And the whole world was infected. At the moment, the world’s most valuable commodity was oil. And oil was traded exclusively using dollars. Greenbacks. No other currency would buy you a barrel of oil, on any exchange in the world. George Washington’s face made the world go ‘round. No two ways about it.
So every nation on earth had been co-opted into replacing their own blood with the blood of the beast. Rather, this blood was the beast. The dollar was a carcinogen, a virus, the delivery vector for ever-more strident, increasingly thorough oppression.
“Rest assured that while the short-term will be uncertain and uncomfortable,” the president said, “in the long run, nothing has changed.”
Half right again. The short-term would certainly be uncertain and uncomfortable.
But everything had changed.
At least, Stalwart hoped it had.
He crossed the Red River, and with that crossing, he found himself in Oklahoma. He checked his gas gauge. Half full. His plan was to keep his tank above that mark at all times. It was only prudent.
Stalwart decided to stop at the next rest stop to refuel. There was no use even trying a gas station. They would undoubtedly all look like they looked during the gas crisis of the early 1970’s: cars lined up for blocks, motorists alternating between a grim collegiality and bare-knuckled hostility, depending on how desperately they needed the gas.
Best to stiff-arm that entire scene, he thought.
But he wasn’t prepared for what awaited as he rounded the bend and exited the highway.
Something was wrong. There were a few dozen cars in the parking lot, but the red brick building housing the restrooms appeared nearly abandoned. Nobody milled about. It was alarmingly still.
Stalwart popped the trunk and the refueling door as he stepped out of the tiny rental car. He made his way around to the back of the car and reached for a gas can.
“Hey, buddy,” a distant voice said. Stalwart looked up. Fat man in overalls, walking around from the back of the brick building, big smile on his face. “Over here, buddy,” the man said, waving.
It felt strange. Where was everyone else? There were way too many cars in the parking lot for just one person to be visible.
Something else was off, too. This part of the country was known for its unabashed friendliness, but the fat guy seemed too friendly. He was trying a bit too hard.
Stalwart closed the trunk, slapped the gas flap shut, and climbed back into the rental car, twisting the ignition key as he pulled the door closed. He locked the doors, backed out of the parking spot and turned north, toward the rest stop exit.
He glanced at the redneck in overalls on his way past. The man was speaking into a walkie-talkie.
This is not good, Stalwart decided. He reached beneath his seat to remove a small black case, glancing out the window occasionally to keep the car pointed in the right direction as he accelerated through the parking lot.
The case’s handle caught on the seat adjustment lever, and Stalwart cursed. He resolved that he’d keep the .45 pistol in a far more accessible location in the future. He tried various combinations of brute force and finesse to remove the case.
Finally, it yielded, and Stalwart threw the case onto the passenger seat.
He looked forward.
Sonuvabitch. He slammed on the brakes, feeling the chintzy car’s antilock system hammering away, feeling his body thrown forward into the shoulder strap. Shock and disbelief crossed his face. This can’t be happening.
The car came to a lurching stop a handful of inches from another very large man in flannel and overalls.
Wielding a shotgun.
Stalwart slammed the car into reverse and stepped on the gas, only to hear a bowel-shaking blast from behind him. He felt the unmistakable sensation of a tire flattening. A third redneck flashed across his rearview mirror, his hand working the slide on a twelve-gauge Remington.
Redneck Number Two leveled his shotgun at Stalwart’s face.
The driver’s side window shattered, a gloved fist propelling shards of glass into Stalwart’s face. The hand reached in and opened the door from the inside.
Stalwart reached for the case on the passenger’s seat containing the .45, and frantically fumbled with the latches.
“I wouldn’t do that, friend,” a gruff voice said, the sentence punctuated by the sound of a shotgun shell racking into place in the chamber.
Stalwart turned his head to face the nearest assailant, who motioned him out of the car. “Ya’ll move real slow-like, y’hear?” Youngish. Face oddly misshapen. Stupid-sounding. Dangerous.
“Are you sure about this?” Stalwart asked. “I mean, the police are bound to stop by any moment, don’t you think?”
The three men laughed, harsh and cackling. One spoke into a radio. “Clem, this here city boy says the po-lice are coming. What do you think?”
Motion near the brick house. Stalwart turned. A man walked through the grass toward Stalwart’s stopped car, dressed in black, large Smokey hat on his head, sporting a big utility belt full of police stuff. He had the unhurried stride of a man in charge. He spat tobacco juice every dozen steps or so.
Stalwart felt a gun barrel in his back, nudging him forward toward the cop. Highway patrolman, he realized as the distance between them shrank.
Not so much a patrolman. More like highwayman.
“Not from around here, are you, boy?”
Stalwart bristled. A decorated combat veteran, he didn’t take kindly to being called a boy, no matter how many guns were pointed at him to emphasize the point. “This is how you treat your visitors, boy?” he asked.
The shotgun butt landed with a dull thud, digging into the small of his back, the pain of his instantly-bruised kidney bringing him to his knees on the hard gravel.
