Directive 51

by John Barnes

  No worry about passing them because when they were drafting, they were doing like a hundred or better; that didn’t seem fair to Marshalene, but shit, life wasn’t fair. She’d just barely found her groove, living in Missoula, when they threw her out of her apartment and made her go home. The whole world was full of mean people, and like the sticker said, they sucked.

  Behind the rear passenger-side motor, where Jason had planted them, the two black eggs were getting steady sunlight from the south, warmth from the motor, and a steady flux of alternating magnetic fields; as programmed, each of them kept resetting and streaming out slightly different versions of nanoswarm every hundred thousand copies or so, which was about every four seconds.

  Almost all of the nanoswarm were caught in the slipstream as the air rushed around the spinning wheels, scattered into the wake in the air behind the Prius. The strong southwest wind off the mountains blew them in a thick cloud across the wide median; some landed in the dirt, many on the small, scrawny pine trees or in the brush, but millions of nanoswarm were sucked into the six-mile-long cyberlinked truck convoy, lighting in the engines and on grilles, finding energy sources and metal and beginning to feed and reproduce.

  By the time Marshalene’s Prius had passed—only about two minutes, since they were going in opposite directions—all 562 trucks in the locked chain were infected, and for the next few hours, they covered Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho’s lifeline highway with tens of billions of nanoswarm, till a few peeled off the convoy; till their engines, electronics, and motors failed and stranded a few more; and till the rest piled at the foot of a cliff in Lookout Pass where IBIS had gone dead and so had the warning system.

  ABOUT THE SAME TIME. GILLETTE. WYOMING. ABOUT 3:30 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.

  Behind a boarded-up apartment building, Zach stripped off his coat, and with it the cheap whiskey smell; his dirty, ragged outer shirt; and his filthy dreadlocked wig and knit cap. He left the clothes on the old bicycle, to be stolen and carry the bug farther. The wig might look suspicious, so he threw it under the old, rotting deck—anyone who saw it would think it was a dead animal.

  At the mall, Zach squatted in the stall till the men’s room was empty, then climbed at once onto the sink, pushed up the ceiling tile, and pulled down the white plastic bag. He jumped down and scrubbed the brownish blotchy makeup off his face, hands, and neck in the sink.

  In the stall, he took clean shoes, shirt, pants, and a light jacket from the bag. He dug out the hotel keys and car keys from the pocket of his bum pants, and put his bum clothes into the bag. As he emerged from the stall, carrying the white bag discreetly by his side, a high-pitched voice declared, “I’m going to poop right in here,” and an indulgent adult male voice said, “That’s right, Malachai, that’s what we come here for.”

  Zach nodded at the little boy and his harried father; the kid looked a lot like his firstborn, Noah, at that same age. Enjoy indoor pooping while you can, Malachai.

  He emptied the bag while unobserved in a toy store (plenty of plastic there).

  At the opposite end of the mall, he caught the shuttle bus to the Holiday Inn, where his car, regular-person clothes, razor, and tub were waiting for him. On the shuttle bus, he bowed his head to pray gratefully. His phone vibrated; he put it to his ear. “Hey.”

  “Hi, I’m looking for Laura Haxson.”

  “Nobody by that name at this phone.” Zach hung up.

  In his hotel room, he hit the dialback.

  The view from Jason’s picnic table at the roadside rest, just outside Gillette, was very Hollywood: water towers and steeples above the blaze of fall colors from the old trees. No doubt it would turn out to be seedy and run-down.

  His cell phone vibrated; the call was from UNAVAILABLE. “Yeah?”

  “Did you want to buy a snowmobile?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you have to trade?”

  “Real old F-150.”

  “Okay, meet me at a rental property I own, it’s real run-down and doesn’t look good, just bring the truck all the way up the driveway.”

  Sounded like WalksWDLord had found a good concealed spot, just as they’d agreed. Jason scribbled directions in ballpoint on his hand. “Got it.”

