Zero Day_ A Novel - Mark Russinovich [91]
“Is it working?”
“As you know, we can’t be certain, but my sense is that it is.”
“What else?”
“As for our own boîtier, I’ve been spending more effort to have them encrypted and compressed. Some variants are encrypted with the activation time or codes that will be automatically published on compromised Web sites. That makes them much more difficult to decipher and should buy us enough time. I wish I’d thought of it sooner, like the noirs. I wish every boîtier had one.”
“What is done is done.”
The reality of the cyber jihad had never reached the level of Labib’s dreams or expectations. As he had once described it to Fajer, it would ideally have been unleashed on an unsuspecting West along with a major Al Qaeda attack against physical infrastructure or targets with symbolic value. But that had proved impossible to coordinate.
The lost years had not proven all bad, though. More and more Westerners were going online, depending on their home computers and the Internet to conduct business and banking. Over those years more and more banks had turned to electronic banking, since it greatly reduced their costs and increased their profits. In theory, a bank of the twenty-first century had no need for a physical office and needed precious few real employees. The profits of such an operation would be enormous, and banks throughout the United States and Europe were racing one another to be the first.
Computers and the Internet were one of the primary means for the expansion of Western culture and were instrumental to its military and economic dominance in the world. They were the means of the most powerful attack on Islam, perverting and tempting Muslims everywhere, launched since the days of the Prophet. Those who said Muslim extremists would never destroy an Internet they too relied on for communication and the spread of propaganda didn’t understand what was at stake. The Internet would be rebuilt in time, but in the meanwhile, the inflicted damage would be incalculable.
The military of the West depended more and more on computers and the connectivity of the Internet, as did Western civilian governments. In the United States nearly every government function was tied to the Internet. Social Security and the Fed, to name just two, could be accessed from the Internet. The list was almost endless, which was why Labib had elected to take a shotgun approach rather than to target specific organizations. He’d ordered a series of viruses crafted that could potentially infect every computer in America and every function tied to the Internet. He was trusting that technology would plant the electronic seed of his jihad everywhere.
The objective was to infect and destroy as much of the information and technology of the West as possible, all on the same day.
When Labib had finally devised the cyber-attack, separating what he could actually accomplish from fantasy, he had flown by helicopter and met with Fajer high in the Hejaz Mountains at the remote camp of members of their tribe. They’d consumed a traditional Arab meal consisting of al-kabsa (rice cooked with chicken in a pot), dates, hawayij (a spice-blended bread), followed by al haysa, a sweet dessert, while watching traditional dance, performed by the unmarried young women and girls of the tribe. Fajer had pointed out one of the girls, about ten years old, a fragile beauty with doelike eyes and a luminescent face. “My future wife,” he said. “I will keep her here so she is not contaminated by luxury.”
Labib thought the idea of raising a wife to form was disgusting but said nothing. Though the Prophet allowed four wives, Labib knew from personal experience that the consequences for all were not necessarily good and thought his brother knew this as well. Labib loved his wife and would never take another.
Late that night, as the camp settled into the evening, amid the