Luis turned his head to take it in. “How did this happen? How did people even find out about it?”
Reynaldo grinned. “It’s like toadstools,” he said. “The growing conditions were right, and there you go. As for how they found out—same way I did. A guy tells another one, or somebody sees it when they pass by.”
Luis’s brain fast-forwarded. The blackout keeps on, more cars and more shoppers, people pitching tents, paying security guys, digging gardens, electing a mayor . . . After a while they’d set up their own power grid—a new city on the ruins of the old one, like a video game only for real.
“I was just thinking the world was going to end,” Luis said. “But this is more like some kind of weird beginning.”
“If you say so, bro,” Reynaldo said. “Me? I’m just hoping the power comes back before everything blows up.”
The sellers had organized themselves according to what they were offering—food, water, coats and blankets, flashlights, cans of gasoline, hardware, battery-powered radios and TVs, cell phones, chargers, batteries, pills, alcohol, and cigarettes. A couple of people had generators for sale, but they weren’t attracting much interest. Too expensive, probably.
“It’s like Walmart only outdoors,” said Reynaldo.
“More shouting than at Walmart,” said Luis.
It was obvious a lot of cash was changing hands. How long before some bad actor figured out how much cash was here for the taking? Were these pop-up shopkeepers ready for that?
“Bingo.” Reynaldo pointed. “This gentleman’s got you.”
Half a dozen people were buying from the pudgy black guy in an old colorless Audi. He was stocking snack food, cereal, and soda. “How much for a four-pack of Red Bull and Cheddar Cheese Pringles?” Luis asked. Then he thought of something else, “Oh, and do you have baby wipes?”
Luis half expected him to say “aisle six,” only he didn’t. “I don’t do toiletries,” he said. “The Red Bull’s twenty. Plain Pringles only, and they’re five.”
Luis didn’t answer right away. So much money!
“You don’t want it, someone else does,” the guy said.
Luis handed over two bills from Señora Álvaro’s stash. “How about a bag?” Luis asked the seller.
“Do I look like I have a bag?” he said.
Luis zipped Genius’s goods into his backpack.
“Where’d you get the dollars?” Reynaldo asked.
“Here and there,” Luis said, “you know, helping out.”
“And you’re spending it on the genius?” Reynaldo asked.
Luis shrugged. “It’s more of a trade. Anyway, I still need wipes and maybe deodorant.” He wished he had thought to ask Carlos for those things.
Reynaldo rolled his eyes. “Somebody didn’t raise you right. We got the apocalypse going on, and you want to be sure you smell nice.”
The woman most likely to have wipes also had soap, shampoo, and paper towels. Only one roll of toilet paper remained in the trunk of her twenty-year-old blue Caddy. Two women were arguing over who had spotted it first, a nice predicament for the seller, who could probably have asked any amount of money.
Luis was glad he wanted wipes, only ten dollars—“a steal and they’re top quality, too, a name brand,” the woman pointed out.
“Do you have any deodorant?” Luis asked.
“Hang on a sec.” The woman walked around to the passenger side of the car, opened the door, closed it, and came over with a stick of Ban.
“Great,” said Luis. “How much?”
“Five,” said the woman.
Luis gave her the cash, then had second thoughts and removed the lid. “Hey!” he protested. “This is used!”
The woman shrugged. “Sure, hon, but I’m clean.”
Luis said, “¡Guácala! Gross!” and tried to hand it back, but she wouldn’t take it. “Like the sign says, all sales final.”
“The sign does not say that,” Luis pointed out.
“It will in a minute. Besides, the deodorant still works. See if it doesn’t.”
Reynaldo couldn’t stop laughing.
By this time the sun was dropping below the outline of the skyscrapers across the river. Luis checked his watch—quarter to five. He told his perplexed brother adiós, gracias, gotta be somewhere, then jogged home to get his bike. With luck, he would be only a couple of minutes late.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Maura was already outside the house at 316 Larch when Luis arrived. Waiting for Carlos, they caught each other up. When Maura saw Mr. O’Hara at the hospital, he was pretty much the same as before, but one of his roommate’s visitors had told her that earlier he’d been restless and mumbling.