  “I’ve got a shower here.” WalksWDLord explained how to walk to the Holiday Inn. “I’m in Room 215. You can clean up here and then we’ll grab some dinner and be on the road.”

  “Very cool.”

  Jason prayed that the truck had one more start left in it. He didn’t think the nanospawn would be able to knock out the alternator quite this fast, but shorting out the battery or eating the electronic distributor was well within their reach, to judge by the way the music had gone dead half an hour ago.

  He thought about peeking under the hood, but there’d be time enough for that once he got to his destination, and meanwhile it would be better not to let in light, or more nanospawn.

  The house with the FOR RENT sign was right where it was supposed to be, and Jason followed the driveway around to the garage in the back.

  Jason stripped off coat, hat, gloves, and sweater, and tossed them onto the back porch. Maybe some homeless dude would find them and spread the nanospawn. He erased the cell phone’s recent calls, turned it off, and tossed it over the alley into a toy-crowded back yard to spread more nanospawn.

  Jason took out his second pair of clean chem-proof gloves (sprinkled with Drano crystals, inside tied-off condoms) and slipped them on, walked back to the truck, opened the passenger-side door, poured Liquid-Plumr over the top of his pack, rinsed with a bottle of distilled water. He shrugged the pack on.

  He left both doors hanging open and the keys in the ignition. On a whim, he raised the hood too, and looked inside by the bright afternoon sunlight.

  The battery top had been clean the night before, but now it was covered with fluffy white crystals. The ends of wires everywhere were clotted with colored metal salts, and corrosion mixed with too-bright spots to speckle the whole surface of the engine. Definitely working—good. I’d sure feel like a damn idiot if it wasn’t.

  ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 5:54 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.

  Heather was huddled with Working Group Jayapura Ground, going over how the supposedly secure TBMW signal had probably been tapped. “A guy in Jim Browder’s Tech Assessment Office, Paulton Shapiro, has cataloged the ways to steal tight-beam microwave signals. The one I think happened here is called phased-interference edge-diffracted scattering, PIEDS, because it’s best adapted to a situation where a beam has to go between very precisely known locations and pass through an aperture surrounded by a conductor, like say the aluminum frame of a window.”

  “Is that off-the-shelf tech?” Khang from CIA asked.

  “You can’t buy it in a store, but DARPA’s labs have been trying to build them since way back in the Obama administration. Probably fifty countries have experimented with it. Somebody was bound to make PIEDS work in field conditions, sooner or later. It’s not intrinsically expensive, just needs very fast processors and some work-arounds on a couple physics issues. And it makes sense. To take the plane by subterfuge, intact, they needed to go the instant the plane went into radio silence. They knew the right time because the Pawhan/Bell cell set them up so that they were vulnerable to PIEDS. So—”

  Cameron tapped her shoulder. “I know I’ve taken you through three working groups in an hour, Heather, but I need you in another one. Please come with me.”

  At first she thought she was going to be in Working Group Pawhan Bell because he led her to the conference room where they were, but he just stuck his head in and said, “Dr. Edwards.”

  “Coming.”

  It was Edwards from the FBI, the one who looked like Popeye and had been at the Daybreak presentation. He nodded politely, and said, “Here we are again.”

  “Yeah.” Heather was trying to think of how to ask what was going on, but Cameron hurried on, and the two of them hurried to catch up; he gestured them
into a conference room but didn’t go in himself. Lenny Plekhanov was the only person in there. “Hi, do you guys have any idea what Cam’s doing?”

  “None at all,” Heather said. “Lenny Plekhanov, this is Agent Edwards—Dr. Edwards, I guess, from what Cam—”

  “The doctorate’s in social psych,” Edwards said, “and Lenny and I know each other, we worked on—”

  The door opened and an assistant brought in five more people; the four Heather recognized were Reynolds, who was another FBI agent; Robbins, the CIA analyst from the Daybreak meeting; Nancy Telabanian, a quiet woman in a dark suit, who was Lenny Plekhanov’s boss from NSA; and the guy from Deep Black. The one Heather didn’t know was an African-American woman in a colonel’s uniform with the Army’s Cyber Command patch. They had barely sat down and begun shaking hands and getting acquainted when Cam came in and closed the door.

