The Leviathan Effect

by James Lilliefors

  Afterward, they sat on a green, paint-chipped wooden bench against the cinderblock wall. Mallory watched a young, heavyset woman lifting weights across the room. He counted seven other people working out.

  “You do realize that something’s wrong with what you’re telling me, though,” he said. “I mean, I hope you realize that.”

  “But I’m not telling you anything.” Blaine looked at him and laughed quickly. “I’m asking questions.”

  “No, you’re telling me a lot, actually. You’re telling me that the government has been receiving threats of some sort from Janus, or, more likely, someone claiming to be Janus.” He glanced at her, saw her raise her eyebrows subtly, the equivalent of a nod, it seemed. “Meanwhile, there have been vague reports in the media over the last couple of days that someone’s been hacking into secret government websites and/or computer networks. Possibly threatening an attack on the nation’s SCADA network. The power grid.” Blaine’s eyes were watching his in the mirror now, he saw. “We both know that’s not likely. So the stories are probably false. Or incomplete. But they must have some basis in truth. Right? Therefore, there must be some sort of high-level hacking going on. But different from what’s being reported.”

  Mallory took a deep breath, and glanced at his own reflection. “Using the name Janus would surely get your attention. I’m just guessing here, but if I were to speculate, I’d imagine that the threat you’re dealing with has something to do with the weather. And I sense it’s something fairly substantial.”

  He finally looked at her reflection. She was suppressing a smile, he was pretty sure. Seeing him notice, she began to stretch out her right calf, then her left.

  “And why would you think that?” she said.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “To which question?”

  “All of the above.”

  Blaine inhaled slowly. “I just wish I could comment.”

  “Me, too,” he said. “The problem with Janus,” he went on, “is that this isn’t his MO. He wouldn’t be doing it this way. Also, there’s a distinct possibility that Janus is no longer alive.”

  “Really,” she said, a new interest rising in her tone. She stopped stretching.

  “Really. But inserting Janus into this—whatever ‘this’ is—would serve a purpose. It shifts attention to China. And to the Chinese military.”

  “Yes, I know. But from where?”

  Now Mallory smiled. Shrewd. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  “Do you have a guess?”

  “Not now. But if you were to provide me with just a little more information, I could probably give you a reasonably educated one.”

  “Let me think on that.”

  “Sure.” Mallory stood. He could tell that Blaine was thinking on it. Uncomfortable with the set-up and probably wanting an ally, as she had years before. But she was also beholden to protocol and law. It was probably something she wrestled with every day.

  “It’s funny about this conversation, isn’t it?” Mallory said.

  “Is it?”

  “Mmm hmm.”

  “Why is it funny?”

  “We’re doing exactly what the United States’ intelligence community does, aren’t we? We’re demonstrating its weakest link.”

  “How so?”

  They were walking toward the locker rooms now.

  “This conversation we’re having. This sort-of conversation. I know something you want to know. And I suspect you know something I want to know. But neither of us is going to tell the other. Because of territorial concerns, on your part. On my part, I guess, just because of pure stubbornness.” Blaine creased her brow. “That’s been the story of US intelligence for the past thirty or forty years, hasn’t it? Then when someone recognizes that a problem exists, rather than try to fix it by opening up channels of communication, they enlarge the problem, creating a new agency to coordinate the other agencies. Like yours.”

  She laughed a genuine laugh—easy, robust, surprising—which Mallory immediately considered a small victory. But she quickly turned serious again as they came to the entrance. “The trouble is, I’m bound by law from divulging classified information.”

  “I know. A shame.”

  “Yes, it is. I just wanted to hear your thoughts. If you’d like to share any others, though, I’d be glad to talk again.”

  Mallory said nothing. He sensed that there were other ways in, just not today.

  “Anyway, I’m going to hit the showers,” Blaine said. She reached to shake.

  “Just keep your options open.” He pulled the business card he’d brought from his pocket, a little worse for wear. “Here’s my number.”

  “Okay.” She smiled. “And I will.”

  THE FACT WAS, Charles Mallory had begun to sense that something was going on even before Chaplin had contacted him. Sensed it like a subtle, irrevocable shift in the weather; unusual patterns beginning to interact in ways that he could feel without having any idea what they meant, where they came from, what they might become. There had been the unanswered messages from Langley. The media reports about cyber-security breaches. Then the emails from his brother. The list of names, and now Blaine contacting him. Converging forces, not yet forming a coherent pattern. But they would.

  It wasn’t his business, of course, nor was it his responsibility, to try to figure out any of this. Except that it now involved his brother; that changed everything. So Mallory had begun working the puzzle in his head, knowing that he needed more information before it began to make sense. He thought of people who might be able to help him. People like his friend Patricia Hanratty, the former intel analyst who had worked on Project Cloudcover. In part it was a game, like working a crossword. Something he kept going back to, finding that each new combination made the earlier clues easier to figure. Blaine had just given him a lot more. As he pulled out his cell phone to call Chaplin, walking across the parking lot, he noticed that he had missed a call. And when he saw who it was, he sensed that he was about to learn another important piece. Patricia Hanratty had called back.

