The Cipher Falls
The aftermath was unprecedented. Even the White House issuing an official statement in the dead of night was extraordinary. China, too, was caught off guard by America’s demand for an explanation. Across the Pacific, it was still the middle of the workday, so no one lost sleep over it, but the sheer audacity of the title “Cyber 9/11” sent shockwaves through the Presidential Palace in Beijing.
At that very moment, Yoo Jae-won completed the rainbow table exactly on schedule, leveraging the overwhelming computing power of the data center he had built at great expense. With the rainbow table finished, the game was over. All that remained was to search the hash value registered to the suspect’s Apple ID. Bingo—one data match.
Because the database file was a staggering 8.5 terabytes, the search itself took several minutes, but it returned a single, precise result.
“This is the password for the phone.”
Yoo Jae-won displayed the password he had found on his monitor in large, clear text. Even at a glance, the complexity spoke of meticulous planning. It filled all eight digits with a random string combining uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers. It was light-years beyond the sort of passwords ordinary people used—Q1W2E3R4, ZXCV1234, or 1111.
“Let’s try it right away.”
At Agent Skinner’s words, Yoo Jae-won nodded. He pressed the power button on the iPhone S, bringing up the lock screen, then held the device out to the agent. The gesture made it clear he wanted Skinner to enter the code himself.
Agent Skinner accepted the phone with a nod and carefully typed the string displayed on the monitor. A soft chime sounded, and the home screen appeared. It was a sight they had all been desperate to see. The team members who had been holding their breath erupted in cheers and whistles.
“First, I’ll back it up to the group server.”
Agent Skinner’s moment of emotion was brief. With the encryption broken, the immediate priority was to copy the iPhone S’s entire storage to a computer. With dozens of specialists already assembled, it would have been foolish to comb through the device one file at a time. The best approach was to create an image and distribute it to the team for analysis. Naturally, Yoo Jae-won was included. When he had promised his assistance, one of the conditions Agent Skinner had agreed to was equal access to all information, which included standing with the team during the briefing.
Once he received the image, Yoo Jae-won began dissecting it at once.
“Well now. So it was Viper.”
The first thing that caught his attention was the messenger the suspects had used instead of ID Talk. Their iMessage exchanges contained only routine messages, and not many of them. Since they hadn’t used ID Talk either, it was clear they had relied on another messaging app. Yet the App Store installation history showed no messenger at all. That meant the app had been sideloaded—an app that didn’t exist in the official store. The password had revealed it: Viper, a secure-messaging app developed in Russia. Its performance had now been thoroughly proven; until Yoo Jae-won cracked the encryption with his rainbow table, no one had even known it existed.
“Hmm?”
Yoo Jae-won launched the Viper app without hesitation. The interface was similar to ID Talk, with separate tabs for friends and conversations. Five chat rooms had already been created. What puzzled him was the contrast: the suspect had shown remarkable caution by using a password-protected phone and a private messenger built for secret conversations, yet he had left the most critical lists—chat rooms and friends—completely untouched.
The friends list included someone who appeared to be al-Qaeda’s field commander. There was even a profile that looked very much like Osama bin Laden, though registered under a nickname rather than a real name. The most damning evidence, however, was the video clips. One showed the cockpit being seized, a ten-second recording sent immediately afterward. Dozens of photos and videos followed. Whenever the plane climbed high enough over a major city, the internet and phone signals returned, and the hijackers had used those brief windows to attempt file transfers. Only about a third succeeded; the rest failed.
Among the successfully transmitted clips was one Yoo Jae-won had already seen on the internet and on television—the very footage Osama bin Laden had streamed when he claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden had presented it as proof, and that same file now sat on the iPhone S.
That was not the only decisive evidence. Three other teams had hijacked additional planes, and the messages coordinating the attack right up until the morning of September 11 remained intact.
“Mr. Yoo, this should be more than enough. Let’s move.”
Agent Skinner, assisted by the data-analysis specialists, had reached the same conclusion at the same time. As an investigator, he was certain they now had everything needed to identify the 9/11 perpetrators. Nothing more conclusive could exist.
“Just a moment.”
Yoo Jae-won stopped him.
“What else is there?”
“We need to track the mastermind.”
The mastermind, of course, meant Osama bin Laden. Identifying the hijackers did not end the matter; every one of them had died at the scene. The 9/11 attacks would only be truly concluded when bin Laden was captured.
Before his regression, America had tried to swat a flea named Osama bin Laden and ended up burning down the entire thatched hut that was Afghanistan, while also inflicting catastrophic damage on its own economy. The war in Afghanistan had become an inescapable quagmire, and the rise of ISIS had further destabilized the Middle East. The soaring costs had toppled an America that had only just begun to recover in the late 1990s. Yoo Jae-won believed the 9/11 attacks had been the spark for the wave of right-wing movements that swept across nearly every country in the twenty-first century. His goal was to prevent history from repeating itself. That meant publicly establishing that Osama bin Laden had orchestrated the attacks and capturing him as quickly as possible.
