Breaking Backbones: Information Should Be Free: Book II of the Hacker Trilogy

By Deb Radcliff

Cy is still healing from injuries that almost killed her during Operation Backbone when she is called back for a very personal reason. Her son Michael is in the clutches of Damian Strandeski, former chairman of the GlobeCom board and kingpin behind all criminal syndicates operating on the dark web.

Cy quickly deduces that her son is collateral damage in Damian’s grab for the lead developer behind a new artificial intelligence named Telos, which is more powerful than GlobeCom was. As she heads to Europe on a rescue mission, Cy’s eldest son Adam enlists their clan’s rogue copy of Telos to aggressively search for Damian. Then the AI seems to take matters into its own hands…

As they execute their plan to save Michael and catch Damian, Cy and her team face unforeseen retaliation that endangers them all. Will they finally defeat Damian, or will he once again take control of the world through technology?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Sep 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665727259

Deb Radcliff

Deb Radcliff was the first journalist to make cybercrime a reporting beat starting in 1995. Throughout her career, she’s met smart and talented hackers, cybercops, intelligence officers, and vigilantes who are the basis of the colorful fictional characters described in her stories. She has won several awards for her coverage, including the most prestigious Neal Award (twice) for business investigative reporting. She is a speaker, writer, and thought leader who is still embedded in the communities she portrays in these stories.

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Copyright © 2022 Deb Radcliff.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,

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except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue

in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Archway Publishing

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-2699-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2700-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-2725-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022913294

Archway Publishing rev. date: 09/23/2022

CONTENTS

Cast Of Characters

Prologue

Part One The AI

1 Awakening

2 Work Camp 74

3 Liberation

4 Devastation

5 Ground Zero

6 Restoration

7 The Triangle

8 First Came Fire

9 Road Trip

10 The River Camp

Part Two The Leak

11 Searching

12 I Am Bilbo

13 Ghost in the System

14 The Reveal

15 Elven

16 The Back Door

17 The Meeting

18 Taken

19 The Chase

20 Paradise Lost

21 The Ground Team

22 The Dragon

Part Three Equalizing

23 Captivity

24 Searching

25 Meat Man

26 The Undoing

27 Homecoming

28 The CCRT

29 The Reckoning

30 Close Calls

31 Allure

32 Revelry

33 Paris Nights

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Cy (short for CyAnthia), den mom to hacker clan called UFJ (which stands for Un Fucking Justice). Formerly Cindy Frank, cyber forensics investigator for the Department of Defense, she went off-grid because she didn’t want to chip her baby.

d_ArkAngl, father to Cy’s first baby, also known as Leonard Smith, involuntary spy for the DoD embedded in China Telecom until GlobeCom went down. Now he’s in hiding with Cy and her clan in the Russian River.

Adam, son of d_ArkAngl and Cy, the first of their clan born off the grid, is twenty years old at the start of this book and living in the Russian River camp.

Michael, son of Cy and Des, born fifteen months after Adam, is nineteen at the start of the book and about to turn twenty at the end.

Des (short for Des0l8tion), former special forces operative, husband and protector to Cy who died in Operation Backbone, is biological father to Michael.

Saoirse (pronounced seersha), daughter of Skew from the Cl0ver Clan, relocated with her family to the Colorado mountains after the clans broke up two and a half years ago.

Elven, Saoirse’s older half brother and Skew’s eldest son, also relocated to Colorado with his family clan.

Liam and Shay, Saoirse’s fifteen-year-old twin brothers.

Skew (short for Skew3r), former head of the Virginia Cl0ver Clan and father to Saoirse, Elven, Liam, and Shay.

Stonces Dupres, son to Adrianna Dupres, who was one of the GlobeCom’s twenty-four board members who was killed after GlobeCom went down.

Geoffrey, Stonces’s right hand and security chief.

Malina Bennette, former special forces with the French Air and Space Force, lifetime friend to Stonces and Geoffrey, and mercenary for hire.

