The Sentinel (Jack Reacher #25)(45)

‘We could. Avoid a confrontation in a confined public space. And inject some bad intelligence into their decision-making process. Two good outcomes with zero effort on our part.’

‘OK. Let’s do that.’ Rutherford turned away from the door and a moment later his face creased with alarm. ‘Wait. What if she breaks in? She could pick the locks.’

‘Also good. We could join her. Ask her some questions. And afterwards we’d have the perfect cover. You came back from dropping some trash down the garbage chute and found an intruder in your apartment. She tried to run. She slipped. And she hit her head. Tragic, but the kind of thing that can happen when you choose a life of crime.’

‘We couldn’t— Shhh. Someone’s coming.’ Rutherford pressed his eye back to the peephole. ‘It’s— Oh my goodness.’

He opened the door and stepped out, still in his socks. Reacher saw a woman on the other side of the corridor. She was facing away, ready to ring Rutherford’s doorbell. She had the same colour hair as the Toyota driver. It was the same length. She was the same height. But her clothes were different. She was wearing a pale grey suit. And Reacher didn’t recognize her face.

‘Sarah!’ Rutherford held his arms out wide. ‘So good to see you. What are you doing here?’

‘I was worried about you.’ The woman pulled Rutherford into a hug so tight it looked like she was trying to break his back. ‘You stopped calling. You didn’t answer your phone. I left you all kinds of messages. Then I heard what happened with your job.’

‘I didn’t get any messages. You must have been calling my work phone. The assholes took it when they fired me. I’m sorry. I should have told you. I should have called.’

‘Are you OK?’

‘I am. I was down for a while but I’m doing a lot better now.’

‘Good. Because there’s something we need to talk about. It could be huge. ‘The woman’s giant purse was slipping off her shoulder and as she heaved it back into place her head turned and she spotted Reacher standing in the doorway opposite. ‘Oh. Hello. You must be Mitch. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

‘Actually, no,’ Rutherford said. ‘Mitch is away. This is Jack Reacher. Reacher, this is my friend Sarah Sands. The one I told you about. Sarah was working on Cerberus with me.’

Rutherford made another pot of coffee while Sands fired up her laptop and listened as Reacher ran through a summary of events since he’d arrived in town.

‘I don’t like this.’ Sands took Rutherford’s hand when he set her cup on the table and looked up at him. ‘I don’t like this one little bit. Someone’s trying to kidnap you? That’s not OK. The Bureau should be all over this. We need to keep you safe.’

‘That’s what Reacher told the cops yesterday but they weren’t too impressed.’ Rutherford sat down next to Sands. ‘I’m still pretty much persona non grata around here.’

‘How about you, Sarah?’ Reacher said. ‘Have you got any contacts from your Bureau days? Anyone who could light a fire under this?’

‘Maybe,’ Sands said. ‘I still know some people. I could make some calls. Maybe kick up a few sparks, at least. Have you got any idea what Rusty has that they want, whoever they are?’

‘We’re still trying to figure that out.’

‘Maybe I can help. I bet they want the same thing I’m here to get. The system we created. Or part of it, at least.’

‘Why would anyone want that piece of junk?’ Rutherford slumped back. ‘It didn’t work.’

‘It didn’t work the way we hoped. That’s true. But that doesn’t mean it was a complete failure. Something you said when the attack first happened didn’t quite make sense to me, Rusty. It kept on bugging me. So I ran a bunch of simulations and I think I found something.’

‘That the whole thing was a giant waste of time?’ Rutherford said. ‘That we would have been better off creating a crossword puzzle app for people learning Swahili?’

‘I can’t believe you didn’t see this yourself,’ Sands said. ‘There’s a giant clue right there in your backup.’

‘No. There’s nothing in the backup. Nothing overwrote what was already there on whatever crappy second-hand servers I used to cobble it together.’

‘That’s exactly the point.’

‘Oh my God.’ Rutherford stood up and pressed his palm to his forehead. ‘Sarah, I love you.’

‘So your system did work?’ Reacher took a sip of coffee. ‘You said it didn’t.’

‘Right,’ Rutherford said. ‘It didn’t.’

‘So why would anyone want it?’ Reacher said.

‘It comes down to the way ransomware works,’ Sands said. ‘Attacks don’t happen all in one go. Imagine a computer network is like an enemy fortress. If you want to capture it you don’t just lob a grenade over the wall and hope the soldiers are all killed. You start by infiltrating your best guy. You smuggle him past the defences and leave him to sneak around inside for a while. Get the lie of the land. Draw maps for when your main force arrives. Find out where all the good stuff is hidden. And see if there are any traps to avoid. In our case, for traps read backups. Backups are kryptonite to ransomware. There’s no point in locking a bunch of data if your intended victim has a clean copy. He’d just laugh in your face. And that’s a big problem because some of these groups are in the game for prestige as much as they are for cash. So if they find a backup – which are usually only connected briefly to capture a snapshot of any recent changes and then get taken offline or even off site for safe keeping – they immediately deploy a special kind of program. A particularly sneaky kind. We call it a trident because it does three things all at once. One, it destroys all the data that’s already been backed up. It’s either wiped clean or replaced with porn or taunting messages, or things like that. Two, it prevents any new backups getting saved. And three, it sends spoof signals to the organization’s management system saying that everything is working OK. That way it avoids alerting anyone to what’s happening and adds to the blow when the main systems lock up and the ransom demand is posted.’