It wasn’t, actually, but there was no need to admit it.
“I haven’t decided yet. Maybe I’ll take a bit of a vacation.”
“You? A vacation? Since when do you go anywhere on vacation?”
“I don’t know. I covered an awful lot of miles on my cross-country trips. I usually had to keep moving, so I drove by all kinds of interesting places that would have been fun to spend some time at.”
“Name one.”
“What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?”
“Maybe. I’m waiting.”
“Well, maybe that island off the coast of Maine, for example. It was really beautiful up there, and I didn’t get a chance to see everything.”
“Like what? Like the only other restaurant on the island?”
“What a typical city girl response. People go to Maine from all over the country. It’s scenic, it’s peaceful, it’s…well, that’s enough. It would be the perfect place for me to—”
“Write a book? Sorry. Not buying it.”
Damn! Why had he brought her up to be so good at this?
“Look. I’ll think about it. But I know that you and Tim have a good thing going here, and you don’t need your old man hanging around your apartment like a lost puppy for a couple of weeks.”
“Don’t you think I can handle that?”
Of course, she could. But he couldn’t handle this charade of pretending he had no other contact with Tim than through her. What if they slipped up and started talking shop in front of her?
“Look, like I said, I’ll think about it. Can we leave it at that?”
“Okay, yes. For the time being. When do you have to move out?”
“Pretty soon.”
“Okay. I’ll be in touch.”
I bet you will, he thought. But he had other plans.
* * *
Frank was running in place, waiting for the light to change, when someone materialized at his elbow, also in running gear.
“Hey, Frank!”
“Hey, Tim. Do you run this way every day?”
“Not always. I like some variety, so I mix it up.”
“Well, since we’re headed in the same direction, how about we get up to date while we run? It’d save me a trip downtown today.”
“Works for me.” It more than worked for Tim; he’d sensed that Frank felt uncomfortable at the office and knew from Marla that her father ran every morning. It hadn’t been hard to pull off the “accidental” meeting.
“So here’s what I’ve been thinking,” Frank began as they headed toward the National Mall. “I still think looking for a cyberattack is a waste of time. My latest thought is that it’s also counter to Foobar’s whole approach.”
“In what way?”
“Well, according to the briefing books, a big part of his fundamentalist pitch to the faithful is that he doesn’t accept anything developed after the Prophet’s time. And he totally rejects the West’s values and reliance on technology, right?”
“Right, but he also bends the rules whenever it suits him. He lets his troops use artillery and guns, for example.”
“Yes, but in his writings he points out that the Chinese had gunpowder and cannons when the Arabs began conquering the world.”
“And tanks? Trucks?”
“Okay, so yes, he bends the rules. But he doesn’t have planes or drones. He says he rejects those.”
“Well, he’s only captured a few planes, and no drones. Plus, he doesn’t have any trained pilots. I bet the anti-modern bit is just talk to cover up the fact that his army is way out-gunned and there’s nothing he can do about it. And don’t forget, his people use social media all the time to recruit more followers.”
“Okay, I’ll let that idea go then. But I still don’t see the big risk as a cyberattack, as such.”
“What does ‘as such’ mean?”
“It means I agree that it makes sense for him to attack our cyberinfrastructure, but not electronically.”
“So you’re still convinced he’s going to attack the Internet infrastructure using explosives or some other physical approach.”
“Right.”
“But that could never be as bad an attack as he’s been claiming he’s going to pull off. Everything’s too spread out. And according to what we heard at the last Tiger Team meeting, Foobar must have used up most or all of his stolen fertilizer on the New York attack. Even if he used ten times as many bombs as he did last time, the most he could do would be to take out pieces of the Internet. After all, it was designed from the start to route messages around any parts that go down.”
“He wouldn’t have to take the whole Internet down to prevent everyone from using it.”
“What’s that—some kind of riddle?”
“Well, maybe, in a way. But it’s not hard to solve, when you remember that everything’s run out of data centers, now that everyone’s moving to cloud computing. Nobody has servers at their own facilities anymore—not even Hillary Clinton. Everybody’s software is hundreds of miles away, and people just connect via the Internet without knowing or caring where their system is physically hosted. And it’s not just their software, either—all their data’s there, too. Take the data centers out, and the entire country shuts down immediately.”
“But there must be thousands of locations out there, with built-in redundancy for each one, so if you took one farm out, your data would have been backed up at two or three other locations.”
“Yes to the second. No to the first. It’s not thousands, and it’s not even hundreds.”
“Really? Why would that be?”
“Because cloud computing hosting is a commodity business. There are only a few big providers, and it’s more efficient for them to centralize their operations as much as they can. Why have hundreds of locations if you can have only a couple dozen? And don’t forget—the electrical cost of running hundreds of thousands of servers is enormous. Over two percent of all the energy consumed in America is used by data centers, so if you own twenty percent of all those computers, you sure as hell want the cheapest power you can find. So that means putting the data centers near the cheapest sources of electricity.”
