America Offline (Book 1): America Offline [Zero Day]

by Weber, William H.

  “Did you fill the truck?” she asked, a single eyebrow arched.

  “I tried,” Nate told her. “But neither the credit nor debit terminals were working. Five bucks was all I had on me. Once the snow’s done beating the crap out of us, I’ll go out again.”

  “That’s strange,” she said, biting her lower lip, a bad habit from her high school days. “I tried paying some bills online, but Bank of America’s site was down. You don’t think those two things could be related, do you?”

  “A major bank and credit card on the same day?” he replied, nonplussed. “I seriously doubt it.”

  She let out a skittish burst of laughter. “Yeah, you’re right. It was probably just a glitch.”

  He looked at her and smiled.

  “You think I’m overreacting, don’t you?”

  Nate pulled her into a hug. “Not at all. I think you’re one of the most level-headed people I know.”

  She laughed. “You need to get out more.”

  “Was there anything about the banks on the news?”

  Amy dug her hands in her pockets and shook her head, sighing. “Only thing on the news is about the snowstorm. They say it’s gonna be…”

  “The biggest storm we’ve seen in a century,” he said, finishing the sentence. “Candice at Casey’s gas station already filled me in.”

  Amy’s expression soured. “I’m sure she did. I see you two are on a first-name basis now.”

  “Now you are overreacting,” he said, winking as he kissed her and headed through the front entrance and up a short flight of stairs into the rest of the house.

  A bright red warning sign had been flashing in Nate’s head since around the time he pulled out of Casey’s and started for home, a carryover, perhaps, from his days on the force. That innate sense honed from patrolling dangerous neighborhoods. That same uneasy feeling soldiers serving in Iraq often described moments before an ambush—a street eerily quiet, devoid of people, absent even the incessant sound of barking dogs. Some soldiers said they could feel it in their bones, a kind of static charge filling the empty space around them.

  Nate had been sensing the same thing, although he wasn’t sure just yet what was causing the strange feeling. Could it be the snow? That seemed harmless enough. Life above a certain parallel in America came with an expectation of the white fluffy stuff in winter.

  “Honey, where are you going?” Amy asked, moving up the stairs behind him.

  “Got to check something,” he replied, not wanting to alarm her. If he was wrong they could get on with their evening in peace. On the other hand, if he expressed his concerns and freaked her out over nothing, she’d be on edge all night. That kind of emotional stress was surely not good for the baby.

  Nate made his way down a long, carpeted hallway to his office. The room was small and sparsely furnished. An L-shaped desk hugged the far wall. Above that was a bookcase with tomes on police procedures and books on the ins and outs of freelance private investigation work: The Investigator’s Licensing Handbook, Analyzing Crime Scene Evidence, Dealing with Stalkers and plenty more. Every patch of real estate on the walls was filled with diplomas and certificates. He had duplicates at his office in town. That was where he would meet with clients. Not here. This was his sanctuary.

  This was also where he kept his guns, housed in a safe seated to the right of his desk. You couldn’t follow people who were up to no good without expecting a little pushback from time to time. Sometimes a little more. But force was a last resort. Taking a life was no laughing matter. As any competent firearms instructor would tell you, if your finger touched the trigger, you’d better be ready to shoot. The acronym IAEF summed up his motto about as well as any could be expected to. It stood for “if all else fails”. Wasn’t it Clausewitz who’d once said, “War is the continuation of diplomacy by other means?”

  Nate grew still until he heard the muffled drone from the other room as his wife returned to her television show. He’d meant it when he said she was the most level-headed person he knew. Calm, cool and collected, that was her baseline. He had tried not to show it, but seeing her on edge had rattled him. He returned his attention to the gun safe, running the combo and opening the door.

  The contents included three weapons, along with several boxes of ammunition—his main sidearm, a Sig Sauer P320 with .45 ACP; his backup, a shortened version of the 1911, the Colt Defender; and his long gun, a Remington 870 shotgun loaded with double-aught buck.