“Maybe that’s good. Maybe he’s getting stronger,” Luis said.
“I hope,” Maura said.
“Did you see your mom?” Luis asked.
“The nurse said she hadn’t been there,” Maura said. “I guess Uncle Nate hasn’t been able to pick her up yet.”
“So what about charging the phone?” Luis asked.
“A lot of people had the same idea as us,” Maura said. “The security guys were chasing people out and yanking chargers from the wall. It turns out only certain outlets work—they’re called red outlets. They’re the ones on circuits hooked up to the generators.”
Luis got a bad feeling. “Does that mean you didn’t do it?”
“Give me some credit,” Maura said. “I was freezing my tush outside the hospital when I thought of Beth’s office. Not so many people go in and out of there. So I went back. Beth wasn’t at her desk, but I found an outlet near it on the floor and plugged in. Beth came back a little later.”
“Did you tell her what you were doing?” Luis asked.
“I said since she wouldn’t help us, we were helping ourselves. I think she felt a little guilty, so she said go ahead, provided nobody else tried to throw me out. And nobody did.”
“Hiciste bien—you did good,” Luis said.
“Gracias,” Maura said. “Do you think Carlos is coming? It’s almost five thirty.”
Luis shrugged. “He’s not always that reliable. Maybe we should go in without him.”
Half an hour later, Maura and Luis were sitting on either side of Computer Genius in the private second-floor rat’s nest. He had been disappointed by the lack of Advil and the Pringles being plain, and Luis had had to promise an upgrade as soon as possible.
Now outfitted with seriously large headphones, Computer Genius bobbed his chin and drummed his fingers on the keyboard of his laptop. Luis could hear the music too. Before all of them on the screen scrolled line after line of glowing white computer code. It was meaningless to Luis—letters separated by slashes, spaces, and unintelligible punctuation.
Maura seemed to understand a little. “It’s computer language,” she explained. “The genius found a way through the firewall of the NJL system, and he pulled up the code that runs the grid. That’s what he’s looking at. He’s trying to find the malware.”
“The what?” Luis said.
“Malware. In other words, the commands—the lines of code—that were inserted by an intruder to mess things up.”
“You mean to turn off the lights?” Luis was trying hard to understand.
“It’s probably more complicated than that. Maybe more like to do something that did something that caused something else—and then that turned off the lights,” Maura said.
Scowling at the screen, Luis shook his head “But there’s so much of it! Isn’t it like looking for a misspelled word in the encyclopedia?”
“More like an out-of-place sentence, a statement,” Maura said. “But if you know about this stuff, you can use an analyzer to find anything suspicious. You know how you can search in a document? It’s like that.”
“What are you looking for exactly?” Luis asked.
Maura shook her head. “It’s not like I’m an expert,” she said. “But the way I understand it, there are certain patterns of code that malware use
s a lot. So you tell the analyzer to look for those patterns.”
Luis thought for a moment. “But what if it’s brand-new malware? What if it uses different patterns?” Luis hoped he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.
“If it’s new, it could be a problem,” Maura agreed. “It kind of depends on how clever the hacker is. Like anything else, there are smart ones and not so smart ones. We have to hope we’re up against one that isn’t so smart.”
But in that case, Luis thought as he watched the bright lines of code scroll by, wouldn’t the power company’s IT people have figured the problem out by now?
Suddenly, with obvious effort, Computer Genius yanked the headphones off his head, tore his eyes away from the screen, and shook himself the way a wet dog does.
“What’s up?” Luis said. “Did you fix it? Are the lights back on?”
“If they are, I didn’t do it,” Computer Genius said. “But I think I see what’s going on. Looks like they used a RAT to drop a logic bomb into the SCADA. Luckily there’s a mistake in the suicide script. You know what that is, right?”
