knew how these guys could be aware of such information.

"Oh, Mr. Allen, we know a lot of things that you don't know," added Agent Jeremy.

"Please call me Sledge."

"Your nickname, huh? But you are not in a position to negotiate, Mr. Allen. You have committed a lot of online crimes and I've got a full list of them here," Agent Jeremy used his left hand to pull a paper out from his coat. "Let's see, 53 recorded illegal phishing activities in the past five months, 33 unauthorized use of stolen credit cards for the last two months, breaking into the Department of Defense's Intranet and stole confidential information..."

"I... There were nothing big or serious at all," interjected Sledge.

Agent Jeremy ignored him and continued looking at his charge paper on his hand, and after a while, said, "Well, the list goes on."

Both agents appeared to be a bit relaxed now and even lowered their guns a bit.

"Well, you know very well that with my petty crimes, I don't deserve to have FBI agents on my trail. So tell me. What do you really want from me?"

Both agents looked surprised and then smiled. "Very smart Mr. Allen. But we'll need to take you back to our office where we can talk more about..."

"Call me Sledge and I demand that you tell me everything right here right now!" Sledge could not even believe that he had the bravery to spit out these words with two guns pointing at him, "I'm not going anywhere until you tell me the whole story."

There is a minute of silence in the room. Both Sledge and Agent Jeremy looked deep into each other eyes, without blinking. "You know, there are countless black hats like me that caused more damages out there... and I don't understand why they chose to send you guys here. Heck, I don't even understand why FBI would be interested in what I do for a start," Sledge added.

THE ARCHITECT

1215 hours, Apr 27

A long one minute silence again, which felt like eternity for Sledge. Finally, Agent Jeremy said, "A government secret file had been stolen. And we need your assistance to recover back the file."

"Huh? What had been stolen? The X-files?" Sledge questioned mockingly, "Or the US unclear bomb launch codes?"

"That information is highly classified, Mr. Allen," Agent Jeremy did not sound entertained, and then he continued, "The file is part of the FBI investigation on GhostNet. Heard anything on that before?"

In fact the name did ring a bell to Sledge. GhostNet was codename given for a large-scale cyber spying operation suspected to be conducted by the Chinese government. The operation targeted approximately 103 countries. The activity involved sending emails to the target Windows machine that contained the Gh0st Rat Trojan horse. Infected computers would then be fully controlled in real time by the attacker.

While Sledge was thinking hard, Agent Jeremy added, "I assumed you know something about that. We suspect the Chinese government might be behind all this, but we have no proof. There had been tension between our government for quite some time and this actually would escalate the issue even further. If you read the news, there had been more than 17 times increase in cyber attacks against the nation's critical infrastructure in only the past two years. I'm afraid, Mr. Allen, we might end up declaring cyberwar with the Chinese government if we let this happen."

"How do you even know that the file were stolen?" asked Sledge.

"I think 'stolen' might not be the appropriate word. The file had been accessed by someone. Our computer logs showed unauthorized file transfer to an untraceable link outside the FBI's network. An agent disappeared almost on the same day and we suspected he was responsible for the leak," answered Agent Jeremy, "Besides, Mr. Allen, the file has been held hostage..."

"File? Hostage? What do you mean?"

"Please allow me to explain. We have received a threat message from someone called 'The Architect', declaring that he will expose the file to the public in 10 days time."

"..." Silence filled the room for a while. It made the sound of Sledge's server spinning hard disk drive very obvious.

Then Agent Jeremy continued, "The Architect had put the file into a public location. The file access is currently secured by password, but The Architect, in his message, mentioned that after 10 days, he will open up the file to the public so everyone will be able to read it."

"Why does that matter? It's just a file about GhostNet, and some hackers. It should be OK for the public eyes, right?" Sledge asked again. But there was no response from Agent Jeremy this time. Agent Vasiliev, standing as quiet as statue all the while, suddenly voiced out, "Mr. Allen, the file could not be disclosed to the public." He spoke in a heavily accented English.

"But you guys, the FBI, are disclosing your files to public anyway today, under the Freedom of Information Act. You disclosed your files in The Vault nowadays regardless." The Vault (vault.fbi.gov) was the FBI's electronic reading room that contained over 6,700 FBI files, some of the files heavily censored.

Agent Jeremy jumped back into the conversation, "Mr. Allen, this case is a bit different. The GhostNet file had not been fully censored. All we can say is that, the information contained inside could cause furor between our two countries if misused. How do we know that The Architect will release the information without modification? It might be misleading the public about the perception of our government. If you still do not get how important this is all about, what I'm saying is that, Mr. Allen, the release of this very file to the Internet, might finally trigger the cyberwar between China and the United States of America. This GhostNet file can be used by Chinese government as casus belli to finally start the first strike."

A few minutes of silence again. Sledge was thinking very hard trying to understand why he was involved in the first place.

"Why don't you get your friends from NSA to help you instead?" It was public knowledge that the National Security Agency, or NSA in short, had an army of cyber warriors comprised of hackers that was specially trained in cyber warfare and could be deployed anytime.

"We had, Mr. Allen, and they had failed. I'll explain. You see, The Architect has located the file in a special site: antilogy.free-dns.com. We tried to trace the server, but most of the time ended up with proxies somewhere in Shanghai, China. The Architect seemed to love games, and we are presented with very challenging conditions to try to remove the file from the server. First, the access to Antilogy, the server that hosts the hostage file, is only possible via secure remote login. And there is a limit of 3 attempts. Every attempt will last for maximum 24 hours. After 3 attempts, no more accesses will be possible. Second, the file access was protected by a password. The Architect actually put the password file in the same location openly. The problem is that the password is encrypted and can only be accessed remotely. We cannot copy the file over. If Antilogy detected that you tried to do file copy operation, your connection will be terminated, and you will lose one attempt. We have used up 2 attempts and..."

"What? You mean you guys are left with 1 attempt only? That's all?" Sledge interrupted. Sledge also could not really understand how The Architect could prevent file copy since 'read' operation would be required anyway to try to decrypt the file, and 'read' operation is basically the same as 'copy' operation. But he guessed Agent Jeremy might not know the answer anyway since he did not seem to be coming from technical background.

Agent Jeremy nodded, "Third, the password file is encrypted using..." here Agent Jeremy paused for a while to ensure he pronounced the next words right, "RSA 1024-bit key, a very strong encryption that requires thousand of computer processing years to decrypt."

"And what do all of these have to do with me?" Sledge knew everything about RSA, but he was confused with his involvement.

"This is a surprise for all of us also, but the head of NSA's T unit... tracking unit recommended you because of your unique history," Agent Jeremy retrieved folded piece of papers from his suit and passed it to Sledge.

Sledge opened and browsed through it. It was a complete background profile of Sledge. There was a photo of him. The same photo used in his ID card. Sledge glanced through the file quickly. It was typewritten. Sledge could not understand that there existed people that were still using typewriter today.

ALLEN, JAMES, Mr.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Surname: Allen

Given Name: James

Birthday: July 31st

Age: 30

Occupation: Network security engineer at Securite

Father: missing

Mother: missing

....

And then, there were sections about his education history and remark.

Education History:

\- Grant Union High School, Sacramento

\- Computer Science, California State University, Sacramento

Remark:

\- Rejected DHS's special invitation to join the cyber warfare army in 2008

\- Winner of "Fastest CryptAnalyst" competition in 2009

\- While working in Securite, helped in drafting the anti malware definition for W32/Tosh.I worms

....

The list went on. _How the hell they knew all these things?_ Sledge thought. It looked as though that it was real that the government knew everything. Then, the next thing that caught his attention was a line on the same "Remark" section that was highlighted in bright yellow.

\- James Allen defeated The Architect in the latest BlackCon.

"I can't remember meeting The Architect before," admitted Sledge.

"Mr. Allen, you attended this year's BlackCon, didn't you?" asked Agent Jeremy.

"Yes," Sledge was even more surprised to know that the FBI was also monitoring the BlackCon. It was an unofficial annual underground online gathering of black hats from around the world. Since it was an online meeting conducted via IRC, attendees did not meet each other physically. There would be moderated presentations and discussions, sharing of zero-day exploits, hack challenges, and many other activities not normally presented in other hacker's conferences.

"As usual, I accepted a few challenges from few people that I can't remember the name. I think I won most of them," Sledge added.

"Mr. Allen, you accepted a challenge from a hacker by the nickname Flux00r. Based on our investigation data, we managed to find out that Flux00r was actually another nickname used by The Architect. The name Flux00r appeared in the previous 2 BlackCon events as well," explained Agent Jeremy.

Now that Agent Jeremy mentioned it, Sledge was able to recall someone with that nickname.

STEGANOGRAPHY

As with previous year's BlackCon, hackers challenged each other online. It was the fifth year of the event and it took place in the #BlackConTheFifth IRC channel. There were rewards offered by hackers that sponsored the online conference for those that were able to solve the challenges presented.

Sledge was approached by a Flux00r during the event. He claimed to be one of the sponsors and asked Sledge to participate in his challenge. The reward was quite good so Sledge did not think too much that time. Flux00r gave him a web link. Sledge opened the link and the website simply displayed a short explanation, an image and a text box with a "Login" button.

10BTC will be rewarded to anyone who can guess the password to enter this website

BTC was referring to Bitcoin, which was a virtual currency. It were not fully legalized yet during that time, but it was quite a popular currency used by people involved in a lot of illegal activities, such as money laundering, drug sales, gambling transactions and a lot more. Bitcoin was managed by servers that updated the currency's transactions using peer-to-peer technology. 10BTC was equivalent to roughly $1,300 at that point of time. It would be easy money if Sledge could guess the password.

The most prominent part of the website was a single image centered on the screen. There was a text box that expected password as input below it. Nothing else. The picture on the website was the only hint there. It was a simple ASCII art image of a key. ASCII art uses combination of the computer characters defined by ASCII standard to form an image. It was a popular type of art used by underground computer hackers and crackers. To Sledge's surprise, normally hackers would use the actual typed texts to form these images, but here, Flux00r converted the whole thing to pure image file in JPEG file format.

Sledge looked at the key for a while. Although he knew it was stupid, he could not resist trying a few combinations of words like "key", "k3y", and other similar words. _It won't be that simple._ _There must be other ways_. Flux00r then added that there were three other hackers before him that had tried and given up previously.

Sledge downloaded the image to his computer. _The hint definitely existed somewhere in this image_ , he thought. He tried to extract the image file properties, such as EXIF, TIFF, XMP and IPTC for information, but found no clue.

There must be a reason why the ASCII art was converted to JPEG file.

Then he remembered about his college research. He was working on a summer project about steganography. It was an art of hiding secret message. His focus at that time was on digital image steganography, hiding secret message into a digital image. Steganography could also be used detrimentally, for example, by terrorist, to hide their secret message exchanges from Internet monitoring authorities. The simple image here presented in the website by Flux00r might contain a hidden message inside it.

Sledge then used his repertoire of steganalysis tools, a combination of tools he modified himself when he was working on his project, on the image. These tools could be used to extract hidden information from images that had been modified to store hidden message. If he had the original unmodified image that he could use to compare with this image, the process would be a lot more straightforward. But instead, he had to rely on certain well-known steganographic algorithms to try to find whether there were any hints of image tampering.

In another hour, his tools had completed the process. He was able to retrieve the secret words stored in the image in plain text, but it was encrypted and turned out to be garbage. Sledge tried a few decryption tools and managed to crack it in a few minutes. Flux00r was using a simple logical bit-shifting algorithm to encrypt the original message. The method takes the bit patterns of a value, in 0s and 1s, and shifted those bits to the left or right accordingly. An example would be 000101011 values, when left-shifted, would become 001010110 instead, all 0s and 1s were moved to the left. This would normally create unreadable texts when converted back from computer binary bits to normal texts. The password recovered was 'BlackCon Champion'. Sledge used the words to key in the website and clicked on the 'Login' button. It worked. There was nothing special in the website, just a simple 'Congratulations!' message.

Flux00r transferred the Bitcoin reward as promised and Sledge totally forgot about him after that.

~~~

"I still don't understand why you guys can't catch him," Sledge said, fully aware of the US government's hacking capability.

"Mr. Allen, The Architect is very good in hiding the trail of his crime. All of our leads pointed to proxies in China that he used to cover his trace. And he's quite good in doing that," said Agent Jeremy. "There are a few possibilities. The Architect might be in contact with the China's government. Although we have no proof, we have every reason to believe that, based on the content of the stolen file, the Chinese government will gain much from this."

"If that is the case, why did he even bother to post the file somewhere for you to break? He could just expose the file immediately, rather than playing games," asked Sledge.

"The Architect also demanded payment of $100 million in cash before the deadline. He requested the money to be dropped into a location of his choice. If he received the money, he will not expose the file. But you know very well, Mr. Allen, that we can't hold his words on this and of course, it has been always the government policy, not to give into the demands of terrorists," said Agent Jeremy.

"What if I say I'm not helping?" Sledge dared to ask although he already knew the answer.

"Mr. Allen, unless you understand clearly the position you are in, you actually might not fare any better with that choice at all. You can reject our offer, and we will move forward with your charges here and we'll meet you in court... Or you can help us and the FBI will forget about all this and you'll come clean in the end," Agent Jeremy ended with a tone of finality.

PROF. BOBBY T. SCOTT A.K.A CRASH

1248 hours, Apr 27

Sledge had no choice. He hated having to travel immediately without saying a single word to Aunt Lucille.

"I have to call my relatives first to inform..." Sledge said, but Agent Jeremy interrupted him, "You can call them later on the way. You better pack your things right away, and bring only what you need... we've got a long trip to the FBI headquarters."

"FBI HQ? You mean the one in the Washington DC? That's thousands of miles from here..." said Sledge.

"That's right, so you better start A-S-A-P..." Agent Jeremy replied without much care and went on to make a call on his mobile.

Reluctantly, Sledge then started packing. Agent Vasiliev watched him as Sledge packed his stuffs. This made him feel totally uncomfortable.

Sledge tried to think of the list of stuffs he might need. First, of course, he needed his laptop, a MacBook Air, with which he did majority of his work. Sledge liked it for its portability and balanced power. He left all of his workstation computers running. He did not know what might happen down the road, so having his desktops connected twenty-four hours would allow him to remote-in anytime he needed. This way, he could pull most his hacking tools collection, source codes, music or movies anytime. Sledge also had his stuffs fully backed up to a cloud provider that allowed unlimited storage and full encryption. He could access them anytime, anywhere in case something happened to his physical files locally. The convenience of cloud computing nowadays allowed everyone to travel light. However, he could not trust the cloud service providers fully and that was why he needed the full encryption and reviewed their terms of service carefully before signing up.

Next, he could not part with his iPad mini. It was a portable tablet device that allowed him to do a lot of stuffs without the load. He packed enough accessories to work with it, Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, NFC and Bluetooth combo headsets and other small gadgets. During the time when he needed his concentration, Sledge preferred to work without disturbance, and that means, blasting rock and roll music loudly on his speakers or headsets, eliminating any external noises and possible interferences.

He was considering for a moment whether he needed his Google Glass or not. He had gotten this at a bargain from eBay. The Google Glass was a convenient device and it had been prescribed for his shortsighted vision. Sledge rarely wore it outside because he did not like the way it made people stare at him. But then, the Google Glass was not really a trendy fashion wear either. It just looked weird and always garnered people's attentions. For those that did not know what the device was, they would usually say something like, "Your glasses look funny." And for people that knew what it was, "Are you recording video or taking picture with that?" or "Please don't wear that to the toilet." He decided to pack it in anyway because it might come in handy.

Sledge then pulled out his portable hard drive. He tried to fit as many files as possible inside, mainly his applications, tools, and source codes, which were his Swiss army knife in this occupation. His hard drive content was fully encrypted. In the case that it fell into the wrong hands, nobody would be able to read his personal files.

Sedge included few other minor equipment in his 'arsenal'; chargers, backup battery power, water proof case for his Android phone, stylus, high capacity thumb drives and memory cards. He did not know what he might need, besides these things contributed negligible extra weight to his laptop backpack.

Hardware was important for Sledge, without the right hardware, he could not perform his tasks well. But he knew having the right software would make a lot of differences. For him, software decided his life or death. For a start, he ensured that the 'essential' hacker tools were installed in all his devices from laptop, tablet to his mobile phone. The port scanner allowed him to scan for open ports in a network, useful to detect unsecured open sockets that could have security holes. Password crackers went next. He had been using these tools a lot once he managed to break into a system. SQLI tools to break into a website vulnerable to SQL injection, exploiting database technology weaknesses. GCC+ compiler and Integrated Development Environments, in short, IDE, for his coding needs. Wi-Fi scanning and hacking tools, allowed him to trace all available Wi-Fi network and break into those with insecure our outdated authentications. Coupled with packet sniffing tools, he would be able to capture and spy on wireless communications around him with weak encryptions. You would never imagine that a fellow patron of Starbucks, who was sitting with a laptop a few tables across you, who might look harmless sipping his coffee from a distance, was actually sniffing and reading the private email message that you are sending. Sledge also copied others such as various networking tools, script generators, terminal interfaces such as Secure Shell, key loggers, remote security scanners, malware generators, and many more. Sledge collection had grown quite a bit since he started this hobby about 10 years ago.

Sledge spent around thirty minutes in the whole process. Most of the time was wasted on his software. He only packed enough clothes for a few days, not sure what to expect. All the while, Agent Jeremy spent his time talking on his mobile, looking or pretending to be busy. Agent Vasiliev was watching him impatiently all the while, and Sledge could not tell what he was looking at from the dark glasses he wore. Sledge thought that he might be making sure that nothing dangerous went into Sledge's luggage.

~~~

It took them 5 hours plus to fly non-stop from the San Francisco International airport to Washington Dulles airport. Out of the plane, they walked briskly to the car park lot and went inside an unmarked black SUV. Sledge knew it was a Chevy Suburban model, the usual type of car that the FBI preferred. From the airport, they drove to the J. Edgar Hoover building, the main FBI headquarters.

Once inside the car, Sledge reached out for his phone in his pocket. Agent Vasiliev was alerted by his sudden movement. "Stop! Do not make sudden movement!" he shouted while reaching out for his gun.

"Relax man! I just need to make a phone call," said Sledge, "Geez, what's wrong with you guys!" He then pulled out his phone and called Aunt Lucille.

"Hi, Aunt Lucille. This is Sledge... I mean James. I'll be away for a while," he started.

"James, what happened?" said the voice from the other end of the call. Aunt Lucille sounded worried.

"Nothing, it's just... I thought I need a holiday... so I decided to go for one," Sledge was not very good at telling lies at all.

"Why didn't you drop by and say goodbye first? Are you sure you are alright my dear boy?"

"Yes, Aunt Lucille. I'm fine. I just need a break," he replied.

"Where are you going? How long will you be away?" Aunt Lucille asked.

"I'm not sure yet... but I'll be sure to give you a call," he said.

"I'm not sure what happened James, but you better take care of yourself."

"Yes, Aunt Lucille. I will. Bye...!" and Sledge added whispering softly, "I love you..."

"I love you too, James!" and as Sledge hung up the phone, he could swear that he saw Agent Vasiliev tried to prevent himself from laughing and made a snorting sound before he looked away.

They reached the FBI headquarters without incident. Sledge was brought to a room, where there was already someone waiting inside. Agent Vasiliev excused himself and did not join them. It was going to be a while before Sledge saw him again.

"This is Prof. Bobby T. Scott, our cyber warfare expert from the NSA, he's the brain behind that helped to pinpoint your location," Agent Jeremy introduced the guy. His hair was all white, balding and he wore very thick glasses that made his eyes look extremely small. He just got that look of the old weird dude that spent too much time in the lab. He was not really fat, but he got a sizable tummy.

"Hi, Sledge, finally... it is nice to meet you!" Prof. Scott walked towards them in earnest and he extended his hand to Sledge. But Sledge just continued staring at him. He could not believe this joker was the guy responsible for his capture.

After a few seconds, Prof. Scott was still standing there, smiling and still extending his hand as if expecting Sledge would eventually change his mind. However, Sledge did not do that and finally opened his mouth, "Well, I don't usually shake hands with white hats... you know... our kinds don't mix."

"Sure, sure... black hats and white hats have different purposes, but we all live in the same worlds. It doesn't matter which sides you are in, we are the same inside us, don't you think so, lad?" said Prof. Scott in response, "By the way, you can call me Crash, that's my nickname..."

"'Crash Override'? 'Hackers' movie... 1995? The nickname of the main character?" Sledge asked. "Err..." but before Prof. Scott could reply, he already added, "I thought you would be more creative than copying someone else's stuff, fanboy..."

"No, no... my nickname is just Crash... that's all," Prof. Scott quickly added.

"And how did you manage to trace me? I used proxies to protect my activities," asked Sledge again.

"Sledge, the government had access to lawful interception facility from telecommunication companies. The 1994's law called CALEA, the Communication Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, allowed for this. It was a simple matter of identifying your traffic patterns..." CALEA allowed the government to conduct electronic surveillance by requiring telecommunication operators and vendors alike to design their equipment in a way that allowed the government to tap into telephonic, Internet, VoIP and all other similar forms of communications in real time. The delivery of the targeted communication content was normally via an IP-based VPN to the law enforcement agencies.

"Ugh!" Sledge knew he could not trust his telecommunication provider.

"Gentlemen, I'm happy both of you could get along very well so fast. Mr. Allen, Prof. Scott will join our party in our mission to track down The Architect," Agent Jeremy interrupted their warm introductions.

"WHAT!? Are you serious?" Sledge blurted out, "Hold on a sec!..."

Prof. Scott winked at him, and then said, "Technically, since you defeated The Architect's challenges, and eventually, I managed to capture you, I am the best guy you can have in your team, right?"

"Prof. Scott, thank you for the introduction, but tempus fugit. Please, we'll need to depart ASAP," Agent Jeremy interrupted again.

"Right you are. Tempus fugit. Time flies. Give me 5 minutes to pack my stuffs and we're good to go," Prof. Scott dashed away while saying these words. His feet caught the foot of a chair on the way out, and he fell with a loud crash. "Ouch... No problem guys, I'm OK...!" He quickly got up and continued on his way, but he was obviously limping slightly because of the accident.

"God, are you sure he's the right guy to bring with us?" Sledge asked in disbelief.

"Well, I don't really know if I make the right choice as well. His track record showed him to be the smartest one out of our candidates, and he proved it right by locating you successfully. Others failed before," Agent Jeremy added, smiling, but with a slight depressing look on his face.

NO PLAN B

1956 hours, Apr 27

Agent Jeremy told them that they would be staying in a three star hotel close by the FBI headquarters building. They would be using the headquarters as their base of operation. Agent Jeremy sent both of them to the hotel in his SUV.

"What? Three star hotel?" asked Prof. Scott, looking unhappy.

"You guys should be grateful that we didn't ask you to sleep in one of our meeting rooms," replied Agent Jeremy.

They reached the hotel and Agent Jeremy asked them to check in and drop their stuffs first while he parked his car.

"Welcome, Mr. Allen. Long stay, sir?" asked the receptionist. "Huh? Excuse me?" the question caught Sledge by surprise. "You are booking the room for at least one month. And there's instruction here that you will be staying indefinitely until you inform us... am I not reading the correct instructions?" the receptionist now reply with a confused look. "Uh, yes... I'm not sure when I will leave..." Sledge replied.

On the way up to the hotel rooms, Agent Jeremy called Prof. Scott to meet him in the lobby together with Sledge.

Sledge was in room 432 while Prof. Scott was just in the opposite room, 434. After quickly unpacking his stuffs, Sledge immediately went down to the lobby and saw that both Prof. Scott and Agent Jeremy were already sitting there in one of the sofa.

Sledge walked over and seated himself directly on the sofa opposite them. He brought his iPad and laptop with him together.

"Where's your friend? The other FBI agent?" Sledge noticed he did not see Agent Vasiliev anymore.

"Agent Vasiliev is more of a field agent. He prefers to shoot first and talk later. He won't be joining us unless we have some live actions for him," Agent Jeremy replied.

"So, what now? What do we do next?" Sledge asked.

"Prof. Scott will start the briefing, about Antilogy... professor, please..." replied Agent Jeremy.

"Antilogy is the server where the GhostNet file is located. The server is hosted via a free domain name server, in the URL antilogy.free-dns.com. As we found out during our last attempts, the password file required to get access to GhostNet file is fully encrypted with RSA 1024-bit at the moment, so nobody will be able to read it. But The Architect threatened to expose the file in approximately 10 days time."

"Since it's a server, why can't you track it down?" asked Sledge.

"Ho Ho... Sledge, you should be the expert in removing your traces. The Architect is the same, or even much better. We had tried to lookup his location via the IP address, but it turned out he was behind a multiple hop proxy network. We were not able to locate the real server, since the proxies he used were scattered around the world. Worst thing is, the proxies kept changing dynamically. Antilogy might as well be a ghost that leaves no traces behind," replied Prof. Scott.

"I'm curious how he can track down if we copy the file offsite. Scott, you should know that the act of trying to decrypt a file remotely should be the same as read or copy operation. It might be an empty threat," Sledge suggested.

"Good question. I have a theory on my own. The Architect might be using a program that can detect remote file transfer as a whole versus decryption process that read only a portion of the file. Anyway, I don't really have a better idea on how that can be achieved as well," Prof. Scott ended with less confidence in his answer.

"I don't think we would want to take that risks, Mr. Allen, knowing who we are dealing with here. We would be better off if we spend the time decrypting the password rather than getting disconnected and lost our last chance," said Agent Jeremy.

"So what's the plan? It is impossible to decrypt an RSA 1,024-bit protected content with today's technology," asked Sledge.

"Here's the plan, Sledge.... That is why we will first have to visit ORNL," Prof. Scott paused to let his idea sunk in.

"ORNL?"

"Oak Ridge National Laboratory," Prof. Scott elaborated.

"You don't mean...?"

"Yes, we will enlist the help of the country's most powerful supercomputer to defeat the Antilogy's decryption."

"Titan?"

At this particular time, Titan was one of the most powerful computers in the world, just behind the Chinese's Tianhe-2 supercomputer. But Titan beat Tianhe-2 in terms of energy efficiency when measured in performance per watt unit. Titan was located in Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

"Bingo, Sledge. With Titan's processing power, you will be able to defeat The Architect's encryption in no time. It will be a piece of cake."

"After that, what next? We can't be sure that The Architect will keep his promise not to disclose the file publicly... let's say if we managed to break in Antilogy..." Sledge asked.

"During the attempt, we need to explore the weaknesses of Antilogy. We need to find if there is anything that could be useful for us to locate The Architect," Prof. Scott replied.

"Hold on a minute, Scott! What is my role here?" Sledge was now looking at Prof. Scott in question marks.

"You are the expert programmer here. Only you can create a code that could handle Titan's parallel processing power. With your help, we could break into the system, and either retrieve or destroy the file." Prof. Scott must have done his homework. He was fully aware of Sledge's prior works and capability to unleash the full performance of machine with so many processing cores.

But Sledge was not so sure himself. "You NSA people should have much better parallel logic coders than me..." Sledge said. He always thought that the NSA employed only the brightest minds in the country.

"We've done our homework, Sledge. Remember the application that you developed to win the CryptAnalyst competition and released to the public? Our best coders couldn't create something that reached even 50% of your application's theoretical efficiency." This last statement was, in a way, big complementary for Sledge. He could not believe that the best cryptographers in the planet could not do what he could. Also, the NSA really followed his every move. Indeed, Sledge did put the application that he used in the 2009's competition to a public server. He did not make the source code available. And he never thought it ever garnered any big interests since there were only one or two people who contacted him to ask how the application worked.

"I found the overall setting... suspicious. Why would The Architect setup something like this? Wouldn't it be easier for him to hand over the file he kept in a thumb drive just when he gets the money, just like in the movie..." Sledge said.

"It's a game, Sledge. The Architect liked games. We knew that from our intelligence so far," Agent Jeremy now chimed in.

Sledge was not convinced. He could not seem to understand the actual motive behind such ridiculous rules made by The Architect so far. There were just so many things that did not make sense to him.

"There is a time limit of 24 hours for every attempt. We have only one try left before The Architect revealed the file to the public, this is our last chance..." Prof. Scott said.

"And who wasted the first two attempts?"

Prof. Scott was embarrassed when he tried to answer that question, "Well... you see... We had to try something, didn't we? Our last two attempts failed to break Antilogy within the time limit given."

"What have you found?"

"Unfortunately, nothing so far. The Antilogy is as secure as possible in every way," Prof. Scott then tried to change the topic, "Your history showed that you managed to win The Architect's challenge before. You might understand him better, hence I recommended you to join this operation."

Sledge suddenly felt angry. Here was the person that caused him to be apprehended by FBI and being forced in this position.

Before he could say anything to vent his anger, Prof. Scott already continued, "I had my team of T unit ready for another attempt." Prof. Scott must be referring to the NSA's tracking unit that Agent Jeremy mentioned before. "They had figured out a few ideas. We will also enlist the help from X unit, network security division. They have broken into a lot of computers before, inside and outside of the country. This should be a good plan."

"What's the plan B? If all these things don't work?"

"No plan B, Mr. Allen. If The Architect revealed the file to the public, we better be prepared for World War III," Agent Jeremy replied.

Titan. T unit. X unit. It sounded like a good plan, but they still only had one last attempt. What made them think this time they would succeed, when previously these guys failed?

ANTILOGY

2016 hours, Apr 27

Nobody spoke while Sledge tried to digest the plan.

Sledge thought that he needed to do reconnaissance to see if he could find anything useful. He suggested this to both Prof. Scott and Agent Jeremy. They both agreed it was a good idea since Sledge would connect anonymously.

"Right now? Let us go and get the Wi-Fi access from the hotel reception first," said Agent Jeremy, standing up. Sledge did not budge. He simply said, "No, not necessary," and took out his laptop and keyed in a few terminal commands. Within less than a minute, he had already been connected to Internet.

"What the hell?" Agent Jeremy said in surprise, "How do you do that? How could you get into a Wi-Fi network without the password?"

Prof. Scott on the other hand did not look that much impressed, "Show off! He's doing DNS Tunneling."

