Bradstreet looked down into the chasm below feeling uneasy. He didn’t like heights. He decided to ease the train off the bridge if he didn’t get the go-ahead. Just then a frightening thought crossed his mind. He punched the button again. “Hey, Lenny! Is 389 behind me stopped? Lenny! Tell 389 to stop!”
Trans-American number 389 had been in the switching yard behind him. It was scheduled to run thirty minutes back but it had a light load and would have closed fast, depending on the light system to alert it when it approached 435.
“Lenny! Can you hear me? Lenny!”
At Mount Rainier Regional Medical Center, the generator continued starting then kicking off. The pattern had repeated itself eight times with no end in sight. The patient’s skull was open, the deadly polymer still in place. Three flashlights were now casting the surgery in ghostly shadows. They were inadequate for an operation but alleviated the darkness.
“Doctor,” Allison said. “She’s starting to fade.”
“Paul, do you have status?”
“I can’t get power long enough to get a reading.”
Dr. Holt positioned his scalpel. “I’m proceeding. I need all the light focused here, please.”
What else is there to do? he thought. If he waited she’d die. The lights blinked off and he paused. When they next came on he’d have to work quickly. Do it wrong, he reminded himself, and she’ll die anyway.
2
MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA
PG TECHNOLOGY APPLICATIONS
9:18 A.M. PST
Guy Fagan finished his coffee as he read the e-mail from a colleague in Washington State concerning the surprise fourteen-minute collapse of the power grid in Yakima earlier that morning. No cause had been found for it.
WAyk5-7863 was considered one of the most stable in the nation. The Inland Empire, as the region was once known, was largely self-contained, walled off from the western portion of the state. Most of its electricity was hydroelectric with a bit of coal and nuclear thrown in, a perfect balance it was thought. The area had a predictable climate that placed no great demand on the grid. Economic growth in the region was anemic and the electrical supply had increased at a modest and easily sustained pace. There had been no similar collapse in years—none, in fact, that Fagan could recall.
It was odd and his colleague was speculating that it might very well have been caused by a computer glitch. That struck Fagan as most likely. Grids were increasingly dependent on computers and specialized software. They were complex structures, far more complicated than the public understood. In the past, during times of great demand, enormous areas had cascaded into darkness, events caused by nothing more than a fallen tree or a collapsed power line. They could take days, even weeks to meticulously rebuild. Electricity, the lifeblood of the twenty-first century, had to be in perfect balance between demand and supply. Computers made that job easier but in providing one more area of control they also made the grids more vulnerable.
Fagan had good reason to know. As a senior software engineer, he was relatively pleased with his position at PGTA. It was his second job out of college and he’d been steadily promoted over the last decade. Since inception, the company itself had deftly carved out a nice little niche for itself in the software industry. In its early days, it had provided generic software of various applications. Now, it produced a significant portion of the code used throughout the electric grid in the United States under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy. The transition had been complete when the company renamed itself PGTA, short for Power Grid Technology Applications, two years earlier.
Fagan himself was manager for the project, writing the code for any emergency override of the electrical grid in the event of an attack against a regional substation or its operators. His work was interesting and important. He took pride in that.
He had been assigned to this project after six years on the IT team that had maintained the security of PGTA’s own systems and database. The company had received a number of awards for the protection it provided its clients. In its years of existence, PGTA had never experienced a serious penetration of its firewall. Not one. And that success was due in no small measure to Fagan himself.
He glanced at the list of unopened e-mails and spotted one he was expecting from DASS, Dallas Applied Software Solutions in Texas. It was a vendor with which he frequently did business, one of his more important sources of industry specific code. He opened the message.
At that moment the Trojan entered his computer, quickly finding its way through an unpatched exploit. It had ridden this message to place itself behind the PGTA firewall. There it unrolled into his computer’s operating system, wrapping its tentacles around every function it was targeted to seek and control.
Before Fagan had time to read the message, his screen lit up with a brief flash. This stopped him short. What was that? Revisualizing the flash, he realized that he’d seen something like it before and for a moment struggled to recall when. Then he had it. It had been during his latest security training. The flash had resembled the antimalware intrusion detection warning dialog. Or something very like it. Regardless, he’d never before experienced such an event on any computer.
Better to be cautious than sorry, he decided. He opened the security software and was relieved when it reported everything was fine. Nothing to worry about. He paused for a moment, wondering if there was anything else he should do and decided there was not. He closed the program and returned to his message, not giving the incident another thought.
As he did, the Trojan guardedly acquired the source code to the power grid control software, blending its actions seamlessly into the activity of the computer so as not to attract attention. Before the day was out, the Trojan would also copy Fagan’s e-mail list and the data files in his computer related to each e-mail.
Fagan liked to work a bit late, volunteer some time to the company. He believed it was the secret to his success. He’d never been one to watch the clock and bolt right at quitting time. Just after six o’clock he turned off his screen and headed out, his thoughts already directed toward the problems he’d face the next day.
