Black Fall

by Andrew Mayne

  My phone rings, showing an unfamiliar number. “One second . . . Hello?”

  “Good thing I never believe anything I read in the papers,” Damian says on the other end of the line.

  “No kidding. Did you call for comment?” I mouth to Nadine: “Damian Knight.”

  “Just use the speakerphone, for heavens’ sake,” Damian replies. I press a button so Nadine can hear him. “I’ve been looking into the people you met on the train.”

  “And?” I’m afraid to ask. The last time Damian encountered people who wanted me dead, it didn’t turn out so well for them. Soldiers in the Mexican army, who were also members of Marta’s cartel, had tracked me down to a little market in Mexico. While I did a pretty good job of fending them off, at some point during their long siege, a Good Samaritan separated their heads from their necks. While it looked like the work of a rival gang, I’m pretty sure my dark guardian angel was somehow involved.

  “I found an apartment near Boston College,” Damian explains. “Three people had been living there. Lots of candles, and a few books that would make the Unabomber’s reading list look as conservative as Richard Nixon’s. Sound familiar?”

  “You said ‘had’?” I pray he didn’t do anything . . . proactive.

  “Unfortunately, they seemed to have skipped town. No trace of where they went.”

  “Can you give me the address?” I ask.

  “I’ll text it to you.”

  I forward the address to Nadine’s phone and ask her to send the Boston FBI office to check it out. Damian is thorough, but there is a chance they might find something. She leaves me alone on the call to run down that lead.

  “Thank you, Damian. We finally got them to see the Red Chain as a real threat around here.”

  “Better late than never. Any progress?”

  “We identified the crazy woman who showed up on my doorstep. Amelia Hamilton, aka Heather Dryl. Turns out she was using a fake ID.”

  “Not too surprising,” he replies.

  “It’s not much of a lead, yet.”

  “I hear someone was shot last night?”

  Other than the tabloid leak about Bogden and Steadmen, we’ve kept our efforts out of the news. Not difficult, given the other crisis. “Yes. A member of the Red Chain.”

  “Does he have a fake driver’s license?” asks Damian.

  I pull up the file. “Karl Gunther. We’ve got other information on him. He’s actually got a prior arrest for a DUI. I’m pretty sure he’s a real person.”

  “That’s not what I asked. Does Gunther have a fake driver’s license too?”

  “Probably. I guess. Maybe?” It would make sense and wouldn’t come as a surprise—unless Damian is going in a different direction.

  “Can you find out?” he asks.

  “It might take a while. Colorado doesn’t use facial recognition software in their driver’s license database.”

  “Fine. Hold on.” I hear Damian typing. I don’t know what he does when he’s not making my life complicated. Besides access to large amounts of money he acquired, god knows how, he has a very deep knowledge of computing.

  Nadine steps back into the room and sits down. A minute later, a text message pops up on my phone with a photo of a driver’s license. It’s Gunther’s face, but a different name, Jason Chulick. “How the hell?”

  “Long story short,” says Damian, “I looked up Gunther in the DMV records and pulled his photo. I then used that photo to search a different database of every misdemeanor arrest in Colorado. Chulick is the best match. I then went back and pulled his DMV license.”

  I show the image to Nadine. Her eyes widen.

  “Well, that’s a heck of a stunt,” I reply. “It would have taken the FBI computer days to sort through. Now we have two aliases to look into. Thank you.”

  “That’s not all you have.” he replies in his familiar, playful tone.

  “Pardon?”

  “Poor girl, you must be tired. Look at Chulick’s license number and then Hamilton’s.”

  I compare them side by side. Nadine looks over my shoulder. Her mouth makes an o shape when she recognizes it too.

  Son of a gun. Like many other states, Colorado driver’s license numbers contain the date of issue and the order in which they were processed on that day.

  Hamilton and Chulick were processed the same day. The license numbers are only twelve digits apart.