"Huh? What... tunneling?" Agent Jeremy looked confused.

"DNS Tunneling is a method to encapsulate data packets into DNS protocol so that DNS servers will forward the packets, thinking that it is actually a genuine DNS request. It exploits a loophole in Wi-Fi security, because normally, DNS requests are not subjected by Wi-Fi access controller filtering," Prof. Scott explained what he knew smugly.

"So, you mean I can break into Wi-Fi network anytime?" Agent Jeremy still sounded as if he had just witnessed magic.

"Well, it comes with limitations, for example, speed is not very great since data packets need to be translated to DNS protocol, then there are also latencies of having to transfer everything to a server first to decapsulate your packets, and..."

"Save your breath for later,... I need my concentration," Sledge said. His concentration could not work with so many noises around him.

Sledge used his laptop to connect to Antilogy using the standard secure remote command line login, Secure Shell, or also known as SSH. He used a random username, PC-15231, hoping that The Architect would not suspect anything and would just assume that his session would look like just any other random users out there in the Internet.

Immediately, his screen displayed an image. "What the...?" Sledge was surprised by the familiar image. It was an ASCII art of a key, the same one he had seen before in BlackCon when Flux00r, or The Architect, presented him with the challenge.

"The ASCII art of a key is the symbol of The Architect. He used it a lot as his trademark in all his hacks," explained Prof. Scott.

[SYSLOG 20:21] Logged in as Guest user: PC-15231

<The Architect> Welcome, Sledge, my boy!

_What the...? How did he know me?_ This definitely freaked out Sledge. The Architect used the broadcast system to send him a message. He was really surprised The Architect knew who he was and the fact that he was connecting to Antilogy.

<PC-15231> How do you know it's me?

Sledge responded using the same broadcast command.

<The Architect> We never forget, really? Sledge, you beat me in BlackCon, and I still remember discernibly.

<The Architect> Oh, and just in case you are wondering, I captured your MAC address the last time you were busy with my challenge happily.

"So that's how The Architect know it's you, MAC address is a unique identifier of your network device and can be used to uniquely identify any user," said Prof. Scott. Sledge was not very happy that he could be identified so easily. He was more careful when he did his illegal stuffs, making sure he did not leave any traces behind most of the time by hiding behind proxy servers or VPNs. He thought next time he should have done these regardless anyway, judging from the way these people could easily identify him so far.

<PC-15231> Who are you and why you are doing this?

<The Architect> My dear friend Agent Jeremy? He should be with you, yet didn't he explain things fully?

<The Architect> Oh, boy, you are really in the dark seriously.

<The Architect> I am one of the Elite of The APOSTLES. Our duty is to expose the cheats and dirt of the government's evil ploy.

<PC-15231> Elite of The Apostles?

<The Architect> The APOSTLES had 12 Elites, and I'm one of them. The US government had done enough war crime, the APOSTLES will make you pay...

No response from Sledge. He was not sure how to reply to this.

<The Architect> I assume you are doing some reconnaissance works here, boy?

<The Architect> But this is not fair, you are not allowed here and you have only one last attempt in Antilogy

<The Architect> So use it wisely

[SYSLOG 20:32] Connection terminated by remote admin...

And just like that, Sledge's session had been terminated. He did not have any chance to find anything useful. He tried to connect again regardless of The Architect's warning, but it seemed that his laptop had been blacklisted by Antilogy. Any attempts made to connect were rejected by Antilogy immediately.

"I lost connection," said Sledge.

~~~

"We are up against one of The APOSTLES? Why you never told me anything about this?" Sledge asked, staring at Agent Jeremy. It was hard not to hear about The APOSTLES since the plane crash incident had garnered a lot of popularity surrounding this hacker group in the Internet. Sledge was never a supporter of the government's law that gave it power to monitor the country's communications, be it Internet, email, phone, etc., all in the name of the homeland's protection. Sledge was a proponent of personal privacy and supported the idea of stopping government surveillance of its people. But he did not like the idea of killing people to achieve that. The APOSTLES' intention was right, but their method was wrong.

Agent Jeremy went into thinking for a while, before replying, "It was on a need to know basis. This is why it is important for us to capture him, Mr. Allen, and we will need your full cooperation to help us with it. Defeating The Architect will bring us a step closer to cracking The APOSTLES case. Other agents are currently hard at work to trace down the remaining members."

Sledge suddenly came into realization that he might have been pulled into something that would be too much for him to chew.

SECOND WARNING

2042 hours, Apr 27

"How do you think The APOSTLES was able to hack a plane? I mean that's quite scary, knowing people could hack into an aircraft system? I heard of people hacking a simulated aircraft system before using a mobile phone remotely. But I never knew that can be done in real life," Sledge asked Agent Jeremy.

Agent Jeremy looked unsure and said, "I'm not sure myself. The forensic team had not come out with any report yet..." Then he casted his look aside to Prof. Scot, "What do you think of the matter, professor?"

Prof. Scott took a deep breath before he started, "This is just my theory, but everyone knows JetAirlines is a low cost airline. They leased a lot of refurbished planes. Those planes might be running older flight management systems, where there could be unpatched security holes. Hackers can attack those systems remotely and gain access to the auto pilot system, navigating the whole plane as if it's a remote control toy."

"But what about manual override? The pilot can easily take control if the auto pilot is not working?" asked Agent Jeremy now. He seemed curious as well.

"Again, this is just my theory, but someone might have sabotaged the manual control system before the plane took off. I do not think it was possible for a remote hacker to override the manual pilot system. It must have been damaged by someone physically."

The realization that The APOSTLES had access to a commercial airplane system made Sledge shiver. _If these people can kill a plane remotely, what can they do next?_

"Scientia potestas est," said Agent Jeremy.

"Yes, knowledge is power," Prof. Scott said in agreement.

They had dinner in the hotel. Agent Jeremy called it a day and told them to prepare for him tomorrow morning. Prof. Scott invited him for a drink in the hotel bar, but Sledge was not interested. He was quite tired and went back to his hotel room. Sledge fell asleep almost immediately.

~~~

"DING! DONG!" Sledge was awoken by the doorbell. He looked at the clock on the nightstand, 3:32AM.

Who the hell is still awake at this time?

The doorbell rang again to his annoyance and Sledge got up and looked into the door's peephole. He saw an anxious looking Agent Jeremy, already in his suit. Sledge opened the door, "When you say early, I never thought that it will be this early..."

"Quick, Mr. Allen! Get yourself ready! We need to go to the office. We had an emergency!" Agent Jeremy said urgently. Prof. Scott was standing next to him and was yawning non-stop.

Sledge was wondering what emergency that made him having to wake up at three something in the morning, but he slipped into his T-shirt and jean anyway. It was cold outside, and Sledge regretted that he did not bring his jacket with him.

They drove to the FBI headquarters and walked briskly to Agent Jeremy's office. "It was The APOSTLES again," Agent Jeremy said while showing them his laptop.

The APOSTLES had posted another message in the text sharing website:

Title: The DDoS Attack of The Century

We are The APOSTLES and we are back to give our second warning to our prey

We will command millions of bots to swarm and cripple your critical websites in approximately one day

We are targeting the government sites and banking facility

We will not stop the DDoS attack of the century

We had become stronger and many have joined The APOSTLES willingly

We had the best cyber capabilities than any nation globally

By: The Architect, Elite, 5th Order of The APOSTLES on Apr 28th

DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, is a kind of attack that uses compromised computers across the Internet to do a concentrated exhaustion of resources. Servers under DDoS attacks normally would not be able to differentiate between real user's valid requests and the attacks'. The attack, if massive enough, would be able to make even servers with high capacity becomes unavailable to legitimate users. If the scale of attack is not big enough, the website would experience slow network performance.

"That was The Architect alright – y. He always ended his sentences with the 'y' words, which I think is stupid – ity," said Prof. Scott, he could not resist.

"I do not understand why The APOSTLES bothered to give warning. This is like a bank robber knocking on the front door of the bank, asking the security guard to prepare in advance before they come in," said Prof. Scott.

"It might be just an empty threat, like some of the popular hacktivist groups few years back. The DDoS turned out to be just random hacks with very minor damages, involving website deface, accounts exposure, and bla... bla..." Sledge tried to suggest. He was aware of the recent increase in hacktivist activities, some of them even gave early warnings, but none of them could cause major enough damages to cause concerns.

"Looking at the previous incident, the government has been taking The APOSTLES very seriously," said Agent Jeremy, "I've been assigned to deal with The Architect. The top had given direct order that we should try to figure out something on our end. At least, since The Architect will lead this attack himself, we might be able to find one or two clues. The NSA and DHS's defense team had been deployed to help minimize the impact of the attack. Prof. Scott, any suggestions?"

"Erm... why don't we just wait for the DDoS to complete? Eventually, it will stop, they can't run it forever... right?"

"Unfortunately professor, that is not an option. Every second our banks cannot function online, millions of dollars of losses will be made. This is so sudden. It will take some time for our cyber defense team and service providers to mobilize, so we can't just sit down and wait..."

"Mr. Allen? What do you think we should do?" asked Agent Jeremy, turning to Sledge.

"The APOSTLES was kind enough to give warning. The banks should be well prepared for this right? Besides, banks and Wall Street financial institutions had been through few similar simulations before," Sledge gave his opinion, referring to Quantum Dawn, a simulated cyber warfare program. The program invited participants with big names like Citigroup, Bank of America, Department of Home Security, Federal Reserve, SEC, and many others. During the exercise, participants would receive various attacks such as fake trading information, DDoS, and virus invasion.

"Those were simulated attacks, Mr. Allen, not even close to real life," Agent Jeremy replied.

"Are you referring to the Quantum Dawn exercises? The number of bots involved in those drills was just too little, not even close to a million. It was proven by previous DDoS attacks, when dealing with overwhelming numbers, those organizations couldn't do anything," Prof. Scott shared his knowledge on the matter.

"Besides, this could be a good chance to start tracking down The Architect," Agent Jeremy suggested.

Sledge thought hard for a while before replying. If he could trace the one controlling the DDoS attack, he might be able to get some hints about The Architect and got all of this over with quickly. Then he could go back to his home.

"We will need an army of our own bots if we want to have a slight chance to fight that massive DDoS attack. But the cost to get that army will be expensive. Is the government willing to pay?" Sledge asked.

"Army of what? Pay what?" asked Agent Jeremy in confusion.

1337 SPEAK

0402 hours, Apr 28

Sledge booted up his own laptop, and then proceeded to open his IRC, Internet Relay Channel, application. IRC was one of the preferred channels by hackers around the world to establish groups, share hacks and illegal software, and other activities. He joined the #Mighty_Iron channel, the channel he frequented for more than 5 years with a group of black hats. The channel operator was a hacker by the nickname, Kewl1c3. Although it was early morning, luckily, he was online at that time.

<Sledge> Yo, bro Kewl1c3

<Kewl1c3> Yo, d00dz! W4zzup? 10ng 71m3 n0 $33

<Sledge> Need your help, bro

<Sledge> I need an army of zombies, fully programmable, as much as you can gather

<Kewl1c3> LOL! w4zz? y0 $3r10us?

<Kewl1c3> z0mb13$ 4r3 3xp3n$1v3 7h3$3 d4y$ d00dz

<Sledge> Don't worry about the cost

<Sledge> I will pay. And I want every single one you can get

<Kewl1c3> 10 gr4nd, n07 1 c3n7 13$$

<Kewl1c3> p4ym3n7 in 4dv4nc3 d00dz!

<Sledge> Can you make it cheaper? Come on, at least give me discount!

<Kewl1c3> N0 c4n'7 d0 br0, 50rry, my b07$ c0ll3c710n 1$ 0f h1gh qu4l1ty, 4nd m3 t4k1ng h1gh r1$k$ h3r3!

<Kewl1c3> y y0u n33d $uch b1g 4rmy?

<Sledge> None of your business, prepare the zombies as soon as possible

"I don't understand a god damn single word the other guy was typing," said Agent Jeremy.

"Agent Jeremy, that is leet speak," Prof. Scott said, "Basically, those are words used by hackers or gamers to be super cool. It uses replacement of various letters like the letter "o" with the number zero, the letter "s" with the symbol dollar and so on. Basically, the translated conversation looked like this," Prof. Scott had retyped the conversation on his own laptop screen, translating the leet speak with normal words.

<Sledge> Yo, bro Kewl1c3

<Kewl1c3> Yo, dude! What's up? Long time no see

<Sledge> Need your help, bro

<Sledge> I need an army of zombies, fully programmable, as much as you can gather

<Kewl1c3> (Laughing out loud) What? You serious?

<Kewl1c3> Zombies are expensive these days dude

<Sledge> Don't worry about the cost

<Sledge> I will pay. And I want every single one you can get

<Kewl1c3> 10 grand, not 1 cent less

<Kewl1c3> payment in advance dude!

<Sledge> Can you make it cheaper? Come on, at least give me discount!

<Kewl1c3> No can't do bro, sorry, my bots collection is of high quality, and me taking high risk here!

<Kewl1c3> why you need such big army?

<Sledge> None of your business, prepare the zombies as soon as possible

"You see, asides from being cool, hackers developed the language to be some kind of security, so that it would be difficult to do keyword search..."

"Thank you very much, Scott, for the translation," Sledge was amazed how Prof. Scott could retype his chat messages so fast, but he was not giving Mr. Know-every-thing-and-want-to-show-off the chance to finish, "We've got our army ready for action. Time to move on to the next step..."

~~~

The APOSTLES second warning message was posted 10 hours ago and the DDoS would have taken place in approximately another 10 hours time. There was nothing else that they could do, and since they still had some time, Sledge tried to get some sleep, but his eyes were wide open. His mind was full of thoughts on how he could stop the attack. By profession, he was a security engineer, but he had never experienced a large-scale DDoS attack before. He had an idea, but he was not sure whether it could work.

It was midnight, and true to their words, The APOSTLES triggered a full scale DDoS attack to major banks and public government websites. It was a disaster. On top of that, there were hackers actively exploiting weaknesses in websites as well. Sites got defaced. Bank accounts got stolen and exposed publicly online. The major banking websites, even with the backup from government and few private organizations, were unable to be accessed. The sheer volume and constant changing of the bot's IP addresses made it very difficult for the bank's security engineer to stop the attacks. The last minute announcements caught a lot of organizations unprepared. Also, with the processing power of a computing device today, and the blazing fast Internet speed, actually made the matter worst. Today, a single bot was around 1,500% much more powerful than a bot 10 years ago.

Sledge earlier asked Agent Jeremy to transfer $10,000 into an overseas bank account. Agent Jeremy made a lot of noise at first, but Sledge told him that he could only help him if the government was willing to pay. Agent Jeremy made the transfer nonetheless. Kewl1c3 managed to gather an army of roughly 152,042 botnets, computers that have been compromised by Trojan horse malware. These computers will have backdoors that the 'bot master' will be able to use to control the activities of these computers. Kewl1c3 passed the bot master remote control application to Sledge, reminding him to try to return as many bots in one piece to him as possible. The number of bots was not that high, compared to The APOSTLES declared number that reached millions. There was also no guarantee roughly how many of these bots would turn up during the day of the attack, since not all computers usually run 24 by 7.

"How do you plan to fight The APOSTLES' DDoS? Aren't their attacks enough? You are planning to start another DDoS? Wouldn't your bots just make the DDoS attack even worse?" asked Prof. Scott.

Sledge explained his plan with a lot of white boarding. First, he would need to create an anti-Trojan horse code. Then, he would program the bot master's logic code to be able to distribute commands to these bots simultaneously to ensure that the offensive operation would be effective. The anti-Trojan horse code would be transferred to the bots, similar to the process of arming your soldier with the right weaponry. The bots would then intercept the session, something similar to session hijacking, and then gain control and neutralize the target's Trojan horse infection. After this operation, the bad bots would stop the attack, freed from the grip of the enemy's bot master.

"How are you going defend an attack of millions of computers... with just 150 thousand odds bots on our end?" asked Agent Jeremy.

"This is not a battle where bigger number will win. As we disarm the infected bots, they will become neutral, and stop the DDoS. I will need you to link us up with the security engineers of the impacted banks and organizations."

"What for?"

"To be able to stop those bots, we will need target identifications. Those security engineers would have IP address logs in their firewall. I need the IP addresses as identification so my bots will know what target to fire at."

"What if you hit the wrong target?"

"Nothing will happen. My code will only work on machines that had been infected and contained the malware's signature used by The Architect."

Now Sledge had never done any presentations or spoke in front of people before, nor he ever dreamt of doing this. He could not believe that this suggestion came from his own mouth.

Agent Jeremy proceeded to gather the contacts of person in charge of network security from the affected organizations. Talking about efficiency, although it was midnight, he managed to do this in less than 30 minutes time. _That's the power of the FBI for you_. _Also, the network security departments would have no sleep. They had been busy fending off the attack_ , Sledge thought. Agent Jeremy passed the contacts to Sledge. To his surprise, the attendance list was composed of high-ranking people, such as Chief Information Security, Head of IT Security, Director of Network, etc. The FBI, or in this case, Agent Jeremy, must be an influential guy. Sledge then proceeded to host a video conference call to explain his battle plan to these experts.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is Agent Jeremy from the FBI. Thank you for your attendance given such a bad timing and on short notice. I understand that your organizations are currently under heavy attack by a terrorist hacking group. You must be extremely busy and your time is precious indeed. However, the FBI will need your cooperation and time to discuss a possible plan to stop this... DDoS once and for all," Agent Jeremy said, opening up the conversation. He then introduced Sledge to the parties.

_Leave the formalities to the PR guy_ , thought Sledge.

Agent Jeremy then whispered to Sledge, "I hope your plan really works, or else these guys will f*** me!"

"Uh... Hi, I'm Sledge..." Sledge took over the microphone and began. Sledge was super-nervous. His audiences were definitely people that were of high profile and importance, those of the level of his boss's boss.

"Speak up, please, we couldn't hear you!" said one of the participants. _Gosh, good start_ , thought Agent Jeremy.

Sledge then spent the next few minutes trying to explain his plan to everybody in the call. He did not sound confident at all. He was not really used to speaking in public after all. Before he could finish, he had already been interrupted.

"Nah! I don't think that will work!" said a middle-aged network security head, skeptical of the plan.

"No harm trying," said another.

"You are wasting my time here. We have a DDoS problem to solve, and have no time for such trivialities," said another.

Around 9 or 10 people left the call. The remaining stayed until Sledge finished and agreed to cooperate, thinking they would have nothing to lose anyway. Most of them never heard or even dreamt of this method before. Some were just plain curious and jumped on board simply to observe if this plan would work at all. Sledge thanked them and then gave them the instructions on how to remotely pump in the attacker's IP addresses to his server, where he hosted his bot master.

After the call, Sledge spent another 5 hours to code the anti-Trojan horse program. With the help of one of the network security engineer who was quite helpful, he managed to track down a remote machine infected by DDoS, hacked in, and copied the Trojan horse out to his machine. He reverse engineered the enemy's Trojan horse and created his own code that would destroy it completely. He then spent another couple of hours to test his code. He infected one of his test machines on purpose, and ensured that his anti malware would work as intended.

"Guys... uh, we're ready," he told Agent Jeremy and Prof. Scott, who had been waiting in the same room all this while.

"Well, what are we waiting for?" said Agent Jeremy.

ZOMBIES WAR

"Offense is the best defense"

1047 hours, Apr 29

_The beauty of distributed system. In the wrong hand, it can become a crowd-sourced crime. The more advanced our computing power become, the more effective DDoS attack will also become. DDoS attacks become daily reality that IT security officers will need to take as granted now and in the future_ , Sledge was not sure why he was having this thought at this moment.

Sledge started to process the first batch of IP addresses he received. There were a total of approximately 200K in the list. He unleashed about 50% of his bots to attack this batch and waited for a while to let the attack make impact.

"Well, how are we doing?" asked Agent Jeremy impatiently after only less than 5 minutes waiting.

Sledge issued the command in his laptop's terminal to show the report sent back by the bots on their activities. It was presented crudely, but even Agent Jeremy could understand this.

[10:52AM] $ ./herdmaster -report-summary

[10:52AM] HerdMaster> Active Bots: 75,000 - Target Neutralized: 50,212

[10:55AM] HerdMaster> Active Bots: 75,000 - Target Neutralized: 52,520

[10:59AM] HerdMaster> Active Bots: 75,000 - Target Neutralized: 58,777

It was a slow process, but it seemed to be working. Once a bot managed to disinfect a host, it will move on to the next one in the target list. There were failures as well, but these were marginal case, because it was less than 1%.

"It really works! Let's go full scale now!" Prof. Scott shouted in excitement.

"Let's increase the speed a little bit. We need to leave something as backup. When things can go wrong, it normally will," Sledge said and increased the active bots to 90%.

"Ah! Murphy's Law, eh?" Prof. Scott replied. Murphy law stated something like 'Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong'. Experience had taught Sledge about that and he needed to have plan B ready in any situations.

When Sledge had cleaned up more than 200K enemy's bots, Agent Jeremy started to receive calls from the security engineers of the companies participating. They mentioned slight decrease in the DDoS load on their network. Slight, but still noticeable.

"How you guys managed to do it? I thought I'm seeing things, but the DDoS seemed to be on downward trend," said one of them. "Just keep pumping in those lists to us," Agent Jeremy replied.

Sledge let his bots continued the attack for another hour.

"Over 500K!" shouted Prof. Scott again. He is laughing now, unable to contain his excitement, "The APOSTLES can go back to the hole where they crawled out from!!"

At this stage, some organizations that previously rejected to cooperate had contacted Agent Jeremy to participate. Some of them even apologized for their earlier reactions. They heard good results from their peers about Sledge's plan.

Two more hours and they had hit the 1 million mark. It was slow, but steadily, the DDoS attacks impact was reduced. Some of the sites were even able to recover from full downtime to at least a crawl. No one knew how many bots unleashed by The Architect were left out there.

At around 2PM, things started to go wrong.

[02:54PM] HerdMaster> Active Bots: 149,028 - Target Neutralized: 1,145,064

[02:57PM] HerdMaster> Active Bots: 145,489 - Target Neutralized: 1,147,542

"Damn it! I'm losing my bots fast," Sledge said. There should be no casualties on his side, unless the other party attacked back.

"What? What happened? How?" Agent Jeremy asked. He was bewildered by this turn of event.

"We are being counterattacked," Sledge now issued commands to stop the bots. But he was losing bots too quickly. Before he was able to stop them completely, he was left with only 30,421 plus the remaining 10% he reserved previously. Sledge sampled a few ex-bots to check what happened. He had to manually hack into the remote system to gather logs. From there, he found that he had been neutralized, in a similar process that he had used. Someone in The APOSTLES, or for that matter, it might be The Architect himself, had equipped his own bots with anti-Trojan horse code. Sledge explained what happened to Agent Jeremy and Prof. Scott. After hearing that, both looked depressed. The DDoS attack had not stopped at all, and they already lost a majority of their army.

"What do we do now?" asked Agent Jeremy.

"I don't know. We might have already lost the war..." Sledge hated to admit defeat, but it looked that this time, his opponent was too smart.

"The Architect really is a formidable foe. Both of you do think alike," said Prof. Scott.

_How was The Architect able to target my bots?_ Sledge thought hard on an alternative plan, but he had not really had any prepared. He went back to his laptop and spent a lot of time sitting in front of the screen, deep in thoughts. At this point, Prof. Scott suggested maybe that they had done their best, and they should wait for the DDoS attack to stop. He was still stuck with his theory that The APOSTLES would not be able to run DDoS forever. _Yeah right!_ thought Sledge.

Time flew and there were no signs that the DDoS was slowing at all. A large portion of The Architect's bots must have been recruited voluntarily. They were not pure zombies, and the bots' owner must have been fully aware or even supporting the attack directly.

Then came an uninvited chat message from a stranger in IRC. Sledge was surprised, felt suspicious, but accepted the IRC chat invitation anyway. There could be no harm in simple IRC chat and he was currently out of his wits.

<TheStranger> Sledge...

<TheStranger> I think you will need help to defeat The Architect

<Sledge> How do you know that I need help?

<Sledge> Who are you?

<Sledge> How can I trust you?

<TheStranger> I'm on your side. Believe me or not, it's up to you

<TheStranger> You are fighting a losing war

<TheStranger> I'm suggesting a different approach. Why don't make your enemies your allies?

<Sledge> Make my enemies my allies?

<TheStranger> Here, I can send you my module, feel free to use it

File transfer <rev_inject.c> pending.... Please click OK to accept...

It was already nighttime when TheStranger pinged Sledge. He put a lot times reading and re-reading the source codes sent by TheStranger and could not find any portion that could cause harm. It was a pure algorithm that exploited The Architect's Trojan horse's weakness, similar to Sledge's, but it had extra capability to reverse inject those bots with your own codes. Theoretically, Sledge could take control of the bots instead of just neutralizing them. In other words, he could convert the enemy bots into his own.

Sledge spent the next hour working hard to upgrade his bots' codes. He was not sure whether it would work, but he had no other choice. After he was done, he then released his remaining 45K++ over bots to the world. At first, it seemed to be a tug of war; the numbers of bots on both sides were decreasing. But after a while, suddenly, Sledge's bots went up in number. It was slow at first, but then it became faster as the number of bots increased. The speed became exponential, and it was clear that whatever he had done, The Architect was unable to stop his bots. When Sledge's bots hit over 10 million, the increment slowed down. The DDoS had been almost stopped. Sledge had reversed their positions.

~~~

By the next early morning, the impact of the DDoS became almost non-existent. His bots continued to clean up occasional enemy bots that appeared in the target list. He was too occupied with fighting the DDoS bots that he had forgotten everything about tracing The Architect. Prof. Scott begged Sledge to explain how he did it, but to no avail. Only when Agent Jeremy asked him, did he reluctantly explain. In the end, Agent Jeremy admitted that he could not understand most the explanation given. Sledge voiced his thought that this TheStranger was suspicious, but both Prof. Scott and Agent Jeremy did not bother too much about it.

"So what do we do with so many bots in our control now?" asked Prof. Scott.

"Sooner or later, the owner will realize that and will run anti malware software to clean his machine," argued Sledge. But Agent Jeremy was not convinced. He instructed Sledge to use a centralized method to clean those bots, reasoning that it would be dangerous if those bots fell into the wrong hands. When Sledge replied that he needed to return those bots to Kewl1c3, Agent Jeremy insisted that it was illegal to possess those bots in the first place. And gave Sledge direct order to proceed.

Sledge did not agree, but he had no choice. _What if The APOSTLES comes back with another attack? Also,_ _Kewl1c3 will not be happy at all if he knew we released all his bots willingly,_ thought Sledge. He coded a self clean up module and distributed it from the bot master. All three of them were exhausted from the previous day's ordeals. Sledge had worked continuously for more than 50 hours without rest. Sledge fell asleep immediately in front of his laptop once he pushed the button to start cleaning up the bots.

THE DREAM

Sledge was waiting in a park. The park was foggy. He could not remember who or what he was waiting for. He just knew that he was waiting eagerly for someone very important. There was a lake in the center of the park. Sledge walked to the lakeside and looked into the water. It was crystal clear. The reflection that stared back at him was a boy, not older than 10 years old. The boy looked really thin and small. He did not seem surprised at all to look at the reflection of a younger version of himself. He had been through this before many times. In a way, he already knew what would come next.

