Valhalla Virus, Nick Harrow [simple ebook reader txt] 📗

into my seat so hard its springs squealed, and I was sure a couple of my vertebrae had been crushed to powder. The cartel freak shoved my chair forward to pin my legs under the desk so I couldn’t try that little stunt again.

“This is a coding problem,” the enormous monster declared. He reached past me to tap the mirror-smooth surface of the white desk he’d trapped me against. His cologne, a surprisingly delicate but somehow musky scent, flooded my nostrils.

“Hey, what’s that you’re wearing?” I asked. “It reminds me of my grandma’s bathroom—”

The cartel’s muscle squeezed my right shoulder so hard I was sure he’d crippled me for life.

“Shut. Up,” he said in a voice like a concrete mixer’s growl.

I recognized a network diagram before the holographic display the hit man had triggered could fully render. Pulses of red light swarmed through the digital schematic and collected at critical junctures like widowmaker blood clots headed for a soon-to-be-dead-man’s heart. If those red blips broke through whatever defenses had held them back so far, the network’s central cores would be shredded into packets and downloaded in the blink of an eye.

“Wow, someone really, really does not like you guys,” I said as I leaned in for a better look at the mess I’d been kidnapped to fix. It was a truly impressive clusterfuck, of the kind I’d never seen in the wild. “This is a DDOS, but not the script kiddie variety. They’re flooding your ports, but I’ve never seen a traffic pattern like this. Looks like a pair of adversarial AIs are running the actual attack. Could be Russian, most definitely military grade. This might be too big of a job for one hacker to handle. I need to call in a few allies to help me lock this down.”

“You will stop the attack,” the orc thug said and gave me a firm pat on my bruised shoulder. “And we will give you one billion dollars. You. Alone.”

“Sounds good,” I said, frustrated by his response. People with money always thought more money could solve any problem the universe laid in their path. Sometimes that was true, but sometimes even the best hackers needed some help. I knew just the right folks to carve this problem up and serve it to the cartel on a platter, but I also knew Mr. Orc Face wouldn’t let me invite my friends over to play ball. Frustrated, I lashed out. “Can I get a pony, too? I’ve never been to Disneyland. Throw in a chartered flight to the happiest place on earth and hire some strippers to give me a concierge tour of Mickey’s Secret Playground while you’re at it.”

The orc cleared his throat and doors opened at the corners of the room. Four more heavies who’d all come from the same factory as my kidnapper entered, and the doors slid closed behind them. They watched me like a pack of ravenous wolves ready to rip into their prey the moment their alpha gave the word.

Maybe if I survived this, I’d remember not to run my mouth around people who could kill me without losing a wink of sleep.

Oh, who am I kidding? I hated getting pushed around, and I doubted I’d ever sit still while a pack of steroid junkies yanked my chain.

“Mr. Clay Knight,” the big man said from behind me. His voice was as tight as a choke chain around a lunging pit bull’s throat. “This is not a joke or a hoax. We brought you here because our people have heard you are the best when it comes to defending against attacks such as the one we are experiencing. When you stop the attack on my employer’s network, I will give you the access code to a numbered offshore account that contains one billion dollars. With that amount of money, you can purchase your own herd of pony-riding strippers.”

“What if I can’t do it?” I asked. “Whoever’s behind this came loaded for bear. They aren’t just hammering your network; they’re flattening a whole chunk of the internet to get you. It’s the digital equivalent of carpet bombing, and even someone as good as I am can’t just make that go away.”

“If you cannot resolve this issue in a timely fashion, I am authorized to terminate your employment,” the orc boy said in a tone tinged with dark glee. “Believe me when I say that termination will be an extremely painful process for you.”

That threat did wonders to clarify my thoughts.

“How long do I have before you start hacking pieces off my body?” I asked. My eyes had already roamed across the schematic to identify the most endangered parts of the network and the attack vectors aimed at their digital skulls.

The incoming hack was impressive, but I spied a glimmer of hope. It would be hard as hell, but I could isolate the weakened nodes and rebuild their defenses in an hour or two. That would hold off the bulk of the attacks that converged on a set of storage and processing nodes at the center of the network. Then another two, maybe three, hours, and I’d turn the denial of service right back on the assholes behind it.

“You must stop the attack before the raiders can reach the secured storage nodes,” he said. “Our IT staff believe that will happen within the next thirty minutes.”

“That’s not enough time,” I said after I’d caught my breath from that gut punch of a deadline. My thoughts raced as I analyzed the hack again and tried to come up with a defense I could implement in the very narrow window I’d been given.

The bad guys had gone all brute force and launched the internet equivalent of a nuclear strike at the cartel’s brain machine. I could build a bunker inside the network that would protect the critical nodes while I looked for a solution. “I’ll have to take part of your network down and redirect all the attack traffic to a honeypot