That didn’t make sense. “So what did they do?”
“Two things. I almost missed the second one, clever motherfuckers. First, they set up a lag—a time delay—a three second stutter, basically meaning anything you do, it takes three seconds to register in the system. A fuck of a lot can happen in three seconds if you’re a computer. Your average computer these days can do one hundred and fifty million million floating point operations per second. If you know what you’re doing, that’s basically enough time to make your computer psychic. From the outside looking in, it can see into the future because it’s really the past. Three seconds worth of it. Think Malaysian Airlines—news breaks that the Russians have taken out a second plane, those stocks are tanking, but your machine’s now got a three-second head start on the trades. You don’t take a hit. You get to dump stuff clean. It’s better than insider trading. It’s fucking genius, kiddo. Three seconds is an eternity with the kind of processing power they’re pulling down. That was the second thing, the one I almost missed. The first? They’d slipped in a Trojan that opened a back door right into the heart of the system, giving them control of pretty much everything from anywhere in the world. Couple that with the delay, and you’ve got a serious breach.”
“It’s the same here,” Jake said.
“Where’s here?”
“International relay station. All the trunk lines run through here. They’ve got a Trojan in here that essentially controls the flow of traffic down the line.”
“He who controls the spice controls the world.”
“What?”
“Nothing, dude. Thinking aloud. Looking at their setup here, I figure they can monitor the whole stock exchange through this hack. And they’ve got a three-second delay between it and the real world in terms of functionality. That means they can block trades or alter them on the fly—whatever they want, it’s all there to be fucked with and the fucking’s good, y’know? It’s all just bits and bytes.”
“Can you disconnect it?”
“Wish I could,” Ryan answered. “But it’s rooted in deep. I’d have to strip everything down just to get at it. And if they’re good enough to do that, they’re good enough to have some shit-hot security around their hack. Put it this way: I love you like a brother, man, but I sure as hell don’t want whoever’s behind this tracing anything back to me.”
“No worries. I owe you one.”
“It’s all good,” Ryan replied. “Listen, I gotta bounce.”
“Later,” Jake said, and hung up. He turned back to face the screen, tapping the edge of his cell phone against his forehead, thinking. So these guys take down Fort Hamilton first. Stage one. Then they go after the stock exchange. Stage two. Now they’ve taken control of the trunk lines. Stage three. Two questions: why, and what’s next?
Why was obvious, on the most basic level: to take control.
Hitting the fort had sidelined the military, at least locally, so no help was forthcoming from that quarter until the choppers and whatever else brought in backup. That was smart. The stock exchange meant they now controlled the money—not a bank, which has all kinds of security to prevent break-ins and robberies, but something a lot safer and more insidious and far-reaching in its influence. It was also the fastest way to turn a profit if they could see into the future when they placed their bets. The trunk lines meant communications, particularly with anyone overseas. The only thing left was transportation. This was the logical stage four. Transportation networks.
This was a huge one, and it made sense: they could control the money and the chatter, as long as there wasn’t a military presence, but more soldiers could be flown in. And plenty of New Yorkers could get out, running to someplace safe, rats deserting the sinking city to let those left behind clean up the mess.
Which meant stage four: shut down all the ways in and out of the city.
The airports would be first.
But you couldn’t just hit them in isolation, you’d have to go after the trains as well. And the roads too, to be safe, but the complete snarl of abandoned vehicles had turned Manhattan into an atrophying corpse, the arteries clogged with gas guzzlers going nowhere, so even if the Army tried to bus in reinforcements they’d have to use tanks to bulldoze their way through the streets. It all took time—the one thing they didn’t have.
Logically, there were six primary targets: Penn Station, Grand Central, Port Authority, LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark Airport.
But there was only one of him. He could call Ryan back, get some extra feet on the ground. That would cross one off the list, but it meant he would still have to cover five.
That was a problem.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“HEY, CHRISTIAN! DO YOU HAVE A MINUTE?”
Christian Eikner glanced up, his frown turning into a begrudging smile as he realized who was interrupting him. “For you, always.” He waved a hand at the others he’d been talking to and broke away from their little group, stepping toward her. “Been awhile, how’re you doing, Finn?”
“You know how it is, all work and no play makes Finn a dull chica.” She shook her head, shrugged, then smiled. “You?”
Christian rubbed a hand over his head. She wasn’t sure if he was basically saying he’d lost a few more hairs, or if he was trying to flatten out the few errant ones that remained.
He was a nice guy, and regularly joked that Bruce Willis and Patrick Stewart had made him cool. She’d never had the heart to tell him not even an industrial freezer could make him cool. Cool just wasn’t in his DNA.
“Not too bad, but as you can imagine, we’re a little busy trying to keep the lights on everywhere,” he said with that self-deprecating grin of his. She looked over his shoulder to where his coworkers were waiting impatiently for him to be done flirting. He seemed to sense the daggers being aimed at his back. “So, what’s up?”
“I have a question and I figure you’re the one person I know who could answer it.”
“I always like questions I can answer. Fire away.”