And then, there was a person in black suit that suddenly appeared on the other side of the lake. He was circling the lake and calling Sledge's real name, "James... James..." The voice sounded distant and muffled. The person walked faster now, half running while continuing to call his name. When he was about 50 feet away from Sledge, other people in black suits started appearing out of nowhere. The other black suits stopped that person and dragged him away forcefully. "No!" Sledge shouted. He was not sure why he cared about that person, but when he saw the black suits pulled that person away, he was crying out loud. And then everything became white color, too bright for him to open his eyes.

~~~

2159 hours, Apr 30

"Rise and shine, sleeping beauty!"

"Huh?" Sledge woke up from his dream to that loud voice. It was Prof. Scott's. He was standing there in the exact same room that they had been, together with Agent Jeremy. It was already dark again outside. "How long... did I sleep?" he asked, while trying to focus his eyes.

"You were sleeping like a baby for more than 16 hours continuously," replied Agent Jeremy.

Sledge rubbed his eyes, and tried to recall what had happened. Then he remembered the event the day before.

"You had become popular overnight. The companies that you helped had only good things to say about you. And the media wanted an interview. I had agreed to let CNN have a session," said Agent Jeremy.

"Media... What do you mean? I've never agreed to an interview before..."

"Hey, this is good for you. Free publicity. We need a hero, and you are our hero. This will be good opportunity to scare the shit out of The APOSTLES," Prof. Scott jumped in.

"I don't want publicity."

"Now... not everybody will get this chance. The press wanted an explanation on the event and the Director had agreed that you deserved the credit, Mr. Allen," Agent Jeremy said.

"Yeah right! Imagine the number of commercials and advertisements that you would get from security software companies," Prof. Scott added.

"Oh, shut up!"

"You better prepare yourself, the interview will be in approximately twenty-four hundreds... tomorrow at 10PM," Agent Jeremy said and then he left the room.

THESTRANGER

"Never trust a stranger..."

2310 hours, Apr 30

Agent Jeremy sent Sledge and Prof. Scott back to their hotel. Agent Jeremy reminded him to prepare for tomorrow's interview but he could not keep TheStranger out of his mind.

_I need to find information about this guy,_ he thought once he reached his room _._

Sledge tried to contact TheStranger in the IRC, but could not find him anymore. He was not online. He discussed this with Agent Jeremy on the way back to hotel, but all he got in reply was, "Well, there are good guys out there as a matter of fact, and this guy is a good and responsible citizen."

"Well, he is a white hat for sure, this Stranger!" Prof. Scott added. But their replies did not do anything to quench his curiosity.

On that day, Sledge spent a lot time trying to find information about TheStranger. He asked a few black hat groups, but none of them heard of this guy before. He could not find anything at all. Sledge even asked the 'expert' that managed to track him, Prof. Scott, to help trace this person with the vast connections he had with government intelligence. Prof. Scott agreed after much debate, but could not find anything at all. TheStranger seemed to be non-existent in the government file. There were no links that gave any clues about TheStranger. Any trace of IP addresses used by TheStranger pointed back to proxy overseas, one that even government had no access. All historical and online communications were encrypted with very secure VPN connections. There was no way to link this person to actual individual, living or dead. Prof. Scott mentioned he could try to hack into TheStranger's active Internet link, similar to what he had done to Sledge previously, using legal interception. But TheStranger was not online at the moment, and even if indeed he was online, he might not be in the country. The legal intercept order would only work inside the country's jurisdiction.

Sledge then went online to chat with an old friend of him, Ne0Phreak. He was one of the few hackers who had the most connections that Sledge had ever met. But he could be a bit weird sometimes.

<Sledge> Ne0, dude. Free?

<Ne0Phreak> no

<Ne0Phreak> busy conquering the world

<Sledge> Still haven't given up on that, do you?

<Ne0Phreak> the world will one day bow to Master Ne0Phreak

<Ne0Phreak> me in bad mood :(

<Ne0Phreak> coz some clever ass killed me bots when me was so happy d-dosing (>_<)

<Sledge> What? You were helping The APOSTLES with the DDoS attack?

<Ne0Phreak> hey, come on man, it was fun

<Ne0Phreak> it was one of the way to conquer the world :-||

<Ne0Phreak> me bots was idle and me put them to good use

Sledge did not expect that Ne0Phreak would be helping The APOSTLES' DDoS attack. He needed help from this guy and he did not want to spill the bean that he was the 'clever ass' responsible to kill his bots.

<Sledge> OK, before that happened, I need your help

<Ne0Phreak> hey mon, every time you contacted me, you just want me help

<Ne0Phreak> nothing good from your side :-[

<Sledge> Come on, man

<Sledge> You are the expert, I need to locate a guy

<Sledge> Only you can do it

<Sledge> I'm stuck and desperate

<Ne0Phreak> really? :)

<Ne0Phreak> ok, mon, what do you need?

_Phew! That was easy_ , Sledge thought.

<Sledge> Have you heard of "TheStranger"?

Here, Sledge waited for a while before Ne0Phreak replied.

<Ne0Phreak> no

<Ne0Phreak> wait...

<Ne0Phreak> me never heard of any stranger

<Ne0Phreak> but wait... searching me super hacker's archive

Sledge waited for another minute.

<Ne0Phreak> there was a record about the stranger somewhere in Po1sonHack group

<Ne0Phreak> this is all me can find

<Sledge> What? That's all? Come on, you should know more

<Ne0Phreak> that's all me have

Another minute and there was still no further reply from Ne0Phreak. _I guess that's all he have_ , thought Sledge.

<Sledge> Well, thanks anyway Ne0, owe you one...

<Ne0Phreak> yeah, yeah, when are you going to pay the last one?

TO HACK A HACKER

"Passwords are made to be cracked...."

0004 hours, May 1

Sledge goggled for the Po1sonHack group. It was one of the oldest hacker groups that specialized in archiving hack news and techniques around the world. It operated a website that archived hacker's news from as early as 1980s. Browsing the website, he was able to register and create account to access the website, but it was a limited account. Limited account did not allow access to the information he required. Those were restricted to core members. The core membership to the group was by invitation only. Sledge tried to contact the forum's administrator, but was rejected flat. He was told to forget about it and that they were not open to any new members at the moment.

_If courtesy doesn't work, time to barge in_ , thought Sledge.

Sledge decided to hack the site to gain admission. He had been very familiar with the whole process. First, he started with SQL injection attacks on the website's URL. The thing about some hacker's website was that, they were usually not a target of hack attack that some administrators never even bother to secure the website. Sledge's SQL injection worked, the web server was un-patched and was running a very old version of the software. Sledge laughed at the security of the site.

_Good start! Piece of cake!_ Next, Sledge tried to gain access to the files stored on the web server.

_Shit! The files were well secured somewhere else._ The website's content files were not located on the same web server. They were stored in another file server and they were secured with access rights.

_Maybe this is why they didn't bother about the web server in the first place_ , thought Sledge. Sledge had to figure out how to gain access to the other file server.

_Those with accounts, will need to login to the website to access the server... this means that... the web server would be storing the credentials!_ Sledge went to grab and copy out the web server's master password list. The file was hashed, a one-way method to protect password and store it in unreadable format. For security reasons, passwords are not usually saved in plain text format. The password stored in hashed format would make it unreadable by normal eyes. But for machine that understands how to generate the hash, it will be useful to be used as comparison when validating password. It was nothing less than Sledge's expectation, hashing were the default basic security these days. Sledge filtered the accounts to only those who are core members, eliminating the rests. There were 11 user accounts remaining in the password file list:

admin:gzOt7144c87406c2dfe725f66f59856e045a

jillian:nD4ha65fa71b8f8cdbbf62075368ec6431fc

r3xx0r:Ur7R1ed44aa53d7235b281de3489f7436de3

thumbnailz:ZSo319ffb4064dc5fcea439a771b4a52c9d7

bloodgory:d9A568d55aa24e39ce6221d78b88e69fd00e

safe421:G9aAc6a1f14bcdd456104abb73d55caf53aa

user5331:5nDV4ff9fea6720294890afd85c858b0e35e

m1k3:yszuad77a3bcd3f2d4746aee10fbe3901852

c311:JH3Ec5f61dde75a490d2af4f88b3e8199e2f

conduit:DU6J12ed5ff6a63f105223ff9db82028bee4

s1nn3r:6INe9daee06928736b569e31e18051a0261c

Sledge hoped that those passwords were stored with simple MD5 or SHA-1 hashes, which were more common and easier to crack than other more secure methods. He had no choice but to try to crack the passwords and see whether luck might be on his side. Having done this many time before, Sledge generally strategized his hacking by phases. During the first stage hack, he would try to perform brute force attack, the attack that systematically tried all possible combination of different alphabets, numbers and symbols and hoped that it might hit jackpot. These attacks would be time consuming, especially as the number of characters in the password got longer, so Sledge normally would hit the stop button after it reached 6 or 7 characters. The processing power required to process higher number of characters increased exponentially after that. This is what a security company CEO, who calculated the limit before, once coined as 'the exponential wall of brute force cracking'.

The processing power of the computer was very important here. Sledge actually created a connection to his computer in San Francisco, and run everything remotely. His gaming machine was a powerful hardware that was installed with dual CPU and GPU configurations. Each GPU had thousands of processing cores. He used the combination of CPUs and GPUs to achieve significant computing power increase.

Sledge finished the brute force with no luck. _Time to move on to the next stage,_ thought Sledge _._ Hackers, who by nature understand how important your password strength needed to be, usually chose much more complicated password.

Next, Sledge threw a dictionary attack, the attack that tried to find a direct match by comparing with a list of commonly used passwords. Sledge had his own custom-built dictionary that he had improved over time. It was a combination of real life user passwords that had his or her password exposed to public. Unlike brute force, dictionary attack does not run systematic trial and error, but instead use the list of words that are most likely to be used as password by real people. Sledge let the dictionary attack run for a while.

_Still no luck_ , the dictionary attack completed without any single success. Sledge had to move on to the next attack, which was a more complicated hybrid attack. He had to use combination of brute force plus dictionary attacks to form possible patterns that he could use to hack the password. He had to identify certain patterns, for example, the first five characters to come from dictionary, while the remaining five would be generated from brute force. This stage required a lot of ideas, patients and luck.

Sledge already spent 5 hours on hybrid attack, but still could not hit anything. _Argh... I give up! If only I have access to supercomputers, I could speed up my attack tremendously._ It seemed harnessing the power of his computer was just not good enough to crack these passwords. He had to use his brain.

And then Sledge remembered something about an advice given to him by a hacker called DoctorM. In an online world, where people used nickname, Sledge never knew whether DoctorM is a he or a she. Sledge always assumed he was a 'he'. He was in a way, a mentor to Sledge. Sledge always addressed him as the 'master' because he taught him most of the things Sledge knew today. When Sledge got stuck in a problem, he would always go back to DoctorM for advice. DoctorM suddenly disappeared three years ago. He was no longer contactable since then. And now since Sledge was stuck again, his thought went back to the time when he asked for advice about password cracking. Sledge opened up the IRC history of their conversations, trying to check if there was anything useful. Then he came to the conversation history below.

<Sledge> Master, I've tried to hack these passwd file for the past week

<Sledge> But I couldn't get anywhere, please give me a hint

<DoctorM> you have to look for the obvious

<Sledge> Obvious? It is obvious the password was encrypted securely

<DoctorM> sometimes, you might have missed the source

<Sledge> Source? What do you mean, master?

<DoctorM> the source is where everything starts

<DoctorM> outcomes are nothing but results of process from the start to the very end

DoctorM always talked in riddles, Sledge never understood what he said most of the time. In the end, Sledge did not manage to hack that particular passwd file at all, but that time he was still a n00b, or a 'newbie', someone new to hacking.

_The source? What the hell did that mean?_ Sledge spent some time pondering and staring into the chat message history.

_The source is the where everything start_. _Outcomes are results of process from the start to the end. I might have missed the start?_ _The process of password file generation is straightforward; I create my password and passed it to the computer. Then it created a hash of the password, and saved it into the file. What did I miss? I create the password... how do I create the password?_

The last question triggered something in his mind. He went back to the website, and started the registration process again. He repeated from the very first step, but with a different username and email address. When he reached the part that asked for the password, the system highlighted the requirement for the password, "Password must be longer than eight (8) characters and must contain at least one (1) numeric characters".

Sledge snapped his finger. He created patterns that created combination of 8 characters with at least one numeric character in it. To speed up the process, he restricted the password length to 8 characters only. He passed the new patterns to his cracking software, and waited.

Another 10 minutes, and "Bingo!" he shouted. The cracking program had managed to crack the password for username: jillian. _There are always lazy users that chose a simple password as long as it fulfilled the system's requirements._

He used the recovered username and password to login to the website and do a search for files using 'TheStranger' as keyword. He found a few hits and clicked on the download button.

What followed were file transfers. Sledge received the files and opened then. They were a collection of unpublished underground hack stories. TheStranger appeared in a few historical headlines, some dated as old as two decades ago. In his roles, he had helped both hackers and governments, taking no sides.

In one of the case, TheStranger was quoted to be involved in the worm released in the NASA offices, wreaking havocs to computer systems. It was part of the activity to protest the use of Plutonium powered spacecraft. The damage was in more than a million officially, and more than 5 million unofficially. The underground news cited TheStranger contributed to writing the worm and then passed it over to the other hackers who triggered the actual attack. There were few other cases where TheStranger had helped to crack down child porn hosting sites. He posted the names of more than 50 such site administrators to the FBI. There were a lot of other similar incidents, and in all of the cases, TheStranger name was never mentioned to the public at all. Some people involved in the incidents, whether black or white hats, were mentioning that they received tips from someone anonymous or from a 'stranger'.

Sledge opened and read more files, but most showed similar contents on different events. One thing he could summarize out from the many files, TheStranger had been around for more than two decades.

RISE TO STARDOM

2118 hours, May 1

It was about time. Sledge had to prepare for the interview. Agent Jeremy dropped by his hotel to send him to the DC's CNN studio. Sledge was in horror when Agent Jeremy told him that it was not an offline interview as Sledge expected. It would be a live broadcast. Sledge had stage-phobia. Actually, he rarely went on stage before, except a few times when he was asked to present his projects during high school. His face went as red as tomato when his turn came, and he could feel his knees knocking each other.

And for tonight, he had no idea that he would be interviewed in front of over 100 million US households and maybe 200 over countries. It was raining heavily outside. _Shit!_ _The more reason for people to stay at home and tune in the TV_ , he thought. He started to feel the stage fright set in. He felt his ears became hot and cold sweats started trickling on his body, hands and foreheads. He wore his blue colored T-shirt with torn jeans and a pair of unbranded sneakers.

They reached the studio and were sent immediately to the waiting area by one of the female studio staff, "Well, please hurry up, you are next and the show is already starting..." She did not look happy since they should have arrived earlier to make the necessary preparations.

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The CNN's Cooper Talk Show. My name is Derrel Cooper, and I'm your host today. As you know, the twenty-nine of April was a black day for most of the banking and government organizations across the States caused by a terrorist hacker group, named The APOSTLES, who triggered a massive scale DDoS attacks. The central bank projected losses in excess of $5 billion, the largest figure in the history of Internet DDoS attack. And when things became hopeless, before the losses continued to pile up and the people of America were deprived for access to online banking services longer, there came a savior." Here, Derrel paused to look at his script for a while.

"He had agreed to appear tonight on CNN."

_I never agreed at all_ , thought Sledge.

"Let's welcome, ladies and gentlemen..." Derrel paused there for a second, before continuing, "...for the sake of respecting our fellow hacker, I will call him by his nickname,... Sledge!" At least Derrel did not reveal his real name. Agent Jeremy must have made sure of that.

Sledge walked on the stage. _I must have looked like a stupid asshole_ , he thought nervously.

Sledge then sat on the sofa on the center of the stage where Derrel sat as well. He picked the empty seat, on the left of Derrel, before realizing he sat a bit too far away.

"Oh, come on! Come closer. I don't bite," Derrel said to the laugh of the audience in the studio.

"Is it hot in the studio? Cause your face is red and you are perspiring a lot..." another round of laugh from the audience. His T-Shirt was indeed wet visibly, and he was sweating now, but not due to the heat at all. It was actually quite cold inside the studio.

"OK. Thanks for joining us today, Sledge. First question, maybe you can help to introduce us something about yourself," asked the interviewer.

"Hi, everyone. My name is Sledge... it's more like a nickname... I'm a hacker..." and he stopped there not knowing what else to say.

Derrel waited for half a minute, expecting more, "Not very talkative, are we? Never mind. Maybe you can tell us more about yourselves, like your hobby?"

"Phishing," answered Sledge.

"Fishing? That's an interesting hobby. I like fishing myself. What was your best catch?"

Behind the stage, Prof. Scott chortled loudly on this, "That boy can make a joke!"

"...." Sledge was silent, as he did not know how to reply that.

Derrel waited for the answer, but as he noticed that he would not get any, he continued, "Anyway, let's move on to next question. Sledge, it is written here that you were a black hat. Aren't black hats considered criminals?" Sledge made a mental note to 'thank' Agent Jeremy later for sharing his part time hobbies to the world.

But now, this was the subject that Sledge was on familiar ground. He felt more confident to answer this, "Yes, of course. But what people labeled as 'black hats' are generally hackers. And hackers live with principle. The main principle of hackers is freedom. Be it freedom for insatiable curiosity, freedom for information, freedom for services that would be available within reach, if not for gluttony from some people or corporations, yet the government labeled hackers as criminals. I know I'm citing straight from the hacker's manifesto. Hackers exist without skin colors, nationality or religious bias. Hackers seek first and foremost, knowledge."

"The hacker's manifesto?" Derrel questioned.

"You can read one online. It was written about two decades ago by a hacker called 'The Mentor'. Most true hackers today live by the manifesto," Sledge replied.

"But hacker is a general word, right? Does the hacker's manifesto apply to black or white hats?"

"The discussion of black and white hats is as pointless as comparing good versus evil. There are no absolute black or white hats. Inside the heart, all hackers are the same."

Derrel stopped for a while here before continuing.

"How do you feel about stopping the country-wide DDoS attack by the hacktivist group calling themselves The APOSTLES? You are the hero that saved the day. We received many praises from the organizations that you helped, for your brilliant idea in fighting the DDoS."

"I'm not a hero and I do not feel anything good at all. I stopped the DDoS with the help of some other hackers. It's not me alone out there."

"You mean there are others?"

Sledge thought for a while about TheStranger, he was sure that without this person's help he would not be able to win, "Yes... I received a lot of help from a lot of people, some of them were not even aware that their machines had been involved."

"We heard that you fight DDoS with DDoS? Now that's interesting. How exactly did you do that?"

"We both had an army of botnets... computers that had been compromised. The APOSTLES' number of bots was overwhelming, but our bots were able to neutralize them. We had released those bots freely now back to their rightful owners."

"Some people say that your method is illegal, against the law?"

"I think it is illegal to control other people's computer without permission. But I couldn't think of better ways to fight back that massive attack unless we have an army ourselves. So I have to resort to that."

"Are you aware that you have been dubbed as... Sledge... the black hat who turned white?"

"Really!? I'm not aware of that. I'm a network security engineer by occupation. I helped defended my companies from hacker's attacks every day. So I guess I should be black and white..." audiences were laughing in the studio, "... or gray, if you combine both black and white." More laughs.

"Do you think you or the government have won the war?"

"Definitely not. Tomorrow or any day after, The APOSTLES might strike back with much more powerful blow. This will be just the beginning. We had not captured the mastermind behind this. If I'm The APOSTLES, I will come back with a vengeance."

"What do you think about the recent activities by The APOSTLES? Are there any differences between hackers and The APOSTLES?" Derrel continued with his question list.

"Oh yes! I see a lot of differences. The APOSTLES hurt people and caused terrors. They can call themselves black hats, but they are no longer ones. They are worst than that. They are nothing but a bunch of terrorists. Hackers' do not cause terrors. Hackers do not wage wars, or build nuclear weapons. Hackers seek only the truth."

There was a few seconds of silence in the studio as people were expecting more questions, but the 15 minutes allocated had been almost up. Then applause came, slowly at first, from few of the audiences, but then it was quickly joined by the others. And in the end, the studio was roaring with noises and cheers.

"Thank you so much for your time today. All right, ladies and gentlemen, Sledge, the black hat who turned white! Please give another round of applause for him!!" The studio was filled with clapping for the second time.

Sledge felt relieved and was very happy the interview ended. Immediately, Sledge walked briskly off-stage and in the direction of Agent Jeremy, who gave him a thumb up, "Good job!"

"I'm just quoting Scott," Sledge referred to the first meeting conversation he had with Prof. Scott when he mentioned that all hackers were alike. "What was all that for anyway?"

"Come on Sledge, we needed to tell the world that the government will fight back, and we will... besides, out there, you did very well. I made the right decision to send you up there," said Agent Jeremy. Deep inside, Sledge knew he was right, the audience's applause was still continuing.

"Why don't you send Scott up there?"

Agent Jeremy moved closer to Sledge and replied with a whisper, "Mr. Allen, you and me know that he is not the right person. Besides, you are the one that stopped the DDoS, not him." He glanced at Prof. Scott, who was busy showing off his latest mobile security applications to a few female studio crews.

"Yeah, but now, every black hats in the world will label me for dead, and even set bounties on my head," Sledge replied, he sounded somber.

THE APOSTLES

2242 hours, May 2

The Architect knew his failure would not come without punishment. He had been expecting a call, directly from The Archon, the leader of The APOSTLES himself. The Archon did not take failure lightly.

He had come this far to the Elite position and gained The Archon's trust. Joining The APOSTLES were by invitation only. There was no other way. The hackers would have to proof his or her skills and made a big name in the underground black hat communities. In the computer world, people can assume other's identity online easily. But not The APOSTLES. The group was feared, even by the worst black hats. There were various incidents of people claiming to be members of The APOSTLES, but they faced immediate punishments from the real members via system hack, public embarrassment or worst case, disappearance without trace, probably dead somewhere. The APOSTLES was too powerful to play around with. All members contributed their illegal crime's heist to the organization. In return, the members were rewarded with unlimited access to the organization's resources such as massive amount of tools, bots, fresh zero-day exploits, expert specialist, and so on.

Just like the military, The APOSTLES was very organized and made of a chain of command. On the top, the title of the leader was held by The Archon. He was the founder of The APOSTLES. Second, the next layer was the Elites, composed of 12 hackers, personally appointed by The Archon. The Elites led the organization's major operations with instructions from The Archon. The next layer were the Adepts, composed of experts or specialist hackers reporting directly to the Elites. Members came and went, but in total, The Archon tried to keep the total number of the members to less than 50, for the sake of keeping the organization small and agile.

The APOSTLES did not have any headquarters. In fact, none of The APOSTLES knew where each of their members was located at any particular time. Online communications were the only thing that allowed them to contact each other and receive instructions. The Archon posted messages to its members via the organization's secret website. The link to the website was an ever changing URL, composed of seemingly random alphanumerics and symbols. Only members with proper application that could generate the URL, could access the site. For the Elites, The Archon normally preferred direct voice communication.

Joining The APOSTLES gave The Architect access to the most sophisticated hacking resources in the planet. An untraceable proxy network secured by IPSec with servers spread across the world, mostly in neutral countries. Cloud-based password cracking servers that had the most comprehensive dictionaries ever created in history. High security decentralized VoIP system with heavy encryption, inaccessible to the government's wiretapping system. Virtual currencies, stolen credit card information, and the likes gave enough funding that could match that of a small nation. There were many other tools. The government of the United States had its own cyber weapons to prepare for the next cyber war. And so did The APOSTLES. The Archon had prepared only the best tools so his people could do their works effectively.

The Architect had been instructed to wait for the call. _Here it goes_ , his computer speaker rang as he received a VoIP call. The caller ID screen flashed with the '<NO CALLER ID>' words. The APOSTLES used custom-made application that had been heavily secured and encrypted. The voice run through so many layer of custom proxies across the world that it would be impossible to trace at all.

"You are a failure!" the voice from the other side sounded angry.

"General, please... give me another chance, I still hold the GhostNet file. I will ensure that they will pay dearly..." The Architect pleaded. Every member of The APOSTLES addressed The Archon as 'General'.

"You lost million of bots. That was a big setback for our other DDoS operations. Anyway, The Conductor is already on the move... he had been instructed to terminate those pests..."

"But they are my prey... and I need these people to play important roles in my mission..."

"You just have to figure it out yourselves. You will proceed with Operation Blindfold as planned, with or without them. We need to disable the key infrastructures if we want to have a chance to win this war. If the Conductor failed, you will have another chance... although I doubt that will ever happen. The Conductor's methods... are ruthless..."

"Yes, I understand, General..." The Architect was clearly unhappy with this decision, but he knew better than to argue with The Archon.

"We are going to win this war. I cannot afford more mistakes..."

"Yes, sir..."

"Your job is to make sure that the 'UDC' is taken care of."

"Don't worry, I will ensure that nobody will stop me," The Architect had put all he had in the original plan but with The Conductor's involvement, he had to make some major changes.

"It better be! If you failed me again, there are many Elites who are waiting to pick up your job..."

"It won't happen, General!" The Architect ended the call but he had another plan in his mind. He decided to eliminate his enemies first, before The Conductor could get to them. He would just have to figure out a different strategy for the 'UDC'.

ALWAYS ABIDE BY TRAFFIC RULES

1624 hours, May 3

After the CNN interview show, Sledge had become quite popular. Those people who were in his circle knew he had stopped The APOSTLES' attack and that gave him some kind of 'Elite' status within the hacker's communities. Sometimes, a bit too much that it became annoying. He was pestered by continuous requests from strangers and friends alike, looking to connect with him. Most of them wanted him to share the information and tools he used to defeat the DDoS attack.

Agent Vasiliev was sent to pick both Prof. Scott and Sledge from the hotel. Agent Jeremy had informed him that he needed his help since they would be going to Oak Ridge. They would need protection since The APOSTLES might endanger their lives on the way. But when he reached, they were not in the hotel. Both Sledge and Prof. Scott had been out to the nearest Apple store. When he called Prof. Scott, he simply apologized and told him that they would only be back in another hour. Agent Vasiliev tried to contain his anger. He told them that he would pick them up from the Apple store instead. He called Agent Jeremy to inform him about this.

"This suck! Having to work with that bossy brat," Agent Vasiliev was not really happy to be on this mission. But he had no choice. The top had assigned him to help Agent Jeremy. He was not happy with his current position for two reasons. First, Agent Jeremy was much younger than him. How could he be the boss? Second, he could not understand computer at all, having no knowledge in such things before. And now he had to be involved in all this.

_Where is the fun in those things that you cannot touch or punch?_ He preferred to handle real life missions that required action in the field. He had records of using too much violence in his mission. His previous boss had reminded to use his brain first. Agent Vasiliev spent a lot of time in gym. He had worked hard to build his muscular 200 pounds frame today.

Agent Vasiliev was driving Agent Jeremy's SUV. Three blocks away from his destination, he reached a 4-way intersection. As always, the traffic light from his direction was always red and he usually had to wait forever for his turn. But today, he was surprised that the traffic light quickly changed to green again. Not about to miss this opportunity, Agent Vasiliev stepped on the accelerator. He sped past the traffic light to continue ahead of the road. In the middle of the junction, he managed to catch a glimpse of the traffic light from the left junction. To his shock, it was green also. "What the hell?" and that was the last thing Agent Vasiliev could say. From the left junction, another car came, also speeding towards the intersection fast. It was a Ford Explorer with a driver that had the same surprise look as him. It was too late. The Ford Explorer crashed into the SUV at full speed. The momentum of the speed from the Ford Explorer pushed the SUV towards a corner lot convenience store. Agent Vasiliev still managed to pull the hand brake before he lost his consciousness. Luckily, the SUV stopped before it hit the building, but not so lucky for Agent Vasiliev who was badly injured.

~~~

As soon as they were informed, Sledge and Prof. Scott immediately took a cab and visited the hospital where Agent Vasiliev was treated. Agent Jeremy was already sitting on the guest sofa, his face looked miserable. The impact of the crash was severe. Agent Vasiliev's condition was stable but he was still unconscious. He suffered fractures on his neck and legs. Due to Agent Vasiliev's quick action, he managed to stop the SUV and there were no pedestrian casualty.

"Poor Vasiliev. What happened?" asked Prof. Scott.

"Not very sure. But according to eye witnesses, it was due to traffic light malfunction," Agent Jeremy replied grimly.

"Traffic light... what?" Sledge exclaimed.

"The police recorded statements from passersby and other drivers. Both junctions had green light at the same time. The traffic light from Agent Vasiliev's direction suddenly changed to green when he approached. While the traffic light from the left junction had been green all the time."

"It was The APOSTLES," Prof. Scott jumped into conclusion, "they manipulated the traffic light control system. I think they switched the light from red to green on the last minute."

"Is that even possible? I thought it was only in the movies?" asked Sledge.

"In 2006, the LA area traffic system was hacked by the unhappy people who designed the system. It caused massive gridlock that lasted for several days. So it was not really impossible to hack into the system as long as you know how the system was designed," Prof. Scott added.

"We do not know what really happened. The city employees did manage to recover traces of remote hacker, connecting into their Automatic Traffic Surveillance Center system and fiddled with the system for about five minutes. The perpetrator left no traces or whatsoever," Agent Jeremy stopped and looked at Agent Vasiliev. They did not say a single word after that.

Prof. Scott was right this time. Any doubts about The APOSTLES involvement were quenched right away that night. The APOSTLES posted another similar message that claimed responsibility for the car accident. It was posted by The Architect, who also boasted that the APOSTLES had access to any traffic light system in the country. It was a punishment and warning made for those that defied The APOSTLES.

Sledge understood that The Architect was on the hunt to kill them. He knew that The APOSTLES were actually targeting him and they failed. The APOSTLES twisted the failure with big words. He could not help to imagine himself and Prof. Scott with Agent Vasiliev, in the same room or same hospital, suffering from the same injuries or even worst fate, death, if they had not been out shopping. They were very lucky.

They went back to the FBI HQ to discuss their next action. Having taken detour to fight the DDoS attack, Agent Jeremy told them that they were running out of time and needed to move fast with their plan. They had to be in Oak Ridge soon. Agent Jeremy had secured Titan for their exclusive use for 24 hours starting the day after tomorrow. During normal days, Titan would be allocating its processing power for running specially approved scientific projects.

"How do we go there? By plane?" Sledge questioned. They were clearly being targeted by The APOSTLES and he did not want them to be sitting ducks on the plane.

"It will be too dangerous to move by air. Let's use the train, it should be safer," Agent Jeremy suggested.

"I'm not aware of any train from DC to Oak Ridge," Prof. Scott added.

"Not your usual Amtrak. There is a new train service in town, recently made operational. It used to be running freight trains only, but now it serves passengers as well. Running on existing freight railways gave it flexibilities to reach many locations. It will pass Oak Ridge," Agent Jeremy explained.

"Great! Now we are taking freight trains..." Prof. Scott added.

Sledge was not very sure, but with The APOSTLES' ability to hack into planes and road traffic systems, he agreed nonetheless.

A CONDUCTOR'S STORY

He was the only son of a multi millionaire businessman. His father always gave reason that he was too busy with his work and rarely went back home. But he knew that his father was actually busy with his many girlfriends outside. He never knew what a father's love was like. And he grew out of it. His mother killed herself two years ago after suffering serious depression for too long. He concluded that his father was the real reason why his mother died and hated him forever for that.

He was an anti social. After school, he would go straight back to his home, a big mansion somewhere in Kansas City, maintained by a few maids and helpers. He had started loving classical music when his mother introduced him to it since he was a toddler. He graduated from piano grade 8 at the age of 13. He also played other instruments well, such as violin and guitar, which he picked up himself. But he stopped playing because his father forced him to take over his business. Andrew Barnes argued almost daily with Mr. Barnes that he aspired to become a music conductor one day. Mr. Barnes did not even bother to listen. He had been in a business life for so long, earning too much money to know that he was making the right decision for his only son. He could not see how Andrew could make a living in the music industry that he did not understand.

Andrew had been introduced to computer when he was 15. Since his dad threw away his $70K grand piano out of the house, he had a lot of time to spend on his laptop. Having no interest in his family business and too much time on hand, he quickly became attached to it. That was where he had found out about hackers. He was a natural, and he picked up his computer skills just like he picked up musical instruments. He made a few notable zero-day exploits that brought fame to his name. Most of his exploits focused very much on transportation system's weaknesses. He had assumed the nickname of 'Conductor' since then.

One and a half year ago, his father went on a business trip with his private jet. Andrew hacked the plane, and caused it to crash land somewhere around Nevada desert. Before the private jet crashed, he played a recording of his own classical music performance and left a message to Mr. Barnes, "Dad, do you love the music? No bad feeling, but I'm doing this for mom! Thanks for the money you will leave behind after this. I will make good use of it." That was the last thing Mr. Barnes heard. The police investigation on the case could not find any foul play and was closed as accident.

