Strange Flesh - Hardcover

Michael Olson graduated from Harvard and worked in investment banking and software engineering before earning a master’s degree from NYU’s Interactive Technology Program, where he designed a locomotion interface for virtual environments.

Strange Flesh 1

The Norn seeks you.

Eeyore, one of my friends at work, has marked the message “Urgent.”

What could she want?

The project I’ve toiled on for the past month remains far from finished. It should be weeks before I’m due an accounting with her.

I stumble into the bathroom to get functional, trying to avoid looking in the mirror. Not yet anyway. I take a deep breath and turn the shower on hot.

The Norn is my boss, Susan Mercer, one of the managing partners of Red Rook, a global network security company based in DC. She’s called the Norn—after the Norse pantheon’s Weavers of Fate—due to the degree of her control over the destinies of the firm’s employees. The name is made especially fitting by her habit of embroidering circuit schematics for signals intelligence equipment from the NSA’s Cold War glory days. She is not someone you keep waiting.

—   —   —

The elevator opens onto Mercer’s dimly lit corner suite at our New York office. She sits at an antique desk in her Shaker rocking chair. A bright lamp casts a circle of light on her hands, which move with preternatural authority over an ivory hoop. Her eyes are focused on me.

“James, good of you to come,” she says in a Brahmin drawl.

“No problem.” I take a small glass box out of my bag and set it on her desk. It contains a rare “Bohemian Garnet” Venus flytrap for her terrarium. Mercer adores carnivorous plants, and she tolerates my gifts as sincere expressions of filial devotion. I know little about her domestic situation, but it’s hard to imagine a husband, and I like the idea that at least somebody gives her something. “I hope you don’t kill this one quite so quickly,” I say.

“This plant’s predecessor was a decadent vegetarian. No aptitude for hunting.”

“You probably froze it.”

“My office isn’t a South Carolina swamp. If a thing can’t adapt—”

Her look of delight fades into one of concern as she sees the scrapes on my wrist and then clocks my totally uncharacteristic turtleneck. The morning’s cleanup had required some improvisation. I was robbed last night. That’s how I’ve chosen to characterize it. Just the innocent victim of a simple theft. Happens every day.

“James . . . ?”

She lets the question hang there, but I just smile at her. Mercer is way too old-school to pry into an employee’s personal life, in conversation at least. She watches me for a while but only asks, “Can I offer you some tea?”

“No thanks.” I perch on one of the unstable chairs in front of her desk.

She sets down her project, the blueprint for some ancient mechanical encoding machine; pours herself a cup; and spends a moment regarding the steam as it spirals up into the shadows.

I notice her tea service rests on a set of black lace doilies that have Red Rook’s logo stitched into them. A logo that says a lot about our operation. Its black circle holds a little red symbol in the center that, while decorated with simple battlements and a drawbridge, conforms to the shape of an hourglass more than the outline of our eponymous chess piece. Close observers will see the image for a rendering of the underside of a black widow spider.

Unusual that a legitimate consultancy would use the color black in its trade dress, given that the hacker term “black hat” means “outlaw.” But we are by no means a normal company. Our clients are Fortune 1000 corporations and any American security-related acronym you care to name: FBI, DEA, ATF, CIA, NSA. While we ply our trade only against criminals, the means we use are often of questionable legality. In fact, we maintain a vast array of unlawful botnets, undisclosed “zero day” software exploits, salaried moles in various black hat syndicates, and even a couple agents in foreign cyber-intel organizations. So the felt of our hat is a tasteful gray.

Just as her silence begins to make me nervous, Mercer asks, “The LinkDjinn affair?”

“Looks pretty standard, and I think we already have hooks into the network the attackers used.”

“One of our Ukrainian honeypots?”

“Exactly.”

“I suppose we have Phissure to thank for all this mischief?” This was a group of Vietnamese net scam artists with whom we occasionally did business.

“That’s what my new friends are telling me. The Brains are trying to confirm it.”

Functional roles at Red Rook are classified according to retro high school social stereotypes. The Brains practice traditional hacking like network recon and searching for useful software flaws. Our Greasers run groups of informants. Jocks do “physical” penetrations.

I’m a “Soshe,” a social engineer, one of the lazy reptiles who use the time-honored techniques of the confidence man to compromise our opponents. After all, why spend weeks snooping around trying to capture a password when almost anyone will just tell it to you if you ask the right way? We Socials believe that a bug in your firewall program, once discovered, can be patched in minutes, but the software running the human brain will stay broken forever.

Mercer says, “Well, that may get awkward. But I’m afraid the matter will no longer concern you.”

“Okay . . .” Surely wearing a turtleneck to the office isn’t grounds for a mental-health suspension.

“Tell me, James, what do you know about the Randall family?”

That gets my attention. While quieting the mental turmoil their name causes me, I stall. “The ones who own most of IMP?”

She nods slowly.

“Well, Integrated Media Properties controls enough of the mediascape to be considered, by some, a threat to American democracy. The Randalls have almost all the voting shares.”

“Correct. Anything else?”

“They’ve got newspapers, cable, film studios . . . I understand they’re picking up web start-ups like it’s ’99.”

She arches an eyebrow. “And?”

“And I went to school with them. The twins. At Harvard. They were two years older than me. I can’t say I really know them anymore, but we were in a club together.”

“Phi Beta Kappa, I presume?”

“Ah, no, ma’am.” Mercer is well aware of all of my affiliations, starting with the League City, Texas, Cub Scout pack number 678. The club in question was the Hasty Pudding Society, an ancient order of alcoholism.

A predatory smile. “Hmm . . . Though you claim only a passing acquaintance, apparently the Randalls remember you quite well. And have tracked you to our humble enterprise here. It’s very unusual, but you’ve been requested for a meeting with them by name. Or by a diminutive at least. Please tell me you don’t answer to ‘Jimmy Jacks’ anymore.”

That means it must have been Blake who called her.

No one ever calls me by my real name: James John Pryce. I’ve been called Slim for my build, Tex for my place of origin, JJ for brevity, and Thump for reasons that were never quite clear. That’s to say nothing of the brigades of online aliases marching around cyberspace on my behalf. In college what stuck were any of several variants of “Jack,” which is more or less appropriate given my middle name.

J-Jacks, Jackie, Jackalope, Jackamole, Sir Jax-a-Lot. “Jimmy Jacks” was the one in general use. I received that nickname the same night I met Blake Randall.