Covered in Darkness

by Heather Sunseri

  “I’m not exactly sure.” I tossed a grape in my mouth, then told him what Jude had told me. “But Sam is a former fusion center critical infrastructure analyst. She thinks like an analyst and is probably examining all angles, if she’s any good. And I’ve heard she was very good. I wanted to hire her back when I was forming my team for Homeland Security, but she claimed she was happy where she was.”

  He nodded while swallowing a bite of quiche. “Well, like I said earlier… if there’s anyone whose instincts I trust, it’s yours. Think you can be back in time to attend the sales at Kensington tonight?”

  I smiled. “I think I can manage that.”

  “You can take my car. I’ll get a ride back to Shaughnessy.” He ran a hand down my cheek. “I had Mrs. G send over a dress for the sales and the party after.”

  I angled my head. “Declan, I have plenty of dresses. I don’t need something new for this. Besides,” I added, “I quite enjoy picking out my own clothes.”

  “If you don’t like what Mrs. G sends over, you can wear something you already have. And although I know you enjoy shopping, you never take the time to do so.”

  “Good point.” I leaned back in my seat and took a sip of my caramel macchiato. “What kind of pedigree you looking for at the sales tonight?”

  He smiled. “A little of this, a little of that.”

  “You’re looking for another Bluegrass Derby horse, aren’t you? That’s what that weird look on Aidan’s face was all about.” Though I didn’t understand the need for secrets.

  “I’m always for a Derby horse.” His face lit up. “With the exception of some sociopath poisoning you and murdering our last governor, winning the Derby was a lot of fun.”

  I laughed, though nothing about being drugged that day was fun. “I would like to do that again. Minus the experience of having my stomach pumped.”

  “Of course.” He smiled.

  We finished our breakfast, enjoying a rare moment of light conversation.

  “Think you can call me when you’re on your way back home?” he asked when we were done.

  “I can do that.” I flagged down Marti and asked her for another latte to go.

  Chapter 10

  Samantha Clay’s house was in the Highlands area of Louisville, an affluent but eclectic neighborhood full of quirky boutiques and excellent locally owned restaurants. It took us much longer than it normally would have, because I took the back roads, thinking the main roads might be clogged. Here and there cars had been abandoned at the side of the road, presumably from running out of gas, and almost everywhere we went, pedestrians roamed. They made me a little nervous; they were most likely harmless, but we didn’t have time for trouble.

  But Bardstown Road, typically a very busy street, was eerily quiet. The businesses were closed, and several storefronts had broken front windows.

  “Why are people such assholes?” I said. “Power has been out just under thirty-six hours. I just don’t understand the need for vandalism.”

  “Turn right here,” Ty said. “Then make your second left. Sam’s house should be the fifth house on the right.”

  As I approached Sam’s address, I saw a nondescript vehicle on the opposite side of the road. Two middle-aged men sat inside the car with the windows down. Both wore sunglasses, and one had a dark beard.

  “This should be it—” Ty turned in his seat as I kept on driving. “What are you doing? That was it.”

  I looked in my rearview mirror. The two men were scrunched down in their seats and staring across the street at Sam’s house. I knew a stakeout when I saw one.

  I made my next right. “Did you see the car across the street from her house?”

  “No, why?”

  “Someone’s watching her house.”

  “What? Who would be watching her?”

  I took another right. “That’s an excellent question.” I pulled over against the curb about where I thought we could cut across to Sam’s back yard.

  “Do we have a signal?” I asked. I held my phone in the air, even though I knew this didn’t increase my chances of getting a signal.

  “No, we lost signal prior to reaching Jefferson County.”

  I slid my phone into my skirt pocket anyway; it felt wrong not to have it with me. I also grabbed my gun and holster from my purse and strapped it to my waist, letting my T-shirt cover it. It was much too hot for the blazer.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “Yes, but what’s the plan?”

  “First we make sure Sam is okay, see if she knows that someone’s watching her house. Then we’ll think about confronting whoever it is.”

  “You can take the agents out of the FBI, but you can’t take the FBI out of the agents,” Ty said. He and I traded smiles. “Let’s go.”

  The street we’d parked on was quiet. Unlike the less affluent neighborhoods we’d driven through earlier, where every porch was occupied by people driven from their homes by the heat, the porches here were deserted. Most of the houses had windows open on the second stories, but the windows on the lower levels were closed, with the curtains or blinds closed. The residents were probably trying to keep the sunlight out, to keep the houses as cool as possible, while also keeping the lower levels locked up tight and safe from intruders.

  When I looked up at the house directly in front of us—two-story, red brick—I noticed movement behind a curtain.

  I skirted the vehicle, already starting to perspire in the oppressive midday heat, and touched Ty’s arm. “We have an audience,” I said, nodding to the front window. The curtain moved again.

  “Good eye. We need to stay alert. I’d say people are getting a little twitchy at this point.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I’d say a third to half of the people around here have a handgun or hunting rifle.”

  “And less than half of them know how to safely use them.”