  He walked to the end of the table and stood resting his hands on it, as if he might need to lunge out the door at any moment. “Heather, I have to ask right away, bluntly. Hannah Bledsoe told me about your presentation regarding the Daybreak movement this morning, and that whatever Daybreak is, it is apparently already active. Can you assure me that it has nothing to do with this present situation? And whether it does or not, do you see an impact on what’s going on?”

  Heather felt the implicit criticism—as Cam had doubtless known she would—in the pit of her stomach. She could feel herself being fitted with the tag that read FAMOUS UNKNOWN IDIOT, the tag that adhered to the officer at Pearl Harbor who saw planes on the new experimental radar and thought they must be a much smaller flight of American planes he was expecting, the intelligence officers who ignored aerial photos of all that Russian construction gear moving into Berlin in 1961, and the FBI administrator who didn’t see anything urgent in so many Saudi men with al-Qaeda links taking flying lessons; she could imagine headlines on a billion screens: DOF COP COULD HAVE PREVENTED DISASTER.

  Edwards gazed at her like the eyepits of a skull. “Well, if—”

  Cameron silenced him with a glare. At least he understands that I’m thinking.

  If the seizure of the Vice President wasn’t connected to Daybreak, it had to be history’s most amazing accidental—

  Timing.

  The thing their unknown enemy was best at.

  “I think,” she said, “that there has to be a connection, even though it’s so improbable that it didn’t even occur to me.” She looked around the room. “Those of you who weren’t at the briefing, how much do you know about Daybreak?”

  “I only heard about it fifteen minutes ago,” Cameron said. He managed not to sound as if he should have heard about it sooner, one more thing Heather owed him for.

  “I read through the liaison’s notes earlier this afternoon,” the colonel from Cyber Command said. She shrugged. “Not with the attention I should have; I thought it was interesting, not urgent for me.”

  Heather sketched it out in a few brief sentences—a leaderless, directionless-on-purpose anti-movement, built around the idea that with enough small, self-replicating bio- and nano- sabotage carried out simultaneously, the Big System—the modern world, really—could be taken down so that it never arose again. She took full blame for not alerting people earlier. “Just this morning, Graham Weisbrod himself had to corner me and tell me that we needed to talk to the rest of DoF, and while we were doing that my chief researcher on the project discovered that Daybreak had started.”

  Nancy Telabanian from NSA, said, “Lenny, I’m guessing you didn’t see how vital this was going to be.”

  “I gave Heather as much support as I could out of the amateur section,” Lenny said. “But Daybreak uses continuously modulated one-time keys for their ciphers—the same basic tech that spy agencies and armies use nowadays all over the world—and what they were using was good enough to keep us weeks, sometimes months, behind Daybreak’s key changes. We usually read their traffic five to nine weeks behind, till just this week when we identified what they were using as their modulator key.” He pushed his big, soft flop of black hair off his forehead, distracting Heather for an instant. “I’m afraid I was every bit as blind as Heather—”

  Edwards glanced around the room. “I am quite certain my office would have done no better with this, Mr. Nguyen-Peters. We all claim to expect the unexpected, but it’s a lie we tell to protect our budgets. We don’t need to analyze how we missed Daybreak. I don’t think that’s productive. I do think Ms. O’Grainne almost certainly has to be right—Daybreak and this attack on the Vice President are linked, or it is the greatest coincidence in history.”

  “Does everyone agree?” Cameron asked.

  Nods all around the room.

  Cameron leaned forward, resting his hands on the table. “Unless someone dissents, Heather O’Grainne is now the head of Working Group Daybreak, and you’re all members. Your mission is to find the Daybreak link to the seizure of Air Force Two; no action plan just yet, we’ll decide what to do once we know what we’re looking at. Heather, bring over whoever you need from OFTA and DoF for the duration of the crisis; I’ll message Graham Weisbrod and square that. Are there any crypto resources that NSA can spare for getting caught up on Daybreak’s communications?”

