“And what precisely does the bank pay Mr. Schwert?” Magnus asked.
“Okay. Nothing. I get your point. So, could I ask you to pose a question to his highness for me?”
Magnus snorted.
“Ask him,” Frank continued, “if he could send me a brief overview of how he designed security into BankCoin. That assumes that he did, instead of relying on the banks to prevent their systems from being breached.”
“So that someone can someday hack into our network and find his description? That would be a nice roadmap for a black hat to have, yes?”
“Okay, then ask him to give me a call.”
“Schwert does not ever use a phone. I would be surprised to learn he owns one.” A twinkle appeared in Magnus’s eye. “Not even so he could speak to one of your Cabots.”
Magnus turned back to his computer screen, leaving Frank frowning at the back of his head. It also left him with no choice but to return to his office in frustration.
What was going on with this world? First Manhattan had turned the global financial system over to someone no one had ever met who couldn’t even be called on a phone. But to be fair, they weren’t the only adults acting like children. The most revered and aggressive investment bank on Wall Street had opened a bitcoin exchange. And not only had Satoshi Nakamoto never been seen or heard, but it had been years since he vanished from the virtual earth he’d once – maybe – inhabited. Why should BankCoin be any different?
Perhaps because this whole circus was stark raving, barking mad.
* * *
It was a Monday morning, so Frank was in New York City. Not because there was something productive to be done, but because it was the day he was required to present himself before Horace Nukem and assure the executive chairman that all of First Manhattan’s assets, as well as its stock price, were safe and sound, not necessarily in that order. Privately, Frank and Ruth had begun referring to the weekly gatherings as Nukem’s EHPPOS therapy sessions. The acronym stood for Everything Humanly Possible is being done to Protect Our Stock.
It was a bleak way to begin the week, Frank reflected as he stepped into the elevator. There was never anything new or interesting to report. Once you built a state-of-the-art cyber castle, maintaining it was as dull as keeping a real fortress in proper shape – the equivalent of repointing the stone work if you noticed any bits of mortar coming loose. At the same time, you’d have no way of knowing it if someone was tunneling underneath your feet, preparing to set off enough explosives to bring the whole castle down in ruins. Unfortunately, even the technically-challenged Nukem knew that.
So, what was the point? Maybe the former general still enjoyed reviewing his troops. Or perhaps he figured giving his staff a weekly dose of his dour countenance would focus their minds on the risk at hand. If so, Frank had to grant him that much. But it wasn’t as if it opened any opportunities to do more than they already were.
Frank picked up a cup of coffee and walked to the glass-walled conference room. Yup. There the executive chairman sat, enthroned at the head of the table like a great stone Buddha with indigestion. Or maybe hemorrhoids.
Oh well. Nothing to be done but get down to the non-business of the day.
Chapter 31
Frank Gets Called on the (Red) Carpet
Ted Miller stared at the phone message. Why would a talent agent be calling him? And about Frank Adversego, of all people? Well, there was only one way to find out.
“This is Lou,” the voice at the other end answered.
“Hi, Lou. Ted Miller returning your call. You wanted to talk about Frank Adversego.”
“Right! Thanks for the call-back. Here’s the story. I’m Donna Shawn’s agent. She’s up for best supporting actress in The Lafayette Campaign. Fantastic cybersecurity thriller! Have you seen it?”
“No, sorry. Afraid I don’t get to as many movies as I’d like to,” Miller said. Where the heck was this going?
“Yeah, well, you should make an exception for this one. Anyway, Donna’s date has come down with the flu, and she needs a stand-in escort for the Academy Awards ceremony this Sunday night, so I got to thinking, and it hit me – who could be a better escort than Frank Adversego? The real-life one, instead of her co-star! So how about it? Can we have him for a few hours on Sunday? It’ll be terrific publicity for your bank.”
Miller stared at the phone. Frank Adversego hovering on the edge of the red carpet? Really? Still, it might make for some nice press.
“Ah, I’m afraid I’ll have to get back to you,” Miller said.
“Okay, but I can only give you two hours. If your boy can’t make it, I’ve got to move to the next name on my list.”
“Got it,” Miller said, shaking his head. Then he punched in Lola Logan’s number.
“Lola,” he said when she answered, “you’re not going to believe this.”
* * *
Frank was feeling great. He was sitting in the bank’s corporate jet on the runway of a private airport outside New York City, and he and Lola would be the only passengers. Wherever he was off to must be really important! The flight attendant handed him a drink, and he looked out the window. There was a town car now, gliding across the tarmac toward the plane. That would be Lola.
Minutes later, they were in the air, and she swiveled her seat around to face him.
“So, are you all set for your big evening?” she said.
“Well, I hope so. What is it?” he said, raising his glass.
“Didn’t Ted Miller tell you?” she said, feigning ignorance. “You’re escorting Donna Shawn to the Academy Awards ceremony tonight.”
“What?” Most of the scotch spraying out of Frank’s mouth landed on Lola. Okay, she thought, maybe I deserved that.