  “They got their fake licenses on the same day.”

  “Exactly,” says Damian. “And that means?”

  Oh, crap. It hits me. I feel butterflies in my stomach. “The other members of the Red Chain probably did the same thing. Maybe all in the same batch.”

  “Thanks to the help of a corruptible DMV employee,” he adds.

  I poke my head out of the door and shout into the bullpen. “We need to pull a series of Colorado driver’s licenses!”

  “What do you got?” asks Ailes, looking up from his computer.

  “Possibly photos of every member of the Red Chain!”

  “Seriously?” Gerald’s face breaks into a grin.

  Nadine departs for the main records building to see what they can find. I retreat into the office. “Damian, I could—”

  “I know.”

  Suddenly everything goes black, except for the glow of my phone. “What the—”

  A few seconds later, the emergency lights flicker on.

  “Black out?” Damian asks.

  “Yeah.” Hesitantly I ask, “Are you in the building?”

  “No. I’m still in Boston.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because the power just went out here too.”

  Oh shit.

  I can’t even enjoy a lucky break for a second before everything hits the fan. Christ. “Damian, I think Black Fall has already started.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Code

  Gerald and Jennifer’s faces, illuminated by the ghoulish blue halo from their laptops, stare back at me from the dark. Only the emergency lights in the hallway, hooked to a battery backup, are on.

  “I’ll call you back,” I tell Damian before hanging up. “What the hell happened?” I ask, stepping into the bullpen.

  “Wi-Fi is down,” Gerald says, looking up from his now-useless laptop.

  “Hold on.” Jennifer types into her phone faster than I can speak. “Outages all along the East Coast. Several in Europe too.”

  “So . . . the power grid has been compromised?” It’s more of a genuine question than a rhetorical one. Gerald and Jennifer are far more technically inclined than I am.

  “Maybe.” Gerald follows Jennifer’s lead and starts using his phone for information. “Ugh. Internet just went down on LTE.”

  “I thought we had backup power and our own Internet connection?” I ask.

  “We do,” Jennifer replies. “But not in this building. Obviously.” She rolls her eyes in frustration, not at me, but at the situation. I’ve had to learn how to parse Jenniferese. She only expresses annoyance at situations, never people, although sometimes it can feel like she’s directing it at you.

  Our ancient building doesn’t exactly have the latest in technology infrastructure. There are even parts of the bullpen where you can’t get a cell phone signal.

  Gerald stands up. “I’m going outside. We can probably get the campus Wi-Fi signal from the front of the building.”

  We regroup on the front steps. The buildings at this end of Quantico are completely dark. The main facility and the dorms glow in the evening fog, their emergency lights powered by a generator we can hear humming in the distance. Oddly, there’s some comfort in knowing that I’m only a few hundred yards away from a working vending machine.

  “Don’t tell me my FBI agents are afraid of the dark,” says Ailes, as he joins us.

  “Life without Wi-Fi isn’t worth living,” remarks Jennifer.

  “How bad is the situation?” Gerald asks.

  If anyone knows what’s going on, it’s
Ailes. “Officially, or unofficially?” he says.

  “I didn’t even know we had an official yet,” Gerald replies.

  “An hour ago, a solar observation satellite spotted a flare building up on the sun.”

  “This is because of a flare?” Jennifer seems skeptical.

  “I said that’s the official story,” Ailes replies. “The flare is real. But this outage isn’t because of that.”

  “We’ve been hacked,” I state flatly.

  “Yes. A well-coordinated, well-planned attack on the energy grid. We haven’t figured out how, yet. But I think we can guess who. The good news, if you can call it that, is that we’ve known for years this kind of thing could happen. It just required a player with enough malice and resources to pull it off. And it looks like we have that in the Red Chain.”

  “How exactly do you hack the power grid?” I ask.