The 'accident' landed him all the family's inheritance under his name. Filthy rich, he had no reason to do any work. He hired people to manage his family's business so he could focus on his new interest. He had been buying navigation parts from around the world to study how to hack into those systems. And these boosted his hacking skills even much more than before. He still played classical music, but it was nothing more than his free time hobby now. With his money, he could bribe those who worked in the transportation companies to sabotage the critical navigation components, such as manual control usually used for overriding automatic system, in his targeted transport systems to ensure that his hack could not be stopped.

Not long after, he had been approached by The APOSTLES. The Archon took a liking to him, especially on his way of spreading terrors through classical music before a hack. He had just the right skills and 'style' required by the organization. He had heard little about The APOSTLES, and what he heard was that it was a legendary organization fighting for the freedom of the people. The Archon was very persuasive, promising that he would have a lot of chance to use his special skill. Andrew agreed to join without hesitation. As part of the protocol in the organization, the Elites must change their nicknames to one favorable by The Archon. Changing nicknames was not rare, but was a practice that was objectionable in the hacker's world. He was simply christened 'The Conductor', maintaining the last word would ensure that the hacker's communities would still recognize him. He had worked his way up to the hierarchy very quickly and before long, he was the number two in The APOSTLES.

Many Elites and Adepts envied his position. The Archon gave The Conductor only the best jobs. He did not bother with politics within The APOSTLES at all. For the first time in his life, he had found a place where he felt he truly belong to. He completed his assignments without remorse and hesitations. And he made sure that his victims would have listened to his pre-recorded performance before their doom. _A necessary ritual to send them on the journey to next world peacefully_ , The Conductor always said.

The Archon had given him direct order to eliminate Sledge and Agent Jeremy, with the rest of those accompanying them. The Archon gave him their locations. Nobody could escape from The Archon's OCULUS. Once The Archon set the OCULUS on his target, he would be able to trace him or her almost anywhere in the world. The Conductor did not waste time to prepare for the next attack.

MIDNIGHT TRAIN

2344 hours, May 3

Taking the train gave them ample time and space to discuss about their next strategy. It was almost midnight and the train was quite empty, with the exceptions of a few. There were only two other people in the same compartment.

There was a sudden jerk in the train movement. The train's lightings flickered for a while. It surprised Sledge and the other passengers for a while. But after that, things went back to normal and the train continued moving as usual.

While they were busy discussing, Sledge was online all the time using his laptop. The train's free Wi-Fi seemed to be out of order today so he had to use his mobile's service. Sledge was busy chatting on IRC from his laptop, when he got pinged by one of his contact.

<Ph03nix> hey sledge, check this out http://bit.ly/12YuzGj

<Ph03nix> those guys you pissed off, The APOSTLES, are at it again...

It was a shortened URL link, provided by URL shortening service. This helped people to share URL much more efficiently.

Sledge quickly opened the link. And true enough, there were already another posts made by The APOSTLES.

Title: The Train Ride to Hell

We are The APOSTLES

We do not forgive and forget

We will punish those that interfere with the grand plan of The APOSTLES

We wanted to make them pay the price

We wanted to make these as painless as possible

We cannot be stopped

We will send them to Hell's Station...

By: The Conductor, Elite, 2nd Order of The APOSTLES on May 3rd

Sledge quickly showed his laptop's screen to both Agent Jeremy and Prof. Scott. By the time they had finished reading this, the train suddenly braked without warning. The force was quite strong that, Prof. Scott, with the other two half asleep passengers, fell out from their seats. Sledge and Agent Jeremy were holding fast to the handrail. Then there was a distant sound of shifting track. It sounded very faintly, but Sledge was sure his ears did not play trick on him. Prof. Scott tried to get up from the floor, but then the train made another sudden shift, this time accelerating quickly, and the force pushed him forward down to the floor again. The train was definitely moving at a much faster speed now.

Then the train's conductor appeared in the compartment. His face was white as if he had seen a ghost. Just as Sledge and the rest of the passengers was about to bombard him with questions, he stopped all of them, "Gentlemen, please stay calm and follow my orders! We need to gather to the first compartment now. I will explain things there, so please save your questions for later. Now, please move quickly...!"

Then they all moved as quickly as possible with the train's shaky movement, to the first compartment. Inside, there were already around 10 people gathering, mostly with distressed looks on their faces. Sledge's group was the last one to arrive. The conductor then settled down and said, "We are in emergency situation. We had lost the train's control..."

There were a few gasps from the passengers. "Now... please remain calm. This might be just a minor glitch. I will need your cooperation and patient, while I'm working to get us back on track..."

"FBI!" Agent Jeremy showed the conductor his badge. The conductor, for the first time felt relieved and it showed on his face. Agent Jeremy then turned to the crowd, "Everybody, please remain calm, we will get the situation under control very soon." When they saw his badge, the rest of the passengers became quiet.

Agent Jeremy then turned to the conductor, "Sir, what's your name?"

"Adam, sir. Adam Burke," replied the conductor.

"Alright, Mr. Burke, can we move to a room where we can discuss the situation better?"

"Sure, let's move to the engine room," Adam led Agent Jeremy to very front part of the train. Sledge and Prof. Scott followed closely behind.

The room was empty. "You operated alone here?" Sledge asked. He was surprised. _Great! This is a budget freight train for you_ , he thought.

"You see... nobody wanted to make the night shift... and since trains are almost fully computerized these days, I usually can manage alone," Adam replied.

"Please brief us about the situation..." said Agent Jeremy as soon as Adam locked the door behind them.

"I am losing control of the train. There was someone... somewhere... overriding the control, which normally only can be done by the central control system."

The train was now moving at more than 100MPH.

Then out of nowhere, a voice boomed out of the train's announcement system, "Ladies and gentlemen! We have a special performance today..."

"Where did that voice come from?" asked Agent Jeremy looking at the conductor. He was definitely as clueless as him.

The voice sounded eerie, and was clearly a male voice. Whoever it was, the guy might have applied a voice filter, either to disguise his voice or to make bigger impact to the atmosphere.

"Oh... the situation in the train is a bit tense. Let me play... some music to ease everybody a little bit..." the voice continued. And the next second, the train was filled with a classical music. It was a slow and sad piece. The piano instrument played the notes at tempo slower than usual. It was a familiar tone to almost everyone.

"Chopin's Funeral March," said Prof. Scott. There was a commotion as people on the train started to get panic. The music did nothing but to make the situation worst.

And the voice continued, "Enjoying the ride? By the way, I'm The Conductor, your new conductor... Tonight, I had a present for our special guests on the train, Mr. James Allen, also known as Sledge... Mr. Jeremy Davis... and Prof. Bobby T. Scott." The Conductor finished with a laugh that echoed throughout the train. The music continued playing, but The Conductor did not say anything anymore.

"Can you change the train's direction to put us back on track?" asked Agent Jeremy.

"No, can't do sir, I lost control of the train. The machine got mad and not cooperating!"

"Mr. Burke, where are we going?"

"I am not very sure, we normally do not use this track... it was usually reserved for freight trains..." said Adam.

"Can you manually override the train to stop?"

"Yes, I think I can do that, the train's emergency brake should be manual and not computer controlled," Adam replied and then proceeded to the train's cockpit and pulled a lever.

Immediately, there was a loud hissing sound made by the train braking and the train started to slow down.

"OK, we will be stopping in one or two minute time," Adam said.

"Can you open the door to let everyone out?" asked Agent Jeremy again.

"The central computerized door control doesn't seem to work... but we can try the emergency door release switch if required..."

Agent Jeremy then quickly explained the situation to Adam, about The APOSTLES and The Conductor's latest threat on the web. Sledge also showed him The APOSTLES' announcement on his laptop.

"You can't mean... we are under terrorist attack?"

"BEEP... BEEP..."

There was a loud beeping noise coming out from the cockpit's system. Adam went to check.

"Oh, holy shit! We had an incoming freight train opposite of us. It is heading straight for us at full speed... head on!" Adam shouted in distress.

"Oh god! We're doomed!" shouted Prof. Scott.

"Please be quiet, Prof. Scott," said Agent Jeremy.

"How long??" asked Agent Jeremy as he turned to Adam.

"Wha...?" Adam was confused.

"How long till we collide...?!" Agent Jeremy sounded unusual and this was the first time Sledge noticed him losing his calm.

"Uh... based on the navigation computer calculation... it's about 5 minutes..."

"Can you open the emergency door? NOW...!" Agent Jeremy commanded.

Adam went back to the cockpit and pulled out a ring full of keys from his pocket. His hands trembling while he sorted the key out. When he found the one, he used the key to unlock a keyhole directly under a big red button. After that, he pressed the button. He waited, but there was nothing happening. He pressed the button again, but still to no avail.

"Damn button!!" Adam pressed the button multiple times continuously now. But still nothing happened.

"We're out of luck. This button is not working... either the maintenance team screwed up or someone must have also hacked this one."

"If I know this is going to be my last day, I should have submitted my e-will first..." Prof. Scott now mumbled to himself.

"Sssh... Prof. Scott, please!" said Agent Jeremy. He paced back and forth, deep in thought. "Can we smash the window?"

"Sir, this train's windows are made of plexiglass, it's bullet proof, you will need a really big hammer and you will need a lot knockings before it will even crack..."

The music in the background continued playing, as if it was accompanying them on the journey to the next world. Then the frightening voice came back again, "Dear honorable guests... our journey is about to end. I hope you enjoyed the ride. We will reach our destination soon... the next stop, your final destination will be... HELL'S STATION!!" And then The Conductor's maniacal laugh filled the train.

HELL'S STATION

0112 hours, May 4

The panic became worst now. People started banging on the engine room's door now, "Hey! Come out! What was that all about?! We need an explanation!"

The voice on the PA resumed, "No point trying to escape, I had ensured no such route exist for you all. I'm The Conductor. Remember the JetAirlines incident? I was the brain behind it. I had so much fun controlling the plane before crashing it down. Too bad I don't have lulz here. Train is such a boring transport to hack. It can only move forward or backward." The Conductor's thought it was funny and laughed like mad again. There were many possible definitions for 'lulz', but it was generally used by hackers to mean 'fun'.

Terror spread inside the train. People started to shout hysterically now. Sledge could barely hear a few out of the loud noises behind the engine room's door, "Oh my god! We are going to die!", "We are going to crash just like the JetAirlines...", "God, I don't want to die yet!", and "We need to get out of here!"

_What the hell? The APOSTLES was composed of maniacs? Somewhere, someone is hacking the train's computer system_ , Sledge was listening to the conversation but was now in his own thought. Sledge knew whoever was controlling the train's computer system, must be doing it from outside or else they would all die together.

"Is the train connected to the Internet anywhere?" asked Sledge.

"You mean the Wi-Fi thing? No, there were some problems with the Wi-Fi. The company's technical engineer told me the _router_ was damaged, or something like that... not allowing access to Internet since last week. They told me they needed to order new replacement unit. Passengers had been complaining since they used to have free Wi-Fi," Adam replied.

"I see..." Sledge acknowledged the reply, but his mind was spinning fast. _The Internet is the only way to access the system remotely._ _If The Conductor is not controlling the train remotely, he must be doing it from somewhere nearby._

He then asked Adam the locations of all the Wi-Fi access points in the train.

"We had five in this train," Adam scribbled on a paper the rough sketches of the locations of the five Wi-Fi access points, "They were hidden from view, residing in the train's ceilings."

"Jeremy, we had to kill the APs," Sledge told Agent Jeremy.

"What APs? But why... "

"No time to explain now... We had to do it fast!" Sledge now turned to Adam, "Mr. Burke, we will try to help you get back the train's control. You should try to change course as soon as we informed you..."

"But..." Adam tried to reply, but he was stopped by Sledge.

"Just do it! Try to put the train on reverse and avoid the incoming train...!" Sledge could barely recognize his own voice as he shouted these words.

"Scott, we needed you here, I'll call your phone and you will need to tell me the exact location of the APs... got it?"

"Yes... I think I should remain here... It's an important job..." said Prof. Scott.

Sledge had a photographic memory. He could remember Adam's drawing and the location of the APs clearly in his mind. He just did not want Prof. Scott to get in his way.

Agent Jeremy then proceeded to open the engine room's door. He was immediately stormed by people who had been waiting outside, with mix of anger and surprised look on their faces.

"What was that? Are we going to die? Please, I don't want to die..." said one.

"Hey Mister! If you think this is a joke, it ain't funny!" yelled another who looked very angry.

"You owe us an explanation," added another guy who looked a bit drunk.

He took out his gun, and pointed it to the ceiling.

BANG! There was a loud voice of gunshot, and the commotion stopped immediately as people squatted down on the floor, surprised. Agent Jeremy then said, "Everyone, please remain calm! We will need your cooperation, and we are working hard to get us back safely. Please remain seated while we sort things out..."

_It's quite convenient to be an FBI_ , for the first time, Sledge was glad that he had Agent Jeremy as company.

Sledge took out his cell phone and called Prof. Scott, "Scott, first AP location?"

"Center of the second compartment." Sledge just wanted to double confirm. Sledge already knew anyway and was already running towards the second compartment.

As both Agent Jeremy and Sledge reached the destination, Sledge shouted, "Shoot on the ceiling!" But Agent Jeremy did not need any further encouragement. He already fired a few shots to the middle of the ceiling.

"How do we know if I hit the target?"

While Agent Jeremy was shooting, Sledge opened up the Wi-Fi detector application on his Android phone. The W-Fi detector application could detect signal strengths from each individual Wi-Fi's access points, uniquely differentiated by their MAC addresses. Same like his iPad, Sledge's phone was 'jailbroken' or 'rooted' so he could have more control on his device. He was glad that he had spent the time to install the Wi-Fi signal tracker application when he was packing.

Sledge's smartphone was hacked to the core. It run a custom firmware. Its CPU was overclocked to achieve 50% higher performance than normal. It had custom UI that he fiddled a lot with during his spare time. Sledge slotted it in a waterproof cover that also doubled the battery life. Sledge needed the battery power, since his phone multitasked as his main photo camera, video recorder, sound recorder, radio, casual portable gamepad, podcast, MP3 player and a slew of other functions.

"We killed this one," Sledge concluded, as the new scan result from the application did not show signal strength from the target Wi-Fi AP anymore.

"How do you know that?" Agent Jeremy asked.

"You have to trust me on that... next one, Scott?"

They continued doing this to the last of the access points. Agent Jeremy had to reload three times. He was a very sharp shooter. Although he had a blind targets, his aim was always quite accurate, hitting near the exact center of the ceilings. When they terminated the last one, The Conductor's connection had been cut off instantly and the classical music stopped playing. The announcement system of the train became silent again. Sledge called Prof. Scott to tell Adam to try moving the train. And within a few seconds, the train suddenly started to move again. It went on reverse direction.

Sledge felt there was something moving outside. He took a good look outside the window. It was dark outside, but the train's window light managed to give visibility to a jeep that was riding closely along the train. There was a man standing on the jeep, not more than 20 feet away from the window. He was facing Sledge's direction, with a surprised look all over his face. Sledge could not see his face clearly, but he could swear that he was The Conductor. Out of instinct, he quickly took a picture of him using his mobile. The man was astonished from the camera's flash and tried to cover his face. And then the jeep abruptly slowed down, and moved away, disappearing into the darkness.

"What was that?" asked Agent Jeremy.

"I think the culprit had just escaped," said Sledge. The Conductor must be hacking from his jeep into the train's Wi-Fi network. He needed to stay close to the train, at least within 100 feet, to be able to remain within the train's Wi-Fi network.

Then, Sledge and Agent Jeremy quickly run all the way back to the engine room. As they passed the first compartment, people started clapping and cheering on them, happy that the train moved again. But Sledge and Agent Jeremy just continued past them.

_Ignorance is bliss_ , thought Sledge. How he wished he was just one of the passenger now and someone else was in his shoes instead.

"How much... time left...?" Agent Jeremy was huffing as he closed the door behind and tried to regain his breath. Sledge was so exhausted himself that he had to bend down and put his hands on his thighs for support. He was too tired to say a single word.

"It is coming... it's coming..." As Adam said this they could clearly see in front of them, to their terror, the incoming freight train headlight. It was only about no more than 500 feet ahead of them now.

"Hit the floor hard...!" Agent Jeremy shouted towards Adam.

"I'm trying... It's already moving... It needs more time!!"

They knew Adam was trying to reverse the train as fast as possible, but it had to start and gain momentum slowly, while the incoming train was already moving at full speed.

As the freight train came closer, its engine sound became louder and thundering. It was blinding now to look directly at it. Prof. Scott was praying hard. Sledge was forced to close his eyes from the glaring light. His heart was thumping faster than any other time in his life. He did not even realize he was holding his breath. He could not help but anticipated for that sure crash to happen. Sledge imagined that he heard The Conductor's music and creepy laugh echoing in his head....

FUNERAL MARCH

0155 hours, May 4

Five seconds passed....

Nothing happened. The incoming train still made roaring sound.

Ten seconds passed....

Still nothing happened. Sledge could open his eyes now. The blinding light that filled the room gradually became dimmer. He could now see that, slowly but surely, the freight train became smaller in front of him. The train that they were on had been moving on reverse direction at full speed now.

And then Sledge took a deep long breath. He felt weak right away and sunk to the floor. Prof. Scott continued praying and mumbling on his knees. He closed his eyes tightly. He was still unaware of the new situation. Agent Jeremy was still standing, but he sweated profusely. He still managed to take out his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face and neck with it. He then took out a comb to tidy up his messy hair. And then he looked as new as before the whole thing happened. Sledge was impressed and could not contain his laugh; it was a weak laugh, "Ha... Ha..."

"What?" Agent Jeremy became aware that Sledge was staring at him.

Sledge continued to smile while replying, "I think if we went to hell just now, you would still manage to look good in front of the devil." Agent Jeremy did not find it amusing. He then noticed Prof. Scott, "Professor! For god sake, get up now!"

Prof. Scott opened one of his eyes slowly, "Is... it... over...?"

"Yes, Scott, it's over, we're meeting our maker now," added Sledge.

Prof. Scott went hysterical, "Oh! NO!! I'm too young to die! I'm not yet married... and..." suddenly he stopped, and got embarrassed when he realized that they were still safely inside the train.

"Sledge, it's not funny!" he threw Sledge an angry look.

"The Conductor? Is he some kind of train conductor or something? What do you make of this?" Agent Jeremy asked Sledge.

"I don't think he was using the nickname to refer to that... kind of train conductor. He was 'The Conductor', as in the music conductor," Sledge replied, surprised by his own understanding of his enemy.

"You saw him, didn't you?"

"Yes, but it was dark and I couldn't see his face clearly at all... but I managed to capture a photo," Sledge recalled. He opened up his phone's gallery and showed the image to Agent Jeremy. His Android phone had enough flash and moderate low light capture capabilities. He thought the photo was still quite a blur to be much useful.

"Send me that file. I'll try to mobilize the FBI team to gather some intelligence. They might be able to use this photo to do identification," added Agent Jeremy. Sledge transferred the image file to him using Bluetooth.

Then Sledge was quiet. He was thinking what could be next. This time, they made it, but what about the next one. He had made an enemy of a terrorist organization. Their resources and skills were definitely on much larger scale than the usual hacktivist group. What concerned Sledge the most was that The APOSTLES seemed to be know where they were most of the time, as if they were being tracked.

~~~

After the event, the train continued its way to Oak Ridge without incident. Agent Jeremy shared a piece of good news for them. The FBI had managed to identify The Conductor and arrested him at his home in Kansas City.

"I'm impressed," said Sledge, "How the hell did your guys managed to do it?"

"It was all thanks to you, Mr. Allen," said Agent Jeremy, "The photo that you took was very useful. I managed to send the file to our civilian intelligence unit, where they processed the image in the computer for facial recognition. The computer shortlisted a few matching suspects, eventually the FBI managed to filter out the right person."

_If the government's computer can process a shot made by a simple camera phone, taken from quite a distance in the dark, and accurately identified the person from a population of 315 million, imagine what they could do if the government installed cameras around the streets. They could potentially track everyone, everywhere,_ thought Sledge. Being a hacker, he was always uncomfortable with the controlling power of the 'big brother'. Facial recognition technology had been always a big invasion of privacy in his mind. And it seemed the government possessed a much more advanced version of this technology than your average photo editor.

"And we hit jackpot. The Conductor was The APOSTLES' number 2. This will deal a serious blow to them..." Agent Jeremy continued, "The FBI sent a few field agents after him and he is now in our custody. But they were too late, not before he managed to wipe out his computers clean. By the time the agents apprehended him, there were no longer any useful information that we can use against The APOSTLES."

"He will be charged with terrorist attack on an airplane that caused multiple deaths and for the attempt to sabotage a public transportation system. The investigation team had also been collecting evidences of other related cases that he might be involved with," said Agent Jeremy while showing both Sledge and Prof. Scott the photo of The Conductor from his Blackberry. Now that Sledge had a better view of The Conductor, he was actually quite young, with a college student look, not more than 20 years old. He did not look like someone who would love classical music for his age. Sledge could not imagine such a young person to be punished for terrorism.

_The advent of the computer gives people a lot of power. It removes the boundary and anyone can harness its power to do good or evil. Just like weapon, it can be used to save lives. Or in the wrong hands, destroy lives. In the end, it depends on who and how it is used._ Sledge always believed that new inventions and technological progress were never harmful to the society. They were just tools. It was the people that misused those tools.

The train's damaged router had prevented The Conductor from controlling the train remotely. In the JetAirlines incident, and other cases, The Conductor had been able to do everything remotely, but not this one. He had to be in nearby vicinity to hack into the train's system, within its Wi-Fi coverage, about 100 feet radius. The Conductor decided to do it anyway, not knowing that it would be his undoing. HIs plan backfired. He had not taken into consideration that Sledge would saw his face and took a photo shot that would lead to his capture.

"One Elite down, eleven more to go..." said Prof. Scott, trying to cheer them up, but Sledge and Agent Jeremy sighed deeply instead.

"Mr. Allen, he left a message for you..." Agent Jeremy continued to the surprise of Sledge, "When we interrogated him, he wouldn't say anything, but insisted that we passed this paper to you." He handed over a piece of paper to Sledge.

It was a musical notation, written on a piece of music paper. Sledge was not very good in reading musical notation, but he played guitar enough to understand a little bit. He opened the GarageBand application on his laptop and played the notes written there. It was the same music they heard in the train. Prof. Scott said, "I think he wanted you death."

ORNL

1628 hours, May 4

ORNL was originally established to help in World War II Manhattan project. It was tasked to carry out a single well-defined mission to create weapon grade plutonium. Since the World War II ended, it had evolved to become research facility to address the national energy and environmental issues. ORNL was managed by UT-Battelle under the US Department of Energy. At this moment, the laboratory also housed Titan, the most powerful supercomputer in the country, which was used to drive simulations and issues with nuclear research.

From the train station, they reached ORNL by a car that Agent Jeremy booked in advance. Once they were inside the laboratory's complex, Prof. Scott showed the way. He knew most of the people here around the lab. They registered and he led them to the building where Titan was located. They entered into a room that was about the size of a basketball court.

"Well, this is Titan!" said Prof. Scott. Sledge had never seen a supercomputer before, so he got quite excited in anticipation on the way here. But now, when he saw the real thing in front of him, it was not as impressive as he had imagined. Titan was formed by rows and rows of cabinets. It looked just like a normal data center to him.

The supercomputer was equipped with 18,688 CPUs paired with similar amount of GPUs, making a total of 299,088 cores raw power capable of 27 petaflops or 27,000 trillion calculations per second, although the standard benchmark tool, LINPACK, measured only 17++ petaflops. _Not bad performance for $97 million spent on this machine to build and maintain,_ Sledge thought.

Compared to that particular moment's world record holder, the Chinese Tianhe-2 was clocking at more than 33 petaflops, faster than Titan. However, the Tianhe-2 had the unfair advantage of owning a total of 3.12 million processor cores. More than 10 times compared to Titan's owned number of cores.

After glaring at the beast of a supercomputer for a minute, they then exited the room and continued walking. When they passed a room with a big transparent window, Sledge was surprised. It was filled with busy men and women. They were sitting in a mess of laptops, gadgets and computer cables. The people in the room were seemingly too busy with their conversations and did not notice them passing by.

"Those are the people from T and X division... the NSA's tracking and network security divisions," Prof. Scott quickly added after noticing Sledge got that confused look hearing the cryptic name the NSA used for its departments. "They had arrived yesterday ahead of us. Do you want to drop by and say hi?" he asked Sledge.

"No way!" Sledge replied quickly.

"Well, I just want to show that we are committed to make this operation successful," Prof. Scott added.

They continued walking for another minute and entered into a smaller room reserved for them for this occasion. They settled down to get ready for action.

ENTER THE TITAN

1710 hours, May 4

_I will have to use this baby to write decryption code that will use up around 300 thousands CPU cores to fight with the Antilogy's encryption_ , thought Sledge. Sledge seated himself on one of the empty workstations, booted up his laptop and connected to the WLAN network where he could access Titan directly. He was given a temporary limited account to access Titan by one of the ORNL personnel.

He searched his portable hard drive for the cryptography code that he previously wrote for the "Fastest CryptAnalyst" competition few years back. It was a library that worked on RSA, and it turned out that he needed to revamp majority of the codes to be able to fully harness the power of Titan.

"We're lucky The Architect used RSA instead of other types of encryption. Asymmetric encryption should be easier to break than a symmetrical one," said Prof. Scott.

"Asymmetry? What do you mean, professor?" Agent Jeremy sounded confused.

"You see, if The Architect used, for example AES 128-bit, which is a symmetrical encryption type, the efforts to break these would be much more significant. We will need to try every... 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 possible combinations. That's a number that starts with 3 followed by 38 digits behind. With Titan's power, we will need half a billion of a billion years to achieve that," said Prof. Scott. Sledge could not believe that there was someone stupid enough to memorize all those numbers.

"Well, someone recently invented a method to crack RSA 1024-bit that can be done using only 1 year of current technology's processing power, but you will need to have access to the system in question, which is not the case here. We can't replicate the same method, and RSA 1024-bit is 1,000 time much more difficult to break than RSA 768-bit," continued Prof. Scott.

"Well, all I know, we have Titan here, so symmetry or not, it's like having 18,000 or more computers fully at our disposal," said Agent Jeremy.

"Mr. Jeremy, you are wrong. According to Amdahl's and Gustafson's Law, the optimal speed-up gain from parallel computing will be always limited by the non-parallelizable portion of your code," said Prof. Scott.

Agent Jeremy looked at him blankly. Prof. Scott then added, "There is always a portion of the code that cannot be parallelized. Those codes that need to run sequentially, limiting the overall potential speed-up by the inverse of the amount of time this code spent." By this time, Agent Jeremy pretended that he never brought up that matter at all.

Sledge put on his headset, which was an earbud type. He started his iTunes, played songs from Oasis's albums and pumped up the volume. Nothing beat rock and roll songs when he needed his full concentration.

~~~

He worked for 10 hours continuously, while Agent Jeremy and Prof. Scott tried to make themselves useful. It was a much difficult process trying to code for parallel computing, especially with so many cores that he needed to make work simultaneously. He had previous experience in OpenCL programming language, which was the language he decided to use with Titan.

Prof. Scott watched Sledge all the while he was coding, made a few comments about how his multiple core handling logics could be much improved further with a research paper he had done on similar topics. Occasionally, his comments proved to be useful, especially when Sledge got stuck in moving forward. Agent Jeremy brought some foods and beers every few hours to keep them going.

ANTILOGY VS TITAN

0316 hours, May 5

Once Sledge was done, he tested his codes on a few weaker RSA encryptions. After he was happy with the results, he reviewed his code for the final time. He discussed with Agent Jeremy what time they should start accessing Antilogy. Agent Jeremy suggested doing it immediately. They were too excited to sleep anyway.

After performing final check, Sledge instructed Titan to SSH into the domain antilogy.free-dns.com. As expected, he was immediately greeted by The Architect's trademark ASCII art of a key.

When he pressed the 'Enter' key, The Architect himself sent him a message. Sledge was amazed. The Architect seemed to give the impression that he was standby waiting for his remote session to Antilogy all the time. They started communicating using the broadcast command.

[The Architect] Welcome, Sledge, to Antilogy! It's good to see you are back certainly :)

[Sledge] I'm going to start to decrypt the file. I hope you are able to hold your end of the bargain if I beat you fair and square.

[The Architect] My dear friend... equipped with one of the world's most powerful computer to beat a humble hacker, is not fairly and squarely.

As expected, The Architect already knew that he would be facing Titan, but there was a clear sense of self-confidence and mocking in his chat message.

"How in the world did he know we are using Titan?" asked Agent Jeremy. Both he and Prof. Scott had been watching from behind Sledge.

"Oh, it's not that difficult, actually. He might be using geolocation lookup for the IP address that we're using, and there's only one super computer in Oak Ridge. It's common sense we will be using one," explained Prof. Scott.

[The Architect] You have 24 hours

[The Architect] Starting from now!!!

Prof. Scott also got busy. He went out to coordinate the efforts from his NSA's colleagues. The teams were tasked to explore the weaknesses of Antilogy while the access to Antilogy was open.

Sledge browsed the remote directory for the encrypted password file.

[Sledge] ls

./

../

password.enc

Secret File

[Sledge]

There was a file called password.enc, which should be the targeted encrypted password file. Also, there was a folder with the name 'Secret File', but Sledge was denied the permission to go inside the folder. The access to the folder required a different set of username and password, which Sledge hoped that they could recover from the encrypted password.enc file.

Sledge started typing a lot of instructions, which he informed the rest of them that they were necessary precautions to ensure everything was in order. Being impatient, Agent Jeremy then voiced out, "Mr. Allen, you are wasting valuable time here."

"Give Titan some time to warm up first, will you?" Sledge replied. After he was done, he then issued the command to start running the decryption module on the password file located in the remote directory.