She wasn’t sure of any other way to say this, she wasn’t even sure what, exactly, she was thinking, but it seemed to make sense in a crazy way and she just wanted him to tell her she was wrong so she could drop it. “This is going to sound nuts, but do you think there’s been a shift in the magnetic poles?” He looked at her, and for a moment she expected him to laugh. He didn’t. She pushed on: “I’m thinking about the blackouts, obviously, but the animals too, the birds falling from the sky, the stampedes from Yellowstone, the dogs, the shoals of fish. The end-of-the-world stuff. All of it.” She had his full attention.
“I’m going to ask you a question in return, Finn: where did you hear about this?” His usual easy-going, affably shy demeanor vanished. He seemed . . . what? Angry?
His friends were staring. One of them started toward the two of them.
Great, an audience.
“I remembered something I heard in a lecture,” she explained quickly, trying to marshal her thoughts into some semblance of order. “This history professor was talking about significant natural events and how they’ve shaped our world and our culture. It was about the nature of societal collapse—how things didn’t have to be asteroids from the sky and huge extinction events to end a society as we define it.”
“And that got you thinking about polar shifts?”
“During part of the lecture he mentioned the last polar shift, which was, what, maybe forty thousand years ago? Sometime during the last glacial period?” Christian nodded, confirming her time line. “But one of the things I remember most vividly was how he said early man would have been confused by the change in animal behavior, but because civilization as we know it was basically in its infancy, they would have adapted to the change fairly quickly, whereas if something like that happened as recently as twenty thousand years ago, when civilizations were much more developed, entire societies could’ve fallen.” Again Christian nodded, but not so much confirming she was headed in the right direction, more l
ike he was encouraging her to go on. “So, anyway, it struck me . . . the blackout, the sheer scale of it, is way too big to be some sort of global terrorism at play, so it’s got to be natural, right? Because something has screwed with electronics. I’m not a physicist, but couldn’t something like a polar shift explain what’s happening out there?”
“Not exactly,” Christian said, “but you’re not entirely wrong, either. Definitely on the right track.” He turned to his friends, who were now loosely surrounding them. “Gents, I’d like to introduce you to Finn Walsh, a friend from Art and Archaeology.” He gave her a sheepish smile. “You’re not going to believe this, but we were actually just discussing the possibility of a polar shift when you saw us. We were busy congratulating ourselves about being the first to come up with the theory, so obviously when you mentioned the exact same thing my first thought was panic. I mean, the last thing we want is somebody stealing our thunder, so to speak.” A couple of the others laughed. Finn rolled her eyes.
“A bad-weather joke from the meteorology department? Why am I not surprised?” But she focused on the rest of what he’d said. “You think it was a polar shift?”
There were a couple of nods from the group.
“We think so, yeah,” a tall, thin woman with a long rope of red-blond hair answered. “But obviously most of our equipment got fried so we’ve got no way of being sure. We’re trying to cobble some stuff together so we can run a few tests.”
“Okay, stupid-question time: if that’s what happened, what can we do?” She got a lot of blank looks in response. “Let me rephrase that: is there anything we can do? Or do we just have to get used to the fact that north is south?”
Christian shook his head. “What’s going on is a natural process and once we’re past the initial stages things should settle down.”
“The lights will come back on?”
“Pretty much. Obviously a lot of stuff’s been damaged, but . . .” He shrugged as if to say that was better than nothing. His coworkers were already returning to their discussion about how to get their equipment functioning.
“Do me a favor. If you find anything out, let me know, okay?”
“I will. Definitely,” he promised.
His smile was sweet. Pity she wasn’t into good guys.
She left him to it, head full of questions, and moved back down the stairs and across the campus toward Schermerhorn.
Back on her floor, Finn was already thinking about the iconography of one particular symbol which she’d just seen painted on a wall as she’d crossed the campus. She was about to go back for a second look when someone called her name. She turned to see Debbie Caulfield waving her over to the break room. Debbie was short and round and could have been called dumpy, but she usually made up for it with a dazzling smile. She didn’t look happy. She looked frightened.
“What’s up?” Finn asked, detouring to join her in the break room. “You okay? You don’t look it.”
The shorter woman nodded. “Yeah.” She blinked a couple of times. For a moment Finn thought she was going to cry.
“What is it, Deb?”
“I . . . before . . . I was attacked.”
“What happened?”
The woman was shaking. “I saw someone coming out of your office. I thought he was a friend of yours, but when I said hi he slammed me into the wall and bolted.”
“Oh Jesus . . . you’re okay, right?”
“Shaken up, but mainly it’s just wounded pride.”
Finn nodded, taking her hand. “He’s no friend of mine, believe me.” She recounted her own run-in with the stranger. “It looked like someone had messed with my computer. I guess you just confirmed it. We should call the cops.”
“Campus security? Fat lot of good those idiots are.” Debbie managed a wan smile.
“No, the real cops.”
“And tell them what? That someone shoved me into a wall? I can just imagine how that’ll play with them given what’s going on out there.”