“Sure.” Luis nodded. “Rodent go boom. Got it.”
Maura grinned, but not Computer Genius. “What do they teach you kids in school these days?” he asked.
“Hey—you’re pretty much a kid too, you know,” Luis said.
“I inhabit a different frame of reference,” Genius said.
“Unh-hunh,” Luis said.
“A suicide script is a Windows batch file, right?” Computer Genius spoke with exaggerated slowness. “It’s supposed to delete the executable file—in this case the logic bomb—as soon as it’s done its job. Then it’s supposed to destroy itself so somebody like me can’t find it.”
Luis nodded. “I see,” he said. “The suicide script is supposed to erase the file that did the job, then erase itself. And what’s the rest of what you said? I guess a rat isn’t a rodent?”
“It’s a remote-access Trojan,” Computer Genius said.
“You mean like the Trojan horse?” Luis said.
The genius looked blank.
“Troy? Greeks? The Odyssey?” Luis said.
“Enlighten me.” Computer Genius leaned back against the pillows.
Luis said sure, happy that for once he knew something. “So, like, a long, long time ago some Greek dudes gave some Trojan dudes a giant wooden horse as a present,” he began. “Giant meaning like an apartment building, and it was on wheels for easy transportation. The Trojans and the Greeks had been fighting, so you’d think the Trojans would’ve been suspicious, but I guess they were pretty excited about such a big present, and they rolled it inside the walls of their city and partied hard and passed out.”
“I have a bad feeling about this,” said Maura.
“Bad for the Trojans,” Luis said. “As soon as they were out of the way, the Greek soldiers hiding inside the horse opened it up, climbed out, and massacred everybody.”
Computer Genius nodded. “Yeah, I see. It is the same deal,” he said. “But instead of a horse, it’s a software module, and instead of soldiers, it’s files that are designed to attack.”
“What’s the ‘R’—the remote part?” Luis asked.
“The system was accessed remotely,” said Genius, “same way I’m doing it now. The original hacker might’ve used an e-mail to somebody inside the system, like somebody who works for NJL. When that guy opened an attachment, an exploit found a vulnerability in the browser software and dropped its payload.”
Exploit? Vulnerability? Payload? Luis didn’t understand every word, but he got the gist. “And according to you, there was a mistake,” Luis said.
“Call it a typo,” Computer Genius said. “The suicide script was supposed to delete a file named ‘wiper.sh.’ But the attackers told it to delete a file called ‘viper.sh’—with a ‘v,’ not a ‘w,’ get it?”
“Maybe they ran out of Red Bull,” Maura said.
Again, the genius did not smile. “It happens. And because of the mistake, the script couldn’t find itself to delete itself, and a bunch of evidence got left behind.”
Luis nodded. It wasn’t quite as complicated as he had expected. “Okay, so there’s one thing I don’t get. How come if you know so much the lights aren’t back on?”
“Even though I can see the malware, I don’t know what it told the system to do,” Computer Genius said. “To figure that out, I’d need to know more about the SCADA, the PLCs and all the equipment at New Jersey Light. There are probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of different devices in the system. Somehow or another, the bad guys told some of them, or one of them, to shut down . . . , but what device and how was it affected? I have no idea.”
“And you think the New Jersey Light IT people don’t know either?” Maura asked.
“It doesn’t look like it,” the genius said. “Otherwise the lights would be back. What you have to get is how complicated the system is. Even for experts, it could take a long time to sort it out. You have to look at every piece of equipment to do it.”
Luis felt crushed. Computer Genius was so smart. He knew so much. He had explained so much. Luis had been sure the blackout was about to be over. Now, all of a sudden—forget about it.
Then Luis had another thought—one he didn’t like. “Genius,” he said, “how do we know you didn’t hack the grid and turn off the lights?”
“Luis!” Maura said, but the genius only shrugged.