“Okay. That makes sense.”
“And then there are other concerns—unless you put your data center in the Arctic or at the bottom of the ocean, where the water is barely above freezing—which some providers are actually talking about doing, by the way—you also need lots of water for cooling, too. On top of that, all the big companies are being pressured to go green, because of global warming. So wherever there’s cheap renewable energy, you see data centers popping up like mushrooms.”
“Like where?”
“Well, think about it for a minute.” Frank wished Tim would quit asking questions or run more slowly.
“Okay, I guess, hydro would be the best source, because it’s cheap, green, and constant, and then after that solar and wind, cost-wise. And I guess you’d also want to have your operation as near to the highest use areas as possible, since data takes time to go back and forth and customers want instantaneous response times.”
“You’re on the right track. When you get home, go on Google Earth and scan your way up the Columbia River until you start seeing huge buildings with hydropower lines running to them. That’s one of the first and biggest data center areas. But you can find them in other parts of the country, too. The largest buildings have over twenty-five acres of floor space. Sometimes they’ve got many times that in solar energy panels on and around them.”
“So that’s good, right? It sounds a lot more efficient.”
“Efficient, yes—but vulnerable. The more servers, software, and data you put in a single building, and the more buildings you put near each other, the bigger the target you create. The more eve
rything moves to cloud computing, the more vulnerable we get, especially since the servers that support the Internet and the electrical grid are all hosted in data centers, too.”
“But still, how could a terrorist take out a data center that big other than with a cyberattack?”
“I don’t know precisely how yet. But if I was a terrorist, I’d rather turn a data center into smoking junk than just take it off-line for a few days. I’m going to send you a link to a report on the impact of destroying data centers, and I’d like you to try and get an idea how few data centers you’d have to take out—and which ones—in order to take everything down. Got it?”
“Got it. Want to run together again tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow, no. I’ve got to get out of my apartment for a couple of weeks while they rehab it.”
“Marla mentioned that. Are you going to stay with her?”
“No. I’m going to work on the road for a couple weeks. I’ve been in the city too long.”
“Sounds like fun. I guess Marla forgot to mention it to me.”
“Uh, it’s possible I forgot to tell her. I’ll give her a call this afternoon and bring her up to date.” Or more likely, the next day, after he’d already escaped.
“Well, safe travels. I’ll go through the data center stuff right away.”
“That’d be great. Thanks.” Frank split off and headed for his apartment. As soon as he was sure Tim couldn’t see him, he stopped and leaned against the wall of a building, gasping for breath.
Damn kids. They were taking over the world.
* * *
14
A-Camping I Will Go
Frank dumped his heavy duffle bag of camping gear in the trunk of the rental Jeep. His destination was the very same data centers along the Columbia River he’d referred Tim to, but he’d flown to Denver instead of Portland. There wasn’t much for him to do for the CIA while Tim and Keri cranked away on the latest assignment he’d given them, and he’d been restless for a while now, anxious for an opportunity to spend a few days alone with his thoughts. Watching the romance bloom between Marla and Tim had unsettled him, turning his thoughts back to the enigma of his failed marriage. In a corner of Marla’s apartment, there was now a plastic bin containing a tortoise, and in the backpack Frank used as a suitcase was the thick envelope of letters from Clare he’d discovered in his closet. He wanted some big skies overhead while he confronted whatever he would find there.
After Clare had left, he had obsessively analyzed and reanalyzed every element of their relationship in an effort to exonerate himself from any blame for the split. The process had driven him crazy. Only by forcing himself not to think about her at all, or to recall anything about their marriage, had he eventually been able to find any peace.
As he sat behind the wheel, he realized he’d been far more successful in that effort than he would have thought possible. Or perhaps it was simply the passage of time. Whatever the cause, he could now remember only the bare outline of the period between when he first met Clare and when she left him. He was torn now between the urge to understand what had really happened between them and the suspicion that some romantic bodies were better left un-exhumed.
Those somber thoughts carried him all the way through Colorado and across the border into Wyoming, where he took an exit off the highway onto a secondary road. That route led him to the dirt road he had selected as his near-term objective, and on that road, he set off to the northwest across the wide expanses of prairie that covered most of the state.
It had been an unusually wet fall, and in the shallow marshes spread across the undulating grassland, dense mats of dark green rushes grew, salted with vivid violet blossoms nodding in gentle winds. Overhead, as hoped, the sky was a flawless blue, complemented by masses of white cumulus clouds rimming the horizon. But the soothing effect of this gentle beauty was obscured by his building anxiety over confronting his past. Why couldn’t he find the answers he wanted on the Internet, like everything else? That was something he knew how to do. Accelerating without thinking, he left behind a roiling cloud of brown dust that rose to obscure the brilliant blue sky.
Maybe he was just being silly, bringing those letters along. Clare had written them decades ago, back when they were much younger—just college undergraduates. So much had happened since then; how much could they matter to him now?
