The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [135]
To start with, I disable all the system logging mechanisms, so they won’t be able to figure out what’s going on in a hurry. I set the remote login ports to shut down an hour hence and scramble the password databases they’re so quaintly relying on, and whip up a shell script that’ll fry the distributed relational database behind the surveillance management system by randomly reversioning everything and then subtly corrupting the backups.
But that’s just a five-fingered warm-up exercise. Billington’s empire is based on the premise that you buy cheap, off-the-shelf gear, customize it to meet a MILSPEC requirement, and sell it back to the government at a 2,000 percent markup. An awful lot of his network—all the workstations those cubicle drones from Mumbai have on their desks, basically—run Windows. You’d expect a corporate enterprise rollout of Vista to be locked down and patrolled by rabid system administrators wearing spiked collars, and you’d be right: by ordinary commercial standards, Billington’s network is pretty good. The trouble is, the Windows security model has always been inside out and upside down, and they’re all running exactly the same service pack release. It’s a classic corporate monoculture, and I’ve got exactly the right herbicide stuffed up one end of my bow tie, thanks to the Laundry’s network security tiger team. Eileen’s mission-critical surveillance operation may be running on horribly expensive blade servers with a securely locked-down NSA-APPROVED UNIX operating system, but the workstations are . . . well, the technical term for what they’ll be when I get through with them is toast. And by the time I get through with them Eileen is going to have a whole lot of the wrong kind of zombies on her hands.
The Laundry carped over giving me a decent car, even though I can prove that Aston Martins depreciate more slowly and cost less in running repairs than a Smart (after all, half the Aston Martins ever built are still on the road, and they’ve been in business for three-quarters of a century). But they didn’t even blink over giving me a key drive stuffed full of malware that must have cost CESG about, oh, two million to develop, and which I am about to expend in the next half hour, and which will subsequently leak out into the general public domain, whereupon it will give vendors of virus scanners spontaneous multiple orgasms and cause the authors to be cursed from one pole of the planet to the other. It’s a classic case of misplaced accounting priorities, valuing depreciable capital assets a thousand times more highly than the fruits of actual labor—but that’s the nature of the government organization. Let’s just say that if what I’m about to unleash on the Billingtons’ little empire doesn’t take several hundred sysadmin-years and at least a week of wall-clock time to clean up, my middle names aren’t Oliver and Francis.
My work done, I glance at my phone. The display is showing a cute, little animated icon of a baby-blue Smart car, dust bunnies scudding beneath its tires, and a progress bar captioned 62Km/74% Complete. I stick it back in my pocket, then pick up the dress shoes Pinky and Brains issued to me. Grimacing, I tie the shoe laces. Then I reach down and wrench the left heel round. Instantly, the shadows in my cabin darken and deepen, taking on an ominous hue. The Tillinghast resonator is running: in this confined space it should give me just enough warning to shit myself before I die, if Billington’s entrusted his operational security to daemons, but in the open . . . well, it adds a whole new meaning to take to your heels.
The corridor outside my door is dark and there’s an odd, musty smell in the air. I pause, skulking just inside the doorway as I wait for my eyes to adjust. Ellis