Blackout: Tomorrow Will Be Too Late

by Marc Elsberg

  ‘Damn!’

  Michelsen looked up to see the man next to her straighten up and stare intently at the row of screens tuned in to the handful of TV networks that were still broadcasting. Only then did she notice that most of the others in the room had also stopped what they were doing. It had become significantly quieter in the room. Someone turned up the volume for CNN.

  The monitor showed a young woman with brown hair speaking into the camera. The caption identified her as Lauren Shannon, The Hague. Michelsen read the news ticker at the bottom of the screen.

  Europe-wide power outage – terror attack suspected. Italy and Sweden confirm manipulation of their electric grids.

  Michelsen felt something inside her break. Now the public would learn about the cause of the calamity from a television network, instead of from the authorities or the chancellor. Their failure to ‘come clean’ meant those institutions would forfeit a large measure of the public’s trust. Hopefully they wouldn’t have to pay for it in the days to come.

  ‘We’re lucky hardly anyone can still watch television,’ whispered the man sitting next to her.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Everyone in this country will have heard the news by midnight,’ Michelsen replied, without taking her eyes off the screen. ‘And speculation will be rife.’

  Now all that’s missing is a story on the accident at the French nuclear power plant, she thought.

  The Hague, Netherlands

  ‘I should tear up your contract immediately,’ raged Bollard. Shannon followed the discussion from the couch in Manzano’s room.

  ‘I didn’t say a word about my work here,’ said Manzano. ‘As stipulated by our agreement. Your own press office confirmed the suspicions to Lauren.’

  ‘After you had told her about the codes in the Italian meters!’ The Frenchman was still incensed.

  ‘Which I found out about before we began working together.’

  ‘Most governments and several energy companies have been forced to start issuing confirmations after your girlfriend’s’ – he pointed at Shannon – ‘inquiries.’

  The images of the reporters who had picked up Shannon’s story ran across the television screen. Almost every channel was running a special report.

  Bollard sighed. ‘What am I supposed to do with you now?’

  ‘You let me get back to work. Or send me home.’

  ‘You can be sure about one thing, all this sneaking around is over,’ Bollard said, and with that he stormed out of the room.

  ‘We kicked the anthill, all right,’ observed Manzano. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m shattered,’ he announced.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘You go ahead and take the bathroom first.’

  While Shannon got ready for bed, Manzano followed the TV reports, deep in thought. He still hadn’t been able to reach Bondoni, and he couldn’t stop wondering how the old man and the three women were faring in the mountains.

  The American reappeared, now dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. ‘Thank you. For letting me stay here. And for giving me the story.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  He was still a little incredulous that she would spend the night in a room with a man she didn’t know without a second thought. She could almost be my daughter, he thought. Not to mention she was drop-dead gorgeous.

  Manzano sauntered wearily into the bathroom. He wondered how long the hotel’s backup generators would continue to provide electricity and hot showers.

  When he came back into the room, Shannon was lying under the covers on her side of the bed. Her breathing was deep and even. Quietly Manzano turned off the television, got into bed and was asleep the moment his head hit the pillow.

  Day 4 – Tuesday

  The Hague, Netherlands

  Shannon woke up from a nightmare, bathed in sweat. She breathed deeply, slowly got her bearings. She was in the hotel room. The walls were flickering with blue and orange light, like in a discotheque. Next to her someone turned restlessly in the bed. Of course, the Italian. She stood up, went to the window, pushed the curtains aside.

  Down the street a building was burning. Flames were shooting out of the windows and the roof. Thick smoke rose into the night sky. Several fire engines were parked haphazardly on the street; two ladders were extended, from which streams of water sprayed into the inferno. Firemen ran back and forth, evacuating the residents of neighbouring buildings. There were people in pyjamas, with blankets around their shoulders. Shannon felt for her camera on the bedside table and started filming.

  ‘Probably someone trying to start a campfire in his living room to keep warm,’ she heard from behind her and gave a start. She hadn’t been aware of Manzano getting out of bed.

  ‘Easy for us to say, in our warm hotel room,’ she responded. ‘It’s the start of the fourth day without heat and electricity. People are desperate.’

  She zoomed in on a top-floor window from which thick smoke was billowing. Then through the lens she spotted something moving.

  ‘Oh my God …’

  A shadow waved, clutched the window frame, climbed out. A woman in soot-covered pyjamas, hair whipped by the wind, blowing across her face. In the dark opening someone else appeared alongside her, someone smaller.

  ‘There are people in the building,’ she stammered, not lowering the camera. ‘A mother and child …’ The woman had taken the child by the arm. She stood on the windowsill, her free hand clutching the frame, leaning with the child as far away from the smoke as possible.

  ‘They can’t get there with the ladder,’ whispered Manzano.

  Flames shot out of the window. The woman let go, swayed and fell.

  Nanteuil, France

  Annette opened her eyes and stared into the darkness. Her bedroom smelled different. Then she remembered that she wasn’t in her own bedroom but at the Bollards’.

