Cyber Attack

by Tim Washburn

  Hank shrugs. “Clothes?”

  “Just casual stuff?”

  “I don’t think we’ll be attendin’ any charity galas while we’re there.”

  Paige scowls. “Smartass. How many days should I plan on?”

  “You’re the computer expert. You tell me how long it’s going to take to find these people.”

  “Okay, maybe a week, then?”

  Hank looks around at all the computer hardware, the expensive desk, and the expensive chairs. “I think you can afford to buy some clothes if it stretches longer.”

  Paige holds up a finger. “Good point. Give me twenty minutes.” Paige disappears down the hall while Hank calls Mercer.

  She picks up on the third ring and Hank says, “I guess we’re headin’ to the Big Apple. You have a jet for us?”

  “You haven’t made any progress?” Mercer asks, disappointment in her voice.

  “No. We’ve been diggin’ around, but Paige thinks the malware might have erased itself. That’s why we need to scoot up to NYC. Any luck with the aircraft manufacturer?”

  “We’re waiting on the judge to give his ruling on the court order request.”

  “How long’s that gonna take?”

  Elaine sighs. “Who knows? You hear the latest?”

  “No, we’ve been workin’. What happened?”

  “Power’s out in Chicago.”

  “I hate to say this, Elaine, but the entire country may be without power before this is all over. You get my text about the e-mail from the field engineer?”

  “I did. Is it really going to take months to restore power?”

  “That’s what the e-mail said. And it was an internal e-mail marked highly confidential.”

  “I don’t need any more information about the e-mail, Hank, or how you got it.”

  “Understood,” Hank says. “So do you have a jet for us?”

  “I will. Dulles is still a mess and Reagan National is without power. Where are you now?”

  “Paige’s place here in McLean.”

  “I’ll have the plane meet you at Davison Army Airfield. Can you be there in an hour?”

  “Depends on how long it takes Paige to pack.”

  “On second thought, let me check the jet’s flight schedule.”

  Hank can hear Mercer tapping on the computer keys. She’s back on the line a moment later. “Actually, you have forty-five minutes to make the plane. It has to be back in D.C. for an evening flight.”

  “We’ll make it. I’ll call you when we’re wheels up.” Hank kills the call, loads up his laptop, and exits the office, walking down the hall to the bedroom. Paige is staring at a couple of outfits laid out on the king-sized bed. “Scratch twenty minutes. You’ve got ten if we’re goin’ to make the plane.”

  “Ten? How am I supposed to pack in ten minutes?”

  “Easy. You grab some clothes and stuff them in the suitcase.”

  “Don’t we have to stop at your place for you to pack?”

  “Nope. Keep a bag in the trunk.”

  “Of course you do. Okay, go drink a beer or something while I finish up. Looking over my shoulder is not helping matters.”

  Hank meanders down the hall to the main living space, bypassing the fridge and heading, instead, for the pictures lined up on the fireplace mantel. There are pictures of Paige with an older couple Hank assumes are her parents. A couple of pictures show Paige with a younger version of herself—a sister, Hank reasons. Other photos depict Paige with a group of friends, another with her parents and sister taken on a beach somewhere, but there are no pictures of Paige paired off with a significant other. “Huh,” Hank mutters.

  Eleven minutes later, Paige appears from her bedroom, rolling a large Louis Vuitton suitcase with a matching shoulder bag slung over her left arm. “You nosing around?”

  “Just lookin’. How old is your sister?”

  “Thirty-one, three years younger than me.” Paige runs her fingers through her dark hair. “I’m ready when you are.”

  Hank steps over and rolls Paige’s suitcase toward the elevator. “What’s your sister’s name?”

  “Peyton. She lives in Chicago with her husband, Eric.”

  “You better call her and give her a heads-up.”

  Paige cocks her head. “Why?”

  “Power’s out in Chicago.”

  “Damn. Do you think they destroyed the transformers like they did in D.C.?”

  Hank punches the elevator button. “Most likely. You need to tell her to get out of the city.”