  “You look for a point of vulnerability,” Jennifer explains. “Last year there were seventy-nine serious attempts on the US grid. Hackers in the Ukraine took down the national grid for six hours by targeting several points. There are hundreds of different systems involved in a power plant. You could start at the source, and make the generator think it’s overheating so it shuts down. You could do it at the end point, and make the system think transformers have blown, cutting off power to a region. You could attack it from the middle and make it reroute power so it overloads. If you are sufficiently evil, you can get the grid to damage itself by burning out power conversion stations and blowing entire lines. Is that what we’re looking at?”

  “Maybe. We’re getting reports of physical damage,” says Ailes. “Simply restarting the system won’t work. It could have been attacked at the root level. Something planned in advance.”

  “Stuxnet for power grids,” says Gerald.

  “That’s the virus we used to shut down Iranian nuclear facilities?” I ask.

  “Yeah. That was a worm designed to target a few points of failure. It spread from system to system and kept hiding. A power grid worm could hit hundreds of points of failure.”

  “And keep attacking us,” Ailes adds solemnly. “That’s the biggest fear right now. This kind of attack might be part of a series of assaults.”

  “What about the rest of the country?” I wonder if this is nationwide.

  “Just the East Coast, right now. If I had to guess, they’re waiting to one-two punch us with more.”

  “So this is pretty sophisticated?” Obviously, it is, but I’m trying to grasp the level.

  “Yes,” Ailes replies. “It’d be more than one hacker. Someone would have to have some high-level understanding of how the grid works. It’s a team project.”

  This doesn’t quite make sense to me. “And up until now, the Red Chain has been pretty antitechnology? That’s what has me curious. We know Devon embraced it. And we know they were somehow in collusion with Devon, or at least with someone who knew him. Which brings us back to the CCA project. The people behind that had no problem with computers, and what’s happening now sounds exactly like the kind of thing they’d want to be capable of pulling off.”

  Ailes takes a seat on the steps next to me. “Unfortunately, the CCA project is something even I can’t get information about. It was a deep, deep black project.”

  There has to be something for us to find. Some lead. Heck, I found out about the CCA from a mailing label in the attic of Devon’s old house.

  “Okay, I may sound stupid here, but we couldn’t find much of anything in the CCA building, right? Just a prototype of their computer system?”

  “It was standard hardware for that time period,” says Gerald. “Some fancy cabinets and projection equipment, but it was all running on a VAX cluster.”

  “Yes, um, whatever that means. But the software? Who wrote that?”

  “Government contractors. Probably the same people who write stuff for the NSA and CIA.”

  “But a company, right? This may sound very naive, but could we look at the source code itself?”

  Gerald exchanges glances with Jennifer. “There might be something to that. Even if we can’t find notation, certain scripting styles might imply specific contractors, maybe even actual programmers.”

  Jennifer mulls it over. “I can get a copy of the hard drive and make an emulator that should let us look more closely.”

  “Let’s get on that,” says Ailes. He turns to me. “You made any progress?”

  “Me?” I think for a moment. The blackout made me forget everything that had just happened. “We got a lead on the Boston cell.”

  “Good. Good.”

  “Oh, and I think I have photos of at least seventy or so members of the Red Chain.”

  “Pardon me?” His voice raises in surprise.

  “It was Damian’s suggestion, really. Fake driver’s licenses. We found a batch made at the same time as Gunther’s and the Jane Doe, whom Nadine tracked down. We were in the process of contacting Colorado authorities and running a VICAP search when the outage happened. Nadine was going to the main computer center here to check up on that.”

  “I suggest you head over there too, and see what they can find. I’ll call them and explain this is a priority.”

  As I start to leave, my phone rings with a DC number. “Hello?”

  A frantic woman asks, “Is he dead?”

  “Pardon me?” The voice is familiar, but I can’t place it.

  “Nobody will tell me! Is my husband dead?” she pleads.

  All of a sudden I recognize her voice.

  Oh, god.