She had a point. The cops wouldn’t prioritize a break-in on campus where nothing appeared to be missing. They’d say it was a job for the clowns at campus security to clean up. She didn’t trust those bozos to organize an orgy in a brothel.
Bozos in brothels brought her thoughts around in a creepy sort of way to sex, which in turn brought her back to Jake. He still hadn’t called back. She hoped he would, soon. She had a lot to tell him.
Chapter Twenty-five
HE WAS IN WAY OVER HIS HEAD.
He needed someone to help him see beyond the accumulation of portents and weird shit that pointed toward some sort of fire-and-brimstone Armageddon, because that wasn’t what was really going on.
The first person that came to mind was the last person he actually wanted to speak to.
She picked up on the second ring. “Finn Walsh, Art and Archaeology.”
“Hey.” He paused a second, not really sure how intimate you were supposed to sound with a woman who’d no doubt made voodoo dolls to stick pins in your cock. “It’s Jake.”
“Thank god! Are you okay? Where are you?”
“Yeah, I’m good. It’s been a really weird day. Really weird. I was going to call, but . . .” He let it hang.
“Tell me about it.”
He took her literally and did exactly that, got it all off his chest, the whole story, from hearing about Fort Hamilton to the guys who’d blown up the Times Square station, the graffiti he kept seeing, the men dead men at the stock exchange, and the fight in the relay station. Including the bodies that were maybe an hour from going into rigor, eyes wide open but glazed over and the blood staining the cement beneath them. All of it. He even told her about Sophie’s call that started the whole thing off, and how that had led him to Harry, and eventually back into her life.
“I don’t even know how to respond to that,” she said after he’d finished. There was no humor in her voice. Shock.
He knew how she felt. He’d lived through it and he still didn’t know how the hell he was supposed to be reacting to these things. He was just focused on going forward.
“Weird doesn’t even begin to cover it,” she went on. “They must have known this was going to happen. They couldn’t react this fast otherwise. And the gas masks. They must have known somehow.” And then she told him the little she’d figured out about the polar shifts and how that would have disrupted the earth’s magnetic fields, how birds needed those to fly and how that disruption could account for a lot of the end-of-the-world portents they’d been seeing. He listened, taking it all in, without interrupting her.
Jake let that information settle in. “This is a purely natural process? Are the poles going to shift back again anytime soon?”
“Not for several thousand years,” she said.
“Right. Okay. So. They knew,” he said. “I don’t know how they knew, but they did. They knew the poles were going to shift, and they knew what it would do to the electronics when they did, and they were in place to act fast. That takes serious resources.” He was thinking fast, trying to process it all.
“You really think these guys are trying to take control of the city? I mean, if they’re already that powerful why would they need to move against an entire system that’s already set up for them to profit?” Which was a good question. “That’s what it sounds like, doesn’t it? Security, finances, communications? It’s like they’re going to war.” She broke off, but before he could say anything she added, “The roads are already screwed up, but it’s got to be transportation next, doesn’t it?”
He shouldn’t have been surprised. She was sharp. She might not be a soldier, or have that kind of background, but she understood strategy and was more than capable of connecting the dots.
He nodded. “They already blew the Times Square station—that’s enough to bring the subway to a halt for twenty-four hours, easily, and just the threat of more bombs, saran gas, anything like that, one more explosion and it’ll be down completely. But that’s internal, it’
s all on the island. If we’re thinking like military minds, they’d want to cut off external access to Manhattan until they’ve finished whatever it is they’re doing.”
“Airports and trains? LaGuardia,” she said immediately. “And JFK. And, oh fuck me . . . Penn. Grand Central. Port Authority. Oh god, can you imagine how many people are there now?”
He could. He’d been thinking about nothing else since the notion had first occurred to him back at the relay station. “And Newark, it’s too close to leave untouched. They can’t risk it, it’s like leaving the back door open. But yeah, we’re on the same page. It’s what I’d do if I were heading up a military op.” He shook his head. “Thing is, these guys are good. They’re efficient. Their strike teams are working to a timetable, no room for error, so they’re already in place in at least one of those sites. There’s no way I can stop all of them.”
“You could call the cops,” she suggested, but the problem was the cops were too busy with immediate threats to worry about some perceived one, and he had no real evidence to support his claims apart from a stack of corpses. And those would only lead to the wrong kinds of questions first. The kind he really didn’t have a good answer for. Who was going to believe stories about shadowy figures going around trying to subvert the city’s essential systems? It was straight out of Conspiracy Theories for Dummies.
“They’re not going to listen,” he said.
“You were in the Army, right? What about your old CO? There must be someone you could call who’d remember you. Give them your name rank and number so they know you’re legit, then tell them what you’ve stumbled onto?”
“Might work,” he admitted, but in truth he couldn’t see himself getting beyond a switchboard somewhere and then being consigned to the crank calls department of Couldn’t Give a Fuck HQ. It wasn’t as if he was some Purple Heart hero. “I’m gonna head to Penn Station,” he told her. Of all the targets this one was closest. “I’ve got to do something.”
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