  “And go where?”

  “Anyplace will be better than a big metropolitan area. Where do your parents live?”

  “It’s just my mom now. They moved to Champaign after my dad retired.”

  “Then that’s where Peyton and Eric need to go. And they need to leave today.”

  “They don’t have a car.”

  “Probably wouldn’t be able to get around, anyway. They’ll have to rely on the oldest form of transportation.”

  “What’s that? Walking? It’s a hundred and thirty miles.”

  The elevator arrives and they load on. “’Bout the only choice they have. I promise you, they don’t want to be in Chicago after a few days without power.”

  “I’ll call her when I get off the elevator. You really think things will go downhill that fast?”

  “Absolutely. It’s probably already started.”

  “Will her cell phone be able to receive a call?”

  “Depends on where she is. Some cell towers have battery backups that’ll last a few hours, maybe a day or two, dependin’ on the network activity.”

  The elevator stops at the lobby and the doors open. Paige digs out her cell phone and starts trying to call her sister as Hank leads them to the Mustang. He pops the trunk and nearly gets a hernia lifting and stowing Paige’s overstuffed suitcase before taking the wheel. After firing the massive engine, he backs out and squeals the tires pulling out of the lot.

  Paige wags her phone. “The call won’t go through.”

  “Keep trying. That’s all you can do,” Hank says, steering up the on-ramp to Interstate 495.

  CHAPTER 16

  Chicago

  The Chicago advertising agency Brown, Wright, Zuker, Tomlinson & Qualls occupies two floors of the high-rise office building One Magnificent Mile, located at the northern end of Michigan Avenue. The seventeenth floor is one large, open creative space for those who design the advertising campaigns while the eighteenth floor plays host to the executives and media buyers responsible for implementing those campaigns. One of those working on seventeen is thirty-one-year-old Peyton Lynch, a graphic artist. Peyton lights her cell phone screen, again, and groans—still no service. The Chicago skies are filled with angry clouds and it looks as if they could unleash a torrent at any moment. After they sat around looking at one another in near darkness for a good hour and a half, a bigwig came down from upstairs and cut everyone loose. But before Peyton can make any decisions about the rest of her day she needs to get in touch with her husband, Eric, who works in commercial lending at a large bank at the other end of Michigan Avenue.

  With no landlines or cell service, Peyton would spend good money right at this minute to send a message via a homing pigeon if one were available. Otherwise she’s going to have to slog all the way down the street to see if Eric’s free so they can start their walk home, which is in the exact opposite direction. For a long time they rented a small apartment in a building overlooking the lake, but at $2,500 a month for less than eight hundred square feet, the walls began to close in on them and they grew tired of throwing their money away every month. So after looking for months and being outbid on three of their dream properties, they finally settled on a two-bed, one-bath condo on the third floor of a three-story brownstone in Lakeview West. Given their thoughts of starting a family soon, the area’s excellent schools sealed the deal. The problem, though, is rather than walk to work as they did for years they are now dependent on the city�
��s subway system for transportation. Not a problem on a normal day but cut the electrical umbilical cord and it becomes a major issue.

  Peyton checks her phone again with the same result—no service. Her mind clicks through possible scenarios. The easiest thing for her to do is stay where she is and wait for Eric to come, but if he works until six or six-thirty p.m. as he usually does, they’ll be traipsing across Chicago in the dark. That wouldn’t normally be a problem because the streetlights, the lights from the businesses, and the lighted residences would provide enough illumination for them to find their way. But the thought of traveling home in absolute darkness sends a shiver of fear down Peyton’s spine. “Flashlights,” Peyton mutters. “We’ll need flashlights.”

  She stands and works her way across the room to the “goody” closet. The ad agency receives a large assortment of products from companies wanting to hawk their wares. Some products get returned, but a majority of them either go home with the employees or end up in the goody closet, a large walk-in space filled with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Peyton opens the door, flicks on the light switch out of habit, and stares into the darkness. “Shoot,” she says, the frustration over the loss of electricity already building. She walks back to her desk, grabs her cell phone, and returns, launching the flashlight app.