Frank jumped out of his seat. “Oh, hey, I’m sorry about that! Let me get something you can dry off with – but what?”
“Well, we got a call from her agent. Apparently, she plays somebody named Josette in The Lafayette Campaign, and her date came down with a nasty case of stomach flu. Her agent thought you’d be a great escort for her since the movie is based on one of your cases. Wasn’t that a great idea?”
“No!” Frank said. “Not at all! I’ve never even watched the Academy Awards on TV. All I know is everyone will be famous and fashionable and photogenic, and then there’ll be me! I won’t have a clue what to do, or what to say, or which way to look! Let’s get the pilot to turn around right now!”
The plane was over Kansas by the time Frank had mostly calmed down and then only after spending a half hour on the phone with his daughter. Although outwardly sympathetic, she was as inwardly thrilled as he was terrified. Boy, would her dad look great next to Donna Shawn on Marla’s Instagram page!
* * *
“How long is this going to take?” Tim asked. A little known but expensively-draped actress was smiling, posing and waving on the television screen, stretching out her moment of red-carpet fame for as long as possible. “This is excruciating.”
“Hang in there. It can’t be too much longer,” Marla said. But she was bored, too.
“Yeah, well,” Tim said, “give me a holler when you see Frank. I’ll be in the bedroom getting some work done.”
Five minutes later she called out. “Tim! Now!”
Marla watched the screen anxiously as her father stopped a few steps before Donna Shawn did, doubtless as he’d been coached to, allowing her to dominate the video stream. There she pirouetted for the cameras, flashing the expected thousand-watt-smile as the disembodied voices of the broadcast hosts made their predictable comments.
“Well, doesn’t she just look great!” one of the commentators cooed in a cloyingly delighted voice, “That dress is certainly going to put the designer on the map! I’ve never heard of him before, be I’m sure we all will now.”
But Marla wasn’t really listening. Instead,
she was focused on her father, just visible at the edge of the screen, standing stiffly and obviously wondering what to do with his hands. Thankfully, it was only another minute before Shawn towed him off camera.
* * *
Frank was feeling jittery but relieved the next morning as the private jet left Bob Hope Airport. He’d taken no chances the day before, drinking nothing but sparkling water after Lola broke the news of their destination to him. He thought he’d comported himself with dignity, or anyway, at least avoided disaster, and hoped any pictures or video clips that made their way online would confirm his belief.
Blessedly, escorting Donna Shawn had proven to be a far smaller challenge than he’d feared. It was clear from the first he was just another accessory to her, something like a two-legged handbag to be carefully positioned to accentuate her appearance for the benefit of the photographers – complementary but not distracting. As long as he kept smiling as he was swept, pushed, or poked along, Donna seemed happy enough.
He’d grown more nervous as the time to announce the best supporting actress approached, though. It was unnerving not knowing when, and from where, the video cameras might zoom in to capture Shawn’s anticipation and then jubilation or desolation, doubtless capturing a slice of his own face in the process.
And then she won. Whatever slight attention she’d paid to him up to that point was history. The rest of the event and the party thereafter were blurs of faces familiar and otherwise, limousines, noise, laughter – she taking part and he watching from a safe distance in the background. He was relieved when he found a couch in a corner of the party, its black leather providing the perfect background for him and his tuxedo to blend into.
That part had been hard. There was no pretending he belonged there in a tuxedo, or really anywhere in such a monkey suit. How had accepting a job to earn tuition for his grandchildren led to being assigned a gig as arm candy for an actress? And not just any actress. He was being taken advantage of by a young woman playing the part of another young woman who had taken advantage of him in real life.
It wasn’t until almost three a.m. that Shawn collected him from the couch so they could be seen leaving together.
Chapter 32
Lights! Action!
Frank suddenly found himself sitting in the dark. The question was why? Just a moment before, he’d been typing away. Now the only light in his apartment was coming from the screen of his laptop. He felt his way to the window and looked outside – everything was black across the street, too. The scene was extraordinary – pitch-black, with no glow of city light reflected by the sky, either. Was the power off all over Washington?
He made his way to his front door and looked out; good; the battery-powered exit light in the hall was still on, casting a dim, reddish light. He entered the stairwell under the sign and started up. When he stepped out onto the roof, the stars overhead startled him – in the city he’d never been able to see any but the brightest ones before. Now the milky way arched majestically across the moonless sky.
He was surprised he could see so much in the ghostly light it cast; faint forms stretched off in every direction. Here and there, the windows of a building with emergency generators glowed. The only other lights visible were the headlights of the few cars still moving so late at night.
Back in his apartment, he scanned his laptop for news, but it was too soon. He tried typing “#blackout” on Twitter, and that was a different story. Holy cow – it wasn’t just Washington! He scrolled downward – there were people tweeting in Denver; Seattle, too. But not Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles. He scanned farther down; hmm. That was strange. The lights were out in Denver, but not Boulder. And though Seattle and the nation’s capital were down, Portland and Baltimore weren’t. That’s not how blackouts worked; they started in one place and spread out to surrounding areas from there. How could the outages be so widespread and so local at the same time?