  Normally, the Sig with the Colt as backup was more than enough for the kind of work he did. That only changed if the subject in question was armed or a known felon. Otherwise the shotgun stayed home, since its primary purpose was for castle defense. The sheer intimidation factor that accompanied racking a round into the chamber was unmatched by any other weapon on the civilian market. Another reason it was such a hit: accuracy was far less of an issue than with other weapon systems. Once you leveled that barrel and squeezed the trigger, you were bound to get a piece of something.

  The shotgun’s reputation ran further than the intimidating noise it made. The mess it made of a man had helped crystallize the weapon’s fearsome reputation in the popular consciousness, which in turn reduced the need to use it. “Talk softly and carry a big stick”—that was Teddy Roosevelt opining on foreign policy, but he might as well have been talking about a twelve-gauge loaded with double-aught buck.

  The shrill sound of his wife’s scream from the other room made the smooth skin on Nate’s scalp draw tight.

  Chapter 5

  Nate came charging into the family room, his Sig in the low ready position, his practiced eyes scanning the room for threats.

  His wife stood pointing at the TV.

  He put the pistol away, his heart beating a racket in his chest. “Geez Louise, babe, you had me thinking someone had broken in.” His eyes shifted to what she was seeing on the news.

  “Police are calling it the largest ever cyber-attack on the US financial industry. Three of the nation’s largest banks, along with a half-dozen credit card companies, were struck this evening by an internet-based attack of unknown origin. Although the banking industry has attempted to downplay the damage, sources inside suggest the funds from millions of bank and investment accounts may have been wiped out. At this stage, spokesmen from the financial institutions affected will neither confirm nor deny the claim.”

  Amy turned to him, shocked and confused. “What does that mean for us?”

  “I’m not sure,” Nate replied. The notion of a cold sweat didn’t do justice to what he was feeling at this very moment. He felt his bum knee begin to buckle and set himself down on the couch.

  Amy followed suit, sitting next to him. She took his hand and squeezed it. “How much of our money was sitting in bank accounts?” she asked, breathless.

  Nate shook his head. “Between our personal accounts and the joint, maybe a few thousand. Just enough to pay the bills. Then there’s both of our 401ks.”

  “How much cash do we have in the house?” she asked. Her mouth had gone dry, causing her words to stick together.

  “Hard to say, but even if we had a million bucks hidden under our mattress it wouldn’t matter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He squeezed her hand. “Whoever did this might have just wiped out the entire financial system. Most, if not all, of it is simply a bunch of zeros and ones held on hardened servers somewhere. If all that’s gone, any money we have won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.”

  “We don’t know that yet,” Amy said, hopeful.

  All at once Nate heard a chorus of pings from his phone as texts started pouring in. Then Amy’s phone started to ring. The landline soon followed. It seemed every communication device they owned had come to life at once. No doubt on the other end of the line was a mob of terrified friends, neighbors and family members, all reeling from the shocking news.

  They didn’t answer them, not right away. Nate set his phone to silent and set it on the coffee ta
ble before him. “There’s something else too,” he said. The TV was still on, the volume down as the talking heads circled like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

  “What is it?” Amy asked and Nate could see from the look on her weary face she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to know.

  “There was something about the way the news anchor explained what happened that struck me as odd. He didn’t describe this as a robbery or a heist. He didn’t say the funds had been drained from people’s accounts and sent somewhere overseas to hackers in another country.”

  “But isn’t that why hackers attack banks, to steal money? I mean why else…” Amy’s voice trailed off with sudden understanding.

  Nate was squeezing her hand, his grey eyes flashing with deep concern, and not only for their own future. They had just witnessed in real time the advent of an economic recession. Maybe a depression. Irrespective of that, the United States along with the rest of the world would feel the effects of this attack for years to come.

  “This wasn’t a money grab,” he said, his voice tinged with icy anger. “Wasn’t a bunch of greasy Eurotrash millennials or even a four-hundred-pound guy sitting on his bed. What happened was far too big, far too sophisticated, for that.”

