by Ben Coes
“We need to start thinking about the possibility that they succeed,” said Miller, the secretary of state.
“What does that mean?” said King.
“If they kill Dellenbaugh and wipe out the Fed, life still goes on,” said Miller. “At the end of the day, we’re still the United States of America, we’re still a country, and we’re still the leaders of this country. We need to start running contingencies.”
“Bailey’s right,” said Arnold, the secretary of defense. “Military response, Congress, and dealing with the humanitarian consequences, the tunnels, the dead, the families. We need to know what we’re going to do.”
“Right now, we need to get to the president first and stop whatever is happening at the Fed second,” said King. “Failure is not an option. We can worry about all that shit if it happens, but it ain’t happened yet.”
95
9:57 A.M.
LOBBY
UNITED NATIONS SECRETARIAT BUILDING
FIRST AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET
NEW YORK CITY
Murphy felt his phone vibrate. He looked at the screen.
NO CALLER ID
Murphy tapped the phone.
“Yeah?” said Murphy.
“Mike?” came a deep voice.
“Yes.”
“To your right,” said Dewey.
“Who am I talking to?” said Murphy.
Murphy felt like he was going to have a heart attack.
Suddenly the door opened and a male figure stepped into the lobby from a remote doorway. He was rough-looking, his right leg was red with blood, and he held a submachine gun. He was wearing a canvas vest over a striped polo shirt that looked dirty, wet, and ripped in several places. He had messed-up brown hair. But he looked American. Murphy, who was still slouched on the floor behind the display case, suddenly stopped hyperventilating and sat up.
Dewey stepped into the lobby at Murphy’s right, eyed Murphy, knelt, removed a pistol from beneath his armpit, placed it on the marble floor, then slid it across the floor to Murphy, who picked it up.
“Did you see anyone go for the elevators?” said Dewey.
“Yes,” said Murphy.
“How long?”
“Two, three minutes,” said Murphy. “I heard an elevator bell.”
“So Mike, I need you to listen to me,” said Dewey.
“I’m listening,” said Murphy.
“I’m going to clear out the lobby,” Dewey said. “Dellenbaugh is on eighteen and as far as we know, he’s alive. We have a few minutes at most. Go find an elevator in the back of the building. Floor eighteen. That’s where he is.”
“What do you want me to do?” said Murphy incredulously.
“Wait for me to clear out the lobby, then go,” said Dewey. “Eighteen. Until I clear the lobby, stay out of my way.”
“I mean when I get to eighteen? What if I’m the only one who gets there?” said Murphy.
“Then try and save him,” said Dewey. “They’re terrorists. Shoot as many as you can. Don’t waste bullets. Also, don’t shoot me.”
“Then what happens?” said Murphy.
“What do you mean ‘then what happens’?” said Dewey, speaking into his earbud and casting a glance at Murphy.
“What happens after that?” said Murphy nervously.
“How the fuck should I know? I’ll take you to Disneyland, how’s that?” said Dewey, tapping off.
96
10:00 A.M.
SEVENTH AVENUE
NEW YORK CITY
Singerman jogged down along sidewalks, cutting in a zigzag pattern, moving closer to the Interchem building.
The sound of automatic gunfire emanated from every direction, echoing inside the abandoned concrete corridors of skyscrapers and automobiles, and bodies on the ground.
At Seventh Avenue, he came to a marble-and-steel office tower and moved around the corner. He caught sight of a pair of enemy shooters immediately. They were emerging from an office building across the street, after a shooting spree inside. Each man clutched a rifle and was firing at anything moving. They pumped slugs up at windows in whatever building they happened to be in front of, shooting out glass everywhere.
Singerman knelt and fired—he sprayed the pair of terrorists in a burst of bullets from the SMG, dropping them to the sidewalk. He ran several blocks down Seventh. He was getting closer.