The answer was obvious: someone had hit the United States with a massive, targeted cyberattack. But not an assault launched by NASLA, because so far as he knew, none of the power grids used a blockchain.
So, who would it be? Was it one of the state actors he’d been obsessing about for so long? North Korea? Iran? Russia? Russia, probably, given the news lately, but it was always a bad idea to jump to a conclusion, no matter how obvious it might seem.
* * *
“Okay,” Yazzi said. “Let’s go. Jim?”
There were a few empty chairs at the hastily called meeting of the National Security Council, but the members most crucial to the issue at hand were all present.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Jim Wakeman, the national security adviser said. “What you see on the screen over there is the list of cities hit by the outage – eight in all. What’s not on the list is as notable as what is. If the blackout resulted from an accident or system failure, the impact would look very different. The way a normal outage unfolds is predictable – it’s like watching a string of dominoes falling over. Something goes down, and that overtaxes something nearby, and that goes down, and so on, until enough backup power sources kick in to shore things up or automatic controls take over and contain it. But there’s no discernible rhyme or reason to last night’s outages. Some cities stayed online while others close by didn’t.
“Also, everything that went down did so almost simultaneously – that couldn’t happen except as a result of a cyberattack. Everything came back up in sync, too.”
“So, what do you make of that?” Yazzi said, “I mean, the fact that power was restored after only a few hours? And what about this: why would someone do this at night? It’s more like a warning than an attack.”
“Exactly, sir. I think you’ve come to precisely the right conclusion. Someone wanted to show us what they were capable of without doing enough damage to compel us to retaliate with force.”
“So, who would that be? Russia? Iran? North Korea? A terrorist organization?”
“You could make a case for any of those, sir. Unfortunately, it will likely take a while for our cybersecurity folks to uncover any details that point to one suspect over another. But let’s assume it was the Russians, since that’s where tensions are greatest right now. They could be firing a warning shot across our bow, showing what they intend to do if we stick to our guns with oil prices.”
“How bad could the next attack be?” Yazzi asked.
“That’s the big question, sir. Did they hit these particular cities because they’re the only ones they’ve been able to compromise, or are there lots more? Could they take down the entire power grid or major parts of it? We don’t know, at least not yet, and we may never.”
“How long would it take to recover if they took down the grid everywhere?” Yazzi asked.
“That would depend,” Wakeman said, “on whether the attack was reversible, like this one, or instead was designed to cause real damage to infrastructure. There’s also the question of keeping the power on after we restored it. Until we found and eliminated the vulnerability they exploited, they could shut us down again.”
“So, to summarize, we don’t know whether we’re teetering on the edge of a national disaster or if we just witnessed an epic bluff,” Yazzi said.
“That’s pretty much it, yes, sir.” Wakeman admitted. “But if Russia was behind last night’s attack, we’ll probably find out soon unless we ease off on the embargo.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Yazzi said. “Still, this is like the Cold War all over again, isn’t it? The more we drive Russia toward bankruptcy, the higher the risk they retaliate by attacking us while they still can. If they do, we can’t stand by without retaliating. I don’t like the escalation risk here.”
“No, sir. Neither do I.”
Yazzi turned back from the list. “I think,” he said, “the best way to avoid that risk is by making sure the Russians have nothing to retaliate for.”
“By calling the Russians’ bluff.”
* * *
“The Russian ambassador is here, Mr. President.”
Carson Bekin stood up to go.
“No – stay.” And then, into his telephone, Yazzi said, “Thanks. Don’t tell him, but he’ll be waiting for a while.”
Bekin smiled as he sat back down. “How long will you keep him twiddling his thumbs?”
Yazzi took a quarter out of his pocket. “Let’s find out,” he said. “Heads, it’s fifteen minutes, and tails, a half an hour.” The president flipped the coin, slapped it on the back of his other hand, and held it out for his old friend to see.
“Tails,” Carson said. “He’s not going to be happy.”
“Good,” Yazzi said. “I don’t want him to leave with any doubt what the message was.”
“Hah! I’m sure there’s not much danger of that,” Bekin said. “You’ve rarely been accused of subtlety. But how do you plan to play this? You don’t have proof the Russians were behind the power grid attack.”
“You’re right, I don’t. But I’ll bet you this quarter they were.”
* * *
The Russian ambassador – tall, red-faced and overweight – was at his most imperious when he was ushered at last into the Oval Office. Yazzi’s rising to greet him did not lessen his annoyance; it would have been quite a snub for Yazzi to stay seated. But then Yazzi did the next best thing by returning to his desk instead of inviting Gorsky to sit across the coffee table from him on the sofas nearby, as he had during past visits.
“So sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Ambassador,” Yazzi said. “Unexpected affairs of state. I’m sure you understand.”
Gorsky did not directly respond to Yazzi’s excuse as he lowered his substantial weight into the chair facing the president’s desk. Instead, he said, “Perhaps you will now share the reason for this sudden and unexpected summons,” he said.
The Blockchain Revolution Page 24