  The first lady is asking me if the president has been killed.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Commander

  “One second, Miriam.” I press the Mute button on my phone. The words sound crazy as I hear myself say them aloud. “The first lady is asking me if her husband has been killed!”

  Ailes matter-of-factly replies, “On it.” Then he pulls his phone from his pocket.

  I unmute the phone. “Miriam.” I feel weird using her first name, but I need to calm her down. “What have you heard?”

  Gerald furiously types away at his laptop, which he’d dragged out to the steps and connected to Wi-Fi. He pulls up a headline:

  ap report: president kent killed in explosion in atlanta

  “Are you still there?” asks Miriam.

  “I’m here.” I keep my voice calm and measured. She’s borderline hysterical, understandably so. “This is the first we’re hearing about it. What are they telling you?”

  “Nobody knows anything,” she says, frustrated. “I thought maybe . . . I don’t know. I thought maybe you might know something.”

  She’s asking me? The first lady of the United States is coming to me for answers? “Miriam, right now you shouldn’t believe anything you hear. This group, the Red Chain, we think they hacked the power grid. We also have reason to believe they’re spreading false stories in the media to ignite panic.”

  Of course, they’ve also been known to kill people in public.

  “You mean he’s alive?” She wants someone to tell her everything is alright.

  “I don’t know. It’s just that right now, I wouldn’t assume anything.”

  Ailes holds up a finger. I put Miriam on mute again.

  “Atlanta is in a blackout. There were reports of Dumpster explosions on social media. We can’t reach anybody there,” he says.

  “In Atlanta?” I ask.

  “Downtown.”

  This is beginning to sound worse and worse. “Like a bomb strike?”

  “One second.” Ailes listens to his contact on the other end. “Got it.” He hangs up to explain what he knows. “We can’t contact the president’s convoy directly because their radios are being jammed. Not just by one jammer, but by hundreds of small jammers that all turned on at the same time as the explosions. Normally, they’d take him to a secure location or helicopter him out, but the explosions were all outside the Secret Service security corridor and they have the
president boxed in. Because of the jammers, communication has been difficult.”

  “What about the president? Is he okay?” I ask.

  Ailes has a pained look on his face. “I don’t know.”

  I unmute my phone. “Miriam?”

  “Yes? Have you found out anything?” she asks, hopefully.

  “It seems like someone is making it very hard for us to communicate with him. I think he might be okay.” But I’m worried I’m giving her false hope.

  “Now they’re saying Senator Friedkin has been killed,” Gerald whispers.

  I mute my phone. “Friedkin, again? First his name comes up with the DC riot shooters. Now this?”

  “I know,” he replies, then points to his screen:

  report: senator friedkin shot in coup attempt

  “Coup!” I blurt out loud, then double-check to make sure my phone is still on mute. “That doesn’t even make any sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” he agrees.

  I return to my call. “Miriam, I’m going to look into this. I’m sure you’ll hear from your husband soon.”

  “Promise?” Her voice is quavering.

  I can’t lie to her, but my gut is telling me this is all smoke and no fire. “I’d be surprised if you didn’t.”

  “You handled that well,” Ailes tells me after I hang up.

  “What if he is dead?” asks Jennifer. “I mean, you did the right thing. But what if he is dead?”

  “I’m not buying it,” I reply. “If they could get to the president, they’d have released a Devon prediction saying as much. These jammers, they’re not like the Russian one used during Marta’s assassination attempt on the Pope?”

  Ailes shakes his head. “No. These are handheld. The size of a phone. Cheap. Very short range. Easy to hide.”

  “And a few hundred of them.” Gerald adds.

  “Exactly,” Ailes agrees. “Getting to the president is hard, damn hard. The Secret Service works at keeping any potential threat as far away as possible, and they react quickly. They scan for explosives, and always have a secure spot to pull him into.”

  “It sounds like the Red Chain counted on the Secret Service response to create a panic.”