But they did. Clare was his first great love. Check that. She was the only great love he’d ever had. As well as the first girl he’d ever dated. What had followed that first date had bewildered as much as excited him.
At his school, a guy that didn’t play sports didn’t register on the social scale at all, and he’d been anything but athletic. But something strange happened during senior high school; his growth finally came in, and unbeknownst to him, girls who had never paid any attention to him before suddenly decided that he had become good-looking.
As it happened, many of the best-looking girls in his school were also the smartest. During his senior year, some of them tired of dating the same circle of jocks they’d passed around for years and decided to look around for someone different. Several of them let him know in ways that eventually even he couldn’t miss that they wouldn’t mind a date.
One of them proved to be particularly determined, and before he was quite sure what had happened, he’d not only asked her out—or perhaps it had been the other way around—but he and Clare were spending all of their time together. She was smart, talented, and pretty with big, brown eyes that unsettled him in a pleasant sort of way when they looked deep into his own and the kind of figure specifically designed to set a teenage male aquiver. Even better, he could talk to her and connect in a way he had never experienced with anyone before, male or female, family or friend.
The rest of senior year and the summer that followed passed far too quickly as their impending separation loomed ever nearer. He’d been accepted by MIT; she’d been accepted by a university down south. They would be far apart. Would their relationship survive?
It would not, at least for long. Just a page out of an old, old story that played out across college campuses every year. But unlike most relationships, this one settled into a pattern of fading and flaring that drove him to distraction. That much he still remembered.
He glanced at his watch; it was after six o’clock. Time to start looking for a place to spend the night. Ten minutes later, he saw what might do; a faint Jeep track angling off toward a rocky hill a half a mile off. He braked to a stop, backed up, and turned on to the track, sizing up his destination as he grew closer. It looked promising, dotted with junipers amid big, muscular granite knobs and balanced boulders covered with pumpkin-orange lichens set aglow by the brilliant, oblique light of the setting sun. Perhaps he’d find a spot with a good view to the west.
He slowly bumped and jolted his way along the track as it wound up and around the craggy hill and eventually crossed a small, flat area facing the sunset. Perfect. He parked the car and started to make camp—a brief chore, as he was traveling so light.
Besides what he’d brought in the duffle, he’d picked up a folding chair at a Wal-Mart near the airport along with his usual insubstantial camp fare of celery, peanut butter, canned pineapple, mixed nuts, bananas, granola bars, and coffee. A cheap Styrofoam cooler filled with ice and beer completed the items essential to the maintenance of Adversegoan existence. The final item was a rare extravagance in the form of a bottle of single malt scotch. He didn’t usually bother with a fire, but a dead pinyon pine was conveniently located at the edge of his campsite, and its complex web of branches had shed their bark, leaving them ash-white and bone dry. In a few minutes, he had broken off all the fuel he’d need, and in a few more, he had assembled a fire ring of rocks.
With his chair and a lantern for later use facing the sunset, he popped a beer and removed the tops of a few stalks of celery with his
penknife. He crunched away for a while, double-dipping his celery in the jar of peanut butter, and watched the shadows of distant mountains creep nearer across the prairie. Beneath his perch, two antelope kept casual watch over two fawns. From above, he could hear the urgent cheeping! of a night hawk that periodically swooped nearby in pursuit of its evening meal of insects. It was gratifying to be back in wide-open spaces, soothed by natural sounds and enjoying the smell of sagebrush carried on a dying breeze.
But now it was growing dark. He struck and held a wooden match to the little thatch of minute twigs he’d leaned against a larger branch and watched it bloom obligingly into a full-blown rose of flames. He placed progressively larger twigs and branches on the expanding fire until he was adding wood thicker than his arm, and then he walked back to the car to let the flames consolidate. He returned with the envelope of letters and settled in by the fire with the envelope in his lap and the bottle of scotch and a cup of ice at his elbow.
There was a date written in the corner of the envelope, something he hadn’t paid attention to before. Noticing it brought back a rush of bitter memories. April tenth. He was surprised to suddenly recall that it had been a Thursday. That was the day during his sophomore year when he’d called Clare on the payphone in her sorority house hallway at the mutually agreed-upon time. But the person who answered was not Clare and told him she was out partying. It was the last straw. He sat down then and wrote Clare a letter telling her not to call or write him again.
At best, that had been a symbolic and ridiculous act; she was barely writing as it was and always took several days to respond to a phone message when she responded at all. He’d concluded that the certainty of no contact was better than the ongoing anxiety of waiting for such infrequent crumbs of attention as she might be willing to drop his way.
Looking down at the still-sealed envelope, he wondered whether that was what he had really wanted. More likely, it had been a vain attempt to assert some degree of influence over a relationship that was clearly outside his control. Or maybe he was simply trying to salvage some last shred of pride from the disintegration of their relationship. Most likely, it was both.
The Doodlebug War: a Tale of Fanatics and Romantics (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 3) Page 14