Damian Strandeski, previously known as Damian Strand, former GlobeCom board director outed as the leader of the Circle of criminal syndicates on the dark web. Now in hiding under an assumed identity.

Ying Liu, daughter of the Chinese board director at GlobeCom and Leonard Smith’s wife until GlobeCom was destroyed and Leonard died then resurrected himself as d_ArkAngl.

Honored Mother, Nǚ Jiāzhǎng, Ying’s mother and former board member of GlobeCom.

Bilbo, former UFJ clan caught and interned at Work Camp 74 with amnesia and who is identified at the work camp as IN23.

Wizard, father figure to d_ArkAngl (a.k.a. Leonard Smith) and lifetime hacker who helped Leonard with legal troubles in his teens. He’s now getting up in age as he lives at the Russian River compound with Cy and her clan.

Bossa (short for Bossanova). After nearly two decades apart, she and Wizard reunite at the Russian River camp at the end of book one, and they help the younglings at the Russian River camp in book two.

R3x 2.0, an updated, new version of R3x, the robot dog that looks like a white Scottie.

Allure, warrior woman and former best friend of Cy at their previous hideaway in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Mane, Allure’s love interest who was gravely injured at the Watergate Hotel.

PROLOGUE

It’s been two and a half years since freedom hackers broke GlobeCom’s backbone networks and unleashed chaos on a world suddenly unable to connect. Dead smart cars piled up like junkyard trash. Planes were grounded. Hospitals were quickly overwhelmed. The global supply chain collapsed. Then riots erupted. For a few months, things were touch and go.

Once society overcame the initial shock, local communities began to restore order. Technical innovation flourished. Supply chain merchants quickly reorganized into local, regional, and international hubs for buying, selling, and transporting goods. And local farmers were again feeding their communities healthy regional food through farmer’s markets, home deliveries, grocers, and restaurants.

In the aftermath of GlobeCom’s fall, about half the population removed their UIs (unique identifier chip implants imposed on them by GlobeCom). The rest of the people kept their UIs, mostly for convenience and medical purposes.

The point is people are buying and selling goods, getting medical care, working, and traveling again. Global stock markets are recovering. Digital entertainment is flowing to most regions. Immersive online worlds are busy with gaming, porn, social, and business communities flocking to the platforms for virtual adventure and meeting places. And many of those who moved off the grid to avoid taking the UIs are now reintegrating into communities that are putting their farming, building, technical, and engineering skills to good use.

The transition was much harder on GlobeCom’s twenty-four board members, most of whom got caught with their hands in GlobeCom’s data-rich cookie jars. Simply put, the GlobeCom 24 (as they were called) took advantage of their positions to illegally access and use data to control people, take their assets, send them to work camps, and disappear those who got in their way.

Once the hackers took down GlobeCom, they immediately turned the masses against the culpable board members by publishing irrefutable evidence of the leadership’s illegal deeds, which quickly spread across the social media boards and underground networks. Since then, many of the GlobeCom 24 and their partners in crime have been brought to justice. But some of the murderous schemers behind GlobeCom have avoided capture, and they are still a danger to the freedom hackers behind Operation Backbone.

PART ONE

THE AI

1

AWAKENING

The sun rises over rolling hills lush with grapevines that are beginning to sprout their early-spring leaves. Located on fifty hectares of prime land off the Rue de Joseph at Bruyères-le-Châtel, the estate includes a large chateau with formal gardens, wild forests, maintained vineyards, and its own operating winery, the Bella Vue.

As is his usual habit, Stonces is up early, taking in the view from a bistro table on the second-floor terrace that faces out over the vineyards. Tall, slim, and dark-skinned, Stonces, at age twenty-three, is blessed with model good looks and a classic sense of style. He owes his graceful nature to his mother, and his dark skin came from both of his parents—his mother’s French Polynesian blood and his father’s Persian roots. Tragically, his features, characteristics, and DNA are all he has left of them.

Sipping his coffee from a white porcelain cup, Stonces looks the picture of serenity, but internally, his mind is spinning. It keeps coming back to this: He feels in his gut that he and his mother have somehow been duped and used as pawns in a long game that neither of them was aware of until GlobeCom fell. Furthermore, he suspects that Damian Strandeski, director of the GlobeCom board and his mother’s former lover, has been pulling their strings all along.