Ducked behind a hot dog cart, he heard a siren nearby. A police cruiser suddenly swerved around the corner. He knelt with the Uzi next to him. Singerman’s eyes caught the muzzle flash from the second floor of an office building as glass shattered in the same set of moments the police car was pounded with slugs, causing it to swerve and smash into the curb. The gunman continued firing from the building.
Singerman waited a minute then ran across the street, behind the cruiser, to the far corner of the block. He sprinted along the block—always with a hand on the building, hugging it in order to stay out of the assassin’s range.
He moved back toward the building where the sniper was holed up. He went through a revolving glass door and crossed a lobby scattered in blood and corpses. He took a stairwell and leapt three steps at a time, in silence, came to the door to the second floor, and paused. Singerman moved the door latch. He took several moments, each hundredth of an inch a particular moment to focus on, in utter silence. Inside, after shutting the door behind him, he sneaked along a dark corridor of offices. He heard the sound of gunfire. He opened a door and light streamed in through office windows, outlining the sniper, holding a rifle. He was a bearded man, in his twenties, and Singerman pumped the trigger, spitting two bullets into the man’s chest.
Singerman took the gunman’s firearm and saw the Iranian move, ever so slightly, still alive and trying to fight back. Singerman pumped the trigger. The bullet slammed the struggling Iranian in the neck, and it silenced him for good.
He glanced out the shattered window. Streets and sidewalks below contained a combination of dead bodies and abandoned cars. A man came jogging down the block, followed by another man. They had on street clothes: jeans, dark T-shirts, and running shoes. Each man clutched a submachine gun. They were looking for people to kill, and they held up on the sidewalk just below the window. He framed one of them through the broken glass and pumped the trigger. As a bullet struck the terrorist in the mouth, Singerman fired again, pounding the second man in the forehead.
He went back down to the lobby and—after inspecting the street in front from behind the window, and seeing no one—went back outside through the revolving door. He saw the dead Hezbollah he’d just killed. They were lying next to one another in contorted piles atop a growing red flood.
Singerman ran along the side of the buildings, cutting toward Sixth Avenue and the Fed. When he saw the Interchem building, he tapped his ear.
“Igor, it’s Singerman,” he said. “I’m at the building. I’ll call you when I’m on the floor of the room.”
As Singerman crossed the final street before the entrance, he heard gunfire just as he felt a bolt of white-hot pain in his back. He was sent forward and down, a pained grunt coming from him. He knew he’d been shot in the back. On the ground, he saw blood above his navel.
“Fuck,” he moaned, trying to move his legs.
He saw the man who’d shot him, behind a car. From the ground, Singerman pulled out a handgun. As acute pain stabbed all over his body, he raised his P226 and fired at the terrorist, missing with several shots, then hitting the man in the torso, dropping him.
“Fuck,” he said again, looking at the Interchem building. He knew he was in deep trouble. He couldn’t walk. Looking down, he saw blood spilling from his chest. He reached to his mouth, and his fingers came back bloodstained. Singerman understood he’d be dead soon. The destruction of the Fed was now inevitable.
97
10:00 A.M.
LOBBY
UNITED NATIONS SECRETARIAT BUILDING
FIRST AVENUE AND FORTY-SECOND STREET
<
br /> NEW YORK CITY
Dewey leveled the MP7A1 in a strike position and switched the fire selector to manual—single shot.
There were four Iranian gunmen—Hezbollah—facing the front of the building, holding the lobby against the waves of law enforcement trying to breach the terrorists’ cordon. Each one of the four had to know that they would die. Yet they’d already accepted that, and today was about going out fighting against an enemy they’d been taught to hate. That knowledge somehow gave them strength. They were firing rounds back out through the front of the lobby toward First Avenue, holding back law enforcement as the kill team moved up to Dellenbaugh.
Dewey gave Murphy a stern look, as if to remind him to not do anything, not even move. Above all else, he didn’t want Murphy to fuck it up somehow.
Dewey paced slowly into the atrium, tucking behind walls and columns, not to hide but rather so as to not get hit by incoming fire from SWAT. The environment was too loud for the gunmen to hear him; their attention was not on a penetration behind them.