Some hours later, when the PGTA offices were closed, the Trojan in Fagan’s computer “called home,” inconspicuously transferring the data it had copied. This launched it on a long digital journey from Menlo Park, California, to whoever had written the malware code, the person who was interested in shutting down significant sections of the U.S. electric power grid by remote command.
3
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND
UNITED NATIONS OFFICE AT GENEVA (UNOG)
OFFICE FOR DISARMAMENT AFFAIRS PALAIS DES NATIONS
5:47 P.M. CET
Franz Herlicher looked at his paper again with amazement.
He had of late noticed a creeping tendency to type the wrong word rather than to simply misspell the one he’d intended. He blamed the word processor’s spell-checker for it. If he misspelled, it caught the error at once. Over the years it had served to improve his spelling dramatically.
But he’d noticed that now he often simply typed a similar, but incorrect word, with nearly the same frequency with which he’d once misspelled words. He wondered if a certain proportion of errors were programmed into the human condition and no matter how hard you worked to eliminate error, error always returned, one way or another.
But that wasn’t the problem here. He’d not typed the wrong word. This wasn’t a matter of inadvertently substituting “tenant” for “tenor” as he’d done earlier that day. No, in the paper he’d distributed he’d managed to mistype throughout it, altering the paper in subtle yet significant ways, finally changing the entire last paragraph, nearly every word of it. The reality was that his paper was no longer the one he’d written.
And Herlicher had absolutely no idea how that could be.
The problem had been pointed out to him by his colleague, Lloyd Walthrop, with the UK Foreign Office in London. His e-mail to that effect had been scathing and Herlicher
was still blushing from the memory of it. Theirs had been a valued professional relationship and he wanted nothing to tarnish it. After all, Herlicher didn’t intend to remain in dreary Geneva among the Swiss forever.
Educated at the Bavarian law facilities in Munich, Franz Herlicher had begun his career with a brief stint in Brussels, working for an odious Prussian he’d despised. When this chance to move to the United Nations came along he’d jumped at it. He’d been promoted to senior analyst within the Office for Disarmament Affairs and was assigned to draft the final committee report on the Iran nuclear weapons program. His first version had been well received with only a few minor suggestions for changes.
This was a break-out opportunity for him, he was certain. The report’s conclusions would likely shape world events and it was not unlikely that the entire report, with his name on it, would find its way into the public domain. The best part was that even if the Western powers refused to act, he would still have garnered exposure that made the kind of career he’d always envisioned.
Herlicher had frankly been surprised when the committee had voted to take such a firm stand against Iran. He’d not encountered such assertion in the organization previously. He’d determined early on that the true purpose of the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs was not to prevent nuclear disarmament or to even accurately report nuclear developments within nations, but rather to evade commitment and responsibility. It was, he understood, the way of the world.
Don’t stick your neck out or it will get chopped off, his father had taught him. Let the world take care of itself. If anyone was truly interested in stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons they’d do something about it, not ask for more reports.
But something had clearly happened to change all that, at least for now. It might have been a sudden realization that a nuclear Iran was a threat the civilized world could not ignore, but Herlicher thought that unlikely. The world tolerated a nuclear North Korea after all. Or it might have been outside pressure, say from the United States, Britain, or even France, even all three behind the scenes, but again he doubted that was the case. The UN was largely impervious to such pressure. Since its inception it had become monolithic, driven by its own internal and self-serving dynamics.
The answer he’d been given over lunch when he’d discreetly posed the question of “Why now?” when the evidence had been there for years had caught him by surprise. It seemed so improbable that he doubted it could possibly be true.
“A source,” the chairman had told him. “A source has come forward with irrefutable evidence.”
“You mean someone came to us instead of the United States?” Herlicher had asked, unable to mask his shock. After all who could trust them? UNOG, for one, leaked like a sieve. Why come to them with such intelligence? Why not sell it to the Americans? That’s what they were good at, buying up people and resources.
And why assume that ODA, as his office was known, would act? Its history suggested quite the contrary. Herlicher had been mystified by the explanation.
“Yes. He’s an idealist apparently and very well sourced. We now know Iran is about to detonate an atomic device. We know where, we know the scheduled date. The evidence is beyond dispute. It has been decided that we will issue a timely and decisive report.”
“Why?”
The chairman leaned forward. “Because if we don’t, the source says he will go to the Americans and it will come out we had the information first. So it’s going to come out one way or the other. Better us since it’s inevitable.”
Now that, Herlicher decided, made sense. ODA had in recent years been largely discredited. This would change that.
In his office Herlicher leaned back in his chair, then glanced at the wall where the window should have been, if only he were ranked more highly on the organizational chart. The old League of Nations had constructed the Palais des Nations in the 1930s. The imposing structure had been assumed by the United Nations after the Second World War and was now the European center for that international body. Some 1,600 employees filed into the enormous edifice each day. The building itself was situated in lovely Ariana Park and overlooked Lake Geneva with a magnificent view of the French Alps, neither of which Herlicher could see from his small office.
