Egress Point

Chapter 21

They didn't do much more idle chatting after that. Arebecca realised that it was too dangerous to talk about escaping or anything that could be used against them. Patey and Nick had been mostly communicating by pointing at letters on one of the keyboards. It was slow, but they didn't think there were any cameras, and there was no way that Max could listen in. They could talk openly about the actual plan, and use the key-point method to slowly add the details that they didn't want Max to know about.

The decryption keys were held within a secure processing site about a mile away. A legitimate business. Patey and Nick were confident that they could steal them. The next part would be escaping not just Max, but Vadik too. It turned out that Vadik was a truly scary man. The head of one of Russia's largest crime syndicates. Max's carder group had spotted the chance of scoring a large number of cards and had made the mistake of making a deal to sell them to Vadik. He had agreed to pay them 25 million euros and set them up as part of his syndicate.

Then Max and his partner had come across the problem of not being able to decrypt the data they'd stolen. They'd gone to Vadik to explain and Vadik had listened and agreed that it was unfortunate, but firmly told them that their original terms were non-negotiable. Max's partner decided he'd had enough, and had left Max to sort things out with Vadik. Max was very angry, until his partner turned up a few hours later. He was dead and had been delivered by one of Vadik's men with a message: 100 million cards by the end of the month. Which happened to be the coming Monday. Arebecca had lost track of the days, but realised that today was Saturday. They had one full day to steal the keys to decrypt the data.

Vadik had insisted that Georgy and Ilia support Max's efforts, and to keep an eye on him too. Vadik was very well connected and powerful. It turned out that Max wasn't a bad hacker, and had a pretty good setup. Patey and Nick seemed impressed with the work Max's team had managed. And with Vadik's connections and money they could do some serious damage. Things like tracking phones was only possible using Vadik's network of criminals and bribed employees.

But this wasn't the only reason why Nick and Patey had agreed to help. The encrypted data that Max had been collecting contained more than just card numbers. Max's team had managed to gather terabytes of financial records. These could be used by Vadik to strengthen his syndicate through knowledge and extortion. Patey didn't want this data to fall into the wrong hands. Max didn't realise how important his stolen data was.

Working with Max gave Patey the opportunity to learn more about Vadik's operation. Anything they learned could be used to attack Vadik in the future, or at least make his life harder.

"Wait," Arebecca said. She thought carefully about what she could say out loud, knowing that Max was listening. "What do you guys actually do?"

"We fix problems," Patey said. "And now the problem we've got to fix involves stealing the decryption keys to a huge amount of stolen data."

"The keys are all managed in a HSM -- a hardware security module," Nick explained. "There's two ways to get to the keys. Either we take the data into the SCP, the secure processing site, decrypt it in place, and solve the problem of how to get the data out. Or we steal the HSM and decrypt the data here, but the HSM is very well secured."

Em had been quiet the whole time. Arebecca figured she was upset with Patey and Nick.

"Are you sure the encryption can't be broken?" Em asked finally. "It would make this all much easier."

"It can be broken," Nick said. "But it would take too long. Max needs to get the card data to Vadik by Monday. It would take months to decrypt it all without the HSM. Besides, we don't have the supercomputing power here to do it. Though Max does have a couple of fairly huge botnets at his disposal."

"If you steal the HSM, then Max's little operation will be exposed," Em said. "So you're going to take the data in and decrypt it in the SCP. And force the decrypted data out to a hotsite."

"Pretty much," Patey said. "That's what Max was planning. He's been working on this for a while, and has managed to coerce one of the NOCs at the facility into helping. And he's bribed a guard at the hotsite."

"Wait? What's the hotsite?" Arebecca felt like she was missing something.

"A back-up. On the network diagrams there's an emergency fail-over site," Em explained. "It's kept ready, but isn't used unless something catastrophic happens to the SCP. The thing is, usually hotsites are nowhere near as secure as the live sites."

"We agreed to help him get through a couple of layers of security at the SCP," Nick said. "There's a security card system that I've got no problem getting through. Then there's a one-by-one man trap with two factor authentication. A numeric keypad and a fingerprint. That's ok too. The hard part is smuggling the stolen data into the room. They're very careful about that. Even if we can fit all of the data onto a solid-state drive, they won't let it through."

"And that's really why I'm here," Em sighed. "You need me to smuggle the drive in."

"Well, actually we'd pretty much got that solved," Patey said. "We reckon there's an air condition--"

He was cut off by a loud thunk on the desk next to Em. Arebecca jumped at the noise and saw that it was made by a solid piece of wood being hit with a large knife. Ilia's knife to be exact.

"I can help you get the drive in," Em said. "But that's it. After that, you make all the trouble go away."

They all stared at Em. Arebecca had no idea how such a small woman had managed to get such a large knife through the metal detector. Then they heard the key-in-padlock sound and Patey yanked the knife out and slipped it behind the keyboard as the door swung open.

It was dinner. And it wasn't bad. Takeaway pizza, cans of drink, and even ice cream for dessert. They spent the rest of the day going through the plan, both out loud, and spelling out words on the keyboard.

One thing was on all of their minds. Even if they did manage to successfully decrypt the data, it was unlikely that Max, or Vadik, would let them walk free afterwards.