HACKERS SEEK A PIECE OF THE FATAL ACTION
“Bounty: A Novel” by Michael Byrnes (Ballantine Books, 432 pages, in stores)
The first chapter of “Bounty” had me fearing the worst. The content was mostly dialogue, and not nearly as clever as it needed to be if it was going to hold my attention. Every reader has things they don’t like. For me, it’s present-tense, second person or bad dialogue.
The talking gave way to a cheesy action piece right out of a Hollywood movie. A bad man sits at his desk in a high-rise building, content that he’s gotten away with his crimes. He gets a message telling him to turn around. He does. Another message tells him to smile. Then — BANG! — a high-powered sniper bullet drills through the window and makes his head burst, as a character says, like one of Gallagher’s sledgehammered watermelons. Ouch. That’s a bad start. A lot of things that end up good start out on wobbly footing, though, and Michael Byrnes’ book is proof. The high-concept novel rights itself after those initial missteps and becomes a smart, imaginative take on the possible consequences of our digital lifestyles.
That sniper shot at the beginning turns out to be key to everything that unfolds. Someone or something, perhaps a sentient AI, or artificial intelligence, has launched a website, Bounty4Justice.com, with the names and profiles of something like 42 corporate or political targets — bankers, financiers, hedge fund managers and more, most of whom are perceived to have escaped justice for white-collar crimes. The website builds up bounties on the targets’ lives; people “vote” and increase the bounties by buying $2 pins.
Soon it’s open season on these corporate or legislative criminals … with a catch. Anyone who kills one of the targets will receive the bounty in exchange for video proof of the kill. The video is posted on the website for the world to watch, and the funds somehow make their way to the killers. Much of the money side of it is handled by a fictional form of digital currency modeled after the real-life bitcoin.
It’s up to the FBI’s computer crimes division to try to track down all the disparate leads and find out who’s behind the site and why officials cannot shut it down. (Some who try end up suffering major hacks that cause catastrophic damage to infrastructure or tech.)
The two main characters, both FBI agents, are Roman Novak and Rosemary Michaels. He’s a fairly senior agent who leads a task force aimed at stopping the problematic website. She’s more of a field agent who happens to turn up some of the best clues. Their romantic inclinations toward one another are all but stipulated; it’s a forced pairing that consumes maybe a paragraph in the whole book.
The novel is strongly driven by plot, rendering the characters all but insignificant anyway. The fascinating part of the story is the bounty website and its mysterious operators, who can control any system seemingly anywhere in the world. It’s as if they have a master key to the internet and can turn it at will. The site or its administrators also are keyed in to prevailing public sentiment way more than anything that trends on Facebook or Twitter. Forget the social network; this is about as anti-social as it gets.
Things only get worse when the website allows anyone to nominate other targets, including sitting American politicians. Hate your boss? Target her for death. Have a grudge? Explain it, and if the jury of public opinion sides with you, your nemesis will be marked for assassination. Novak himself ends up on the list, as do his closest colleagues in the FBI.
The worst part is that government authorities are unable to protect any of the targets, despite their best efforts. Complicated protection schemes fail, apparently due to the hackers’ ability to access any information they want. Even a faked death doesn’t fool the hackers forever. No matter how much money a person has, no matter how connected they are, they can’t escape killers ranging from elite assassins to everyday joes with nothing left to lose.
Plot explication needs to stop here, lest it ruins the story for you. Suffice to say that Byrnes explores the dark side of the internet thoroughly, builds action to an exciting peak … then undermines the whole thing with a less-than-perfect ending that some readers will see coming from a mile away. It’s forgivable, because Byrnes actually follows some of the consequences to their logical extremes, recognizing that such software is beyond value and that it could easily be turned to even more devious ends, such as targeting racial groups or members of one political party or another.
The stakes are real, even if the story isn’t, and this all plays out against the backdrop of the true and invasive Stuxnet worm, a sort of time bomb believed to be the work of the U.S. and Israel, which infected untold machines worldwide.
Despite its flaws, the story is a quick and urgent read, a page-turner, and its warnings about internet privacy, hacker collectives and the darknet are all too real. This “Bounty” is worth collecting.