Should this report not live up to his admittedly high expectations, his plan was to return to the EU, hopefully in a slot above the evil woman he’d left behind. One of the men to help him with that transition was Walthrop, which was why the e-mail had been so difficult. Never before had words on a computer screen seared him with such force.
Herlicher finished his after-lunch coffee and reread the report once again. It summarized the facts leading to the conclusion. He’d asked Walthrop, confidentially, to run through it and let him know if he’d overlooked any aspect his final report ought to address. He’d been intending to curry favor with the man by giving him an advance peek but his effort had the opposite effect.
His first reaction to the e-mail had been to ask himself how the man could have misread his report so badly. Still, cautious as ever, Herlicher had gone to his “Sent” folder and clicked on the attachment to confirm what he’d sent. Perhaps he’d linked to some early draft or even a different report altogether. Something.
And then he’d seen it. In utter and total disbelief he’d stared at the report he’d sent. In shock, he’d printed the thing out and was now holding it in his hand. It wasn’t the report he’d written. It wasn’t the report he’d attached and sent!
A wave of paranoia swept over him. His immediate thought wasn’t “How could this happen,” but rather “Who was doing this to me?” And why? What possible purpose could this serve?
He’d immediately sent Walthrop an explanation but realized how futile it sounded. Someone had entered his computer, bypassing all security, and cleverly altered his words so that the report said the exact opposite of what he’d written. It was incredible. Herlicher struggled to gather his wits as he reconsidered the situation. Who would believe such a story? It was his report, sent from his office, from his computer. How could anyone tamper with it? And if it had been altered, why had he sent it in the first place? That would be the question.
Still, what else could he say? It was the truth. Someone had found a way to change his report. He didn’t know how, or when, but someone had done it. He followed up by calling Walthrop repeatedly, but either the man was not in his office or he was refusing to pick up his telephone.
Herlicher sat in despair. He wondered if in a moment of insanity he’d really written it that way and now had no memory of the act. Perhaps in some kind of psychotic, self-destructive trance he’d made the changes. He struggled with the thought, earnestly trying to conjure a memory, anything that would suggest such an explanation. There was none.
Iran was poised to detonate a nuclear bomb in less than three weeks. That was the point of the report. That was what he’d written. There’d been no reason, no possible motivation, for him to have written anything else. He had no opinion on the subject, no reason at all for the report to say one thing rather than another. But the report now said there was no evidence to suggest Iran was about to do any such thing.
Herlicher went carefully through the printed report, making a point to highlight every change. When he finished he was surprised there were so few, no more than a dozen words spread throughout, two short sentences rewritten, then the new concluding paragraph. How long would something like that take? Given their totality it didn’t seem possible anyone could have done it quickly.
He rose, instinctively straightening his tie as he did, and paced as he thought this through. Could he be actually suffering some kind of breakdown and not realize it? He’d read once that the deeply mentally ill had no idea they were deranged.
Was he crazy? Ausgeflippt. That was the German word for it. His mother had once mentioned one of her uncles in that way but he’d been under the impression the man’s aberrations were a consequence of the war and his years in a Russian POW camp.
Now Herlicher considered that perhaps that was what she’d wanted him to think. He could recall no other instance of mental illness in his family. Of course, his mother could have been lying.
Herlicher glanced at his door quickly. No one was there. Maybe someone had come into his office and made the change. He locked the door at night as instructed but he wasn’t the only one with a key, and to be frank, sometimes he forgot.
Still . . . someone wanted him to look bad. That was the most likely answer. Who could that be? Though he’d been very careful during his time in Geneva there were always enemies, those who disliked him personally, those who sabotaged a colleague for fun, those with an agenda. And there was always the latent hostility toward all Germans you saw throughout Europe. No, any list would be very long and he was sure to omit someone.
Three others had keys officially but how could he know for certain where it ended? He was not the only one ever assigned to this office. They might have kept the key. That’s what he would have done. Then there was the cleaning staff. Not all of them were Swiss. Some were Italians.
Then he recalled that he was supposed to lock his computer screen whenever he left his desk, but he rarely did so and it locked automatically after being idle for fifteen minutes anyway. The only way someone could have altered his report was to slip into his office while he was away and before the computer went into default mode and required the password.
Herlicher strained to recall the events leading up to the e-mail. What had he done? Had he left the office long enough for someone to make changes? He wiped his brow with his pristine handkerchief.
Now he had it. He’d left his office to use the restroom. He’d finished the final draft and decided to take a break before composing the e-mail to Walthrop. He left the office and passed . . . Carlos Estancia, his supervisor. Why didn’t he think of that immediately? It was so obvious. The man didn’t like him. How many times and in how many ways had he shown that? But had Estancia popped into his office during the time Herlicher had been gone and quickly altered the report?
Trojan Horse Page 2