  Wading into the closet, she’s trying to recall if a recent ad campaign had featured batteries, or a camping scene, or maybe a night shoot. Inside, boxes line the shelves, each labeled with the name of the client. Peyton scans the boxes, hoping a name pops out. In the first row, there’s a box for a soup company, a tire maker, a toy company, a national lingerie retailer—Peyton is currently wearing one of the bras from that campaign—an auto manufacturer, and a movie promotion. She stops and goes back, recalling a scene from one of the agency’s earlier shoots. Pulling out the box for the auto manufacturer, she places it on the floor. The ad was a promotion for a new and improved version of one of their popular trucks. Peyton remembers one scene that was shot at night, something about difficult terrain that only their new truck could surmount—who knew?—and she’s hoping to find a flashlight left over from the shoot. Pawing through the box, she smiles when she finds a flashlight at the bottom. She holds it aloft like it’s a first-place trophy and clicks the button only to be disappointed—the batteries are dead. Standing, she starts rummaging through the boxes again.

  Thirty minutes later, Peyton exits the closet with two flashlights and a brand-spanking-new box of AA batteries. There’s no one left in the office to celebrate her find, so Peyton returns to her original problem: What to do? She carries the flashlights and batteries over to her desk and dumps them in a reusable shopping bag she keeps handy in case she needs to lug something home. She stands there, hand to her chin, thinking. Eric’s boss is an asshole of the highest order and the odds of Eric being released early fall somewhere between zero and 10 percent. Paige sits and wipes the perspiration from her forehead. It’s suddenly stuffy inside with no air-conditioning. A bolt of lightning strikes nearby, lighting the room with a brief, blinding flash. That’s followed a second later by a loud rumble of thunder that Peyton swears rattles the glass. She holds up a finger. “Umbrellas,” she says to the empty room. She stands and heads back to the goody closet.

  When she’s halfway across the room, her cell phone rings and she thumbs the answer button without looking at the screen. “Eric, are you headed this way?”

  “It’s me, sis,” her sister, Paige, says. “You need to get out of Chic—”

  “Paige, you’re breaking up. What did you say? Paige?” She hears the beeps that signal the call has ended and immediately redials her sister. All she hears is silence and she glances at her phone screen—NO SERVICE.

  CHAPTER 17

  En route to Davison Army Airfield

  “Damn it, the call dropped,” Paige says, looking at her phone screen. She hits redial and puts the phone to her ear.

  “How much did she hear?” Hank asks.

  “No idea. Now the call won’t go through.”

  “If there’s only a few towers in the area with battery backup, it’ll be a crapshoot for you to get another call through.”

  “Can’t the FCC force them to install a backup power source on all the cell towers?”

  “They tried back in May of 2007 after Hurricane Katrina and again in June of 2012. The industry took them to court to block it.”

  “Why in the hell would they do that?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Money?”

  “Yep,” Hank says. “It’s the number one driver for most business decisions. Forget what’s best for the customer.”

  “But don’t they lose money when their systems are not up and running?”

  “How are they goin’ to lose money? You’re locked into a plan that charges a certain amount every month. Hell, they’d probably save money if the power went out every once in a while. Ever see a credit to your bill for lost service?”

  “No.”

  “There you go.” Hank glances in the rearview mirror to check traffic before pulling into the right lane. “What’s our game plan when we get to New York?”

  Paige glances out the side window and tries her sister again, ending up with the same result. “Call still won’t go through.” She turns to look at Hank. “I think we have to approach it the same way we did with the power companies.”

  “Why? Because that worked so well for us?”

  Paige shoots him an angry glare. “Let’s hear your plan.”

  Glancing ahead, Hank spots the exit for Fort Belvoir and pulls over into the far-right lane. He glances at Paige. “Do you think the malware really self-destructed, or is it still there and we just didn’t find it?”