  She stared at him and swallowed hard. “You mean like a state-sponsored attack?”

  “Maybe even bigger. To pull off something like this, it would take more than one of our enemies acting in concert.”

  As former head of cyber-security at Byron Nuclear, cyber-attacks had been one of the many contingencies he’d planned for. Thankfully the plant itself was cut off and largely safe from any internet attack. Nate had quickly learned how the power company executives preferred electrified fences and guards with guns as a deterrent from the most likely attack, a physical one. They were so confident that when Nate had aggressively pushed them to wargame a cyber-breach, they had decided instead to send him packing.

  But unlike the power plant, the banking system was infinitely more vulnerable. Even with their active measures in place, someone had still managed to get inside several key financial institutions. He had read a report back in his days at the plant that speculated foreign powers had already inserted malicious code into key industries and infrastructure throughout America. Likewise, our cyber-command had done the same to our enemies. It was the twenty-first-century version of mutually assured destruction. You hit us, we’ll hit you. But it was one thing to trace the ballistic trajectory of an incoming missile back to its launch site and another entirely to trace the origin of a cyber-attack. The internet was a murky place. Uncovering the perpetrators and striking back would take weeks, maybe even months.

  •••

  The next few hours were spent watching cable news and speaking to friends and family. There was still no clear indication of the extent of the damage that had been done. The banks themselves were remaining surprisingly tight-lipped. But each new “expert” they trotted out only deepened Nate’s already acute sense of urgency. The government had bailed them out once before. Nate wondered if they’d have to do it again. That was likely the best-case scenario.

  After the first half hour, Nate had finally set his phone aside. His brother’s wife Lauren was freaking out. It didn’t help that Evan was currently working at the plant and might not know what was going on. There were too many unanswered questions, that was the problem. That was what made it so difficult to know the best way to react.

  About a year ago, someone had managed to gain access to Amy’s bank account and empty her checking accounts of the three thousand dollars she kept there. It was never made clear how it had happened. For days, she had wondered whether she’d clicked on an email or a link she shouldn’t have. Amy was sharp when it came to technology. Wasn’t her style to fall prey to the typical ruses—Nigerian princes desperate to offload their millions or fake lottery scams. Even the fake IRS calls so popular of late were given a quick and rather curt piece of her mind before she hung up. Through it all, the bank had remained silent. Ninety-nine percent of the time, when customers were the victims of fraud, they would launch a brief investigation and ultimately replace the funds. The question was: would the same thing happen now? Or was this particular hack simply too large and devastating to overcome?

  Nate had been careful to spread his money around to a few of the major banks. That way if, God forbid, one of them happened to go down, he wouldn’t be left completely penniless. Of course, he had never imagined an attack sophisticated enough to bring down all the major institutions at once, not to mention the major credit card companies.

  “How long do you think it’ll take them to fix this?” Amy asked, chewing at her lip like she intended on boring a hole right through it.

  “Soon, I hope,” Nate replied. He glanced down at his silenced phone and saw six more texts had come in.

  Amy drew in a deep breath. “I can’t shake this terrible feeling that we’ve lost everything.”

  Nate leaned in and hugged her. “Not everything,” he said and kissed her forehead. “I’m a hundred percent sure this’ll all be resolved in a matter of days. There’s simply too much on the line for too many people.” A heavy weight pressed on his chest with just how easily the little white lie had come off. “Besides, we have more than enough stocked here at the house for the next few weeks or even more, if need be. I just hope our people are busy figuring out who did this and hitting them back ten times harder.”

  •••

  Not long after, Nate brushed his teeth and got ready for bed. Normally the pistol would go back in the safe down the hall, but given the present uncertainty, he thought it best to keep it in the nightstand by his bed. He plugged his phone into the charger and scanned through the newest messages he had received. Most of them were nearly identical. Just about everyone he knew was losing their minds. Working in finance was a high-pressure job, anyone he’d known in the industry would be the first to admit it. No one had a sense of humor when it came to their own money. During the Great Depression, a number of folks who had lost everything ended up stepping off the edge of a building. Steal a man’s money, you might as well have taken his soul. It was a sad truism, but for many, there was hardly a graver wound one could inflict.