  The uncomfortable conditions brought about by the power outage, their son-in-law’s mysterious hints and the hurried flight from Paris had made for a restless first night. But after last night’s news reports, sleep was impossible. Bollard Senior had tried without success to reach his son on the landline in the hope of verifying whether there was any truth in the story. The four of them had then sat up discussing what it might mean, until weariness got the better of them. Annette had lain awake for a while, listening to her husband’s long, calm breaths interspersed with brief snoring sounds. Much as she was doing now.

  But then another sound made its way to her ears. It sounded like a staticky voice ringing out from far away. Annette listened. The monotone sing-song, she couldn’t understand a word of it, grew louder, seemed to get closer. Then silence.

  A few seconds later the address started up again. Again growing louder, but still just as unintelligible. She sat up and shook her husband by the shoulder.

  ‘Bertrand, wake up. Do you hear that?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ he grumbled, irritated at being woken.

  ‘Listen! There’s an announcement coming from outside – in the middle of the night!’

  The covers rustled, she heard her husband shuffle into a sitting position.

  ‘What’s going on? What time is it?’

  ‘Shh. A little after four. What are they saying?’

  Again her husband groaned, ran a hand over his face, then listened intently.

  ‘I can’t understand a word they’re saying,’ he said after a while. His wife heard his feet patter across the floor, then the window and the shutters clattered open.

  ‘… await further messages,’ announced the staticky voice, louder now. After a short pause it started back up again. Though it seemed to be moving further away.

  ‘Please stay in your homes and keep the windows closed.’ The clipped voice was still hard to understand, but Annette could piece together the gist. ‘There is no danger and no reason to worry. Await further messages.’

  Her husband turned to her.

  ‘Did he just say …?’

  ‘We’re supposed to
keep the windows closed.’

  ‘Why though?’

  ‘Go on, do it!’

  Her husband closed both windows.

  Annette got up and put on her dressing gown. She grabbed the torch that she had left sitting on the nightstand, just in case, and opened the door. Her husband followed her. In the hallway they ran into their host.

  ‘Did you hear it too?’ asked Annette.

  He nodded. ‘Stay in the house and keep the windows closed.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Bollard.

  The Hague, Netherlands

  ‘Let’s go through everything one more time,’ said Bollard. ‘We’ll start with Italy. By this point they’ve checked out the residents of the apartments where false codes were fed into the meters.’

  He turned to the corkboard in their improvised operations centre and pointed at the images of apartments and their residents.

  ‘They focused on those from the past few months and years. Aside from the odd tax offence, which isn’t considered a real crime in Italy, the occupants were thoroughly unsuspicious and respectable. There continues to be no trace of the alleged electric company employees.’

  Bollard pointed to an image of a modern Italian electric meter.

  ‘Technicians from the Italian electricity provider Enel have checked the access protocols of the Internet firewall and discovered a string of suspicious incidents, starting almost eighteen months ago, where internal systems and databanks were accessed. The IP addresses of the intruders lead to Ukraine, Malta and South Africa. This was probably how the perpetrators got their hands on access data for the meters. They also reconfigured the routers so that the disrupt-codes could be distributed across the entire grid.’

  ‘How did these attackers know how to break in to the Enel network and to mess with the meters in the first place?’ asked one of the female detectives on the team.

  ‘Practically every critical infrastructure has been breached at some point in recent years. Some think hackers are to blame, some claim that states are behind it – from the Chinese to the Russians on up to the Iranians or North Koreans. Whoever they are, those responsible for such attacks are pros; they have all manner of ways to dodge firewalls and get into internal IT networks, ranging from bogus websites which implant a Trojan or a worm on anyone who visits, to USB sticks “left lying around” for an employee to find, or simply through innocent-looking emails. The vulnerable points are always people. That’s why many institutions have banned the use of data storage devices and restricted employee access to websites. Unfortunately, people don’t always obey the rules.

  ‘As for manipulating the electric meters: that couldn’t have been simpler. These things are in every home, and you can buy second-hand ones on eBay. Take one apart and you can soon figure out the way they work – and there’s plenty of literature on the Internet to help you, some of it from the manufacturers themselves, explaining how well equipped these little boxes are for a plan of this sort. The most important feature being that every meter in the system is capable of broadcasting data to all the other meters.’

  ‘But surely there’s some safeguard in place to prevent meters accepting random data from unknown meters. Don’t they require some kind of authentication?’

  ‘They do, but the attackers probably snatched that up when they infiltrated the internal IT networks and databanks at Enel. They might even have found it on the Internet. Once they have the authentication, the rest is child’s play. Which gives us reason to assume that the authentication for the Italian data sources was weak. All the attackers had to do was to imitate the requested data source and enter their desired command code.’

  ‘Aren’t these the systems that all of Europe is supposed to be outfitted with in the next few years?’

