“Sure. Maybe with some crossovers, but it’s easy enough to see that their online strategies operate according to different philosophies. Maybe there’s one or two guys overseeing it, but the actual attacks are all over the place. You see, they’ve been going after their competitors with sophisticated attacks going back a few years. I mean before Harcourt Bolton was sprung from that black site prison, which means he had infrastructure in place to run that part of things. That means Kuga not only had people already in place, but whoever was in charge of that division knew how to pick top talent. When I realized that I put some of my people on it, mostly looking for known or suspected top-tier black hat or black-leaning gray hat hackers who have either vanished recently or who’ve gotten rich.”

“Did you find any?”

“Sure. The one thing about the kind of hacker who specializes in this stuff is that a lot of them are young, and they have egos. They want to be known for what they’ve done. They tag it, usually by working some kind of smart-ass code into whatever software they wrote to do the intended damage.”

“What kind of damage?” asked Wilson. “And who are the targets?”

“Well, before Ohan was killed, his network had been thoroughly hacked. Dissected, really. We’ve acquired enough of his laptops, external drives, and even one mainframe—thanks to Arklight—and those files are riddled with malware. Those are applications designed to perform a variety of very malicious tasks. All kinds, too, and my bug-hunter guys were able to isolate each. There were malware strains designed to create persistent access to a network, which allowed Kuga to spy on Ohan’s day-to-day business operations. Other malware was planted to clone IDs, passwords, and the kind of encryption coding used to hide numbered bank accounts. We found these little bits of code left in the system, hidden inside Trojan horses, that pinged Kuga every time a transaction was made above a certain dollar amount. Kuga was able to review the purchases, which is how—I’m guessing—he was able to know which products and product lines were selling for top dollar, what the swings in sales numbers were, and who was buying the stuff.”

“Clever.”

“Very, and that code is a real bitch to find. Maybe two or three of the world’s top cybersecurity companies or groups could have found it, but then again, maybe not.”

“But you found it,” said Wilson. Not quite making it a question.

Bug sipped his drink and didn’t comment on that.