  But there had also been other texts on Nate’s phone. One or two had been about work. Clients asking about surveillance jobs and whether he’d found any proof of infidelity. Those were some of the lucky few who hadn’t heard the big news yet. What they also didn’t realize was that with no guarantee of being paid, Nate was putting everything on hold. Another reason was the weather. No one would be stupid enough to rendezvous with a lover during a blizzard. Especially not one like this.

  Amy was still in the bathroom when Nate stood and went to the window. Much of the ground was already blanketed in several inches of snow. Down it came, fat flakes driven hard by the wind. He could hear it pushing against the house, making the windows creak and the joints moan. Not to mention his own human joints. There would be a major run on the banks tomorrow in Byron, Rockford and probably every other city in America. It didn’t matter how much snow fell tonight. Plowed or not, the roads would be busy.

  “It’s really coming down,” Amy said, coming up behind him, her belly pressing against the small of his back.

  Nate nodded, but couldn’t quite bring himself to say anything. The two of them were on the cusp of bringing a child into the world—their first. And a girl, no less. He should be ecstatic, and yet Nate couldn’t help but wonder what sort of world would be here to greet her when she finally arrived.

  Chapter 6

  Day 2

  The next morning, Nate lay in bed, staring down at the text message his brother Evan had sent him less than an hour ago.

  POWER OUT. SUSPECTED CYBER-ATTACK.

  EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN PROCEDURES NOT WORKING.

  He propped himself up on one elbow, rereading the message over and over, his chest growing tighter with each reading, his pulse galloping faster until he could feel the blood thu
mping in his neck.

  Thump… Thump… Thump…

  During a major power outage at a nuclear plant it was imperative to insert the rods and prevent the core from overheating. Failure to do so could lead to a meltdown. Anyone who had seen what had happened to the Fukushima plant in Japan or Chernobyl in Ukraine knew precisely what that meant. But the plant had backup generators to supply power intended to keep the core cooled, powered by a bank of batteries designed to last for several days and in some cases weeks. The attack had somehow managed to subvert all of that and perhaps more.

  Nate fumbled with his phone, his fingers cold and stiff. What’s going on? He typed the words and hit send. The progress bar stopped at ninety percent. Nate’s cell and wifi signal were both full, so why was this not going through? He was about to call when the text finally completed. Nate knew cell towers utilized battery backup systems designed to maintain communications in the case of power failure. Although he wasn’t sure how much longer they would last, especially once the rest of those affected woke up and found themselves in a deep freeze.

  It was for that very reason that Nate had insisted they install a landline at the house. Even in the face of a major power outage, landlines can continue to operate for at least a week.

  Nate sprang out of bed, threw on a pair of sweatpants and a sweater and headed for the kitchen. The phone was in a cradle on the wall. He plucked it up and dialed his brother’s cell number. The line rang close to fifteen times, which in and of itself was strange since his brother’s voicemail came on after five rings.

  Reluctantly, Nate set the phone back on the cradle and leaned forward, his forehead pressed against the cold kitchen wall. What should he do? That was the question bouncing off the inside corners of his mind. They were now facing a fresher and infinitely more dangerous threat than they had last night, but with even less certainty on how to respond. First an attack on the banks and now on the lifeblood of the country itself, its power supply. Should they evacuate the area and head to some kind of shelter, assuming one even existed? Or should they wait to see if things became more serious? In his text, Evan hadn’t told them to pack up and flee at once, which implied the quick reaction teams at the plant were actively working to get the situation under control. As a former head of cyber-security there, Nate knew something of the protocol. All non-essential personnel would be evacuated while men like his brother struggled to prevent a full meltdown.