“Come on, now,” the cop said, his face wearing the smile of a man accustomed to wielding power capriciously. “No need for bad blood. Best you make nice. Ain’t it, Jimbo?” He nodded toward the fat man in overalls, who had finally made his way over to Stalwart’s car.
“S’right Clem,” Jimbo said, somehow stretching the cop’s name into two syllables. He waddled up to Stalwart, still on his knees in the gravel, grimacing in pain.
The big man clamped a rough, weathered hand hard around Stalwart’s jaw and lifted his face to look him in the eye, lips parting in a malicious grin, revealing a messed-up grille with a smattering of brown teeth peppered with tobacco remnants. “You gon’ be here for a while, I reckon.”
7
Department of Homeland Security Headquarters, Washington, DC
Dan Gable pounded away on the keyboard of his office computer. Sam realized it was representative of how she most often thought of him, as the eminently capable guy behind the scenes, gaining access and marshaling resources.
But that wasn’t entirely accurate. Her deputy had certainly seen his share of field action. He’d saved her life on more occasions than she could count.
Last night was one of them.
And on one particularly memorable occasion, it could be argued that Dan had brought Sam back to life.
Dan was Sam’s singular exception to the golden rule of counterespionage investigation: trust no one. Trust was risk. Trust was vulnerability. Trust was blindness.
Sam trusted Dan implicitly. He’d simply proven himself too valuable to be anything but her right-hand man, and despite the rugged cavalier-ness and pleasingly frontier-esque individualism inherent in the spy catcher’s mantra, the world was simply too big, too powerful, and too screwed up to tackle alone. Every Sam needed a Dan.
If he ever turned on her, she knew it would be catastrophic. But he probably wouldn’t turn on her. She didn’t think it was in his nature.
Plus, they loved each other like siblings, even though Dan worked for Sam. Their relationship was informal but always professional, collegial but all business. They hung out together on weekends, but that was only because the job demanded they work weekends. Bastards needed catching, and t
hat rarely happened on a convenient, predictable schedule.
“So what’s this all about?” she asked.
“Something weird has gone down,” Dan said, looking up from his computer monitor.
“Sounded that way. We saw the news ticker on in Brock’s hospital room, and caught a little bit of the radio news on the way home.”
“What station?”
“Some local thing,” Sam said. “My XM channels weren’t working.”
“That checks. XM rides on the same birds that carry bank transactions.”
“Birds?”
“Satellites,” Dan explained. “Someone fried a few of them. And the terrestrial cable switching trunks, too. Mason McClane called a while ago, panties all in a wad over some call his boss got from Sec Treas. Everyone was wondering how the hell the most connected country in the world could somehow end up with its banking system cut off entirely from all communications.”
“So how’d you figure it out?”
“I didn’t,” Dan said. “I just called an NSA buddy when I got to work. He sent me a SIGINT file. I was just starting to play with it when you walked in.”
“Quick thinking. I hadn’t made the signals intelligence connection.”
“Yep. Not a single cell phone can fart without the NSA catching a whiff.”
“Creepy.”
“Handy, in this case,” Dan said. He imported a page full of numbers and symbols into some other program. Seconds later, a map appeared.
“Looks like Virginia,” Sam observed.
Dan zoomed in. “Hampton, to be precise.” He whistled. “Someone threw a ton of energy skyward. Looks like they did it a few times, separated by just a few seconds.”
Sam shook her head. She thought about how many satellites orbited the earth, and how dependent the global economy had become on satellite communications. Because they were so far away and so difficult to damage while in orbit, satellites had enjoyed relative sanctuary from the innumerable skirmishes that punctuated the human soap opera every day.
Until last night, apparently.
“I think the game has just changed in a big way,” she said.
Dan nodded. “Yeah. This is a big deal. And the fact that they took out the transoceanic fiber-optic relay stations means they knew exactly what they were doing.”
“I thought at first that it was some sort of brute force thing,” Sam said, “but this is starting to feel very strategic. Surgical, even.”
Dan’s phone rang. He answered, listened for a second, then said, “She’s right here.”
Sam took the phone. Mason McClane sounded tired. There’s a lot of that going around today. “Hi Mace,” Sam said to her boss.
“Sam, sorry to drag you into this. You’ve had a helluva weekend. I’m relieved and happy you got Brock back in good shape, and you seriously cracked some skulls in the process.”
“Thanks, Mace. All’s well that ends well, I suppose.”
“Things have gone to shit. Can you come upstairs?”
McClane’s office wasn’t posh by any stretch, but it was comfortable, and the view was even better than Sam’s. Looking east, Sam saw the Capitol building, and the Washington Monument stood tall, stark, and beautiful to the west. She recalled a very memorable midnight chase a few years ago that had ended in a bitter, bloody struggle at the foot of the monument. Wasn’t the kind of thing a girl could forget.
“Sam?” McClane was looking at her. “You with us?”
“Yeah. Sorry. What did you say?”
“I was just saying, this is exceptionally sensitive stuff. Eyes only.”
Sam nodded. Usually is.
“It wasn’t just an attack against the communication nodes used by the banking industry,” McClane said. “It looks like there’s much more. All twelve regional Federal Reserve banks were hacked.”