Prof. Scott asked a lot of questions about the way Sledge's program worked. When Sledge was about to blow up, luckily, Prof. Scott was distracted by one of his own team, calling him over to show him some findings on Antilogy. After that, when he came back, he became more interested in how incredibly fast, Titan's decryption speed was in Antilogy and no longer bugged Sledge any further.

Few hours passed and there was still no result. Both T and X unit personnel reported zero findings. They were not able to penetrate Antilogy's defense. Agent Jeremy tapped his fingers on the table playfully, but it could not conceal the look of worries from his face. Finally, he said, "We don't have much time, we have been doing this same thing for quite a while in previous attempts, why are you not doing something different?" Sledge ignored him for a few seconds and simply replied, "I'm trying something different...and try to shut up because you are disturbing my concentration. Do you not know what the Hofstadter's Law says?"

"What... Hoff... that... what law?"

"Hofstadter's Law, which says that 'It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law'," Prof. Scott jumped in to show off his knowledge again. After that nobody said anything anymore while Sledge continued issuing various commands into Titan.

~~~

And then, unexpectedly, a message appeared on Sledge's terminal.

[Decryptor] Code broken, file decrypted successfully with retrieved 1024-bit key...

"BINGO!" shouted Sledge so loud that this threw Prof. Scott off from his chair, falling head over heels. "What? Who...? Wh...", Agent Jeremy muttered while waking up from his half sleeping state. Both quickly rushed over to Sledge's laptop. Sledge opened the file to check what he should do with it. The decrypted file looked just like an innocent compressed ZIP file.

"Wait!" Agent Jeremy stopped Sledge, "This file is highly P&C. Please let me open it privately!" Sledge stepped aside, followed by Prof. Scott, whom did so while mumbling. Agent Jeremy opened the file. It turned out that there was just one TEXT file.

Congratulations! You deserved the username and password absolutely:

Username: antilogy

Password: Ant1l0gy@4439

Thank you sincerely!

\- The Architect

Suddenly, Titan no longer responded to any commands from Sledge's machine, and the SSH connection from his laptop got terminated. "I've been kicked out. It's a trap! He owned Titan!" Sledge tried to open connection back to Titan, but was rejected. The whole thing was a honeypot. It was a trap set by The Architect. And the game was over.

QUANTUM LEAP

0808 hours, May 5

Prof. Scott had called the ORNL personnel to disconnect and shut down Titan immediately. Titan refused to cooperate even after reboot, always trying to create connection back to antilogy.free-dns.com all the time. And only after force rebuilding the whole Cray Linux operating system environment, did the ORNL personnel managed to discover that, during the five minutes when The Architect owned the system, it had been used to perform encryption on a remote file. It was the intention of The Architect all the while, to lure Titan to connect to Antilogy, and exploit the system while they were busy with trying to retrieve the password and finding Antilogy's security holes.

The Architect also left another message in the Titan's system log:

I thank you for the Titan's access deeply. I have used this powerful supercomputer to re-encrypt the password file to access GhostNet elegantly. The file access is limited in Antilogy, but won't stay like that for long surely. If you want to claim back the file, you will have to break the RSA 1,073,741,824-bit cryptography. I'm giving you unlimited access to decrypt the file in Antilogy since you won't be able to do anything anyway. Time is running out before I release the file to public, my dear Jeremy.

The Architect

_The Architect must be a damn good hacker, to be able to exploit the weakness of the proprietary Cray operating system,_ Sledge thought. He had to admit that the feat was not a simple one.

They had checked Antilogy, and used the recovered username and password to login to the 'Secret File' folder from another machines. There was another file there, but with every attempt that they made to read or delete the file, Antilogy would throw error that said permission denied. And there was another encrypted file, the one supposed to contain the correct login details with the right permission. If The Architect did not bluff, the encryption this time would be way much more overkill than the previous one. The only good thing that was different this time was that they were now able to copy the encrypted password file out to decrypt outside of Antilogy.

They were back sitting in the same room now. All of them looked tired. Agent Jeremy just sat there and looked outside the window. Even the talkative Prof. Scott was not making any noise right now. Sledge, as usual, was sitting in front of his laptop and was busy with chatting with his circles online.

"We're back to square one... no we're in even worse shape than we began," said Agent Jeremy after moments of quiet. "What should we do?" Agent Jeremy looked at Sledge as if expecting a reply. But he did not. Sledge was still busy with his laptop without giving him a look. Suddenly, Agent Jeremy went emotional, got up and pulled Sledge up from his seat by grasping his T-shirt. "Did you listen to me?! We're finished. How can we recover the file now it has been encrypted with such crazy strength?" Sledge looked at him again with the 'it's not my problem' look.

"Since we have unlimited access to Antilogy now, we could try the brute force method to 'guess' the password. But Antilogy, and in fact most servers out there, might have blacklisting capability that can detect these attempts and stop us from trying." Then he added, "We can't do anything to break that crazy encryption... with our current equipment." Agent Jeremy let go of his grasp. Sledge added, "Well, the necessary processing power to process that decryption is well beyond current classical computer's grab. Different story if we have access to quantum computers..." Sledge stopped there when he realized he had suggested the impossible.

Agent Jeremy seemed to be surprised by that statement, but being trained in hiding his emotion, he quickly hid that feeling. He returned to his seat and sat there looking blankly outside the window again. He remained quiet for a while. Prof. Scott jumped in, "Well, we all know that quantum computer field is still not mature yet. Quantum computer works based on quantum theory, and is using qubits instead of the normal bits, or 0 and 1, or ON and OFF. Qubits has the ability to store various states at the same time, so a 2 qubits computer can store 2 to the power of 2, which is 4 states, 3 qubits can therefore store, 8 states, and so on. It's an exponential increase over today's computer and will even be able to easily surpass the power of Titan..." he was about to continue when Sledge stopped him, "Right, smart ass! Thanks for the explanation, but we all know about that already, so keep your mouth quiet!"

"But Sledge, you know that quantum entanglement is the main issue, you see. While this problem remains unresolved, we cannot easily create a working quantum computer. This is the only..." before he could finish, suddenly Agent Jeremy got up and said, "This will cost me my career."

"What?!!" both Sledge and Prof. Scott interjected at the same time.

THE ARCHON

1529 hours, May 5

They took a non-stop flight back to the FBI headquarters. During the flight, Sledge still could not help worrying whether the plane they were on had been hacked by The APOSTLES or not. The Conductor had been arrested, but there might be other people in The APOSTLES with similar skills. Prof. Scott kept pestering Agent Jeremy whether he knew anything about quantum computer. Agent Jeremy just ignored him all the way. "You'll see later," he said, not denying anything, but refused to discuss further about it. After settling down in Agent Jeremy's office, Prof. Scott started to ask the question again, but before he could say anything, Agent Jeremy stopped him and said, "I will have to make a quick call. I'll come back soon".

"Do you think he is serious? Do you think the government owns quantum computers? Do you even think he will borrow us that machine?" asked Prof. Scott. Sledge just raised his shoulders and gone back to his laptop.

Agent Jeremy stepped out and made a call with his Blackberry. After he gave report on what had happened, the other party on the call said, "Good job! Now you've made us look like a bunch of fools!"

"Sir, we will need to authorize the use of Vesuvius II", agent Jeremy tried to sounds calm with this request, "Since we have access directly to the password file now, we can contain the whole operation locally, this time, we will not endanger our asset."

"How can you be so sure that the file that we have access to right now is authentic?" asked the other party.

"No sir, but I think we have no choice!" answered Agent Jeremy.

"You know that you are going to put your career on the line for asking this, Agent Jeremy? The reason that I'm still talking to you and considering this is because of your recent track records in stopping the DDoS and capturing The Conductor..."

"Yes, sir, I am ready to face the consequences, sir. Please give me authorization," Agent Jeremy replied, trying to sound confident, but he could hear clearly that his voice belied his intention.

There was an uncomfortable silence, as if the party at the other end of the call was in deep thought, trying to make a very difficult decision.

Another minute passed and Agent Jeremy came back to the room, "We will fly to Utah early tomorrow morning. We will use Vesuvius II to try to decrypt the password file."

"Vesuvius? What the..." Prof. Scott choked on his coffee, "You mean we will use quantum computer to decrypt the password file? You mean we will be allowed to access the quantum computer built by NSA in Utah? The one that is rumored to be able to decrypt anything and everything without a sweat? Why I was not made aware of this information? Why..."

"Prof. Scott, please, you are all questions. What I can say is that we will fly to Utah and pass the necessary file to the corresponding people. Then let the experts decrypt the file for us. We do not need hackers, black or white, anymore for these tasks," said Agent Jeremy.

"That means I am free to go now?" Sledge was hoping he could get out of this.

"No, Mr. Allen, you are not free yet until we told you so. We will need you to stay with us until the very end of this matter," said Agent Jeremy with his usual formality. "This time, we will just need to let the experts do their job. Besides, quantum computer will require different set of programming skills."

"I'm doubtful of the power of quantum computer," said Sledge. "We have seen news on 512-qbits performance of the Vesuvius. It cannot even match the power of a smartphone." The D-Wave Two, or the project code name Vesuvius, was developed by D-Wave Systems, and was one of the world's first 512 qubits quantum computers. It was the successor to the first commercially available quantum computer, the 128 qubits D-Wave One.

"Well, Mr. Allen, in that case, we'll have a few surprises for you. We'll just have to see, won't we?" said Agent Jeremy, this time with a higher confidence, since it was a rare moment that he seemed to know more than both of them

Agent Jeremy sent Sledge and Prof. Scott back to the hotel. Since the incident with Agent Vasiliev, Agent Jeremy had been driving another black SUV. It was slightly newer but otherwise, looked exactly the same like the previous black SUV.

In the middle of the night, Sledge woke up from his dream again. The same dream as always. He tried to sleep again, but his eyes were wide open. He turned on his laptop, went online and noticed a particularly strange email message from an anonymous sender.

From: <Anonymous>

Received: May 5, 23:34:21 UTC-4

Subject: Use your PGP key to open...

It looked suspicious and was fully encrypted with PGP, Pretty Good Privacy, a popular email cryptographic algorithm to protect privacy. The message subject gave instruction to use his own PGP key to open it. Sledge knew enough about the way email worked. An email would not cause any harms unless you open a link or attachments embedded in it. He proceeded to use his key to decrypt the mail. Sledge was surprised that it worked. Normally his PGP key was only known to his select few circles in the hacker communities. Those that he decided to share the key to communicate safely.

The message contained inside was simple. It was an instruction to go online in IRC to join a seemingly random channel, #243212AS. The email gave the IRC link together with the server's IP address and port number. Sledge suspected that this was a temporary channel set up just for this occasion. He opened the channel and joined in. There was no password required. Immediately, he was greeted by The Archon.

<The Archon> Greetings, Sledge!

<The Archon> I am The Archon, the leader of The APOSTLES

<The Archon> First of all, congratulations to you...

<The Archon> You have been invited to join The APOSTLES exclusively

Sledge was not sure whether this guy was bluffing or he was really from The APOSTLES. Everybody could pretend to be anyone else in the Internet. And he was not sure why the leader himself would come and contacted directly.

<Sledge> Are you sure you are the leader of The APOSTLES? Don't mess around, I'll trace you and call the police

<Sledge> And how do you get my PGP key?

<The Archon> The matter of PGP key is too small for our discussion here, but nothing that I, The Archon, can't do

<The Archon> Nobody can find The Archon, The Archon will find you... Nobody can escape from OCULUS

<The Archon> I'm the leader of The APOSTLES, whether you believe it or not

<The Archon> And I'm here to offer you an opportunity to join our rank

Here, Sledge was slightly convinced that this might be The 'real' Archon. At least the person on the other end was able to obtain his PGP key easily. Sledge was considering whether it would be worthwhile to trace his location. He tried anyway, if this is really the leader of The APOSTLES, then it would be valuable information.

<The Archon> No use trying to trace me Sledge

<The Archon> I'm behind MAZE, our own Tor-like network.

<The Archon> You don't need to try. The government could not even do anything about it.

He was right. Sledge's trace ended up in a proxy server in Pakistan. Tor was used to provide anonymity and privacy to its users. The traffic from the original users will be routed randomly to a collection of servers, called Tor nodes. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, for people to track and assemble the whole packet to finally be able to derive the original sender's location. The connections between intermediate hops would be further encrypted to provide further security. On subsequent communication, the Tor network would choose another path randomly again.

Tor, from the acronym, The Onion Router, which explained its multiple layers of security, was initially used to secure government communication, personal and business privacies, and to protect communications on sensitive topics such as rape, AIDS, and abuse survivors. But as with other tools, it was also used in the black market for copyright infringement, money laundering, child porn abuse, credit card frauds and other various illegal activities.

Sledge now understood why the government had difficulties in tracing these guys. They were hiding behind a complex network routing. Most likely, the nodes or proxies they were using were located outside the States in neutral countries where the government did not have access. Realizing he would not be able to locate The Archon at all, Sledge then continued typing again.

<Sledge> Why do you want me join you?

<The Archon> There's a vacant position in my Elite...

<The Archon> Since you have defeated The Conductor, you are the rightful candidate to fill in the vacancy

<Sledge> I can't join you, the FBI already got me on my tail.

<The Archon> Why worry on such negligible issue?

<The Archon> I can give you a new identity

<The Archon> I can email you for an immediate flight ticket to a safe location overseas

<The Archon> It is a very safe country. Nobody will be able to track you

<The Archon> You will have the Elites and Adepts of The APOSTLES covering your back

<The Archon> And you will have unlimited supply of Bitcoin and Litecoin to last you a life time

<The Archon> To do whatever you want as you like

Now, this was an interesting proposition. Unlimited amount of money for him to do anything as he wanted? What could he lose? Sledge actually considered it for a while before he thought about the airplane accidents and would-be train accident if they had failed to stop The Conductor.

<Sledge> Yeah, right? You mean like The Conductor's fate?

The Archon did not show any sign of agitation. His reply was calm; at least that was what portrayed in the chat session. Instant messaging was a good communication method to hide people's emotion.

<The Archon> The Conductor was careless. He didn't foresee the son of an Elite in the picture.

<The Archon> Anyway, he will be rescued very soon enough. We will not leave our war comrades behind.

Sledge was confused. He did not understand The Archon's chat message.

<Sledge> The son of an Elite? What do you mean by that?

<The Archon> Sledge, it's in your blood. You are an Elite

<The Archon> If you agreed to join The APOSTLES, right here, right now

<The Archon> I can tell you all about your father

Sledge thought for a while about this. All this while, he thought his parents had been gone missing. That was what his Aunt Lucille had told him all along. Sledge could not believe it, here, out of nowhere, The APOSTLES' leader came and contacted him, telling him he knew his father, and he was an Elite.

<Sledge> I couldn't believe you

<Sledge> My father is either missing or no longer alive

<The Archon> Believe me Sledge, I know everything about you.

<The Archon> Your father is still alive

<The Archon> You lost your father at 10. Why settle with a sad ending?

<The Archon> We can have a happy reunion of the Elite's father and son

Sledge was unsure how to reply this. The Archon seemed to know at least that his father went missing when he was 10 years old. Any doubts about The Archon disappeared. This guy started to get on his nerve now.

<The Archon> The APOSTLES invitation is only open once in your lifetime

<The Archon> If you didn't want to join now, you are declaring a war with us. I cannot guarantee your safety after that. Even if you are the son of an Elite.

<Sledge> Why are you doing this?

<Sledge> I mean why are The APOSTLES targeting the government?

<The Archon> Don't you get tired of the government spying on people?

<The Archon> This is supposed to be a free country

<The Archon> But the real freedom today, can be actually found in 3rd world countries, not here

<The Archon> We are liberating the people from the grasp of the government dog

<Sledge> But what about the civilian? The airplane crash killed lots of innocent!!

<The Archon> Their sacrifice is regretted

<The Archon> But they have done their part in our fight for freedom

<The Archon> There will be always casualties in war

Sledge thought it was sick in a way. As much as he hated the government's grip and control on privacy and its people, he could not agree that killing people would be a solution. When playing his first person shooter games, he would have no issues being the guy that kill people to solve a government's problem. He thought he was OK with that all the time. But right now, when he faced similar situation in real world, his stomach felt nauseous.

<Sledge> I will never side myself with a terrorist

The moment he typed that words, he felt a bit of regret. Here was the only chance to find out about his father, and he had let it go.

<The Archon> Well said, Sledge!

<The Archon> I honor your decision regardless, but you WILL regret this

<The Archon> The next time we meet will be on the cyber battleground and you will be put on our bounty list

<The Archon> You will be the target of the Elites

<The Archon> And eradicated, just like all our other enemies

With that last message, The Archon terminated the chat session and shut down the channel. Sledge was immediately disconnected. He could not sleep anymore and spent the whole night thinking about the conversation.

ROOM 432

0157 hours, May 6

Since Sledge was not sleepy at all, he spent his time tinkering with his Google's glass video recording functionalities. That helped to keep his mind away from thinking too much about The APOSTLES. After a while, getting bored of recording nothing but himself and his room, Sledge decided to go out. Sledge went down to the lobby to sit in the hotel's 24-hour bar. He was still wide-awake and he thought he could get some booze to knock him down. He brought his laptop with him.

The conversation with Archon bothered him much, and he started goggling for The Archon and The APOSTLES. But there was not much information about The APOSTLES except that this hacktivist group had gained a lot of popularities among the black hat communities. It was quite the norm for 'noob' or 'newbie' to adore famous hacktivist. If they could join the fray, they could have a lot to boast under their nickname. The APOSTLES' recent activities did nothing but to increase the cool-factor level of the group. Although Sledge stopped the DDoS attack, it was before it could cause billion of dollars of damage, and The APOSTLES had claimed that its 'short' operation had been successful regardless.

If he were not able to find any useful information on The APOSTLES, he could not even find any single information about The Archon. After spending about one hour time with no results, he decided to go back to his room. Sledge went into the main elevator. There was one person wearing a dark gray sweater with baseball cap waiting for the elevator when he reached 4th floor. Sledge thought that he was not the only one who could not sleep that night. The guy seemed to be in a hurry and rushed in immediately to the elevator. He seemed surprised to see Sledge. Sledge thought the guy must have not been expecting anyone to be still awake at this time.

When he was just outside his room's door, he did not feel like going back inside. It rarely happened to him, but he needed someone to talk to right now face to face. The other person that he usually went to would be his Aunt Lucille. But at the moment, he would not even dream about getting her involved in such a dangerous situation. He decided that the nearest guy right now would be Prof. Scott, the last person on earth he would think about talking to. But the fact that he was just opposite his room, in room 434, and he was the only person that he would not have to worry about disturbing at this time, made him consider this. He stood in front of Prof. Scott's room for a while, thinking hard what excuse he would use to knock his door at this hour.

Before Sledge could finish thinking about it, Prof. Scott suddenly opened the door, "AHA! Sledge, my boy! Good to see you. I called your room, but nobody pick up. I couldn't sleep, maybe you can chat with me till the morning? Hmm... by the way, why are you standing there? Are you looking for me?" Prof. Scott only now realized that it was weird to see Sledge standing in front of his room.

"No! No way! I'm just on my way back from the bar... that's all," Sledge denied.

"Great! So you couldn't sleep too? Come in! I've got something interesting to show you," Prof. Scott gestured him to come into his room.

His room was messy and had a funny perfume smell. Prof. Scott showed Sledge a new book he wrote on the No-SQL attacks for the latest big data software. Since big data technology does not use SQL statements anymore, by theory, it should not be vulnerable to SQL injections attack. However, Prof. Scott highlighted various ways that these systems would be vulnerable to No-SQL attacks instead and proposed a few countermeasures.

Suddenly, there was a continuous 'beeping' sound.

"Did you hear that?" Sledge asked Prof. Scott.

"Hear what?"

Then Sledge realized his Google Glass was the source of the sound and he was the only who can hear it. He had forgotten to turn off the video recording, and now the device memory was full. He quickly turned it off.

"Nothing, so where were we?" Sledge had quite a fun time arguing with Prof. Scott on the validity of his proposed solutions until he did not realize that it was already morning.

"Let's get breakfast. We will need to pack for Utah soon," Prof. Scott suggested.

They walked out of the room and Sledge saw that the cleaning lady was pressing the bell of his room. Sledge simply told her to go in and proceed with the cleaning since he was about to go for breakfast anyway. Then, as both Sledge and Prof. Scott turned to walk to the direction of the elevator, the cleaning lady opened Sledge's room. There was a short 'click' sound, and then there was a loud explosion. Both Sledge and Prof. Scott covered their ears. When they turned quickly to see what happened, this was what they saw. There was a lot of smokes and debris. Sledge's door, or whatever left of it had exploded, and the cleaning lady was lying on the floor, wounded and unconscious, probably dead.

~~~

"Someone tried to kill me," Sledge told Agent Jeremy when he arrived in the hotel as soon as Prof. Scott called him. They were gathering in the crime scene now; which was his room. The poor cleaning lady was sent to the hospital immediately but she did not survive. Sledge was lucky. If he had decided to go back to his room earlier instead, he would have been killed. Police was on the scene immediately and had recorded both Sledge's and Prof. Scott's statements. The bomb seemed to be hand-made since the explosion was not really that big. It only destroyed the door and damaged parts of the wall. Also fortunately for Sledge, his stuffs inside his room stayed intact.

"Do you suspect or remember anything?" asked Agent Jeremy.

"Yes, the same one I told the police. There was this guy, entering the elevator on my floor, before I came back to my room. I had given the police the descriptions of the guy," Sledge recalled. He felt a pang of guilty, realizing he might have caused the death of the cleaning lady.

Earlier, with the police, they had checked the hotel's surveillance camera. They were positive the guy in the dark gray sweater was the primary suspect. The camera captured him breaking into Sledge's room. But they could not find anything useful about him since his baseball cap hid his face fully from the hotel's entire camera.

"But wait..." Sledge suddenly remembered something. He still had his Google Glass on him. He plugged the device into his laptop and transferred the last video recordings he made. Normally he would just transfer the stuff wirelessly, but today he was in a hurry. Then he played the video back for them and skipped to the part where he met someone in the elevator. Although slightly shadowed by the baseball cap, the video recording managed to capture the face of the suspicious guy.

"Good job, Sledge. I'll send this to our intelligence units to do identification. And we'll have him in no time," Agent Jeremy patted Sledge on the back.

Sledge did not tell anything to Agent Jeremy or Prof. Scott about the chat he had with The Archon. He was not sure how they would treat him if they found out that he was the son of The APOSTLES' Elite.

"We can't stay here any longer. Pack up and let's move your luggage to the HQ. We've got to move on to our next schedule. Let the police do their work here," Agent Jeremy instructed and they agreed.

_Luck had spared my life twice, but will I be still so lucky next time?_ Sledge asked himself.

VESUVIUS II

0811 hours, May 6

After they moved their belongings to the FBI headquarters, they went to the airport and took the flight to Utah. Agent Jeremy did not bother about traveling by air anymore since his last suggestion for taking the rail had almost cost them their lives. During the flight, Sledge's mind was filled with this morning's bomb incident and last night's conversation with The Archon. Air travel, including the past few ones, had not been a comfortable experience for him. It made him feel vulnerable.

But nothing happened and they landed without incident. Immediately, Agent Jeremy received update about the hotel bomber. The FBI had managed to nab the guy. He admitted guilty immediately when shown with the video recording. He also confessed that he was an 'Adept' member of The APOSTLES. He had just recently joined The APOSTLES and it was his first duty to try to kill Sledge. Besides that, he knew nothing about the organization at all. The FBI could not extract any further useful information from him.

From the airport, they transferred to a helicopter ride to the new 'Utah Data Center', twenty-five miles south of Salt Lake City. "I heard this is a restricted area... anyone coming near here will need special access," shouted Prof. Scott over the loud sound of the helicopter's spinning blades. No one seemed to be in the mood of having a discussion. The Utah data center was also known as Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, or in a not very short acronym, IC CNCI DC.

The new NSA building had only been completed for less than 6 months. Parts of the buildings were still under continuous expansion and renovation works to extend the data center even more. Going into the main building, they arrived at the entrance and were greeted by a few security officers. They were subjected to similar securities as in airport. "Well, here goes my nude photos again," said Prof. Scott as he walks into one of the X-ray scanners, similar to the one employed by Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, in the airport previously. After security checks at the visitor control center, they walked down the main hall past the administration, across a long walkway. Both sides of the walkway housed the NSA's data centers and the impressive amount of servers was bewildering. Over 200,000 square feet of the building were populated by innumerable servers and network equipment.

"Well, the good citizens of America paid for this with their tax money... and then, the government used the money to monitor everything about the same citizens. The good citizens lost their privacy and freedom. What an irony," Sledge commented sarcastically.

Agent Jeremy was about to say something, but then Sledge interjected him, "You wanted to say that this is for the benefits of the citizens, didn't you? These facilities will be used to ensure safety of the nation from terrorist, right? Your standard rehearsed rhetorical speech..."

"Are you referring to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act here? Or more commonly known as... FISA? Section 702 stated that the government does not have direct..." Agent Jeremy tried to explain the act, but was interjected halfway before he could finish. "I'm referring to whatever that allowed government to 'spy' on its people. Be it PRISM, FISA, Patriot Act or any other things that facilitate the government surveillance on its people," Sledge replied.

Sledge was aware that the completion of the Utah data center had given the government much more power in analyzing data that they had amassed. The government, in its cleverly polished political speech, had acknowledged that they would need special court orders or authorizations to monitor people's communication. But nobody could be sure whether there were any loopholes in the laws that allowed bypassing this.

Few big companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook had tried to come out more transparent in the disclosure of the government request for data. This was part of the organizations' efforts to show user that they care about privacy. But such companies were prevented from disclosing too much detail about the government's activities. And this was moot. The fact was that the government required all telecommunication infrastructures to comply with the law to give government access to any data that flow through their facilities. That was also why the government needed a big data center to support the analysis of those data. The huge amount of data was transformed further to become 'metadata', or data about data, that could be used as search keywords during official investigations.

"You didn't know how much PRISM and other similar programs had helped to stop domestic terrorist attacks."

Prof. Scott looked like he was about to say something, but he kept quiet, unsure which sides he should be on. As a government official, he thought he should defend his employer. But as a citizen, deep within his conscience, he was sure that these acts were not fully ethical in nature. _A necessary evil_ , he thought.

"One or two?" Sledge sounded slightly heated by the argument.

"I can assure you, Mr. Allen, that we had protected many lives of citizen of America and prevented more terrorist attacks than you could ever imagine. The intelligence gathered from these systems allowed us to stop more than 50 terrorist plots, inside the country as well as internationally, just last year alone," Agent Jeremy replied louder this time.

"By recording and listening to civilian's phone conversation? The last time I heard, you were in all major telecommunication providers in the country. Or by going through each and every citizen's email?"

"Why would the citizens cares about the government reading their emails? When at the same time, the same citizen publishes every minute details about him or herself in Facebook, Twitter or other online social platforms? All of that information is open to the public anyway. Imagine what people, having access to your information with bad intentions can do with that information today. At least, if only the government has access to it, the people will not be in danger."

Sledge did not say anything anymore because he knew Agent Jeremy was at least partially right in a way on the point above. _Why would a normal citizen that posted everything about himself or herself has to worry so much when most of the information had been made available in the public voluntarily? The government didn't even have to put much effort to exercise its capabilities to obtain that information._

All of them continued walking to the end of building. There was a small room that was locked with a very thick door. It looked super heavy. Agent Jeremy touched his visitor's tag, entered the passcode, and the doors opened slowly. They entered, and standing inside were two people in their lab uniforms. One was a very good-looking girl that did not look over 30 years old, while the other was an even younger girl.

"Prof. Emma, I believe? I appreciate your time made available for us. Is the preparation ready?" said Agent Jeremy. Prof. Emma did not reply anything immediately. She gave all three of them a deep penetrating look.

"Well, Agent Jeremy, I think it's more like we have been ordered to assist you," said Prof. Emma after a pause.

"Please... don't say that, we really require your expertise," added Agent Jeremy.

"The preparation is ready," Prof. Emma signaled all of them to follow her. There was another door at the end of this room. Prof. Emma opened this door, and they walked into another room, which turned out to be much more spacious than the previous room. In the center of the room, there was a weird looking device shaped in big circle. It looked kind of out of place for a computer. The equipment did not seem to be very Earth-like.

"Gentlemen, I present you Vesuvius II, the most powerful computer in the world, unofficially," said Prof. Emma. All of them tried to erase the look of awe from their face. Then Sledge added, "Is it really that powerful?"

Prof. Emma then gave him a mocking smile. She looked even much more attractive this way. "Well, have we met before? You looked familiar... Here is another non-believer of quantum computer power. To answer that question, Mr.... "

"Sledge. Please call me, Sledge," he answered hastily.

"Well, Mr. Sledge... what a weird name, but to answer your question, that depends on the context of operations you would want Vesuvius II to perform," said Prof. Emma, and then she continued, "In a normal computing applications, you might find that Vesuvius II, can't even beat your laptop, not to say supercomputers of our age. But if you want them to do specific applications, like breaking encryption, this is just what this baby is designed to do. The 1st generation Vesuvius has 512-qubits. We are talking about Vesuvius's ability to handle 2^512 combinations at the same time here. Imagine the number 13 with 63 digits behind, which is far beyond what you can imagine. The one you are looking at here has more than 512 qubits, so I can guarantee you its power in solving your problems."

"This is a more advanced system? How many qubits does this one have?" asked Prof. Scott.

"I'm sorry, this information is confidential. I can assure you it has more than enough to solve your problem," replied Prof. Emma. It seemed to Sledge that D-Wave Systems had developed a much more advanced quantum computer secretly for the government. And unlike the others, the more advanced version of the system was not sold commercially to the public.

"How do you solve the quantum entanglement issue?" Sledge asked trying to hide his curiosity as much as possible.

"Well, that information is confidential as well, but in summary, Vesuvius II uses a variant of adiabatic quantum computing instead of the traditional quantum computing. This is the first machine in the world that can factor very large numbers to be able to finally use Shor's algorithm to break public key encryptions," explained Prof. Emma.