  CATHERINE BLAINE SAW the Suburban pull out behind her as she drove onto Wisconsin Avenue from the gym parking lot. Secret Service detail. Rain was still steaming off the pavement from the morning’s downpour and the air smelled of soaked lawns.

  The Suburban followed her as she drove toward her office on K Street, keeping a distance, but taking all of the turns she took. Even when she deliberately went the wrong way.

  As Blaine came to Pennsylvania Avenue, her phone vibrated and she saw that she wouldn’t be going to her office this morning, after all. There had been another message. She was being summoned to the White House: YARI.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  9:12 A.M.

  FOUR OF THE FIVE members of the circle were already seated around the mahogany conference table in the Cabinet Room when Catherine Blaine entered.

  Clark Easton gave her a look. Sideways, steady. Impossible to tell what it meant. Stanton, the Vice President, rose and shook her hand, as usual.

  Blaine saw the now-familiar setup. Five of them gathered around one end of the conference table. Four men: husbands, fathers, grandfathers. Shirtsleeves. Secretary Easton, with his tiny scribble pad, his hard blue eyes silently managing the proceedings.

  The President told her the news. Another message had been delivered.

  “We gave them our assent last night,” he said. “We received their response this morning. The final one, apparently.”

  The President passed copies to each of the people in the room. This one had been sent to the President’s email address.

  The subject line read, FAREWELL.

  Blaine read the message:

  Hello. This ends my involvement in this business. Soon, one of you will most likely be approached by representatives of a third party. What happens after that is entirely up to you. Keep in mind that this group will know nothing about our email communications or about me. This is a separate relationship. I do not anti
cipate the need for any further communication. Thank you.

  —Janus 58D39J675T9

  No one spoke for a while. Blaine read through the message several times, noting the word choices; the tone, this time, seemed slightly different from the earlier ones. She looked at Easton, then at the President, feeling claustrophobic all of a sudden. Charles Mallory had been fresher air; she wished she’d been able to open up more with him.

  “Well,” Vice President Stanton said, breaking the spell. “That’s it, then. This is what we’ve been waiting to hear.”

  Easton grimaced ambiguously.

  “So we’re going forward with this,” DeVries said. Part statement, part question.

  “I don’t see that we have much choice,” said the President.

  “I just can’t help feeling there’s something nasty in the woodshed here that we’re not looking at,” said Stanton.

  “There is,” the President said. “Of course, there is. But meeting with them doesn’t mean we’re capitulating to anything. It just means we finally sit down face to face and see who the hell they are. That’s been the objective of our strategy all along.”

  DeVries nodded.

  “I don’t like it,” the Vice President said.

  “Cate?” the President said.

  Blaine nodded. Showing she was on board.

  “Okay.” The President sighed and collected the messages. “Now,” he said. “Second item: this storm in the Atlantic. Alexander. It’s about to become a Category Two hurricane. It’s a huge system that’s stretching across more than four hundred miles and growing. We lost a weather plane in it overnight, with eight people on board.” He paused, looking down at a summary from his morning intelligence briefing. “They were flying a fairly routine mission into the eye and the plane disappeared. That’s the first time we’ve lost a plane in a hurricane since 1955. All communications lost, no trace of her. We’re not making that announcement until we have more details, but obviously this is a matter of grave concern. We’re also fielding reports of communications lost with several ships in the Atlantic. Six ships in two or three days. Four of them freighters, two fishing vessels. I’ve been briefed by Jim Wu, who tells me that this storm is developing in ways that are very unusual.” He glanced down at his briefing paper. “Alexander is behaving more like a Pacific Ocean hurricane than an Atlantic storm.”

  “That’s it, then, isn’t it?” asked the Vice President, turning and pointing toward the windows.

  Blaine nodded absently, trying to make eye contact with DeVries.

  “Possibly,” the President said. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. Let’s just say, we’ll be watching the system very carefully.”

  For a long time, though, no one said anything. They just listened to the rain on the windows.

  CATHERINE BLAINE WALKED up the steps to her townhouse, thinking about Janus’s final message. And Charles Mallory’s warning that this wasn’t Janus. That it wasn’t his MO.

  What was it, then?

  In the kitchen, she poured a glass of diet soda and noticed that her message light was blinking. She hit the retrieve button, hoping to hear Kevin. Instead, she heard the gruff but friendly voice of her mother, calling from North Carolina.

  Dear, we’re about to leave the beach here and drive to Tennessee. Your father’s out loading the car right now. This storm sounds just awful! They’re asking everyone to leave, so we’re not going to chance it. We’ll be staying with your Uncle Pete and Aunt Carol in Pigeon Forge for a few days, okay? So I know you’ll be busy and hard to reach but you call Uncle Pete’s if you want to talk with us, okay? You just be safe, sweetie. Give Kevin our love. Bye, dear. We love you.