  “I’ll get them for you, Lenny,” Telabanian said.

  “Good.” Cameron stood back up and said, “You’ve got this room any time you need it, but I imagine you’ll want to work mostly from your desks in the main room. Any objections to anything I’ve just decided?”

  Edwards said, “I’m very glad we’re finally giving Assistant Secretary O’Grainne what she needs to do the job right and quickly.”

  Heather realized then that Cam had more or less forced a buy-in on everyone in the room, especially Edwards. Now they’re on record that whatever I did wrong about Daybreak before, it was because I didn’t have the resources. Now that I do have the resources, the price of keeping my job is that I really have to do it. The only way Cameron could throw me a line was to give me enough rope to hang myself. That’s the nature of friendship in this town.

  ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES LATER. GILLETTE. WYOMING. 4:38 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.

  It looked like a weather station. An anemometer on a waist-high tripod turned slowly around in the light breeze; a wire from its base went to a telephone-sized aluminum box, connected by a short wire to a black box the size of a matchbox—a cellular wireless server.

  Inside the aluminum box, a computer continually compared the time and the windspeed. Decisions about time took priority, and up until recently had been very simple: The program said do nothing until 4:00 P.M. or later, so every second, right on cue, the computer woke up, saw it wasn’t 4:00 P.M. yet, set a timer to tick off another second, and went back to sleep, like a child on Christmas morning who checks every five minutes to see if it is time to get up yet, and then dutifully goes back to bed before checking in another five minutes. At the speeds at which computers operated, that was less than a billionth of its working time.

  After 4:00 P.M., the computer began to consult its rolling record of the windspeed across the last twenty minutes. This was more complicated. On the plains close to the Rockies, a strong west wind tends to rise in late afternoon, almost every day, as the shadowed east faces of the mountains cool and pour a torrent of cold, dense air down to where air warmed by a whole day of sunshine is still rising off the ground. The wind blows strong and flows across hundreds of miles; it’s a perfect medium for dispersing anything in the air.

  Zach had written the program to detect the point when the strong evening wind was well-established; it took windspeed readings every second and kept a back file of 1200 of them, twenty minutes’ worth. Each second after 4:00 P.M., it averaged the list; when the average windspeed across the last twenty minutes was more than thirty-five kilometers per hour, it reviewed the list to make sure that there had been no more than ten consecutive seconds below 25 kph, Zach’s test to make sure that this was the real, strong mountain breeze, n
ot just a stray gust.

  At 4:42 P.M., those conditions were all met. The computer sent 750 phone numbers to the server, which dialed the triggers in all 750 of the bottles filled with black powder. As each came online the computer told it to arm and check; all were armed and checked in less than four seconds. The computer sent a signal to fire; a hundredth of a second later, when the 750th call dropped, the computer fired a small charge to destroy itself. People on the street thought it was a gunshot, looked around, and concluded it was something else.

  Davidson resented like hell the way he had to be out there on collection days from fucking three thirty till goddam well six fucking o’clock sometimes, because although he had a great team with Howard and Isaac, and a tolerable one with Dorothy and Juan, the team of Fred and Annie was just absolutely not to be trusted at all. Sure enough, they came in late because they’d stopped to check on their kid in the day care, and they gave him some routine about how it smelled so bad they had to take showers, because it would never’ve occurred to numbnuts Fred or his fat slobby wife that maybe they should wait till they were done to shower instead of just getting all stunk up again.

  Now they were busy telling Davidson their whole fucking life story, which was something they often did on the clock. He could have told it for them: Fred used to drink and party, and Annie did too. They got Jesus after their firstborn baby died, and he must have been sent from heaven to straighten them out. I’m sure that comforted the shit out of the little fucker, drowning in the bathtub while you idiots got stoned. But Davidson didn’t say that; people who would at least show up weren’t all that easy to find.