"I can't believe there's anything today that can break Moore's Law," said Prof. Scott.

"Actually, no law has been broken yet. Like I said, this machine is not anything faster than your average laptop used for normal computing. The only area it excels is with highly specialized applications, cryptanalysis for example," Prof. Emma replied.

"Right, ladies and gentleman, can we go down to the root of the matter?" said Agent Jeremy. He had either become impatient from a topic he could not understand or he just wanted to go straight into business. He passed a USB thumb drive to Prof. Emma. "This USB drive contains the encrypted password file."

Prof. Emma brought the thumb drive over to one of the laptop sitting on the workstation. All three of them moved closer behind her, curious to have a glance of what she would be doing. "Sue, can you please power up VES?" Prof. Emma told the other girl with the lab coat, who seemed to be her assistance. "VES? What a nice pet name..." said Prof. Scott, but Prof. Emma just ignored him. She then run her terminal and started an application that requested for file as input.

Before she dragged the file to one of the applications, Sledge stopped her, "Are you sure you laptop is secure? We're dealing with a madman here. We will need to play safe."

"Relax, man. My laptop is installed with the latest antivirus, and I have firewall software running," replied Prof. Emma.

"Turn off your network connection also," added Sledge.

"Is this really necessary?" questioned Prof. Emma.

"You do not know the risks when dealing with The Architect," said Sledge. Prof. Emma gave him a disbelieving look, and then turned to Agent Jeremy. He just nodded in return.

"Alright, alright, geez, I will turn off my Internet, but I need to connect to the Local Area Network to access VES. What's wrong with you guys?"

Prof. Emma dragged the encrypted file into the application, and it started to process the file and showed the progress: 0%, 10%, 20%.... The whole process seemed to be quite fast, and Sledge gave a quick glance to the odd-looking machine that was Vesuvius II. But there was not any sign of the quantum computer busy working hard. It was pretty quiet for being the most powerful computer. Overall, it only took about 20 seconds for Vesuvius II to crack the RSA 1,073,741,824-bit private key. This was too overwhelming even for Sledge to believe.

The decrypted password file content was actually pretty straightforward, containing another set of username and password.

"Oh my... how could it be possible? This machine is the devil, all hacker's wet dreams. It used to take 1,500 years for a one core CPU to break RSA 768-bit. This is totally unbelievable..." said Prof. Scott.

"Welcome to the future. You can continue with your wet dream. In the meanwhile, we will have to check the result," said Prof. Emma nonchalantly. She connected her network back to Internet to get into Antilogy. Then she simply logged in using the obtained username and password. With this credential, she was able to copy the other file with restricted access to her laptop successfully. "Done. Agent Jeremy, I assume this file is P&C, and you would like to verify the validity first before we try to delete it once and for all from this Antilogy?... Agent Jeremy?"

Agent Jeremy seemed to be still awed by how fast the whole process is, "Ah, sorry. Yes, you are right. The file cannot be opened by anyone in this room except myself."

Sledge then looked at him and said, "Why don't you let us verify the file first before you open it? It might contain something dangerous."

"Nice try, Mr. Allen, but I will not be fooled. Ladies and gentlemen, can you please step outside for a moment?" Agent Jeremy pointed to the direction of the door.

All of them, with the exception of Agent Jeremy, walked out of the room and gathered in the previous smaller room. Prof. Scott and Sue seemed to be busy talking about Vesuvius II. Left with Prof. Emma, both of them looked at each other in the eyes, and then Prof. Emma said to him, "Mr. Allen, huh? So that's your real name? Sledge is your nickname? Trying to sound cool, huh?" Sledge gave her a stupid smile, which made him look like a fool. He could not seem to be able to figure out a good reply for her. After that, she turned away and tried to make herself busy with note-takings. Sledge tried very hard to think of a good topic to start the conversation again with her. But he could not think of any.

"Um..." Sledge was about to say something. "Hey, I remember you now. You were the guy in the CNN interview," Prof. Emma came into realization. "No wonder you seemed familiar. What is the 'black hat who turned white' doing here anyway?"

_Oh my god!_ Sledge thought. _Here's another one that watched my embarrassing show!_

But before he could say anything, suddenly, a loud alarm buzzed throughout the whole building. "ALERT! ALERT!" the PA system suddenly announced, "INTRUSION DETECTED IN THE SYSTEM. POSSIBLE VIRUS INFECTION. PLEASE FOLLOW SECURITY PROCEDURE 14 TO CONTAIN THE DAMAGES IMMEDIATELY. I REPEAT, PLEASE FOLLOW SECURITY PROCEDURE 14 TO CONTAIN THE DAMAGES IMMEDIATELY. THIS IS NOT A DRILL!"

BLACKNET

2119 hours, May 6

There was chaos in the Utah data center building. Agent Jeremy, while he was trying to open the alleged GhostNet file, had opened the Pandora's box instead. The file in question contained a malware, a worm. The worm was capable to connect to local network and infect most of the computers in the data center in lightning speed. Some of the alert employees of NSA, upon hearing the emergency announcement, had immediately shut down their system to prevent the infections further. However, more than 80% of the systems in the data center were still managed to be compromised.

"Why the hell do you open an executable file?" asked Sledge with a blaming tone.

"I'm... I need to check if the file was valid... so I opened it," Agent Jeremy seemed to lose his usual coolness.

"We would have avoided this catastrophe if you let us checked the file first. You should never opened a foreign executable file," Sledge replied.

"But there were no executables. I just clicked on a PDF file, which looked like the GhostNet file. And Prof. Emma said she had installed antivirus and put appropriate security measures in her machine," said Agent Jeremy, now pointing the problem to Prof. Emma.

"Yes, I have the latest version of corporate antivirus installed, updated daily with latest definition. And I never leave my firewall OFF at any time," Prof. Emma said in defense.

"This is a new type of virus, never before detected and released in the public, so there won't be any definition for it," said an authoritative voice from behind Prof. Scott. A middle-aged man with stern face entered the room. "It exploited a new security loophole of popular PDF document reader software and from there, took over the system. By the way, I'm Mike, the Head of Network Security of this facility."

He was followed by a few people, who stopped further behind him. They were his subordinates. Mike continued, "We are in a deep shit situation, ladies and gentlemen. The worm had caused all hell to break loose and compromised most of our systems, including our central data center operating system. We are not able to do anything with it. The worm gained root access to the system and prevented us from resolving the situation. Please look at this... John, please."

One of his guys brought a laptop over and placed it on the middle of one of the tables for everyone to see. On the screen, the following words were displayed:

> System infection success...

> Operating system pwned...

> Access control rewritten...

> No system access possible anymore...

> Do not shut down your machines...

> Or else, your data will be lost forever...

>...

>

> From your dearest friendly worm,

> BLACKNET

>

> Press [Enter] to view the message from my creator...

"Our security engineers had analyzed the logs and traces left by this... BLACKNET worm. It is a variant of Stuxnet worm, a famous malware that was reported to have heavily infected a lot of Windows systems. And what we have here is a modified version that exploited a 'zero-day' bug in our operating system to compromise 'root' or administrator level passwords..." explained Mike.

"Stuxnet? But isn't that a worm discovered in 2010 that was supposed to be written by the government of United States to cripple Iran's nuclear facility?" asked Prof. Scott.

"Isn't Stuxnet a Windows operating system only worm?" Sledge added.

"This variant, my friend, is modified to attack both Windows and nixes system. And BLACKNET proved to be much more fatal. It intercepted the administrator passwords via network packet capture of active sessions. Then it sent the hashed password remotely for brute-force operation. The remote server... might be a supercomputer... returned the clear text password almost instantly, and BLACKNET used the retrieved password to wreak havoc. All of these happened in less than a minute," Mike continued with his explanation.

"It couldn't be... Titan? But Titan had been rebuilt again... there is no way someone still had control over it," exclaimed Prof. Scott who looked in the direction of both Sledge and Agent Jeremy. Sledge concluded that either The Architect still had control over Titan or The APOSTLES had access into another supercomputer somewhere else.

"You guys owe me a lot of explanation, but let me finish first," he pressed the 'Enter' key of the laptop in front of them. The now familiar signature ASCII art of a key appeared in front of them first, followed by the following messages:

AGENT JEREMY

YOUR TEAM HAD BEEN PLAYING MY GAME BEAUTIFULLY

I WILL PROVIDE YOU WITH ONE LAST OPPORTUNITY

I DEMANDED MY PAYMENT OF $100 MILLION IN CASH MONEY

TO BE PREPARED IMMEDIATELY

SO YOU WILL GET THE PASSWORD KEY

IF YOU INPUT THE PASSWORD CORRECTLY

BY THE HOURS OF A SINGLE DAY EVENTUALLY

BLACKNET WILL SHUTDOWN ITSELF WILLINGLY

DO NOT TRY TO GUESS BLINDLY

AFTER 3 RETRIES, BLACKNET WILL WIPEOUT EVERYTHING COMPLETELY

AND I WILL EXPOSE THE GHOSTNET PUBLICLY

SINCERELY,

THE ARCHITECT

RETRIES LEFT: 3

TIME LEFT: 23:32:34

PASSWORD: _

The screen stopped there and seemed to expect a password as input. The timer continued counting down and it was clear to everyone that they only have less than 24 hours to retrieve the password, or risk losing everything in the data center. This was a double blow for Agent Jeremy. They had been tricked again. Earlier, Sledge had gone to delete the GhostNet files in Antilogy. He managed to do it with the username and password obtained by Vesuvius II. But The Architect might still have kept copies of GhostNet file, which he could expose to public anytime. The GhostNet file in Antilogy was just a decoy. The real target of The Architect had been the Utah data center from the beginning.

"Why don't you just reformat and rebuild everything?" asked Prof. Scott.

"Sir, FYI this data center contains the information of almost every data that had ever passed the Internet. This is a new data center, and we have not established any good remote disaster recovery site. Our master backups are still located on site. Losing our data here means we will lose more than 30 years of government intelligence efforts and 295 exabytes of data," explained Mike.

"Wow! 1 exabyte is 1,000,000 terabytes. And 5 exabytes is equivalent to all words ever spoken by human being. How much data contained in 295 exabytes, is simply just... unimaginable," said Prof. Scott.

"Thank you for making it clear for us, but this data center is designed to cater for 1 yottabyte of data, in other words, 1,000 exabytes. We have not run on full capacity, but you know Kryder's law, storage size increased at a speed much faster than processor, doubling every 13 months, so this capacity, which might seem big today, will be a laughing material in the future. We are continuously increasing the storage to handle future bigger requirements," Mike replied. He was secretly proud of the data center's capability and could not resist bragging a little bit.

"What if we go ahead to cut the power source of the affected machines, and then used a different system to recover the data?" Sledge suggested.

"That would be no use. As you know, gentlemen, Utah DC stores a lot sensitive information. All our data are currently encrypted fully within our proprietary file system based on the required government standard FIPS 140-2 Level 4, and only the admin user currently holds the master key for everything. Any attempt to recover the file physically would be impossible because tampering the storage would zero out the plaintext cryptographic keys and other related security parameters. Once the admin user had been compromised by the worm, we lost everything," Mike replied.

_Oh, perfect! They had put in super-secure system in place and now they couldn't do anything about it_ , Sledge thought he should have enough of the whole encryption stuffs by now. He was also confused how NSA could have built something without a backup or fail safe mechanism.

"This madman's target had been this data center from the start. He knew we would be using Vesuvius II to decrypt that file, which is located here. This guy has insider information about us," concluded Agent Jeremy. He sounded weak. Then his Blackberry rang. He picked up the mobile quickly as if he had expected the call and stepped outside. They could hear his words faintly before he was out of the room, something that sounded like, "Yes, Mr. Director..."

COUNTERATTACK

2236 hours, May 6

Agent Jeremy came back with a very pale face, "We've lost. I've been relieved from this operation with immediate effect."

"Will the government pay the ransom?" asked Prof. Scott hopefully.

"You and I know very well that the government does not negotiate with terrorist," replied Agent Jeremy.

Then Sledge said, "I think... it is our turn to strike back at The Architect."

Everyone turned to look at him as if he had said something weird. Then he went to the table and placed his laptop besides Mike's. He opened his browser and pointed to Google Maps, displaying the maps of Washington DC, centered on a location.

"You know... I had been busy. Since Titan's incident and Antilogy allowed unlimited access to anyone, I had been running exploit scripts day and night before we got here, trying to find loopholes in the system. It was similar to what the NSA's T and X unit had done. The scanning was only possible via direct connection to Antilogy. I managed to trick the server to give me its 'real' IP address, instead of the proxy's that was usually visible from our end. I did a geolocation lookup on that IP address and received a coordinate. However, the accuracy of the coordinate is quite low, around 5 miles radius," he stopped and pointed to the icon centered on the Google Maps. "Agent Jeremy, can you run a check on government officials that are based in the DC, especially those that are within this radius?"

Everyone was too confounded to say anything, except Agent Jeremy who replied with his usual cool, "But why do we search for government agents? For all we know, The Architect might be anyone in the world with access to Internet."

"This guy had all the information about all our plan so far. I couldn't think of anyone else except that he is an FBI agent or some government operatives who have direct access to Titan, this data center and Vesuvius II. He's extremely familiar with all our moves. And he knows you personally, Agent Jeremy," concluded Sledge.

"Why you didn't tell us about this matter earlier... before we even started using Vesuvius II?" Agent Jeremy questioned again.

"At that point of time, I was not sure how we could locate one person in such a big city, and there are a lot of people staying within the radius of the pinpointed area. It would be like looking for a grain of sand in the beach. After the BLACKNET attack, I could confirm my suspicion might be right. The Architect is someone close to the government previously and he had full knowledge of the facility or else he wouldn't be able to execute such an attack."

There was a long silence in the room. Agent Jeremy seemed to be contemplating hard. And then he asked again, "For all we know, I can get that list of all government operatives based in that location, but then... it might be a long list. How can we narrow it down further?"

"We will need to short list only those that are in that area on the time window when Titan and this data center were attacked. And your guy would need to have direct access to confidential information on Titan and Utah DC facility. You are a smart guy Agent Jeremy, you concluded earlier yourself that The Architect had insider's information and access..."

Sledge's logic made sense. Agent Jeremy went out to make a call immediately.

Prof. Emma then gave Sledge an interesting look, "You are quite sharp. What do you do again for a living?"

"Uh... I'm a security engineer..." Sledge was not going to share that he was also a black hat, but before he could stop it, Prof. Scott already added on his behalf, "While he was a black hat, he also lives on the charity from some people." Prof. Emma just gave Sledge an amusing smile. Sledge felt his face was blushing and tried to hide it by turning away.

Then, Agent Jeremy came back, "Destination Washington DC, gentlemen. We will get our suspect list once we reached there shortly and we don't have much time to waste." Prof. Emma then said, "I think you mean 'ladies' and gentlemen. I am coming as well."

"What!?" exclaimed Agent Jeremy, "What do you..." Before he could finish his sentences, Prof. Emma continued, "Mr. FBI, you had exposed serious danger to my quantum computer, and NSA's facilities. And I will need to see through the end of this," she said with a finality in her tone. "But..." before Agent Jeremy could continue, she already walked past him out of the room and said, "Wait for me while I packed my stuffs." Sue followed suit.

"I don't have any objection that they come," said Prof. Scott, all the while his eyes followed Sue until she disappeared out of the door.

"You guys are fully aware that what we're doing now is an unauthorized operation. And I don't have backups anymore from the FBI, so whoever involved here might be risking criminal prosecution later."

"Well, can I stay behind?" asked Sledge, "I may have made the suggestion... but I mean you need someone to try to crack the password... and I'm not trained in field operations or..."

"For you, not an option. You will need to come with us, Mr. Allen," said Agent Jeremy.

"Hold your horses... For all you know, it could be a trap," said Sledge, "We will need to be careful..." Sledge had been cautious since The Architect had been playing them for a fool for the past two times. "It is better if we get the right people there. Government officials,... the police, or whoever..."

"We ARE the government officials, Mr. Allen. We will go in and send The Architect to prison," Agent Jeremy was on fire.

"Good luck guys! My engineers will continue to analyze BLACKNET and beat the clock to see if they can remove it before time runs out," said Mike.

THE GATHERING

0023 hours, May 7

The Archon called the Elites for an emergency meeting. As usual, it was done via VoIP conference. The APOSTLES never had any physical meetings at all. Anonymity was of utmost importance in the protocol of the organization.

One by one, the Elites joined the call. It was not normal for any Elites to miss a meeting. Attendance was compulsory, but today, The Architect noticed that, there were only 9 of them, 2 Elites were missing.

"General, where is The Stranger?" The Architect dared himself to ask.

"I sent The Stranger on a very important mission. He couldn't join us today. The Magician had his own personal business somewhere. Both are excused from not attending today," replied The Archon.

"We had lost The Conductor. Our strength is reduced. We will need to act quickly," everyone could feel that there was an unusual anxiousness in The Archon's voice. Most of the Elites were aware that The Conductor was The Archon's favorite. "The preparation to go full scale had been made. We will strike fear into our enemy, which is the government dog of the United States. We cannot fail."

"The Architect... What is the status on UDC plan?" asked The Archon.

"My plan had been going very well, general. Now, I'm holding the UDC hostage. In less than 20 hours time, the BLACKNET worm will cripple and destroy the biggest database system in the planet. It will put them back to the starting line," The Architect replied arrogantly.

"That is good, but why don't you destroy it immediately? Why give them time?" questioned The Ripper, another Elite.

"My plan involved a few more people that we need to get rid of. I'm using UDC to lure Sledge and the FBI agent. Knowing Jeremy for quite some time, he is a man of action and he will come directly to me," The Architect replied, "When they accessed Antilogy, I set up a bait. I knew Sledge would run a security scanner. He was too predictable, being a security engineer by occupation. I left my geolocation security loophole open on purpose. My logs showed that he had fallen for it. He will be able to pinpoint Fort Zion from there, and he will not suspect anything... And then it will be their end. I will make sure to destroy our enemies before they can put more dents into our plan." The Architect ended his statement with a victorious laugh.

There was a minute of quiet in the call. Nobody spoke. The Architect was in an enviable position to destroy their now common enemy, Sledge.

Sledge's success in thwarting both of their Elite's attack had reached the radars of the Elites. He was even responsible for the arrest of an Adept and The Conductor, which was their 2nd Elite, the highest rank after The Archon. It caused a deep mental blow to them. They were fully aware of what he was capable of so far. And he could be a potential dangerous stumbling block for The APOSTLES. The Elites was not yet aware that The Archon had offered Sledge a position in their rank, but was rejected.

"Good job,... you can proceed with your plan as long as you make sure that both of them are eliminated," The Archon said finally.

"Thank you, general!" said The Architect. The Conductor's failure had turned the tide. The Elites did not take a liking to each other or anything, but if one is capable of taking down an Elite, there was a protocol in the organization that would reward whoever capable of hunting down the perpetrator handsomely. The Archon had placed a bounty on Sledge. Whoever managed to eliminate him, will be rewarded with 200 points.

The Elites were ranked based on a point system. The Archon created a competitive system, where the Elites get rewarded by points for completing certain objectives. Sometimes, the objectives were open to all Elites, allowing all of them to take a shot. The first and fastest would bag the points. But sometimes, The Archon assigned the objective specifically to an Elite. It was like a game to the members. The Elite that had the highest point, would be getting closer to the top, and had higher chance to become the next leader of The APOSTLES. It was no top secret that The Archon commanded a wealth that could match a small nation. The Architect held the 4th rank at the moment. He had 502 points. The capture of The Conductor had shifted his and other Elites' rank one step higher. The 12th positions will be vacant until The Archon appointed a replacement. The Ripper was just slightly above him with 632 points. The Architect was definitely not happy with his positions. He did not like The Ripper at all. If he could stop Sledge, then the reward would boost his position above The Ripper.

This was the first time The APOSTLES lost an Elite member before, but the rules had been made clearly when they joined. If one were captured by the authority, The APOSTLES would try to come and rescue him or her. But one cannot maintain the Elite position any longer. He or she will be degraded to a mere Adept member level, in the eventual case that one were rescued, released or escaped.

"We will initiate the last stage of Operation Blindfold in one week time. After that it would be full front assault to the enemy. We won't wait any longer. The time for retribution has come. And I will need all of your help to make this happen," The Archon continued.

"Yes, general!" shouted everyone in unison and they continued their plot to bring down the government.

FREEDOM FIGHTER

0314 hours, May 7

They immediately travelled to DC on the next available flight and stopped by the J. Edgar Hoover building, the FBI headquarters. Sue was actually not tagging along, to the disappointment of Prof. Scott. He was quiet all the way.

_We had been traveling all around the country, and we finally ended up here where we started, in DC. What an irony! The Architect must have agreed that the most dangerous place is the safest place after all,_ Sledge contemplated.

Inside the HQ, Agent Jeremy received a list of more than 11 government officials that might have passed or stayed in the radius of 5 miles of the coordinate that Sledge provided. When he showed the list to Sledge, they further shortlisted the number down to 3 by filtering the durations of their activities to the time of Utah data center incident.

For the 3 people in the list, in the list, Sledge further checked their backgrounds.

"Agent Bill... doesn't have any computer background, so he's definitely out..." Sledge said more to himself than others, while rummaging through the files of the 3 suspects, "And... Agent Susan had only joined the FBI for less than 1 year, I don't think she will have any motives like what The Architect had... that leaves..."

"This guy... Bryan Hopkins!" Sledge concluded.

"Hmm... Bryan? He seemed to be familiar... And he's not even a field agent," said Agent Jeremy. There was something but him, but Agent Jeremy could not recall who this guy was at the moment.

"It is written here that he was an ex-NSA employee... and he possesses very good skill with computers. Can you send someone to locate him?"

"Are you sure...? Because he was..." Agent Jeremy.

"Bryan Hopkins? He was the original architect for the Utah DC before he got replaced. He was quite a legend among the NSA employees because of his intelligence..." Prof. Emma added.

"Oh my god! The Architect! That makes perfect sense..." Prof. Scott blurted out.

"Jeremy! We've got locate this guy fast. We have no time!" Sledge now shouted impatiently.

Agent Jeremy went to make a call. And they anxiously waited for the result.

~~~

Agent Jeremy's Blackberry rang. Everyone was tense and immediately casted their eyes on Agent Jeremy's phone. Agent Jeremy checked his phone, but he looked disappointed. He still picked up the call anyway.

"Hello, Agent Jeremy?" said the voice from the other side.

"Yes, Mike. What's up?" Agent Jeremy replied, "Do you have updates on the BLACKNET?"

"Yes, we had examined the logic of the worm's source code and found that the threat is real. BLACKNET will trigger data destruction after it timed out without the proper password. The destruction process will be coupled with secure wipe, meaning that we will not be able to recover any data after that... ever," Mike explained.

"Go on..."

"And, uh... I have bad news. In the process, when we decompiled the BLACKNET worm, we found a section of code that looked like the password for BLACKNET."

"And..." Agent Jeremy could already guessed where this would lead.

"After we verified the source code of BLACKNET, we, uh... then tried to key in the password in the worm's console. But it turned out that it was the wrong password, we tried twice, and we are only left with one last attempt now," finished Mike.

Agent Jeremy sighed and went silence for while, "... thanks for the update, Mike." He hung up and shared the news to the rest of them.

"Good job," Sledge said mockingly.

And then they went silence and waited again.

~~~

Another 15 minutes later, Agent Jeremy's phone rang again for the second time. Agent Jeremy turned on the speakerphone.

"Jeremy, we have located Bryan Hopkins from the records of our surveillance cameras. He was spending a lot of his time in this newly built... structure, Fort Zion. I won't even call it a building. I'll text you the address right away," said the voice.

"Thank you, Charles," said Agent Jeremy.

As he was about to hang up the call Agent Charles said, "Wait, Jeremy. I'm coming with you."

"What?"

"You are shorthanded. Agent Vasiliev is still hospitalized. Let me help you. I owed you one anyway," Agent Charles offered. Agent Jeremy had saved his life once while they were investigating an online drug syndicate activities two years ago.

Agent Jeremy considered his offer for a few seconds before replying, "Alright, but I'm in charge here. You will not endanger yourself and will listen to my order."

"Yes, sir!" and then Agent Charles hung up the call.

"We're going to the enemy's building... Wouldn't... wouldn't it be safer to wait for the official FBI to handle this?" Prof. Scott said, trembling.

"We're operating on our own now. Because of the previous failures, the Director had pulled me out from this operation. No more backups. We are not authorized in this operation anymore. Agent Charles will be coming with us. He will be of great help," Agent Jeremy explained. He sounded grim, but he still held his air steadily.

"Well, guys, at least we know where to go now... and we have a Fort to visit," he ended trying to lift up the mood, but everyone remained grim.

FORT ZION

0359 hours, May 7

They had decided not to go back to the hotel anymore after the bombing. They did their preparations in the FBI headquarters. Tired as they are, Agent Jeremy decided to make a move immediately. He suggested that it would be the best timing to catch The Architect unaware. Besides, time was running out.

Sledge thought that he only needed his iPad and mobile device this time, so he did not spend much time preparing. Prof. Scott, as usual, brought nothing with him except his mobile phone and wallet. Prof. Emma had transformed into someone totally different. She wore dark brown leather jacket on top of her tank top, with slim fit jeans and matching boots that made her looked like a model. She let her straight hair down instead of tying her usual ponytail now.

Sledge wore his special fleece jacket. From outside, it looked like normal jacket. But inside, it had a lot of special pockets made for gadget geeks. The jacket had one that fit the iPad mini nicely, which was concealed and hidden. The jacket could also fit two mobiles, one water bottle, glasses, digital camera, keys, pens, MP3 player, small booklets or passport, and a lot more. The neckline was designed to keep headset cables in place, eliminating cabling mess. Tonight, Sledge put only his iPad into the secret pocket. He preferred to put his mobile on his jean's pocket, which was much more accessible than the jacket. Since his Google Glass had proven useful in his last encounter with The APOSTLES, Sledge decided to put it on again. He kept his normal glasses in the jacket for backup.

Agent Charles met them later outside the building. He was a man in his thirties, had a dark hair with military cut. He was in black suit and shades, even though it was dark outside. He told them that his outfit would make him easy to blend in the shadow, like a ninja. He was much more easygoing and not as serious as Agent Jeremy. The rest of them liked him immediately.

They drove in Agent Jeremy's black SUV to Fort Zion. With one more additional person, the SUV felt a bit crowded inside. The building was so new that it showed as an empty land in Google Maps. During the trip, they did not talk much. Agent Charles tried to pull a few jokes, but he gave up after realizing there were not much responses. All of them felt anxious having to go to the field. None of them, except both agents were trained as field operatives and now they had to face a terrorist madman. Prof. Scott was shaking his leg. When Sledge pointed this out, he just told him that the night air was cold.

They parked the car 50 feet away from the building. It was clear why The Architect called himself the 'The Architect'. The design of the building was truly magnificent. Based on Agent Charles's report, the building was commissioned to be a green building. It was shaped like a temple pyramid and was fully covered by various varieties of vines, which made the whole building look like one big hill, blending nicely with nature. Overall, it was roughly 60 feet tall, with the base at least 30,000 square feet. Fort Zion was a place built with a lot of automation and sensors. The building looked intimidating even before they entered.

"Ready guys?" asked Agent Jeremy.

"I still think it is a trap. We should wait for the government officials to come," whispered Sledge.

"We ARE the government officials," said Agent Charles. "Don't worry, I am armed, nothing bad could possibly happen right?" Agent Jeremy patted on the gun hidden behind his suit on his waist. Sledge still looked worried.

"Well, here goes nothing..." Prof. Scott said.

"Wait here... Let me survey the perimeters," Agent Charles offered himself. They waited for a while as he walked briskly approaching the building.

"Should we knock at the front door?" asked Prof. Scott jokingly. Nobody replied.

About five minutes later, Agent Charles returned, "The building is locked tight. There is no other entrance except the front door. It is open as if inviting us to go in."

"Like I said, it's a trap. The Architect is waiting for us with whatever surprises he prepared," Sledge added.

Agent Jeremy considered his options for a while, "Mr. Allen, you could stay here if you want," and then continued, "Well, then, where are our manners? Let's not make The Architect wait any longer."

Sledge thought it was bad idea. But Agent Jeremy already walked towards the building's main entrance. Prof. Emma and Agent Charles then followed him behind. Sledge looked at Prof. Scott, whom was the only one left behind with him. Then Sledge decided that it would be a better idea to go in as well.

"Hey, wait for me..." Prof. Scott run after them.

They walked into the front entrance, which was open, just like what Agent Charles told them. They entered into what looked like the main lobby. Although it was fully lighted inside, the building looked empty. From the lobby, they walked past what looked like an unpowered card reader operated automatic gate. One by one, they jumped past the gate towards the elevator.

"According to the developer's description of this building, it was meant to be a green office. It was completed five months ago, but nobody knows what happened after that. There was no official opening or whatsoever," Agent Charles was now speaking in whisper to shed some backgrounds on Fort Zion that he had gathered.

They went inside the lift.

"How many floors is this building supposed to have?" asked Agent Jeremy.

"Five," Agent Charles replied, but he could understand why Agent Jeremy asked. The elevator only went up as far as the 2nd floor. Presented with no other option, Agent Jeremy pressed the second floor button anyway. Once they stepped out, they were awed by the beauty of the interior. The building was designed with a lot of glasses. Walls and partitions were also made of glasses that had LED light reflected on it. The colors were uniform throughout, and they changed colors simultaneously in approximately every one-minute.

Sledge unlocked his phone but he found out that there was no mobile coverage in this building. Sledge could confirm before entering the building that his mobile had perfect signal. _Darn!_ _This building might have radio signal jammer_ , Sledge thought.

"Welcome, to my humble abode, mate-y!" boomed a voice out of nowhere. All of them were startled. The building was equipped with PA speakers throughout. Sledge also noticed that there were many video cameras all around. They were installed almost hidden, blending nicely with the environment.