As if the heavens themselves were helping, bin Laden had stepped forward far earlier than in the original timeline, amplifying his own notoriety. Originally, he had waited roughly three years before revealing his identity on Al Jazeera. This time, he had appeared directly via internet stream. That alone dramatically reduced Yoo Jae-won’s burden.
Even though the stream had used proxy servers and IP manipulation to conceal his location, such measures were useless against Yoo Jae-won. While preparing for his regression, he had collected classified documents that had never been made public. The United States had a policy of releasing secret files decades after an event, and those files had revealed a great deal about 9/11—particularly bin Laden’s movements immediately afterward. Thanks to that information, Yoo Jae-won already had a fairly accurate idea of where bin Laden was hiding. Combined with the data from the stream, the location had narrowed even further.
“You can actually track Osama bin Laden?”
“Of course.”
Moreover, the iPhone S contained precise clues that could refine the approximate location Yoo Jae-won already knew. Once the existing intelligence was cross-referenced with the data from the phone, they would have coordinates accurate enough to launch a cruise missile.
“Good heavens.”
Agent Skinner could not hide his astonishment. To a man who had joined the FBI in the mid-1980s, Yoo Jae-won’s explanation sounded like science fiction. Yet it was reality, and Yoo Jae-won immediately began proving it.
Despite having stayed up all night blocking DDoS attacks while building the rainbow table, Yoo Jae-won’s energy surged the moment he began the trace. Part of it was his youth—he was still in his early twenties—but the greater force was his iron resolve to capture Osama bin Laden in one stroke and change the course of the world.
Because of that, the direct report to higher-ups was delayed a little longer. Instead, the information gathered so far was compiled into a report and sent up the chain. The recipients were stunned. The contents were so shocking and hit the core of the matter that the report reached the Oval Office almost unchanged from the version Skinner had prepared.
Once the logjam broke, good news followed in quick succession. Another suspect’s phone had been recovered from the wreckage of the plane that struck the Pentagon. It, too, was an iPhone S. Though damaged, it was in better condition than the one pulled from the Hudson River. Like the Hudson device, it was locked behind a high-level password, but the SIM card revealed the phone number, which in turn led to the Apple ID. That was all they needed. The hash value registered with the Apple ID yielded the password from the rainbow table, and the lock opened without resistance.
The greatest advantage of the rainbow table was that, once created, it could be reused as long as the encryption settings remained unchanged. The unlocked Pentagon iPhone S allowed cross-verification, confirming the identities of the 9/11 attackers, their motives, their backers, and providing irrefutable physical evidence.
—Emergency address by President Al Gore from the White House!
—Major evidence found regarding the masterminds behind 9/11!
—The moment the memorial period ends, America will act!
At 11 a.m., roughly two hours after federal agencies had begun their official workday, President Al Gore delivered an emergency address. The announcement was broadcast not only across North American networks but to the entire world. While the discovery of crucial leads about the suspects drew attention, what captured even greater interest was the declaration that America would act the moment the period of mourning concluded.
Almost no one failed to associate the word “act” with overwhelming military force. The United States spent more on defense than any other nation. Its armed forces were deployed from the Far East to Europe. Until now, those forces had been constrained; the world had grown wary of American expansion. Russia, heir to the Soviet Union, and the rising power of China had been especially vigilant. But now no country could stop America.
The collapse of the north tower of the World Trade Center had killed hundreds and injured over a thousand. One side of the Pentagon’s iconic pentagon had been destroyed, and the Capitol itself had been struck, killing members of Congress and visitors alike. The American people were enraged and demanded fierce retaliation against those responsible. The Al Gore administration felt the same. Unlike the George W. Bush era, no neoconservatives like Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney had been allowed into the administration; anyone with Republican affiliations had been excluded, naturally filtering out the neocons. Still, neither President Gore nor his newly assembled White House staff and cabinet were purely dovish. Once roused, Al Gore was a man who did not hold back. Even before the regression, he had taken the position that harsh, even inhumane treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay could be justified if it yielded information.
Every nation on earth focused on the scale of forces and the scope of operations a furious America might deploy, while simultaneously trying to gauge the quality of American intelligence. If they could learn what America knew, they might at least predict its next moves. Because America had not announced an immediate strike, China and Afghanistan still had a small window of time. The reason was simple: with so many dead, funeral services were being held in New York and Washington, D.C. In Korea, a disaster of this magnitude would have prompted a joint memorial altar, but American culture was different. A presidential memorial service was planned, yet individual funerals proceeded according to each family’s wishes. As a result, the familiar pattern of the poor remaining poor and the rich growing richer played out even in death. Nameless victims received modest services in cold morgues, while those from wealthy families were given lavish send-offs.
It was unfortunate, but Yoo Jae-won found himself contributing to that disparity. He was preparing to attend Jacob’s funeral—the largest and most extravagant of all the 9/11 victims’ services.