The Midnight Watch: A Sigma Force Short Story by James Rollins

 
    The Midnight Watch
    April 25, 12:21 A.M. EDT
    Washington, D.C.
    W E’RE UNDER ATTACK.
    Jacketless, with his sleeves rolled to his elbows, Painter Crowe paced the length of the communication nest at the heart of Sigma Force’s central command. Data streamed across the monitors that covered the curved walls as a single warrior waged a battle against a faceless enemy.
    Jason Carter sat at a station, typing with one hand, clutching a Starbucks cup in the other, while studying the screen before him. “It looks like they built their own back door into the Smithsonian Institution’s network using a high-level system administrator access. At this point, they literally have the keys to the kingdom.”
    “But who are they ?” Painter stopped to stare over Jason’s shoulder. The twenty-three-year old was Sigma’s chief intelligence analyst. He had been recruited by Painter after getting kicked out of the navy for hacking into Defense Department servers with nothing more than a BlackBerry and a jury-rigged iPad.
    “Could be the Russians, the North Koreans, but I’d place money on the Chinese. This has their fingerprints all over it. A few months back, they hacked into the Office of Personnel Management, stealing information on millions of federal employees. They used a similar back door, giving them administrator privileges to the OPM servers.”
    Painter nodded. He knew the Chinese government employed an army of hackers, numbering over a hundred thousand, dedicated solely to breaking into U.S. computers. Rumor had it that they had successfully hacked into every major American corporation over the past several years, absconding with blueprints to nuclear plants, appropriating technology from steel factories, even cracking into Lockheed Martin’s servers to copy the top-secret schematics for the U.S. military’s F-35 fighter jet. If there was any doubt about the latter, one only had to view the Chineses’ new FC-31. It was almost an exact copy of the American jet.
    “If it is Chinese, what are they after?” Painter asked. “Why hack into the Smithsonian servers?”
    Jason shrugged his shoulders. “Either data theft or sabotage. That’s the end goal of most hacks. But from the code, it looks like they’re just blindly grabbing files. I’m not seeing any attempt to install malware into the systems.”
    “So data theft,” Painter said. “Can you stop them?”
    In the reflection of a neighboring dark monitor, Painter caught the young man’s crooked grin. “Did that a full minute ago,” Jason said, “and slammed the door behind them as I kicked them out. They won’t be coming in that way again. I’m now attempting to identify which files were taken from which servers.”
    Painter glanced to the clock.
    00:22
    The attack had started exactly at midnight, most likely timed to strike when the hack was less liable to be detected. Still, twenty-two minutes was twenty-two minutes too long for an enemy to have unfettered access to the Smithsonian servers. The Institution was home to nine different research centers, encompassing a multitude of programs that spanned the globe.
    Still, they were lucky. The only reason this attack had been caught so promptly was that Sigma Force’s servers were linked to the Smithsonian’s systems—though Sigma’s operations were heavily guarded behind multiple firewalls to keep their presence hidden. Painter imagined those towering digital walls. It was a fitting metaphor. Sigma’s central command had been covertly established beneath the Smithsonian Castle. He glanced up, picturing the turrets and towers of red sandstone above his head, a true Norman castle perched at the edge of the National Mall.
    A fortress that someone had attempted to breach .
    Or at least that was Painter’s greatest fear: The Smithsonian servers were not the primary target of this attack but, instead, the hackers were sniffing at the walls of Sigma’s own digital fortress. Sigma was a covert wing of DARPA,