"Do you like my interior design originality? Let us play a little bit and enjoy. I'm at the top floor, come and catch me quickly!" the voice said again. They had no doubt that the voice was The Architect's. Then as if someone pressed the switch, the LED stopped glowing, leaving clear glasses behind.

"We had no choice. We had to find some stairs to go up!" Agent Charles said.

It was tough navigating the glass walls. It was like a maze. "Ouch!" there was a loud bumping sound, and they saw Prof. Scott covering his face with his hands. He had bumped into one of the glasses. Without the LED, it was difficult to see the glass even when it was right in front of your nose. Before long, they had been back to where they started. Agent Charles got frustrated and fired a few shots to the glass walls. But instead of breaking, it just caused some dents to it.

"Plexiglass. Don't waste your bullet," Agent Jeremy said. They were surprised the glass walls, or to be accurate, the hard clear plastic did not look like any plastic at all.

"Do you have the blueprint of this building?" Sledge asked Agent Charles.

"No, I didn't bring it with me, but I remembered seeing the blueprint in my computer before. It was not like this. The whole second floor and maybe higher floors as well seemed to have been redesigned," Agent Charles replied. They had no choice but to find their own way out.

Prof. Emma took out her lipstick from her jacket. She marked the areas that they had travelled, Sledge was not sure why she brought that with her along, but he was glad. The markings helped them navigating the maze of plexiglass walls and in another 15 minutes, they had reached the other end of the building. There was an open door with stairway, which looked like the emergency exit, right in front them. But the way was blocked directly by another piece of plexiglass wall.

They thought hard about the way to pass through the hard to break plastic. "Dead end? I don't think you could just say 'Open Sesame' and The Architect will open the way for you..." Prof. Scott said, but just as he finished, the plexiglass in front of them slid sideways. The mechanism that powered the sliding plexiglass was hidden below the floors. It was quick, smooth and produced no sound. The way before them opened. They stayed where they were for a minute, confused what to do next.

"I guess... it does open when you say that, professor. Shall we proceed?" asked Agent Jeremy.

"Let me go first, it might be a trap..." Agent Charles volunteered, and before Agent Jeremy could stop him, he already walked in. He continued walking towards the open door that led to the staircase.

Nothing happened and then Agent Charles looked back and said, "Come on! Let's move up!"

They all walked pass the sliding plexiglass door as well. Agent Charles made sure that they all followed him, and as he was about to turn around and led the way, he did not notice another sliding door closing on him. "Charles!" Agent Jeremy shouted. But it was too late for him. His body was cut into two and he died immediately.

Prof. Emma shrieked loudly. All of them except Agent Jeremy closed their eyes by instinct. The brutality of his death was just too gruesome for them to witness directly. But they had no time to think about that, because the door behind them slid back and closing their way out. They were trapped.

And then the floor below them collapsed and they fell down. Sledge lost his consciousness when they hit the floor.

TRAPPED

0717 hours, May 7

"Sledge, are you OK?" the sound was muffled and distance at first. Then it got louder. Sledge tried to open his eyes. He had a very painful headache. As he tried to focus his eyes, he saw Prof. Emma looking down at him. Her face was a blur. Then he quickly sat up and noticed he was not wearing any glasses.

"What happened?" Sledge asked as he looked around. Agent Jeremy and Prof. Scott seemed to be uninjured. Prof. Scott looked a bit confused. They were inside some kind of lock-up with iron bars and plain walls, totally different from the surroundings they were previously in. "Where's my mobile?" Sledge suddenly noticed that the mobile phone in his jean's pocket was missing.

Sledge felt helpless without his mobile. He had setup a lot of stuffs inside and made everything worked to his preference. Getting a new smart phone would be a hassle, as he had to spend a lot of time tweaking it all over again to his liking. But he was in a much more dangerous situation at the moment to worry about such trivial matter.

"We had been stripped of our gadgets while we're unconscious," Agent Jeremy said, "My guns, our mobiles... all gone... even Agent Charles..." Agent Jeremy looked very sad when he remembered how Agent Charles died. Nobody said anything for a while.

Sledge reckoned that they fell back to somewhere on the first floor. His Google Glass was also missing. The Architect apparently knew all about it and thought it might be dangerous to leave that with Sledge. Sledge checked his jacket's secret pocket for his iPad mini. He was glad that it was still with him. Whoever that had performed a search on him might not have figured out that he had secret pockets all over his jacket. He was not sure whether his fall actually damaged his iPad. At the moment, he did not want to bring it out to check, wary that The Architect might still be monitoring them from video cameras around the building. He took out his normal glasses from the jacket and put it on. It was cracked a bit on the left-side lens, but overall, still in good shape. He could now see clearer. Prof. Scott's glasses were also still intact on his face.

There was a small LCD TV located directly just above the cell's bars. It was playing CNN news. The volume was barely audible but with enough concentration, they could still pick up the news.

Suddenly, a laugh echoed out from nowhere. "Welcome, my dearest guest, I've been expecting you! What do you think of my Fort Zion? Beautiful, isn't it?" said the voice. "You will be trapped here and left for dead without anyone coming to help you." The voice came back, louder and evil, projected by an almost invisible loudspeaker attached to the ceiling corner of the cell.

"What happened to the 'y' words? Lost your style...?" asked Sledge. He sounded calm, but he definitely was not. The Architect might have prepared or rehearsed most of his statements in advance, but not now.

Although the statements did not end with the 'y' letters, it was definitely The Architect's voice. Sledge was very sure that he was somewhere in the building communicating with them remotely using the custom PA system.

"Boy, you would be wise not to incur my wrath, for I can kill you with a press of a button. This whole building of mine is booby trapped with bombs that I can trigger selectively. But I would prefer to let you suffer and die, while you watch the world fall into panic and terror... slowly. Just like Agent Trevor and Redford." The Architect threatened.

"What do you really want!?" shouted Agent Jeremy in anger. He clenched his fists tightly in realization that The Architect was also the one responsible for the other missing two agents. He always thought that Agent Redford run away from the country after exposing the GhostNet file.

"Agent Jeremy, this is the end of your journey, and our game. Checkmate! I have never expected that you will pay me the money. The intention of the APOSTLES from the start is to trigger the cyber war between China and United States. Eventually it might even lead to real war, World War III. To make the game fair, we need to disable key infrastructure of the US cyber weapons, just like the NSA's Utah data center. The other Elites have been already on the move and will soon cripple other critical government infrastructures."

"Why don't you just kill the Utah DC immediately? Why give us time?" asked Sledge.

"Boy, use your brain... if I have done that, will I be able to capture you and Agent Jeremy here? This was just another part of my personal revenge. I have personal grudge against our Mr. FBI here. And of course, to you as well, Sledge, since you stopped my DDoS plan. I'm glad The Conductor failed to bag you, or else I wouldn't be able to personally see to your end here. Now that I've got you here, I can leave the UDC to BLACKNET. Once it's over, there will be nothing left behind."

"You know this guy?" Sledge asked Agent Jeremy.

"No, I have no clue," Agent Jeremy replied honestly.

"Sledge had beaten you once, and will do it again..." Prof. Scott suddenly said defiantly, to the surprise of others.

"Are you referring to BlackCon?" The Architect gave out a mocking laugh, "Do you really think Sledge won the challenge? No, no, no... the game was a set up from the start. It was a bait, set by me, and the FBI eaten the bait. It was within my plan that the FBI will sooner or later come to you for help. Wasn't that how the FBI concluded that Flux00r is me? Since I used the same key symbol? But I've been expecting your moves all this while. You have played within my script very well. I am lucky The Conductor failed to kill you. If he had succeeded, I might need to resort to different plan altogether. I really want to express my sincerest thanks to you that I had been able to achieve this much..."

Sledge started to understand The Architect's big picture and the part about The Conductor's involvement. If they were killed earlier in the train incident, then they would not be able to 'hand deliver' the BLACKNET worm to Utah data center.

"Why Utah data center? What's in it for you people?" asked Agent Jeremy.

"Mr. FBI, the UDC is a big threat with its capabilities to record all information in the planet. Coupled with Vesuvius II quantum capabilities, the government would be able to decrypt and intercept whatever communication we had. We've had enough with the government spying on the people. As always the case in the first part of war strategy, Operation Blindfold was meant to make the enemy blind, stripping you out of your deciphering abilities. Then The APOSTLES would not have anything to worry of anymore. Without UDC, we can communicate much more freely..."

"How were you able crack the Utah DC's root password so quickly?" asked Sledge out of curiosity.

"OMNICRACK, our cloud based password cracker is a perfect system. No password is too difficult for it. But why worry about this since you are going to die soon anyway...?"

"What will you get out of this? Why do you join terrorism group?" asked Prof. Emma demandingly.

"Question and question. I guessed it's just normal that people that are about to die would want to know everything," said The Architect, "But that's all you are permitted to know. I will now watch you suffer as you die slowly. Sit tight and enjoy the show!" The Architect finished with another laugh again.

Silence then followed.

I "LIKE" FACEBOOK

"Can you trust your trusted friends?"

Senator Catherine Bowman, 43, was one of the few supporters of the government's FISA law. When there were big hoo-hahs about the disclosure of NSA's surveillance program called PRISM, she was one of the first few to quickly point out the benefits of it, such as how the program had played important roles to help stop terrorist plots.

Senator Bowman was also a believer of online social networking and social media. She was an avid user of Facebook and Twitter. She was active in both platforms and rallied her support from these online social networks. She had more than 100,000 likes on his Facebook page. And of course, hundreds of thousands of twitter followers as well, although most of them were fake ones that her team spent a lot of money and time to create. She was a true believer of Metcalfe's law. Metcalfe's law stated that the value of a network system grows approximately the square of the number of its user. And online social networking platforms such as Facebook worked based on that principle. With these platforms, she had secured the support from younger generations and possibly future voters.

Senator Bowman was also one of the first senators to lash out on The APOSTLES in the media. She stressed the importance of government surveillance programs at such time. She called for revision to the Patriot Act and FISA to give more power to the government officials in fighting terrorist group like The APOSTLES.

She managed to grab The APOSTLES' attention and they had enough of her. They hacked into her Facebook accounts, and posted damaging messages on her behalf. They managed to hack into her laptop and dug out few pictures and made them available to the public. They were personal pictures of Catherine's wild life before she became a senator. The APOSTLES also hacked her email account and made public some email messages that highlighted misuse of her senator's position. Even worst still, the hacker changed the password to the accounts, and Senator Catherine was not able to login soon enough to delete those posts until Facebook helped her to reset her password again. But the damage was done. The public had lost confidence in Senator Bowman. What she had worked hard to build, her reputation, for the past 15 years, went down the drain in one day.

~~~

1237 hours, May 7

Back in Fort Zion, the LCD TV was the only thing making audible noise in the lock-up now. The CNN channel reported a few breaking news related to cyber terrorist attacks. As usual, The APOSTLES claimed responsibility for their crimes via postings in the web. One of the Elite managed to trigger an explosion in a government building by overloading the electricity current. Since it was working hours, casualties were in the hundreds. Other crimes involved illegal ATM money withdrawal from the bank accounts of a few government staffs, postings of more than 100,000 credit card information to public website retrieved from Central Bank, mysterious public transport accidents, and many other crimes. In such a short time, The APOSTLES had spread its wing of terror and caused fear for its capabilities.

"What is the government doing? They are being made a fool..." asked one of the citizen interviewed on the TV.

"The government should be ashamed for letting these people do whatever they want..." said another one.

"The US government is fighting a new kind of terrorist... one that they cannot locate... one that they cannot touch physically. The next war fought will be invisible war... it will be fought in the grid," concluded one analyst in CNN interview.

Another notable incident that made the headlines was the downfall of Senator Catherine Bowman. She resigned immediately the following day after her accounts were hacked.

"How do you think the terrorist group was able to hack into Senator Bowman's Facebook account?" asked one of the interviewers to an online social platform security expert.

"This could be done today. Facebook had a feature called trusted friends password recovery that allowed your friends to recover the password for you. What the hackers have to do is simply go into Facebook and tell Facebook that you no longer have access to your accounts. Facebook will ask you for your new email accounts and goes into the laundry list of security questions. If you are lucky, you can go through this, but if not, no issue as well, it will ask you to select three friends from a list of your trusted contacts. And then, eureka... Facebook will then send the security codes to unlock the account," the interviewed security expert elaborated.

"But that means that the hackers must be a close friend of the senator to be able to do that?" the interviewer asked again.

"Oh, I don't think it is very difficult to be a friend with Senator Catherine in Facebook. I believe she was an active Facebook user and had a lot of supporters online that she would not hesitate to accept as friends. And a hacker could simply create fake profiles and befriended her. But that was not all. Hackers today also can become trusted contacts in Facebook easily by creating fake profiles that went to the same school or university, working in the same workplace, or having the same surname with the targeted profiles. The hacker would need at least three fake profiles, but this could be easily done. You could think of many other ways to create the so called 'trusted contact'."

"Won't Facebook system have some kind of intelligence that would have detected hack attempts? I mean it would be very obvious to Facebook that the same computer had been trying to create three profiles at the same time?"

"Well, yes. Facebook, in fact, could detect that. It wrote cookies and flagged the IP address to prevent malicious attacks. But it's a simple matter to overcome that. Anyone could just clear the browser's cookies and use a different IP address or proxy server, and Facebook would not recognize you anymore."

The interviewer thanked the security expert and ended jokingly, "Well, folks. Thank you for joining us. Be safe online! Please remember to secure your accounts and be mindful that at least _three_ of your trusted friends do not scheme together to hack into your account."

To add further to the damage, The APOSTLES had published the GhostNet file in the Internet. The efforts that Sledge and team had spent all this while to recover the file had been futile. Even though they managed to crack the password in Antilogy twice within the remaining 10 days timeframe, The Architect had not kept his promise. The contents of the file were all about the US government's heavy cyber spying activities on the Chinese government. There were many records of the Department of Defense hacking into the Chinese government servers. There were not much things about the Chinese GhostNet at all. The file highlighted that GhostNet was used as the main reason to fund the necessary programs to ensure the supremacy of the United States in the cyberspace. Of course, the US government immediately denied the validity of the contents. The director of the FBI released official statements that the file was 'fake', stating that The APOSTLES was trying to mislead the public and caused tension between the two countries. There were no official responses from the Chinese government, but since the disclosure of the file, the CNN had reported that the incidents of hacking and DDoS attacks that originated from servers located in China had increased more than double-fold in a short time.

The situation was grim. It was just the beginning of the bleak future of The United States of America.

~~~

Sledge felt devastated that he had been used by The Architect as one of his piece in the game. He hated himself for being so predictable. It was true that he tried to warn Agent Jeremy about this, but now that The Architect explained it, he had been involved much earlier than he ever imagined.

Realizing there was nothing they could do, all of them sat down on the cold floor. Despite having her jacket on, Prof. Emma shivered a bit from the cold. Prof. Scott looked too shocked to say anything. Sledge wanted to do something, but not before Agent Jeremy passed his suit for her. _Well, I had my iPad in my jacket, and I don't want The Architect to know that I still had it with me,_ Sledge thought _._

Then Agent Jeremy started talking, "I won't give up. I will leave this place alive. I still have two kids waiting for me back home."

"You have two kids? How old are they?" asked Prof. Emma.

"One is 4 years old, and another one is just 14 months. Both are boys. I really missed them now. I wish I had my Blackberry with me now so I can show you their pictures," Agent Jeremy replied trying to smile, but he could not. "Every time I got back home, they will... rush to me and call out 'Daddy... Daddy...' endlessly. Especially the young one, he was very cute..." Agent Jeremy stopped there and became quiet, his mind full of memories of his kids.

"How about you... Sledge? What's your story?" Prof. Emma turned to him now.

"Huh? Oh... what? Me?" Sledge did not expect the question to come from her.

"Yes, you... tell us about yourself..."

Sledge gathered his thought for a while, not knowing where to start.

"Oh, you see, when I was small, I was a script-kiddie, oh, I mean I was one of those green hackers that just run a bunch of tools, pretending to be cool. In fact, I knew nothing about hacking at all," explained Sledge after noticing the blank look in Prof. Emma's face.

"I did a lot hackings into my school's computer system and landed myself into disciplinary actions. Changing my history subject's mark for example. My teacher knew I was always bad in history, and suspected something was amiss," here Prof. Emma chuckled. "Believe it or not, the Department of Homeland Security tried to recruit me, offering me to join their cyber warfare army with a good compensation," said Sledge, "I rejected the offer preferring my own freedom than being a government dog..."

"You are talking to one now," Prof. Emma said with a smile. "And there are two more over there..." she pointed to both Agent Jeremy and Prof. Scott.

Sledge was embarrassed and regretted that he did not choose his words properly. He was never good at talking. Prof. Emma continued, "Oh, so they recruited hackers in DHS as well? I thought only NSA does that."

"Well, yes, you see, NSA is the offensive team. Hackers who joined NSA normally go to cyber war. Those joining DHS is on the defensive. Their job normally revolves around trying to protect the cyber security of the nation," explained Sledge.

"I lost my parents when I was only ten years old. I lived with Aunt Lucille since then. She was taking good care of me and made me who I am today... although he might be disappointed to know what I had become..." Sledge added with a laugh. "I think if there's someone else that I would like meet for the last time before I die, that person would be her."

"Forget about me. What about you... um... Prof. Emma? Why do you join NSA?" asked Sledge stiffly.

Prof. Emma went into deep thought for a few seconds before saying, "My father died from the terrorist attack during 9/11. When I saw that building collapsed with my father buried in it, I decided that I would give all my strength to prevent such things from happening again. Even if that means the end of privacy for everyone in the world, as we know it," she confided with a smile.

"Oh, sorry to hear that," said Sledge.

"No, sorry to make you hear such bad story. That's why I decided to join NSA and led the quantum computer deployment projects. Vesuvius II is the latest one. Having the ability to decrypt anything would give the government an advantage in the war against terrorists," her face looked really sad when she uttered those words. "I do not want the same thing happened to other people again. The NSA's PRISM program had helped to stop many terrorist plots. For example, it had prevented the 2009's Al-Qaeda's plan to blow up the NYC's subway. Without this program, the terrorist attack would have succeeded and many lives might have been lost."

Sledge never thought of that. He would probably do the same if he were one of the relative of the victims.

"Would we be able to escape from here?" asked Prof. Emma, trying to change the conversation's topic.

Sledge was not sure how to answer that. In fact, he was not confident that he would be able to do anything at all, after falling for another of The Architect's trick. He just fell into trap after trap lately.

"I'm sorry to disturb you guys, and you can continue to pretend that both of us do not exist here... but I must commend you for bringing us so far, Mr. Allen," Agent Jeremy suddenly interrupted. "We couldn't do it without you." This surprised Sledge. It was unusual to hear Agent Jeremy praised anyone. Sledge then felt that he had to do something, but he was not sure what that would be.

And then, he realized he still had a weapon in his hand. His iPad mini. He asked Agent Jeremy to cover his back while he sat facing the concrete walls, away from the surveillance camera. He did not want The Architect to notice it. He took the iPad out, unlocked and examined the device. Except for a few cracks on the screen, it was still fully working. Sledge could scan and detect a few wireless SSIDs. _Time to break into the enemy's network._

"What are you planning to do with that...?" Agent Jeremy asked. But Sledge simply hushed him and looked at the camera behind him. Agent Jeremy understood the message and did not ask any further.

With one final determination, Sledge used his jailbroken iPad to run a brute force WPA cracker app. WPA2 was the type of Wi-Fi security protocol that the Architect used in this building. It was the best security that Wi-Fi access point had to offer at that time. The whole building was generally blanketed with Wi-Fi coverage so that his wireless security cameras could be installed and working anywhere. Sledge had to wait, since brute force could take a while and his device was not as powerful as a laptop.

Meanwhile, he could see that Prof. Scott had given up any hope of escaping and he just sat there without uttering a single word. Prof. Emma was a bit optimistic and continued chatting with him. Sledge concluded that he liked her very much.

ESCAPE FROM DEATH

"Technology works just like magic...."

1841 hours, May 7

The Architect was a very happy man at this moment. His plan, which he set in motion since early this year, had paid off. Now, he was holding Utah data center hostage. He had full knowledge on how the government worked. They would not pay the ransom he requested. And The APOSTLES had no plan to set it free. He would just leave the worm to wreak its havoc as time run out.

And he had Agent Jeremy and Sledge and a few other extra government's personnel on his hand. Their fates lay on him. He had always wanted to exact personal revenge on Agent Jeremy and now they literally fell down to his trap by their own actions. While they were unconscious after they fell from the second floor, The Architect had removed Agent Jeremy's gun and the rest of the mobile phones from them. Sledge had shown that he could be dangerous with simple gadgets like his mobile phone. He had proven that with The Conductor and The Architect did not want to make the same mistake. He had gone into the extent of destroying their phones and Sledge's Google Glass, wary that even keeping the devices with him could be dangerous. A phone owner could track his or her device via GPS or Internet, and who knows what Sledge might have installed in his. He had the whole Fort Zion covered in radio signal jammer, so he should not worry about that. But The Architect was a very careful man. He did not want to leave anything to chances.

He had called The Archon earlier to inform him of the good news. The Archon congratulated him, but told him that the job was not finished yet. He would be rewarded only after he made sure that the data center was wiped out and the meddling bugs were removed. The Architect had a lot of patience. He preferred to let his victims suffered before they died. He wanted them to witness the horror of The APOSTLES' wrath before their doom.

The Architects was monitoring his prisoners via a separate LCD screen. They had been sitting quietly for a while now, barely moving. It was a good sign. They seemed to have given up any hope of escaping. It was the same thing that happened to his previous victims. Everyone would be mentally broken in the end, but it seemed to happen much sooner to these people.

~~~

The app ran continuously for 4 hours before it hit jackpot. Sledge considered that it was his lucky day. Since it was a kind of brute force attack, the cracker could normally take up to 10 hours before successful. However, if he had access to the Internet, he would be able to send the request to his servers back at home, or to cloud service providers for even faster hacking. Using multiple instances of server from the cloud, he would have enough processing power to cut down the few hours' time to only few minutes. It was against the normal cloud service providers' terms of service to use their services for illegal activities such as password cracking. But still, hackers were not usually bounded by rules.

After establishing connection with the password he retrieved, Sledge performed an IP and port scan of the local Wi-Fi subnet. He managed to hit a few IP addresses that had not been protected by firewall. There was no access to Internet. The network was really secured. Sledge could not use it to make emergency calls or send message to the outside world. But he did not plan on giving up. This was very different from what he had been doing previously. His life was on the line this time.

He then telnetted into those IP addresses with open ports and tried to find any loopholes around The Architect's network. He could not detect any. The Architect's network was just too secure.

And then he received a 'push message' in his notification center. It came from one of his favorite alternative instant messaging application, based on the peer-to-peer protocol. He was really surprised, or more accurately, 'freaked' out this time. Who in the world would be able to connect to his IM and wanted to chat with him in the enemy's network?

<TheStranger> Sledge, what took you so long to connect? Now follow my instruction carefully

<Sledge> What? You again? How are you able to connect to this network?

<Sledge> Who are you actually?

<TheStranger> This is no time for small talk

<TheStranger> I'm going to assign a new user that you can use to connect and override Fort Zion's control

<Sledge> What do you mean?

<TheStranger> Can you do it? You will only have control for about 2 minutes

<TheStranger> Look for C&C. That is where he is located

<Sledge> Hold on, I don't understand

<TheStranger> Open this link from your browser: http://192.168.0.21/fzcc

<TheStranger> Use this username and password: admin / 4A35BD@dw421#

Sledge memorized the password from the chat history. It was a piece of cake for his photographic memory.

<TheStranger> I will give you the signal

<Sledge> Wait, give me a few minutes to get familiar with the interface first?

<TheStranger> No time for that, Sledge! It's either you survive or die

<Sledge> What about The Architect? He might notice us escaping and won't just sit tight

<TheStranger> Don't worry about him. I have overridden the camera in your cell and injected a looping video of all of you being good boys and girls sitting quietly. But you only have limited time, so you must run as fast as possible to the 5F's C&C. You will not miss it.

Sledge could only assumed that '5F' was referring to the fifth floor and C&C was a place on that floor.

<TheStranger> 5 more seconds...

<TheStranger> 4

<TheStranger> 3

Sledge opened the link above. The website was quite empty, with the exception of an image of The Architect's ASCII key, username and password field, and one login button. He keyed in the username and password from his memory and immediately switched back to the IM application.

<TheStranger> 2

<TheStranger> 1

<TheStranger> NOW!!

Sledge switched back to Safari, and then hit the 'Login' button. He found himself immediately presented with an indoor map or a floor plan to be exact. Touching on a specific location opened a window that showed a few toggle buttons with labels like ON, OFF, OPEN, CLOSED, LOCKED, UNLOCKED, and so on. Sledge came into realization that TheStranger had given him the control system for Fort Zion. This might be the same system that The Architect used to trap them. A lot of things were happening in his mind, as he tried to process the information as fast as possible. But all of these took only 3 seconds.

"Guys! Get up! We need to prepare to run! FAST!!" he shouted. His voice was so loud it surprised all of them including Agent Jeremy, "On your feet! Move!"

"Wha...? Holy cow of...?" Prof. Scott exclaimed, waking up from his stunned state.

"No time for question!" Sledge had successfully located the location of their cell in the website. He pressed the button on his iPad. "CLING!" The cell door unlocked and opened automatically.

"WOAH! How do you do that?" Agent Jeremy shouted. Prof. Emma laughed in disbelief and then looked at Sledge in childlike admiration.

"It was like... magic," Agent Jeremy said again, still not understanding what happened but he at least knew Sledge played a part in it.

"Indeed. Clarke's Third Law stated that 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'," Prof. Scott added, life came back to him suddenly. It was true for Agent Jeremy who did not fully grasp the workings of latest technologies. He had been impressed by what Sledge and other hackers could do since he was assigned this mission.

"What are you guys waiting for!!!" Sledge took the lead and then run out of the cell. Confused, the rest of them just followed suit. Sledge remembered TheStranger asking him to look for 'C&C'. _But_ _what the hell is that_? He was not sure if he could trust him, but he had no choice at the moment. They run down a narrow hall quickly, while Sledge continued zooming in and out of the floor plan, trying to find hints on what to do next. He estimated he only had around 20 seconds left. And then he stopped. On the map, he saw a room, situated nicely in the center of the building on the 5th floor and it was labeled 'Command Center'. He immediately knew where he had to go.

"Where are we going?" asked Prof. Scott. Sledge ignored him and utilized the map to find the shortest route to the room. They fell back to the first floor. So they had to go up four floors to reach the fifth floor, where he imagined that The Architect might be located. There was another elevator from this side. _Taking the elevator would be too risky_ , thought Sledge. Sledge led them to take the stairs.

The door to the stairs was locked. Sledge used his iPad to unlock the door. It opened with a click and they proceeded to go up the stairs. When they had ascended to the third floor, Prof. Scott called them to stop. "Hey... continue... without me... I'm too old... and too tired for... this," he said with heavy breathing and then he sat down in between the flight of stairs.

"Come on, Scott! We cannot stop now!" Sledge tried to encourage him.

"No use... I'm... done for..."

Then Agent Jeremy went over to Prof. Scott and kicked him on his butt.

"Ouch... what was that for?" He stood up straight now, out of pain on his behind.

"Move!" Agent Jeremy gave him a stern look. It gave Prof. Scott the impression that he was in no mood for negotiation, so he continued to ascend the stairs with them. Prof. Scott complained, but they just ignored him all the way.

Once they reached the fifth floor, they run into a wide walkway made entirely of transparent glass. _Plexiglass again_ , Sledge thought. Both sides of the walkway overlooked the floor directly below. Sledge still took the lead, but he could feel his knees buckling as he walked that transparent walkway. The Architect could just press a switch and the walkway below them would give way. And they would all fall to their death below. Despite Sledge's imagination, nothing happened until they reached the end of the walkway. There was a big circular room in front of them. The door to the so-called 'Command Center' room was locked. Sledge tried to open the door, but it would not budge.

"What now?" asked Agent Jeremy.

There was no sound from inside. Sledge checked his iPad's Safari. It showed 'Session timeout'. Sledge tried to login again but to no avail. Either he had reached his allocated access time limit or The Architect might have found out and disabled his access. Sledge then opened up his IM session and tried to message TheStranger.

<Sledge> Stranger, come on! We need your help again!

~~~

He typed and waited, but after 1 minute, there was still no reply. _Well, I have become too dependent on him_ , Sledge thought. And then suddenly the door opened... Agent Jeremy was the first one to storm into the room. And then followed by Sledge. This was what he saw.

There he sat, a thin, but tall man, with thick glasses in his mid-40s. His hair was long and messy. He looked as much surprised as the four of them. The room had the look of a real command center. It had countless servers, switches and instrument panels, most of them heavily customized. There were countless buttons and panels that must be linked to the whole building electronically. Also, there were rows of LCD monitors that captured the images from the surveillance cameras throughout Fort Zion.

"What the... How? You were trapped... Zion is very secure..." he said quickly, and then he tried to escape from another door, but Agent Jeremy was too fast for him. He jumped over him and landed a punch to his face. The Architect became unconscious from that hit. The Architect had been too sure of himself and had not noticed their escape until they had entered.

Sledge checked his IM application, and saw a new message:

<TheStranger> You guys couldn't do anything without me, could you?

<TheStranger> :)

<TheStranger> My work is done here. You guys would have to figure out everything by yourselves from here

Whoever this guy was, Sledge thought he owed him a lot.

STEGANOGRAPHY REVISITED

1958 hours, May 7

Now that The Architect was out of the way, Sledge tried to think hard for clues on how to stop BLACKNET from 'killing' the Utah DC's data. He sat in front of what looked like the main computer that The Architect used to control the building and to trap them earlier. Now that Sledge had more time to observe the room in more details, he found that it had impressive designs. His network setup at his apartment's room was like a child's play compared to The Architect's.

"We have about 50 minutes left... to find a way to stop BLACKNET," reminded Agent Jeremy.