  We started toward the driveway of a neighboring house. This house was quiet and still, but I was hyperaware of our surroundings, listening and watching for any sign of life.

  As we got closer to the house, the smell hit Ty and me at the same time. We both reflexively covered our mouths and noses with bent arms.

  “What is that?” Ty asked, keeping his voice low.

  I gestured toward a city garbage can. “Someone cleaned out their refrigerator before their food spoiled inside the house.”

  We walked down the driveway into the back yard. A seven-foot privacy fence enclosed the back yard on the left, but this one was open, framed only by a line of arborvitae, so we would be able to pass through and hopefully get to Sam’s house.

  As we stepped through the back yard, the little hairs on the back of my neck suddenly stood at attention. I thought seriously about arming myself with my Sig, but I didn’t want to look threatening to anyone who was watching—and provoke them into unnecessarily defending their property. But there was no doubt in my mind that we were being watched.

  Just as we neared the back of the property and were about to step into the back yard of another house, I heard the low, guttural growl of an animal.

  Ty and I froze. Ty’s head rotated around, his eyes wide, mirroring mine.

  When the growls turned to full-on, ferocious barking, my heart leapt into my throat. That was, until I realized that the dog was actually on the other side of the privacy fence. I massaged the spot on my chest directly over my wildly thumping heart. Ty bent over at the waist to catch his breath, laughing through his own fear.

  “Let’s go,” he said finally. “That barking will draw attention our way. We need to get to Sam before people venture out to see who we are.”

  We passed through a couple more back yards without incident. Luckily, none of them were enclosed with a fence. When we reached Sam’s back yard, we climbed some steps to her back door. An ultra-efficient generator thrummed with remarkable noise off to one side.

  We knocked lightly and heard someone moving around inside.

  “Who is it?” a female voic
e asked. “You should know I have a gun.”

  Ty and I traded looks.

  “Sam, it’s Brooke Fairfax. I’m a friend of Jude’s from Kentucky Homeland Security.” I held my identification up to the glass.

  Silence. Several seconds passed before we heard the sound of a deadbolt and the rattling of the doorknob.

  When the door opened, Sam stared at us with worried eyes. She was barely five feet tall, and she’d been telling the truth when she’d warned us she was armed.

  “That’s a serious weapon,” Ty said, nodding toward the Ruger nine-millimeter.

  Sam just shrugged.

  “Can we come in?” I asked.

  Keeping the pistol pointed to the ground, she backed away and allowed us to enter the kitchen. The temperature was made tolerable by a host of floor and box fans strewn about.

  Sam closed and bolted the door behind us. “Jude tell you where I lived?” She laid her gun on an old farm table in the middle of her kitchen and sat in one of the ladder-back chairs.

  “Yes,” I said. “He said you had a theory about the power outage that didn’t quite match the company line.”

  “But first…” Ty crossed the kitchen and walked toward the front of the house. “Did you know you’re being watched?”

  “What?” Sam looked at me, then stood and followed Ty.

  “There’s a blue sedan parked across the street, with two men staring at your house.”

  Ty sidled up to the front. Floor-length panels hung across the double windows, darkening the living room. A little light seeped in through the sides of the curtains and through an arched window over the front door to the right. Ty verified the car was still there, then backed away and allowed Sam to look out.

  “You recognize them?” I asked.

  She turned and faced us, fear etched in her tense expression. “No.”

  “Let’s go back to the kitchen,” I said. “We’ll talk, then Ty and I will see if we can get you out of here. Since they’re just sitting there, I assume they’re simply interested in your movements.”

  “Why else would they be there?” Sam asked.

  “Good question.” But not one I wanted to answer, since I didn’t want to concern her more than she already was. “Let’s start with your theory of why you think the power is down.”

  Sam returned to the chair at the head of the table. She ran a shaky finger along the barrel of her gun. “You should know, I’m a conspiracy theorist.” She lifted her eyes to mine. “Maybe it comes from my time at the fusion center before Kentucky lost their funding. Maybe it’s because my father is a prepper—he’s why I have not only a generator but a satellite phone—and is constantly researching the ways our society could self-destruct.”

  I waited patiently for her to continue.

  “Anyway,” she said, “while I was in the break room yesterday—waiting for my bosses to decided if they even needed my help—I overheard a casual conversation between two women. One of them mentioned how she had received an email about health insurance open enrollment on Monday, and she couldn’t believe how much her insurance was going down. The other woman had gotten the same email.”

  “Okay…” What did this have to do with anything?

  “It’s only September,” Sam continued. “Open enrollment doesn’t happen for another month. I know this because it’s always right around my birthday. Not to mention: When was the last time you remembered anyone’s health insurance premiums going down?”

  “You think it was a phishing scam?” Ty asked.

  “Something like that. So I asked the two of them about the email. Told them I hadn’t received it, and that I wanted to look for it when our computers were back up. They said the email came from the head of our personnel, Myra McCreary. It had Myra’s signature at the bottom of the email, and the attached spreadsheet had our company’s logo at the top.”