What he can’t understand is why the hackers who call themselves freedom fighters would kill his mother in a fake car crash, as Damian claimed they did. By that time, the hackers had already accomplished their primary mission. They broke GlobeCom—and with it, they seem to have freed humanity from GlobeCom’s overreach and control over their daily lives.

Why then would the hackers proceed to take his mother’s life if they had already achieved their goals? And why do so directly? From what he’s observed, the hackers don’t do violence. They lurk in the background, using computers to find the dirt on their targets, and then they prefer to simply out their targets on social media and turn society against them, the way Leonard Smith did when he outed the crooked GlobeCom board members shortly after GlobeCom fell. Does that mean that Leonard was a hacker embedded in his job as CSO of the GlobeCom China hub?

Stonces wonders.

But even if he were a hacker, Leonard was not likely to have been a killer. The cocky bastard seemed to see Adrianna as a powerful, strong-minded, and altruistic single mother who lived on her wits and grace—the same way Stonces viewed her. And she was quite fond of Leonard, even a little flirty, although Stonces still can’t understand why.

Stonces also makes note of the fact that Leonard didn’t out any dirty secrets on his mother, Adrianna, who was one of the GlobeCom 24. Was that out of loyalty to his mother? Or was it that his mother wasn’t complicit in any of the crimes that most of the other board members were involved in?

Except for the last-minute change in his mother’s behavior before she was killed, Stonces has no reason or evidence to believe that she was involved in any of the board’s illegal activities, which are still being uncovered today. So maybe she simply wasn’t culpable enough to make it onto Leonard’s hit list.

Stonces places his empty cup on its matching saucer and looks out over the hills that are now lit up by the morning sun rising behind him. He can’t shake the thought that out of all the other board members, Damian had the most motivation to take his mother out of the picture. By removing the European competition, and by interning the Chinese board director (along with her family and her many guards), Damian could control the entire EU, Middle East, and Asia-Pacific regions under a rebuilt GlobeCom 2.0.

Stonces shivers as his mind flashes to the day when his mother abducted Ying Liu, daughter of the GlobeCom Chinese board director and Leonard Smith’s loving wife. His mother had Ying taken right here in this chateau, in the gilded receiving room on the floor below him. He recalls Ying’s parting words as she succumbed to the tranquilizer that Adrianna put in her tea. You will be sorry for this, Ying had slurred. I join my honored mother and relatives, living and dead. A family curse to you and all you love!

God, Mother, what have you done? Stonces says to himself in French. Was it your idea or Damian’s idea to send Ying and her family to the work camps? And in so doing, did you unknowingly hand China and EU interests to the Russians?

At the sound of Stonces’s voice, Geoffrey appears on the terrace. Geoffrey is Jedi like that. He’s invisible until somebody needs him; then suddenly he’s there on the ready.

May I help you, sir? Geoffrey asks politely in French.

What? Stonces responds absently, also speaking French.

I heard you speaking, no? Geoffrey continues in his deep, resonate voice.

Oh yes. Ah, nothing. Just talking to myself, Stonces answers.

You seem to be doing a lot of that lately, Geoffrey observes. Are you introspecting or planning?

A little of both actually, Stonces responds. How do you always read me like that? I’d be at a complete loss without you, you know.

Geoffrey straightens his shoulders as he responds, Yes, sir. Thank you. And … we all miss her, he says gently. Your mother, Adrianna, lit up this chateau and everything around her. We are equally dedicated to you, and we stand by for anything you need.

For a moment, they are quiet as Stonces gathers his thoughts.

Standing next to him, Geoffrey is a tall, broad-shouldered, sophisticated Black man in middle age who dresses to perfection with custom tailors on call. His expertise is security and protection, and he’s been with the family for twenty-five years, starting nearly two years before Stonces was born. Stonces is keenly aware that, since his mother’s death, Geoffrey has made Stonces his life’s mission. And he’s come to rely on Geoffrey more than the man will ever know.