Sledge did not need that reminder. He already knew that they only had very little time left. Sledge rummaged through The Architect's main machine, while Prof. Scott and Prof. Emma fiddled around with few other computers scattered around the room. Since The Architect was using the main computer, the machine was left unlocked. Sledge tried to contact TheStranger again, but there were no longer any response. He was curious how TheStranger were able to hack into The Architect's network remotely. Sledge was sure TheStranger must be connecting from outside, since they could not find anyone else inside the building. There was more important matter at hand, so he decided to forget about it first.

Sledge found a lot of interesting encrypted conversation history between members of The APOSTLES, but at that moment, he had no time to really process all those things he saw. There were a few chat histories with The Archon, the leader of The APOSTLES, where The Architect received a lot of instructions. He used his photographic memory to make mental note of the conversations. Another thing he found out was that, surprisingly, The Architect used a mix of various operating systems such as Windows, Mac, and Unix variants. Unlike most black hats, he did not seem to have a preference for Unix variant operating systems. He continued searching for clues for the password, but it was like searching for needles in the haystack.

Time passed and there are no positive results. Prof. Scott suggested a few keywords, such as 'APOSTLES', 'key', 'BLACKNET' from some of the searches that he performed on the main NAS storage, but none of them seemed convincing enough. They only have one final attempt left and Agent Jeremy was not going to risk it.

"20 minutes left..." Agent Jeremy's countdown created uncomfortable sighs from everyone in the room.

"Poor Utah DC. I don't think you will be able to survive this one," Prof. Scott lamented.

"I think we will lose no matter what. A password from a madman will be very difficult to guess," added Prof. Emma. She seemed to have slowed down her search.

Sledge memory suddenly travelled back to the BlackCon. He then remembered the steganography game he played with Flux00r, or The Architect himself. _The Architect is always proud and full of himself, he might be using back that technique to store the password somewhere safe_ , Sledge thought, _But he will not do the same thing. He might have secured it differently. But what would he do to safeguard the password?_ Sledge was deep in thought for a while.

"I think The Architect will not be so ignorant as to put the password in plain view. He must have hidden it somewhere," Prof. Scott murmured in his deep thought.

"Hidden?" Sledge was thinking loudly. Prof. Scott's statement reminded Sledge of something. Sledge went online with the main computer, and downloaded the tool to detect Alternate Data Stream, or ADS for short. The Architect's main computer had NTFS file system, and this confirmed his suspicion even further. He run the tool and after a few seconds, _Bingo!_ He found there was a file in the main machine, hidden using the ADS method. He located the file and extracted it out in plain view. It was a plain image file. Sledge opened the file, and it was in fact the same image that The Architect used as his trademark. The Key.

"Thank you, Scott! Sometimes you can prove yourself to be useful..." Sledge said.

At this point of time, both Prof. Scott and Prof. Emma had given up their efforts and came over to check what Sledge was doing. "Hey...! What do you mean by that? I'm always useful..." Prof. Scott tried to voice out his objection, but was stopped by Sledge. "Sssh... OK, give me a break!"

From this point onward, it was quite straightforward for Sledge. He extracted the hidden message inside the picture using another tool he downloaded from the web. The message was encrypted, but Sledge suspected that it might be the same simple bit-shifting encryption mechanism previously used by The Architect in BlackCon.

Sledge downloaded another decryption programs to decrypt the password.

> Decrypting password... in progress...

"Come on!" shouted Sledge, "Not much time left!"

But before Sledge could finish doing that, they had forgotten all the while about The Architect. He had become conscious again after a while, and while everyone was busy huddling around Sledge's terminal, he had gone to one of the computer. Even with his hand bound by his back, he managed to issue a few commands.

> Decryption completed... Extracted message was "vx@462xws$g2932123590&d42&251&fyiolk3nr"

Sledge was astonished, "What... is this?" Sledge was sure that the extracted message was too long to be a password. There were nothing else hidden inside the picture at all. The Architect stored what seemed to be rubbish strings inside. Suddenly the computer gave out error messages.

> [Error] File not found

>

> System going down for reformatting...

> Shutting down and preparing for rebuild....

The Architect laughed. "You lost boy! I'm not saving BLACKNET's password in this place at all. I have deleted everything from my system. You will not be able to recover the password at all, ever... "

The terminal now was flashing texts in red colors. There was siren buzzing as if the fire alarm triggered. The Architect was well prepared and had planted bombs in the building in advance. While they were busy looking for the password, he had activated them.

> Explosion timer confirmed. Please evacuate the building immediately...

> Timer for explosion: 60 seconds

"WE WILL ALL DIE TOGETHER!" yelled The Architect.

"You!" Agent Jeremy landed a punch on The Architect's face again and he fell down with a shout of pain.

"Oh, my god! We need to get out of here... fast!" Prof. Scott trembled.

All of them run for their lives to the door that The Architect tried to escape form before. Agent Jeremy pulled The Architect together with him. It was a staircase from the central control room to the emergency exit of the building. All of them managed to get out within 40 seconds. Once they were outside, it was already nighttime again, and they kept running further away to avoid the blast radius as far as possible.

And then, without warning, the whole building exploded. It thundered with a boom that could be heard miles away. The shockwave sent all of them flying around. The blast triggered something in Sledge's mind, which caused flashback of the BLACKNET's message. His photographic memory was recalling the texts on the screen vividly. He came into realization that he knew the password to BLACKNET all the while. But he landed headfirst and everything became black.

~~~

"You OK?" said a voice somewhere. It seemed distance, but was repeated enough to annoy Sledge to open his eyes. When Sledge came to, there were already few good Samaritans trying to help them. Judging by the look of these people, they must have been in the same situation, barely escaping from the explosion. Fort Zion was covered in blaze, lighting up its surroundings. Agent Jeremy had been standing and been fully conscious while Prof. Scott and Prof. Emma were still lying on the street. They had been sent scattered more than 10 feet away from each other by the shockwave.

"Jeremy... how much... time left? We... will need to call... Mike... ASAP," Sledge voice was a whisper, weak from the pain in his head. He could smell blood coming from his forehead.

Agent Jeremy looked at him for a while, looked at his watch, and then directed his look at those people that had been pestering him with questions. There were one guy and one girl directly in front of him. The guy, who looked honestly concerned then said, "Hey, what happened there?" Agent Jeremy caught one deep breath and then said to the guy, "FBI! I need to borrow your mobile phone," while showing him his badge. The Architect had not bothered to take that away from him.

The guy seemed surprised and confused, but he took out and gave his mobile to Agent Jeremy anyway. Agent Jeremy, never trusting technology, memorized most of his important contact numbers. He punched in Mike's number on the borrowed mobile and then passed it to Sledge immediately.

The phone rang four times, which seemed like an eternity to Sledge, before Mike answered, "Hello! Mike's speaking..."

"Mike, the password is..."

MASTERMIND

2204 hours, May 7

The Utah data center was saved. Sledge had given the correct password for Mike. Mike initially asked a lot of questions about the password, like how Sledge was able to find it, how they could be sure it was the right one, and so on. Agent Jeremy kept on instructing Mike to proceed and given that they did not have much time left, he agreed. _There were nothing left to lose anyway_ , thought Agent Jeremy. Either, they keyed in the wrong password or the time run out, BLACKNET would win anyway.

But it turned out that the password was a valid one, and BLACKNET immediately stopped. It even disinfected the entire system and terminated all copies of itself, leaving no trace behind. BLACKNET restored everything back to normal, which was a rare capability to be found in any malware. The BLACKNET must have been engineered by people that loved perfection.

Sledge saved the day again. But he was not sure whether he should be happy about it at all. _I should have just left the Utah DC destroyed_ , he thought. He was never the supporter of government's spying on people. But he did not say that out loud because Prof. Emma might hate him forever for that. She thanked him so much and praised him for saving 'one of the most important facility in the government's war against terrorism'.

Prof. Scott was so happy that he was still alive. He muttered something about being able to see his Sue again. And he swore that he would never join such dangerous mission again, ever.

Unfortunately, with the explosion in Fort Zion, everything burned down to rubble. The FBI was not able to obtain any useful information that could lead to The APOSTLES. Nobody knew if The Architect's copy of GhostNet file was also destroyed together with Fort Zion. Not that it mattered anyway according to Agent Jeremy, since the 'modified version of the file' had been made public.

The Architect was actually an ex-NSA employee, with the name, Bryan Hopkins. He was the NSA specialist who was originally tasked to architect the new Utah data center. He was then charged with misconduct on the leak of blueprints on the data center to some European syndicates before NSA even started the work. They paid good money for the confidential design documents and Bryan could not resist. Unluckily for him, Agent Jeremy was sent on his trail. He was the one responsible for exposing his illegal transactions and getting him replaced by another guy. His blueprints were scraped by NSA since the leak raised security concerns. NSA appointed another architect who redesigned the whole data center again from scratch. He was then charged in court, demoted and transferred to the FBI's back office to do paperwork somewhere in Washington DC.

Unhappy with his new job, he secretly shared a lot of government confidential files to the public anonymously. That was when he was invited by The Archon to join The APOSTLES. The Archon could locate people easily, even when Bryan had tried to remove all traces of his crime. The Archon offered him an interesting position because of his access to government's secret files. He asked Bryan to create a nickname, which was part of the pre-requisite to join The APOSTLES. The Archon told him that he could choose any word as long as it started with the word 'The'. Bryan replied, "Architect... The Architect."

The Archon initiated Operation Blindfold. He was tasked to destroy government's intelligence, trigger online terror, and damage to the government's reputation. He then kidnapped the other two FBI agents in attempt to obtain access to the highly confidential GhostNet file. And then, all was history. Masterminding the DDoS attack, holding the GhostNet file hostage in Antilogy, trying to wipe out the Utah data center's storage, trapping Sledge and companies to be left for dead, was all part of his plan.

~~~

The Architect was sent to the federal's prison. He was charged with murder of at least three FBI agents, one minor and other online computer crimes. Sledge was currently on his way to visit him. He requested this from Agent Jeremy earlier although he was not sure what he could get out of this. He thought he could probably dig some information about The APOSTLES that would be useful.

Sledge entered the room and took a seat. The Architect had his back on him for a while before he turned around. He looked weak and thin, but his hair was neatly combed now.

"Well, well, look. Here comes the man of the hour finally. I'm amazed someone so young was able to crack my password without understanding me fully," his real voice was deep and menacing. For someone that always ended his sentences with the 'y' letter, he was not humorous at all.

"I see you've gained back your sense of wordplay. Why do you help the APOSTLES?" asked Sledge.

"My friend, you disappoint me truly," he went on to explain, "I used to work for the government... it was silly... but you of all people should be the one really hating the government... for trying to control the freedom of society."

He paused for a while and then continued, "Who are the government dogs, they think they really are, to act godly!!? I'm a freedom fighter of the people, and I really think you are one also wholeheartedly." Sledge knew he was at least right on this. Deep in his heart, he had never agreed on the government's unchecked surveillance power.

"There are other ways to achieve freedom for the people. Getting petition to change the government information law for example... people's power will prevail eventually," Sledge tried to sound convincing, but he was not really sure himself that it was a good idea.

"And what will it take to make that happen fully? You and I know better that the big brother's game are beyond our play. But today, you have done nothing by capturing me physically. I'm just one of the Elite members of The APOSTLES. The master plan had been put in motion and they will come to free me eventually. When that time arrived, you will be the first one that I will eliminate painfully."

The Architect laughed like a psychopath.

"I was always wondering how you guys were able to track our movements. You seemed to know where we were most of the time."

"Nobody escapes The Archon's OCULUS. He can locate his targets anywhere in the world from a press of a button remotely."

This was the second time Sledge heard about the OCULUS. First was from The Archon and now from The Architect. He simply concluded that it must be a very sophisticated surveillance or tracking system that could locate people easily.

"And what about this MAZE? The Tor-like system that The Archon was talking about?"

The Architect was taken aback for a moment. He was surprised Sledge knew about MAZE. "Not bad, not bad... You know something about our tools, eh boy? As long as we have MAZE, you will not be able to locate any of us surely! We are protected securely."

The Architect did not share anything useful at all. Sledge was about to ask him on OMNICRACK, but decided that it was pointless to continue talking with him. He got up and walked to the entrance of the cell. He stopped at the door, turned and then added, "Also, another thing... I hated people calling me 'boy'... I had already put you and The Conductor behind the bar. You thought that you are smart, but you had chosen the wrong guy in BlackCon. I will make sure to put all your friends with you together so you will have company." He tried to sound brave, but deep inside him, he knew he had no confidence whether he could really do that.

"This is not the last time you will see me, boy!!! I will be out of here in no time. Next time, the game will not be so easy," shouted The Architect in response.

And then Sledge signaled the security officer to open the door for him and left The Architect behind.

LIKE FATHER LIKE SON

2312 hours, May 10

Agent Jeremy finally allowed Sledge to leave after The Architect's capture, "Take a few days break, I'll be in touch soon."

"But we had a deal, I helped you capture The Architect. I had upheld my end of the bargain, and now it's your turn."

Agent Jeremy thought for a while before replying, "Mr. Allen, I'm going to offer you a position in the FBI. You will work directly with me. We really need your expertise to help us in our battle against cyber terrorist. You knew how far The APOSTLES were willing to go to achieve their plan. We had dealt with The Architect and The Conductor, but there were many more outside. The mastermind of the Elites was still running freely outside, and who knows what he might be planning right now."

"You had your team of white hats to do that," Sledge replied.

"Mr. Allen, we will need all the help we can get. And you are a valuable addition to the team. Personally, I think you are the only one that can stop The APOSTLES. You have proven so far with 2 Elites. I have grave news from the front. I was lucky to be assigned with The Architect. And I had you with me. While we were behind the cells in Fort Zion, the APOSTLES had been mobilizing and launching terrorist attacks. You saw the CNN news, Mr. Allen. Not so lucky for the other agents. The Elites had killed at least another five FBI agents and few other DHS and NSA's employees. One of them I knew personally. The APOSTLES will not stop. I will not let more people like Charles die needlessly." Agent Jeremy was obviously still impacted deeply by Agent Charles's death.

Sledge was in no mood to argue, "Let me think about it first..."

"Alright, but not too long, Mr. Allen. We're counting on you. The director had posted me back on this operation. We will strike harder now. We will be getting more help." Sledge was a bit hopeful when he heard that they would not be fighting alone, but when he thought about Prof. Scott, he gave up that hope.

Sledge decided to fly back to San Francisco. Agent Jeremy paid for the flight ticket. He also purchased an open flight ticket for him to come back to Washington DC. _He was just making sure that I will come back here_ , Sledge saw through him.

Immediately upon touching down in the airport, Sledge called Aunt Lucille. She was happy to know that Sledge was back in town. She did not seem to know anything about Sledge's newly gained popularity though. Aunt Lucille did not read news or watch TV that much. "No news is good news," she used to say to Sledge.

Sledge was now in his own room. He was sitting in front of his computer but he was not doing anything. He was spending the whole day thinking about Agent Jeremy's offer. _It might not be that bad, to work on the good side_ , he thought, but to think that he would have to fight against an army of terrorist made him shudder. _These guys are not your normal black hats; they are terrorist group, real life one at it_. Then suddenly came another chat message from TheStranger. His heart skipped a beat and he quickly opened the conversation window.

<TheStranger> I only have few minutes, we need to talk on a secure channel.

<Sledge> Ok, what should we use?

<TheStranger> Use X-Lite with Zfone. I will send you the SIP IP

Sledge already had the X-Lite VoIP client installed, but he never used Zfone before so he downloaded and installed one. Then TheStranger messaged him the SIP's server IP address, the VoIP server that he could use to connect to.

"I'm thankful for your help but why don't you tell me who you are now?" Sledge said immediately after the call connected. He never meant to be impolite, having been saved twice by TheStranger, but he did not like too much mystery.

"James, I'm so sorry... for not being there all this while..." the voice from the other side sounded weak.

"Wait... what do you mean?"

"I missed our time together. You were still only 10 years, and a crybaby, the last time I saw you."

"Wait... this is weird... dad, is that really you?"

"But you should be more independent... you shouldn't need my help most of the time..."

"After all this time you went missing, now that is all you've got to say? It's spanking time?"

"We don't have much time! Now listen... You have to grow up. I can't help you like I did all the time. I'm sorry for going into hiding. I made a terrible mistake. And I must pay for it dearly now. You will have to protect yourself from now on."

"What about... mom? Where is she now?"

"I don't have much time, we have to discuss that next time..."

"Next time? I do not even know when you will contact me again next time!"

Then Sledge remembered the conversation he had with The Archon, "Wait, are you one of The APOSTLES? An Elite? Is that why you were able to hack into Fort Zion? Into The Architect's system?"

The other party went silence for a while before replying, "...Please trust me, you will have to stop The APOSTLES. You will be in touch with The Boss. You can trust him; he's one of my old friends... Darn! I have to go now..."

"Wait...!! Dad?"

Beep... the other party hung up the VoIP call and Sledge sat in his room the whole afternoon dumbfounded with the knowledge that his father was also a hacker, just like him.

EPILOGUE

1325 hours, May 11

The next day, the shock of the discovery that TheStranger was his dad had not left Sledge yet. He could not sleep at all. Sledge concluded from the confusing conversation that he had with TheStranger was that, his father was still alive, TheStranger was actually his father, and he had helped him at least on two occasions, both when his life was at stake. His father had asked him to stop The APOSTLES. And who the hell was The Boss and why did his father ask him to trust that guy? And The Archon had told him that his father was an Elite. Was TheStranger, his father, really an Elite? He had so many questions. He was confused the day before, but today, he was sure that he had to go down to the root of the matter.

His office inbox was full with emails from his superior. He could judge that Anne, his lady boss, had been pretty angry from the tone of the email messages. Her email questioned why he was missing from work without informing her. And she had tried to contact him on mobile as well lately, but could not reach him. He then prepared a letter of resignation to her, explaining why he was missing for the past weeks. He also informed his boss that he had decided to quit his job and thanked her for the opportunities provided to him so far... and bla... bla... the usual formalities.

Sledge then gave Agent Jeremy a call. Agent Jeremy was very happy that he agreed to his offer. He also promised that he would get a 'handsome' pay in return. He had made his resolve to find his dad and to put an end to The APOSTLES. After he had done that, surprisingly he felt very tired and fell into his bed immediately. He had the usual nightmare again. And then he was awakened by a loud sound.

RING!... RING!... He had a terrible headache. The sound was piercing his head.

His new Android phone was vibrating and ringing on his table. He had bought a new one since the last one was lost in Fort Zion. He had no time to fiddle with it yet.

_Damn it! I forgot to change the ringtone_ , thought Sledge. He usually changed his mobile's ringtone from default one to songs from The Black Parade music band. He could not stand the default ringtone.

"Eh... looo...!" he was yawning while saying hello.

"You are still sleeping, sleepy head?" it was Prof. Emma's voice. Sledge jumped out of his bed instantly. He glanced quickly at his watch, and it was already the next day's 12.23PM in the afternoon. He had slept for more than 18 hours continuously.

"Oh, Hi... No..."

"I've reached San Francisco, you need to give me a tour. Meet me near the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. Bring your bike also," Prof. Emma blurted out quickly.

"But..."

"Any objection?"

"No... not really... I mean..."

"Good, see you later at 5PM," and then Prof. Emma hung the phone up. Sledge was surprised why she was even in town.

Sledge ended up arriving at the Golden Gate Bridge thirty minutes too early. He was so nervous that he could not put his thought about their meeting aside. On the bridge, people were either strolling or biking leisurely across the bridge in both directions. But Sledge did not bring any bike with him.

Sledge tried to dress his best before coming. But the best clothes he had were those that he wore to work. After he tried on a few, he decided that he looked stupid. He gave up and just put on the newest T-shirt and the best jean he had. Sledge had ordered new glasses, exactly the same one that looked like the old one. However the shop had informed him that it was an old, out-of-stock model and needed at least one-week to arrive. Sledge had to wear contacts while waiting for it.

Then he saw her riding her bicycle towards her from the distance. "Hi!" said Prof. Emma. She seemed to be in a good mood.

"Hi!" replied Sledge. He could not stop looking at Prof. Emma. He thought that she looked gorgeous in casual attire. She wore plain pink color polo shirt with white shorts, exposing her smooth slender legs. Her long blond hair was tied up in ponytail again and Sledge thought this made her also look as attractive as when she let her hair down. He could not believe that the girl in front of him was a professor.

"What?" Prof. Emma became aware of the long stare.

"Nothing," Sledge tried to divert his eyes to other places, "You looked great."

"Really!?" came the only reply and Prof. Emma instantly changed the topic, "Where's your bike?"

"Er... I'm sorry. I don't have a bike..." Sledge tried to bluff his way out, but he knew what was coming next.

"So? Why don't you go and rent one?"

"But... I don't... I don't know how... to ride a bike," Sledge finally admitted. He was embarrassed and regretted why he spent so much time on his computer, while forgetting to learn simple things like biking. Prof. Emma was amused and simply smiled before adding, "You should have told me earlier."

And then, Prof. Emma got off hers and both walked along the bridge. Sledge was not sure how to continue with the conversation. Thirty years in his life and he had never gone on a real date with a girl before. He did have a few crushes before during high school and college, but he was always turned down. Sledge concluded that all girls preferred the athletic types and he was not one.

"Thank you..." said Sledge, trying to initiate a conversation.

"For what?"

"You know, for inviting me... on a date... "

"Who said this is a date?"

Sledge felt very embarrassed and his ears turned red quickly, "No, I mean... I'm happy we can meet... "

"Your face is quite cute when it turned red... like a tomato... a big red to-ma-to..."

Sledge was not sure what to say next. They walked in silence for another minute.

"How do you know the password?" asked Prof. Emma, stopping now.

"It's a S-E-C-R-E-T," Sledge replied playfully. He was apparently hopeful that this would increase her curiosity. This was the time he could shine and show off.

"OK. Not that I really care anyway," replied Prof. Emma lazily.

"Huh?" Sledge's plan did not work. Prof. Emma did not seem to be interested and walked away.

"Hey, wait..." Sledge followed her, "Come on, it's actually very simple, remember the BLACKNET's message from The Architect?"

"No, I can't remember," Prof. Emma did not even make any effort to think before replying.

"...IF YOU INPUT THE PASSWORD CORRECTLY, BY THE HOURS OF A SINGLE DAY EVENTUALLY, BLACKNET WILL SHUTDOWN ITSELF WILLINGLY..." Sledge recited the portion of the message, "Does that ring a bell?"

"If you input the password... with the hours of a single day... Oh, damn it! Hours of a single day!" exclaimed Prof. Emma.

"Yes, the password is two four zero zero or twenty four hundreds in numeric," Sledge laughed. Prof. Emma seemed genuinely surprised and joined the laugh, "Why military time? Why would The Architect give this hint openly?"

"I don't know. The Architect worked for the FBI before, so I simply guessed that he could be used to that time format. I heard Agent Jeremy mention something similar before. On why he gave his hint openly, maybe he likes games, and all of this were just part of his games. Maybe he's just bad with memorizing password. Or maybe black hats all think alike... he might just want to mock us. If indeed his plan worked, he will be laughing at us right now since the password had been right in front of our nose all this time," Sledge suggested.

"You are pretty smart... for a boy..." Prof. Emma added on.

"Come on! You know I hate people calling me that. What about yourself, Emma, you are pretty smart too..."

"I am used to hearing this and it won't work on me... Do you know...?" Prof. Emma stopped midway in her sentence.

"What do I know?"

"You know... You looked a lot better without your glasses."

"Yeah, I know. I'm used to hearing that. That's what my friends told me all the time."

"You're unexpectedly quite full of yourself, huh?"

And then they spent the rest of the afternoon strolling in the spring days of San Francisco.

About The Author

Erick stayed in Malaysia with his wife and two sons. He was not a hacker, and knew almost nothing about hackers at all. He loves exploring new gadgets and technologies. Erick had been working with computers since his junior high school and his passion in this field still burnt brightly till now. He had been thinking about writing books since ages ago, and he finally did it with 'Sledge', which was his very first attempt at it.

The author can be reached at:

erickch@gmail.com

NEXT BOOK PREVIEW

ASSEMBLY OF THE GUARDIAN

1404 hours, June 5

Both Elites of The APOSTLES, The Architect and The Conductor, had been defeated and captured. Sledge, Agent Jeremy and Prof. Scott had been decorated with the medal of 'cyberwar hero' by the DoD for their efforts. Both Elites' capture had put a hole in The APOSTLES plan, but it did nothing to stop them. While Sledge and team had been busy, there had been coordinated attacks against various government facilities.

The Stranger, a new Elite, joined the fray. He had caused more havocs and hacked into a few government facilities including the Pentagon. When The Stranger first appeared in the news, Sledge was shocked. TheStranger had admitted to be his father. He could not believe that his dad was actually involved with The APOSTLES, just like what The Archon told him. Also, secretly, Sledge tried to convince himself that it might just be a coincidence. Some other person was using a similar nickname. Besides, his father's nickname was always with a 'space' between the words 'The' and 'Stranger'.

Agent Jeremy had asked him to come back to the FBI headquarters. Sledge packed most of his stuffs this time, not knowing when he would be able to come back to the warmth of San Francisco again. He had given Aunt Lucille a visit earlier. Aunt Lucille had made him his favorite key lime pie. Sledge thought that it was the best cake in the world. When Sledge told her about his new job in the FBI, Aunt Lucille just smiled and asked him to take care. "I'm happy as long as you are happy, dear!" she said. As usual, her kind words filled Sledge with warmth. Sledge's heart felt heavy that he had to leave her again. He promised Aunt Lucille that he would try to come back as soon as possible.

Sledge arrived to the now familiar J. Edgar Hoover Building. He walked straight into Agent Jeremy's office. Agent Jeremy was busy on the line and signaled Sledge to get himself a seat. Agent Jeremy had gotten himself a new Blackberry. When Sledge asked him later why he went for Blackberry again, even though the federal government now allowed iOS devices like iPhones, he just mentioned that he had been used to the Blackberry's way of working. However, to his frustration, he had gotten a newer version of operating system that he was not familiar with. He had a hell of difficulties using it.

"Welcome back, Mr. Allen. Thanks for coming. We are expecting more people. They are supposed to be arriving any minute by now..." Agent Jeremy greeted him once he hung up his call. He looked at his watch in anticipation.

"Who are we expecting?" Sledge was curious. He was not a very social person and he preferred to ask more about these people before hand.

"You will see them soon. By the way, we will have a very busy schedule ahead of us. Since Fort Zion, The APOSTLES had been running rampant and the situations had been a bit... out of control lately. We are still unable to trace the culprits behind those attacks, even with our 'supposingly' advanced technologies. To add to that, the Chinese hackers had been quite aggressive lately."

Agent Jeremy used a mild term. It made into the news that the Chinese hackers had managed to hack and steal secret files related to the government's weaponry designs, such as the next generation stealth planes, amphibious vehicles, blanket bombing capabilities, and so on. Both presidents of the countries had met to talk about this, but there were no results. The Chinese president had claimed that it was the US that had been hacking into its government system for quite a while.

Then the office door opened. First, Prof. Scott entered, and then followed by three more people. Two guys and one lady. For a while, apart from Prof. Scott, Sledge thought that they really made an entrance.

"Welcome, ladies and gentlemen! Let me introduce you to one another. I believe everyone here have met Prof. Scott?"

"Yes, thank you for picking us up here, professor..." said one of the guy who looked like he was his mid thirties. He had a tidy black hair and very friendly smile.

"Well, then... I will introduce Mr...."

"Sledge! Please call me, Sledge," Sledge interrupted him before Agent Jeremy could address him with his real name.

"Yes, the famous Sledge! We've heard a lot about you," said the only lady in the room. She was very pretty, with straight neck length red hair. Her hair color seemed quite unnatural. She wore low cut dress and Sledge found it hard to keep his eyes away from her chest.

"Good, so you've heard about Mr. Allen, now, why don't you introduce yourself, Mr. Kenneth Johnson?"

"Thank you, Agent Jeremy! Please call me K," he introduced himself with a big smile that made him look approachable. "I'm the cryptography specialist from NSA. I am honored to meet everyone in this room and to be part of a fantastic team in our noble fight against The APOSTLES," he added. He was as polite and formal as Agent Jeremy.

"Thank you, Mr. Johnson. Ms. Coleman, do you want to go next?"

"Sure... Hi, everybody. My real name is Kelly Coleman. You can call me by my nickname, Aeon. I'm the white hat specialist from DHS. My specialty is in programming."

Sledge could never imagine that there existed such a pretty and sexy female programmer in this world. His biased image of programmers of the other gender was of usually shabby in appearance. He was totally wrong this time.

"Thank you!" Agent Jeremy turned to the last person. He had a rough face. Either he forgot to shave or he just liked to leave those mustaches and beards sprouting all around his face. "Finally... The Boss? Would you like to introduce yourself?"

Sledge was surprised here. He was not sure whether he heard it wrong, but Agent Jeremy seemed to be calling this guy by his nickname. A first for a person such as Agent Jeremy, who usually never called Sledge or anyone else by his or her nickname.

"I'm The Boss. You can call me The Boss and yes it's a nickname. I will be in charge of this operation," The Boss introduced himself. He had a deep and cold voice. Sledge looked at Agent Jeremy questioningly. He always assumed that Agent Jeremy would be in charge. Agent Jeremy just nodded his head slightly in confirmation.

_He's in charge here? Not a man of many words, huh?_ _Wait... This is The Boss?_ Sledge remembered the conversation he had with TheStranger, the one who claimed to be his father. TheStranger had told him to trust The Boss. Sledge thought that he would not have the slightest comfort to put his trust in this person.

"We have assembled the best team here. We need a name for ourselves... How about... 'The Guardian'?" Prof. Scott suggested, "The Guardian vs. The APOSTLES, that would make a nice headline."

Sledge thought Prof. Scott might have copied that idea from somewhere. _The Guardian, the assembly of specially chosen white hats to be sent on special operation to eliminate The APOSTLES. Dramatic!_

"Enough drama! You can create whatever name you want, but let's not waste more time. As we speak, The APOSTLES had been causing more and more damage. We need to plan our next move immediately," The Boss jumped in with authority. Sledge thought that it would be very difficult to please this guy.