“There are twelve Federal Reserve banks?” Sam asked. “I thought there was just one.”
McClane shook his head. “I thought the same thing, but I’ve gotten a civics lesson this morning. The Fed banks are not really federal, and they’re not really reserve banks. But yes, there are twelve of them. Or there were. Today, there are effectively none.”
“Come again?” Dan said.
“Completely crushed. Some kind of a cyber attack. None of the system administrators at any of the banks can even log in.”
Sam looked puzzled. “So they can’t ignore their email or play solitaire. What’s the big deal?”
McClane laughed. “That’s what I thought, too, until Treasury explained it to the Director and me this morning. Here’s the rub. There is almost no money in the country’s banking system. Almost every bank borrows its daily supply of money, then lends it out at a higher rate. They make money on the spread.”
“And you’re saying that the daily money supply comes from those twelve non-federal, non-reserve banks?”
“Exactly. In the form of new loans. The federal banks exist to make the money supply ‘elastic.’” McClane made quotation marks in the air with his hands. “Even if there’s a run on a local bank, that bank can borrow as much cash as it needs, in order to avoid a panic.”
“Except, now they can’t,” Dan said.
Sam considered for a moment. “We’re totally screwed,” she concluded.
McClane nodded. “Pretty much.”
“Has the herd stampeded yet?”
“CNBC was on-air live at the stock exchange this morning when the brokers all figured out what happened. They ran out of the building like it was on fire, scrambling to withdraw their own funds before the local banks ran out of cash.”
Sam shook her head.
“We’ve asked the news stations not to broadcast this,” McClane continued, turning his computer monitor so Dan and Sam could see it. He clicked on a video, and expanded it to full-screen size.
Absolute bedlam. It looked like a Third World war zone. The video showed a parking lot full of cars, and full of crazed, rioting people bludgeoning each other and hurling things through the windows of a building. The sign in the corner of the parking lot said First National Bank of Reston.
“Jesus,” Sam said. “Where are we, Mozambique?”
McClane nodded grimly. “May as well be. It’s a little-known paradox that as a currency melts down, that currency’s cash suddenly becomes extremely scarce. People scramble to get as much of it as they can, and spend it to buy food and water before the currency inflates so far they can’t afford to buy anything with it.”
Weird. “So much for a few days of relaxation,” Sam said.
But she was prepared. She had a hardened shelter in her basement full of food, water, guns, and even gold. She’d installed it after a particularly grisly case left her more than a little paranoid. Seemed like it would come in handy right about now.
“Right. We think there’s something else going on, though,” McClane said. “Like I mentioned, there was that computer virus that filleted the Fed.”
“Some would say they had it coming,” Sam said.
“Maybe so. But this virus went miles beyond a mere denial of service. From what they can tell, the virus actually overwrote all of the account information. For every account.”
“Wow,” Dan said. “So it’s not just that the money isn’t available. Nobody knows how much money each account holder should have available.”
“Right,” McClane said.
“This is going to make Paris in 1789 look like a vacation,” Sam said.
“And Russia in 1917,” Dan said.
“You don’t know the half of it,” McClane said. “The DNI called FBI and DHS this morning. There’s preliminary evidence to suggest that the virus that decimated the Fed came from inside the NSA.”
Sam let out a low whistle. “I’m sure nobody’s spun up about that at all,” she said sardonically.
“Not at all,” McClane responded in kind. “Now you know why this is eyes-only.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “We wouldn’t want the masses to know they were r
ight.”
Dan laughed. “How do you work for a government you don’t trust?”
“Keep your enemies close,” Sam said darkly. Honestly, it’s a damn good question, she thought.
“So here’s the deal,” McClane said. “We have two angles to chase down here. One is the giant electromagnetic emission that came out of Hampton. I think Dan filled you in on that.”
Sam nodded.
“The other angle is the NSA breach. Obviously, we need to tread very lightly there.” McClane looked sternly at Sam.
“Lightly is not really in my repertoire,” Sam said.
Dan agreed. “Ask the guy whose kneecap she blew apart last night.”
“Then learn,” McClane said. “But at the end of the day, we need to figure out what the hell is going on.”
Sam nodded. “I agree. Big as this was, it could be the beginning of something much bigger. Who else have you talked to about this?”
McClane shook his head. “You undoubtedly noticed how empty the building was. It’s been tough to get ahold of anyone.”
“Strange,” Sam said with a wry smile. “Maybe they suddenly had something more important to do than sit in meetings.” Like trying to keep their houses from being looted.
Or maybe they were out doing the looting themselves.
“Anyway, I smell a road trip,” Sam said. “Dan, I think you’re probably better suited for the NSA thing. I can’t even spell ‘virus.’ I’ll head south to Hampton to chase down the satellite thing.”
McClane nodded. “Keep me in the loop,” he said.
Sam and Dan stood up to leave. McClane held up his hand. “I almost forgot,” he said. “A national security watch item was stolen last night. It popped up on the classified network this morning and the watch officer reported it to the director.”
“They finally got their hands on that rocket-powered dildo?”
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 145