Dewey skulked until he was at the nexus of the lobby, near the elevators, behind the four gunmen who were approximately a hundred feet away. The gunmen were focused on what was happening on the outside, and assumed the lobby was secure behind them. The lobby was so vast that they didn’t notice him.
Dewey pumped the first slug into the back of the head of the terrorist to his right. A gunman at the left swung his AR-15 as he shouted. From across the atrium, Dewey registered the gunman’s movement and pumped the trigger on the submachine gun. A short burst of suppressed slugs hammered into the gunman’s upper chest and neck. A third gunman turned. The Hezbollah fired blindly, spraying bullets. Dewey ducked and pumped the trigger on the SMG. He heard bullets whistle over his head as the man shot at him then was caught by Dewey’s gun—kicked violently backward, off his feet, tumbling down onto the marble floor. The fourth man—looking behind him to see what had just happened—was abruptly struck in the head by a high-caliber bullet fired from across the street.
98
6:01 P.M. GST
10:01 A.M. U.S. EST
USS PRINCETON
GULF OF OMAN
Admiral Dave Morris stood on the bridge of the USS Princeton. The guided-missile cruiser was pointed directly at a spread of land at least two hundred miles in the distance, an invisible point of land, but which was there.
“Firing sequences,” said Morris to one of his aides. “Lock and hold.”
Flouting Navy regulations, Morris had longish black hair, interspersed with silvery gray, and a thick beard and mustache, also scattered with gray. At six-foot-seven, Morris towered above everyone else on the bridge of the Princeton.
The bridge was the ship’s radar and war room. Morris had the con. He was widely considered one of America’s greatest naval tacticians. He’d fought unpublicized battles on water for nearly four decades now, unseen skirmishes never reported, and had nearly died in the Straits of Gibraltar, after a vicious but victorious exchange with Vladimir Putin’s navy.
He heard the high digital tone of the systems finally aligning.
“V5 weapon control system targeted and launch ready, sir.”
“Fire on three, two, one,” said Morris, “fire.”
The air was abruptly, and violently, rocked by loud explosions. Four Tomahawk missiles blasted one by one into the air, ripping into the sky above the ship. Each missile weighed almost two tons and cost around $1.5 million. Today, the Tomahawks would pay a surprise visit to the Republic of Iran, a six-million-dollar present from the United States to the country’s leader, Ali Suleiman.
Morris glanced through the window and looked around the bridge.
“Let’s raise security levels across the board,” said Morris. “I want battle stations. Please ask the Nimitz to send out a group protocol immediately.”
99
10:04 A.M.
THE CARLYLE
MADISON AVENUE
NEW YORK CITY
Igor sat upright, in front of a wide arc of computer screens. They spread in a curvilinear concave on top of a glass desk held up by brass stanchions.
Igor was sliding and pivoting on an Eames office chair on wheels—high-back, stainless steel, and clad in bright lime green leather—skating along the mahogany floor in front of the array of computer screens. The screens were filled with various activity. Igor was shirtless. A can of Dr Pepper was next to an elongated, unusual-looking red keyboard with white letters and numbers. Behind the Dr Pepper can were half a dozen others, all empty.
Through the windows, the faint roar of sirens and occasional screams could be heard from the streets below.
Igor, for a computer hacker, was in good shape. He wasn’t brawny, but rather sculpted, thin, and tan. He had earbuds in both ears. Usually he would’ve been listening to music. But right now he was tied into a central communications tree at the highest levels of the U.S. government.
Igor’s fingers moved intuitively across the keyboard, while his eyes swiveling back and forth between the two large screens, which were each cut into quadrants. Igor kept his eyes on eight different sections, watching everything as his fingers played the keyboard like a concert pianist.