Actually, I do need something, Stonces declares after a moment. How about doing a thorough sweep for cameras and bugs? I feel like I’m being watched.

Very good. I will extend the search to buildings, grounds, vehicles, and signal-emitting devices we carry on our persons, such as our wrist comms, Geoffrey offers. If you don’t mind my suggesting, we should also evaluate and update our perimeter defenses. For instance, we need to install signal blockers for any devices that aren’t ours that won’t affect our own communications.

Yes, all of those things, Stonces agrees. After all, we don’t want anyone eavesdropping on our plans for Work Camp Seventy-Four.

2

WORK CAMP 74

One Month Later

The windowless dining hall is devoid of happiness or beauty, its bare cinder walls coated in decades of grease and dust. It’s cold in here, so Ying is wearing her wool jacket over her camp-issued jumpsuit, while across the table from her, IN23 is wrapped in a blanket from his bunk.

They’re sitting in their usual spot near the kitchen, with steaming cups of coffee, while the kitchen bots are hard at work behind them. Ying has long given up asking for tea and has learned to choke down the bitter black tar they call coffee here because she needs the caffeine. Workdays are long, and for part of the year, there’s no daylight, so it’s hard to keep going without a little help.

She likes to meet with IN23 here early in the morning because the kitchen robots are so noisy that it’s hard for the listeners to hear their conversations. The kitchen bots are essentially mechanical arms reaching down from conveyors in the ceiling. When hard at work, they sound like an orchestra with the whizzing and whirring of the machinery, the tapping of eggshells, the chop-chop-chop of onions and potatoes being cut, and the prepared veggies dropping into buckets, plunk-plunk.

For the first few minutes, they sit quietly as Ying reflects on her time here. Despite the winter cold and the third world living conditions, she was lucky to carve out a decent arrangement at the dreaded Work Camp 74, thanks primarily to IN23.

She remembers meeting him the day after she was dumped here two years and seven months ago. He was the lead developer for a powerful new artificial intelligence that was underway at the work camp when GlobeCom fell. She recalls how he immediately picked her out to work in the machine-learning group, where she helped the programmers with mathematical algorithms supporting predictions and decisions. She couldn’t understand how she would be useful there, since she never wrote a single line of code, but IN23 assured her that her background in financial law, particularly her knowledge of numbers and accounting, would be useful. Thankfully, he was right, and as a bonus, her relationship with IN23 kept her in good standing with the guards (or rehabilitation counselors, as they were called).

It didn’t take Ying long to learn that IN23 was a savant who could do the work of three developers at once. She also quickly discovered that he was an amnesiac, which is why he went by his inmate number instead of a name. When she first met him, she instinctively knew she needed to handle him gently because he seemed unable to capture the nuances of human communication. Then the medic on duty informed her that IN23 has a light case of Asperger’s.

To Ying’s good fortune, it turned out that she was one of the few humans at the camp to have a calming effect on him. The bosses at the camp knew that a happy, grounded IN23 made a better manager, and things got done in record time around there. And the guards still share their Dolly Parton music with him because they know that Dolly’s music is all that IN23 remembers from his past, and Dolly’s music also helps him focus.

Now, the AI, which IN23 has led development on for the past ten years, is nearly complete. And as that day nears, Ying’s been meeting him here every morning for some private time while the inmates are still asleep.

This morning, they’re talking in hushed voices as they regurgitate the same conversation they had yesterday, the day before, and the day before that. They’ve heard chatter that GlobeCom was never restored after the hacker attack just over two and a half years ago. However, they can’t verify the story. No new inmates have arrived at the camp since Ying was interned here, so they can’t get news of the outside that way.

She looks across the table at IN23, who seems lost in his own thoughts. The guards, the cameras, their implanted UIs are always watching, she thinks as she checks the little rice-sized bump on her left forearm above the wrist. She’s constantly aware of her UI, implanted against her will and used to hold her here under someone else’s identity, which is tracking her every