  ‘Indeed,’ was Bollard’s only reply. He turned to another row of photos. ‘And with that we come to Sweden. The attackers there acted according to the same method: three residences were selected. And here too the residents have turned out to be respectable and cleared of all suspicion after intensive investigation. As in Italy, it’s highly probable that the codes were fed into the meters by the men who passed themselves off as technicians from the electric company.’

  He placed himself in front of the map of Europe in the middle of the wall.

  ‘In addition to the attacks on the IT systems, we also have reports of arson in substations and transmission towers downed by explosives. As yet, however, there is no distinguishable pattern behind these attacks, which is going to make it difficult to catch the saboteurs.’

  With that, Bollard ended the presentation and hurried back to his office. He checked his computer to see if there were any new reports out of Saint-Laurent. Since that morning the incident had been raised to INES 3 by the French Nuclear Safety Authority. The population within a twenty-kilometre radius was being told to stay indoors. Once again Bollard tried his parents’ number. The line was still dead.

  The Hague, Netherlands

  Shannon had to pull into the opposite lane in order to drive around the mass of people outside the building. Only then did she realize that it wasn’t a crowd trying to get into a supermarket. These people were mobbing a bank branch. Two minutes later she was right there among them.

  ‘I have seventy euros left in my wallet,’ a portly man told her, waving his wallet at the camera in frustration. ‘Anything that you’re still able to buy you have to pay cash for. And who knows how much longer it’s going to be like this? That’s why I wanted to get enough money out. And now this!’ He gestured behind him. ‘If they’re already out of money, what will it be like in a few days’ time? No question, tomorrow I’ll be here at dawn.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Shannon. ‘Are you saying the bank is out of money?’

  ‘For today they’re out, that’s what they told us. More cash will be delivered tomorrow. We all waited here for nothing.’

  Shannon filmed the men and women who were still pounding furiously on the bank’s windows before they gave up and gradually went their separate ways. She panned on to the handwritten sign behind the door.

  Closed due to technical disruption. Cash can be withdrawn as of tomorrow. The maximum amount for withdrawal will be €250 per person.

  So the bank had closed. No cash till tomorrow, and even then there would be a limit. In the lobby she caught sight of the cashiers standing in a group and gossiping. She knocked several times until one of them turned around. He shook his head. When Shannon showed him the camera, he turned away.

  Paris, France

  ‘I need results,’ Blanchard stated wearily. ‘The president, the interior minister, you name it – everybody is calling for our heads.’ He didn’t care to recall that, only a few days earlier, he had threatened everyone present that their heads would roll. Now his own lay on the chopping block.

  ‘Oh we’ve got results,’ said Proctet. ‘But they’re not good.’

  Blanchard closed his eyes for a moment. He saw the blade fall on his neck. For two days the entire IT department and two dozen IT forensics specialists they’d brought in to assist had been working around the clock. And yet it seemed all they could come up with was more bad news.

  ‘We’ve found parts of the malware that acted as a trigger. It’s been inside the system for more than eighteen months. This attack was planned well in advance. It means our current data protections are unusable, because they too are contaminated.’

  ‘So we fall back on the older ones then.’

  Proctet shook his head. ‘Eighteen months in the digital age is like a century in the real world. Those data protections are hopelessly outdated.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘We have to wipe every computer.’

  ‘There are hundreds of them!’

  ‘A few dozen would be enough to start with,’ answered Proctet. ‘If it weren’t for the other thing.’

  Blanchard stared, aghast, at the young man. ‘What other thing?’ he asked under his b
reath.

  ‘The few servers that were still running tried to access computers they had no business accessing.’

  ‘You’re trying to tell me …’

  ‘… that the servers are infected too. Precisely.’

  ‘This is a disaster,’ mumbled Blanchard. ‘How long do you think it’s going to take?’

  ‘A week,’ Proctet said quietly. Everyone in the room heard his words. Blanchard thought he saw the young man grow even paler. Then he added, ‘At least.’

  ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ cried Blanchard. ‘Did you see the news this morning? We’re looking at a nuclear meltdown in the middle of France if the people in Saint-Laurent don’t get power for their cooling system soon! Who knows where else it could happen?’

  The Hague, Netherlands

  Bollard scrolled down the website’s news ticker in disbelief.

  + Plant operator confirms controlled release of radioactivity +

  (5.26 a.m.) Électricité de France, the company that operates the crippled power plant in Saint-Laurent, confirms the controlled release of small amounts of radioactive steam into the air surrounding the facility in order to ease the pressure in the reactor container.

  + Nuclear Safety Authority: ‘No damage to reactor shell’ +

  (6.01 a.m.) France’s Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) declares that the reactor container in Block 1 of Saint-Laurent is undamaged. The cooling systems in Block 2 are functioning without issue.

  + Block 2 will assist Block 1 +

  (9.33 a.m.) According to an announcement from the power plant’s operator, one of the three redundant backup cooling systems in the uncompromised Reactor Block 2 is to be repurposed for Block 1 as quickly as possible. Experts consider such a solution both unfeasible and dangerous.