  “A spreadsheet?” I asked.

  “Yes. A spreadsheet with macros. When I questioned them further, I discovered they had been prompted to enable macros within the spreadsheet—and of course, they did.”

  “I’ve heard about this type of spearphishing before,” Ty said. “Hackers place a simple stream of coding in a spreadsheet’s macro. Spoofing the email of a top-level person in the business and sending it to a highly targeted group of employees greatly increases the chances they’ll open the email and click on the attachment.”

  “Exactly,” Sam said. “All it takes is for one person to download the right program onto the company’s server for a hacker to get complete access to the server and everything it controls. Look, seventy percent of the nation’s key electric grid components are more than twenty-five years old. This stuff was designed before the internet even existed on a large scale. If a savvy hacker got past our firewalls and into the grid’s inner guts, they could cause a real shitstorm.”

  “You really think hackers used malware to take down the grid?” Ty asked.

  “Don’t you?” Sam looked from Ty to me. “Isn’t that why the director and the deputy director of the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security—two former FBI agents and analysts—are in my house? You don’t believe a storm took out a significant, but completely contained, portion of Kentucky’s power grid, and that this somehow resulted in a widespread blackout that has lasted thirty-six hours.”

  I paced. “So why is LP trying to convince the country that this was nothing more than a power outage, caused by an overloading of the circuits after a storm took out a few substations?”

  “That’s the multi-million dollar question, isn’t it?” Sam said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Every hour, every minute, every second that the power is out, businesses are losing money. Lives are being lost, literally. If generators at hospitals start failing and they begin losing patients in droves, or if people are dying because they can’t get their medicines, Louisville Power will be sued many times over. If it turns out that they can be held responsible, that they could have prevented the power outage…”

  “How would this make LP responsible?” Ty asked. “Even if hackers—”

  Sam held up a hand. “Not just hackers, but terrorists. They wanted something, and Louisville Power didn’t deliver.”

  I studied Sam’s determined face. For someone so small, I was willing to bet that she was way underestimated. “So,” I said. “How do we prove this theory?”

  “I need to be connected to Louisville Power’s main server when the power comes back on.”

  “Do you need to be inside the company to do that?”

  “No, and I’m not sure they’d let me back in anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t realize it until it was too late, but Blake Saltzman overheard me discussing the open enrollment email with the two ladies. Next thing I knew, Mr. Saltzman was asking me to go home. ‘To get some rest.’ Don’t call us; we’ll call you.”

  “They don’t want you discovering the malware.” If it existed.

  She nodded.

  “So what do you need?” Ty asked.

  “I need someone I can trust to make sure I’m awake the second the power comes back up. I need to find the malware before they do.”

  “You also need protection, apparently.” I nodded toward the front of the house. “We can help you with both.”

  Chapter 11

  Declan

  Being prompt was not one of Brooke’s gifts. I doubted I would ever get used to it, but I forgave her for it because the alternative was not one I was willing to accept.

  I called her again.

  She answered on the first ring. “How’s my favorite Irishman?” She sounded upbeat, which made me even more willing to forgive her for being late.

  “Better now.” I stood in front of the wall of monitors in my home office, hoping my SUV would appear at the front gate any second.

  “Have you missed me?”

  “You have to ask?”

  “Sorry for the lack of contact. In addition to n
o electricity, there’s no cell service in the ’Ville either.”

  “The ’Ville” was what many locals called Louisville. I didn’t care for the nickname.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re back in the civilized world,” I said. “According to the news, Louisville will be dark for another evening at least. Hospitals predict they’ll lose power in the next few hours. Critical patients have already been relocated to Lexington and other regional hospitals.”

  “Yeah, it’s a powder keg. The National Guard has things mostly under control for now, but I predict more crime and chaos to erupt tonight. It’s a freaking oven in Louisville, and people are getting as angry as they are hot. But LP expects the power to start coming back on in the next few hours. We have their cyber security expert stationed inside the fusion center. Jude, Ty, and Carson are with her.”

  “And where are you?”

  “I’m on my way to change for the Kensington sales, of course. I told you I would attend the auction tonight. And I’m always up for getting dressed up for a cocktail party.”

  I was relieved that she wasn’t calling to cancel on me, but I couldn’t tell if she was being serious about looking forward to the cocktail party. “I have a surprise for you—one that I think will make the night worth it.”

  “Please say it’s shoes. Please say it’s shoes.”

  I imagined her closing her eyes and praying her words. “I’m not spoiling it. Hurry home.”

  Just as I was hanging up the phone, it alerted me to a perimeter breach. I looked up at my security monitors. I had cameras strategically placed all around the farm, and since I’d become involved with Brooke, I’d decided it made sense to pay someone to watch them at night. I had night watchmen on the farm already; why not pay one of them to monitor the video feeds when he wasn’t making the rounds on the farm?

  I’d become even more alert ever since Romeo had let my prized Derby winner out of his stall.

  I moved closer to one of the screens. A figure in dark clothing was moving through the shadows.