  “I ran every software program in my toolkit and didn’t find squat.”

  “Maybe we need a better toolkit.”

  “Hell, Hank, techies at both the FBI and the NSA worked on the software, including me.”

  “Let me reframe the issue. If you invite someone you’ve just met over for dinner are you going to serve them the very best wine in your cellar or will you pick, say, a midrange selection, savin’ the best for yourself and your dearest friends?”

  Paige thinks about the question for a moment. “You think the NSA is holding out.”

  “Of course they are. You don’t give your best toys away to someone that Uncle Sam says you have to play nice with. And I guaran-damn-tee you the folks at USCYBERCOM have software toolkits that’ll put ours to shame.”

  “How do we get access to them?”

  “Good question. I’m goin’ to make a few calls after we board the jet.”

  “Do you have contacts at both of those places?”

  “I’ve worked ops with other agencies. So yes, I have developed some contacts over the years.”

  “Do you have the type of relationships that they’d be willing to part with some of their most prized hacking tools?”

  “Don’t know. Won’t cost anythin’ to ask.” They ride in silence for the next mile or so.

  “I’m going off subject for a moment,” Paige says. “Are you like a numbers savant or something? Was that what Elaine meant when she referenced your”—Paige makes air quotes with her fingers—“ ‘big brain’?”

  “Is it really botherin’ you?” Hank asks, slowing the Mustang for the gummed-up traffic ahead.

  “No, not bothering me, I’m just curious. For instance, we were talking about making the government force the cell companies to provide backup power and you said May something and then another date.”

  “May 2007 and June 2012. That’s not difficult to remember,” Hank says.

  “What about when you were talking about your hometown? You mentioned the population in precise numbers. Most people would say ‘around such and such.’”

  “The population of Ada is 17,143. Or it was the last time I checked.”

  Paige turns in her seat, now facing Hank. “Do you have hyper . . . hyper . . .”

&nb
sp; “Hyperthymesia?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Well?”

  “No. People with hyperthymesia have an autobiographical memory of events that happened in their past.”

  “If not that, what? Did you get knocked in the head when you were little and it scrambled your brain?”

  Hank sighs. “My brain is not scrambled, just wired a little differently. I’m not big on labels. I guess the closest thing—though some suggest it’s hogwash—is that I have an eidetic memory.”

  “Like photographic memory?”

  Hank nods.

  “You remember everything?”

  “Mostly,” Hank says.

  “Can you recall everything you’ve seen? Like scrolling back through a roll of film?” Paige asks, her voice incredulous.

  Traffic is crawling. Hank checks the side mirror and waits for a gap before easing the Shelby into the exit lane.

  “Am I being too nosy?” Paige asks.

  “If I said yes, would you stop with the questions?”

  Paige thinks for a moment. “Probably not.”

  Hank sighs—again. “Yes, I can recall most everythin’ I’ve seen and heard.”

  “Wow. Everything you’ve heard, too? Wow, wow, wow.” Paige lets Hank’s revelation run around her brain for a few minutes. “Whew, man. That might drive me crazy.”

  Hank glances over. “It can if you let it. My grandmother taught me how to compartmentalize it.”

  “She has it, too?”

  “Yes. Apparently this thing skips generations. Neither of my parents had it, but my grandmother’s grandfather had it—or at least he did accordin’ to the oral histories passed down through the tribe.”

  “You can’t forget anything even if you wanted?”

  Hank shakes his head. “With effort I can wall it off in my mind.”

  “Can you then remove the memory, or image, or sound from behind the wall if needed?”

  “Yes.” Hank exits off the highway and picks up a feeder road that’ll take them to the airstrip.

  “Amazing. You said you remember most everything. What can’t you recall?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Paige laughs as Hank pulls up to the guardhouse and holds up his badge. The man, dressed in army fatigues with corporal stripes on his left sleeve, grabs a clipboard and writes down the badge number and Hank’s name. The guard points his pen at Paige and asks, “Her name?”