The information on the screens was mostly streams of code, either white, green, yellow, or red against black, or black on white. This was the Fed. One section displayed a complex blueprint that he manipulated with the keyboard. It was a layout of a project in a Parametric Technologies digital CAD drawing. It was the architectural blueprints of the building that housed Fedwire, that part of the Fed that controlled all U.S. liquidity.
The second section of the screen was an algorithm written to determine the Federal Reserve’s security access to the room that housed the Risch algorithm that controlled the Federal Reserve, and thus the wealth and liquidity of the United States of America. He searched for vulnerabilities. Singerman had told him there was a security weakness in the entrance hardware. The entrance itself was some sort of electronic “sliding door” at the end of a fifty-foot corridor. To enter the governors’ room, one had to walk through the tunnel, which meant one had to turn off the electronic sliding door.
At the beginning of the tunnel were four screens. These were the screens the four governors of the Fed looked into, and pressed their thumbs down upon, in order to get into the tunnel. Igor obviously understood. This was why the governors had all been murdered.
One of the screens flashed green. It was providing him with signals metadata from the entrance corridor:
PEC: SCAN A-3
Ft. 50.0 Ht. 14.4 Temp. 4098.7 F
“Iisus,” said Igor aloud. “Chetyre tysyachi gradusov. Eto goryacho.”
* * *
Jesus. Four thousand degrees. That’s hot.
Igor ran the readings against a database he kept in a folder on his main platform, a folder composed of advanced weapons systems, beyond guns and ammunition, beyond chemical agents. All those were in a different folder. This one contained experimental weapons programs in the U.S., at the Pentagon and CIA, as well as what he’d been able to hack out of Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Israel, and other countries, along with the private sector, companies like General Dynamics, Boeing, Airbus, Halliburton, Raytheon, and several others. The cutting edge of defense systems. It was a compendium of advanced, technology-based systems, still secret, still in their infancy.
He doubted the readings would find a match. Yet, after half a minute, a quadrant in the lower portion of one of the screens flashed bright red:
Dassault Systems
Lyon, FR
ETY: FOR/Svi
Testing: UNIT 4672–87
Summary: Iodine sheet field
Certainty: 96.4%
Igor continued reading about the defense system that was guarding the Fed.
Dassault’s Iodine Sheet Field (“ISF”) is a SIGINT binary, iodine-based heat defense system capable of being confined within a geometric walled parallel. ISF has been shown to turn on and off
with thermal and/or chemical residue at 00.0013548 tHs per programmed grid pattern. It is the closest any government or company has gotten to a so-called force field, capable of being turned on and off, and heat and/or chemical protocols are untraceable immediately. The Dassault System ISF effectively vaporizes anything in its field of range, including human beings but more importantly any weapons and weapons systems, including bullets in flight and MANPADs. ISF is as of yet unknown to China or Russia. It was implemented by the U.S. Treasury Department at a cost of $16.4 billion. The location of the implementation is unknown, but it is most likely an end-of-days protective mechanism guarding the central trunk of the U.S. Treasury and the U.S.
Back on the first screen, Igor watched as new electronic signals emanated for the first time in hours from the Federal Reserve. But it was not benign. This was primary SIGINT moving down through the trunk of the steel box housing the Fed. He knew what it meant. Someone was inside the Fed, and whoever it was was typing.
He started to worry. He realized he needed Singerman’s help. There was no way to hack the Risch algorithm from the outside. The only way was for someone who knew how to get in to do so. Singerman had to get in and stop whoever it was.
Igor tapped his ear twice.
“Aaron, it’s Igor,” said Igor.
He heard nothing and waited, watching as signals activity from the Fed picked up.
“Aaron?” Igor repeated, but there was no reply.
100
10:05 A.M.
OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF STAFF
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Adrian King’s office was large—though somewhat thin and rectangular—but it had amazing views of the South Lawn and more important was next door to the Oval Office. The far end of the office, behind King’s desk, was all French doors and windows, and led out to a granite terrace that ran around part of the West Wing. Often Dellenbaugh or King would simply step out onto the terrace and walk to the other man’s office.