“You don’t know for sure,” he admitted. “But if it was me, I’d already’ve turned the lights back on. Then I could collect my pay and watch Star Trek reruns. No more hard work and having to think so much.”
Speaking of having to think . . . Luis’s head was spinning. If the genius was the hacker, then he, Luis, might as well give up. He didn’t want to give up. Therefore, whether it was true or not, he had to decide that the genius wasn’t the hacker.
Maura seemed to be way ahead of Luis. “Are you saying you can’t bring back the lights?” she asked.
The genius shrugged. “Probably not,” he said. “But don’t worry. Eventually the IT guys at the power company will get to the bottom of it. There’s a lot of them. They can call in security guys from all over the world, not to mention the IT people at the equipment manufacturers. They would’ve found the malware by now, but they’ve hit the same roadblock. What they’re probably doing is calling in reinforcements.”
“I don’t get it,” Luis said. “They’ve got so much help, so many experts. Why are the lights still out?”
“You’re not getting all that they have to do,” Computer Genius said. “Just to identify the problem, they have to analyze the malicious code and decrypt it. After that, there’s a whole reverse engineering process to see which of all those thousands of components it affects—not to mention what it does. It’s like . . . it’s like putting Humpty Dumpty back together, get it? It’ll probably happen, but it could take weeks.”
Even in the bad light, Luis could see that Maura’s face had gone pale. “Hampton will be a ghost town by then. People will move out if they can. Whoever’s left will be desperate; they’ll trash all the houses. It’ll be one big dark, cold wasteland.”
“Could be good for me, though,” Computer Genius said. “More abandoned houses. Higher quality.”
“Genius!” Maura said.
The genius pulled a wipe out of the box and used it to clean salt from his keyboard. “Of course,” he went on, “if everybody’s gone, who’s gonna bring me my supplies? I guess there is, just maybe, one alternative.”
Maura and Luis said, “Yes?”
The genius crumpled up the wipe and tossed it across the room. “There’s more to this than code, you know. What if you guys play private eye? You know, like in the movies. How come you came to me in the first place? Did somebody give you a tip that a cyberattack caused the blackout?”
Luis looked at Maura, and she nodded—giving him permission. “Maura’s grandfather,” Luis said. “He used to work for the
power company. We think he might know something, but he’s sick. He can’t really answer our questions.”
“Try again,” Computer Genius said. “Any kind of clue might help. I just need a little direction.”
“You sound like Yoda,” Luis said. “ ‘Go forth, Luke Skywalker.’ ” Computer Genius ignored this.
“And there’s one other thing. Whoever sabotaged the system probably left a back door for themselves.”
“Uh . . . okay,” said Luis, “meaning?”
“Meaning they’re probably watching me prowl around the system myself right about now. They know somebody’s onto them.”
“Wait—do they know where we are?” Luis felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Had the bad guys turned on the camera on the genius’s laptop? Were all of them being watched?
“No way,” said Computer Genius. “I mean, give me some credit. Even the IP address won’t tell them much. All they know is it’s somebody—and not the power company either. So you might want to keep that in mind.” He pulled the covers up to his chin and yawned. “Come on back when you’ve got something helpful. The cash dollars you can leave in the coffee can.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Where did you get so much money?” Maura whispered as she and Luis picked their way down the stairs.
“Doesn’t matter,” Luis said. “Watch that step. See it? There’s a hole.”
“I’m fine,” Maura said. “Where did you get the money?”
“I am being a gentleman,” said Luis.
“You are being irritating!” said Maura. “Anyway, we’re home invaders, not dinner guests.”
“Ouch,” said Luis. “Okay, fall through the floor if you want. See if I care. See if I notice.”
“Thank you,” said Maura. “I will.”
On the second step from the bottom, Luis felt a chill. From every scary movie ever, he knew that ghosts and chills went together. It had something to do with ectoplasm. Not that Luis believed in ghosts . . . But now there did seem to be a presence in the house, a new presence.
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