  Blaine felt a bittersweet twinge as the message clicked off. She was disappointed—though not surprised—that her father hadn’t left a message. Increasingly, he let her mother handle communications between them, as if he were expanding his retirement to include family affairs, too. He had been a taskmaster during Blaine’s childhood; now, he often seemed a quiet, aloof stranger, only marginally interested in her career.

  The storm was making her feel a little blue, she realized. She tried calling Kevin, who answered after five rings.

  “Hi, Mom. Amanda’s here,” he said right away. “We’re getting ready to go out for pizza. But I can talk for a minute.”

  “All right,” she said. “Are you okay?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be?” Then he told her he was worried that Alexander might force them to postpone their trip to the Eastern Shore another week. Blaine said they’d just have to wait and see.

  “Amanda’s parents have a place on the beach in, like, Dewey? So I may end up going with them.”

  “Not if the storm’s coming, honey.”

  He quickly changed the subject, asking if she had seen Letterman last night.

  “No, honey, I normally don’t watch that,” she said.

  “Well, you should have seen it last night. It was a classic.” He then told her all about it, reciting almost word for word Letterman’s exchange with Seth Rogen.

  Afterward, Blaine turned on her television and switched among the cable news networks. She was surprised to see that the hurricane had already begun to impact the East Coast. She left it on CNN and watched:

  At this hour, the outer bands of Hurricane Alexander are buffeting the coasts of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina with high tides and gale-force winds. Officials in North Carolina have issued mandatory evacuation orders and more are expected elsewhere along the coast over the next 24 hours.

  Alexander is now a Category Two hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale with maximum sustained winds of 107 miles per hour and gusts topping 130. The storm, moving west-northwest at 12 miles per hour, is projected to strengthen into a Category Three storm overnight with landfall projected near Virginia Beach, Virginia early Sunday morning.

  The effects of the hurricane are already causing property damage and flooding in several coastal communities. In Savannah, Georgia, wind gusts up to 65 miles an hour have downed trees and power lines. Heavy surf and drenching rains in the Outer Banks of North Carolina have flooded roads and strong winds have reportedly blown the roofs off of several beachfront properties.

  FEMA crews have been deployed up and down the coast to work with state and local emergency management agencies. Meanwhile, ten thousand National Guard troops and scores of Red Cross teams are being mobilized to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Alexander.

  But federal officials stress that the most important thing right now is for people to take this storm seriously and prepare for it properly—and in many cases, they’re saying, the best preparation is simply to get out of its way.

  The scene shifted to FEMA Director Shauna Brewster, standing behind a lectern at FEMA headquarters on C Street.

  Anyone who lives in a coastal county should be prepared to leave. For the sake of yourself and your families, we implore you to act responsibly.

  Brewster’s normally animated expression was flat and sober, Blaine noted.

  Blaine surfed channels for another several minutes, and found something else that got her attention, this time on FOX News: Dr. Keri Westlake, physicist at the University of Maryland, had gone missing several days earlier.

  Blaine knew Keri Westlake. Not well, but she had worked with her several times when Blaine was in Congress. A bright woman, with lots of ideas and enthusiasm. She’d advocated a federal initiative for climate research, as Blaine had done, and supported Senator Hutchison’s bill to create a weather modification bureau.

  She was thinking about Keri Westlake, staring at the rain puddles in the street, when her cell phone rang.

  “Cate, Rube.”

  It was Dr. Sanchez.

  “Oh, hello.”

  “I’ve got some more information for you. Can we talk?”

  “Sure. Please. Go ahead.”

  “No. It’s something I’d like to show you. In the morning again?”

 
; “Sure. All right.”

  “Same Bat time, same Bat station?”

  “Yes. Sure,” she said. “Works for me.”

  DMITRY PETRENKO DROVE slowly through the rolling Virginia hill country, surveying the sloping entrance and exit ramps to the underground facility, well hidden behind a wall of stone and a dense cluster of trees, on property Victor Zorn had purchased with funding from Volkov.

  Petrenko had arrived two nights earlier on a private jet, with five members of his security detail, to move the mobile Command and Control Center into the facility and to make it operational. An additional four men would be arriving early tomorrow morning on two separate commercial flights. Three had already driven across country in two cargo trucks, bringing the communications equipment that could not be transported by plane.

  Petrenko had been prepping this meeting for weeks, although many of the specific details had only been provided to him over the past two days. He had arranged for the hotel rooms, the decoy vehicles, the drivers. His most important task, though, would be securing Mr. Zorn. Clearly, the Americans would want to learn all that they could about him, to take advantage of the small window of vulnerability that he would be giving them. And naturally they would use everything at their command to do so: satellites, planes, digital audio and visual sensors, high-tech security cameras. Petrenko’s job was to thwart those efforts. To shield Mr. Zorn as much as possible. They had war-gamed their tactics for weeks, and he was certain that he could protect Mr. Zorn from close scrutiny. What worried him was something else.

  The other part of Petrenko’s job was simply to observe. To make certain that Mr. Zorn was doing what he said he was doing—and to report the results of his observations to their boss, Vladimir Volkov.