The two officers holding the clerk dragged him through the doorway and followed the detective down the winding corridors. All the doors on either side of the hall were open, their locks smashed and the frames splintered. All of them were empty now. The businessman had been the only client on the premises at the moment. Two other members of the staff knelt on the floor, cuffed hands behind their backs, under the guard of furious-looking cops. Both of the staff members were bruised and bleeding.
“Please,” begged the clerk, “there’s no kids here. Believe me.”
“Shut your mouth or lose your teeth,” snarled the detective.
They arrived at the next to the last door in the hall, which stood open, half torn from its hinges. The detective went in first, and the cops flung the clerk onto the floor next to the businessman, who was sprawled and semiconscious, his face pulped from a savage beating.
The room was silent.
The detective approached the bed, on which a small, naked figure lay sprawled, wrists and ankles tightly bound by padded cuffs. The last remnants of a school uniform clung to the bare skin. The girl’s mouth was open, the lips parted in a small “Oh” of apparent surprise. Her eyes were open and stared sightlessly at the ceiling. The thin chest did not rise and fall, and her limbs were utterly slack.
The detective bent over her, staring in absolute horror at the tiny body. Then he closed his eyes and sagged back, reaching for the bedpost for balance. He remained like that for a long, long moment during which the clerk didn’t dare breathe.
Then the detective opened his eyes and turned slowly toward the clerk. Everyone else turned with him, looking at the young man on the floor. The weight of their hatred was crushing.
“You’ll burn for this,” said the detective. “I swear to you, you’ll burn.”
The clerk was crying now, tears running from his eyes, snot bubbling from his nose. “No … please … it’s not what you think.…”
The detective rushed at him and kicked him in the stomach. Once … then again. Each blow doing awful damage.
“Stop!” screamed the clerk. “She’s not dead.”
The detective stopped, foot raised for a third kick. Doubt clouded his face and he looked from his target over his shoulder at the girl.
Very slowly the girl turned her head toward him. She blinked slowly and smiled at the detective.
“System failure,” she said. “Please reset.”
She began to blink rapidly and repeated the phrase.
Over and over.
* * *
The clerk and the businessman were arrested, but within two hours they were released. Lawyers descended in flocks on the police station. Threats—very credible threats—were made about the lawsuits that would be filed. Apologies would be required at every level of the police administration, because the businessman was very important. He was a senior vice president of a petroleum and metals conglomerate with holdings all across Japan that employed twenty-eight thousand people. Jobs would be lost within the police department. Heads would roll.
Or so all the lawyers threatened.
The dynamic of that legal barrage faltered a day later, when Mr. Yohji Watanabe, back home in the safety of his home, collapsed in the shower of his palatial estate on the outskirts of Tokyo. His wife heard him fall and came running, but she stopped in the bathroom doorway, her horror mounting higher than her need to see to her husband. He lay there naked, tangled in the plastic curtains, bleeding from his nose and mouth, from his ears and eyes, from his rectum and the tip of his penis. The shower water had turned the blood pink and washed it all away before Mrs. Watanabe even stopped screaming.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CASTLE OF LA CROIX DES GARDES
FRENCH RIVIERA
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2:47 AM LOCAL TIME
“Mademoiselle,” said the Concierge, “you are looking well.”
He was a very good liar, but they both knew that he was lying. Zephyr Bain glared at him from the big screen in the little Frenchman’s office. Now they were both in wheelchairs. She looked like a scarecrow covered with sun-withered leather. It was hard to believe that she was only in her mid-thirties. She looked ninety. No, thought the Concierge, she looks dead.
Zephyr didn’t acknowledge his compliment. “Is it done?”
“Oui,” he said. “Prague was a huge success. More than we could have hoped for.”
“And Mexico?”
He shrugged. “The government there refused the Deacon’s offer and instead went with Sigma Force. Exactly as John predicted they would.”
“Good,” she said, and there was much more life in the ferocity of her tone and in the flash of her eyes than in the shrunken husk of her body.
“We are exactly on schedule,” said the Concierge.
Zephyr leaned forward, and her eyes seemed to flash with green fire. “Tell me that it’s going to work.”
The Concierge nodded. “I promise you, mademoiselle, it is all going to work.”
Her eyes shifted to look past him. He knew what she was looking at. His house had been heavily reinforced in the past eleven weeks, and she could see the heavy steel shutters on the windows. He had done everything to make his estate impregnable. Robotic sentries outside, armed drones in the trees, mines placed under the turf all across the lawn. Inside the house, the Calpurnia AI system oversaw every detail of security and would respond with escalating aggression against any attempt to break in. If Havoc ran as expected, that would be inevitable. There would be riots in the streets. Everywhere. For as long as the rioters lived. Call it eight months, according to the most recent computer models. He had food and supplies for two years. The Concierge always paid attention to detail, and, with what was coming, those details were the only thing that would keep him alive. The entire house had even been constructed out of flame-resistant materials in case this part of the world caught fire.
Which was so very likely.
He smiled up at Zephyr Bain. “When would you like to start the clock?”
She thought about it.
“Soon,” she said.
“How soon, mademoiselle?”
“As soon as we break Joe Ledger’s heart,” said Zephyr. “But be very clear on this, my friend. He dies before I do.”
The Concierge nodded. “Oh, of course. That was always my plan.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
SENATE SUBCOMMITTEES ON CYBERTERRORISM
CAPITOL BUILDING
WASHINGTON, D.C.
ONE WEEK AGO
“A cyberapocalypse?” said Goines, smiling faintly. “Isn’t that a bit of a reach, Deputy Director? I know that you need to defend your funding and budget requests, but let’s not descend to grandiosity.”
Sarah Schoeffel fixed the senator with a hard, unflinching stare. “I am not given much to exaggeration. I used that word with precision. Allow me to explain.”
“Please do,” said Albertson, though he wore an expression of even greater skepticism than Goines.
“It is within the skill set of modern hackers to launch a coordinated deep-penetration attack on American banks. Going solely on established actions by black hats and gray hats over the last ten years, we know that they can hack into the mainframes of the banking system to destroy records, drain accounts, and freeze the response networks needed to stop loss or prevent further damage. In 2008, the Federal Reserve invoked a number of what were called “unusual and exigent circumstances” to lend billions of dollars to banks that had been damaged during the credit meltdown. We know, from evidence collected by the NSA and the Department of Military Sciences, that the Seven Kings were responsible for a large portion of that financial catastrophe. Billions were looted, and let me remind you that more than a hundred billion has never been recovered. Now go back to September 11, 2001, and look at what happened to stocks and banking. During the flight to safety before trading was suspended, billions were moved and a great number of people profited hugely. At first, we thought it was a typical crisis-induced tra
ding frenzy, but the DMS proved without a shadow of a doubt that the Seven Kings were not only profiting from the panic but had provided funding and support to Al Qaeda to guarantee that the planes would hit the towers. Those planes were physical, but they were in support of theft of funds on a grand scale, because Hugo Vox had thousands of traders waiting to exploit the event.”
The congressional panel watched, silent and calculating.
“Cyberattackers are aware that the damage they inflict is massive and isn’t easily repaired. Federal deposit insurance only applies if a bank fails, not if hackers drain the accounts. In the event of a cyberattack that drained funds, banks would have to tap their own reserves and then their own private insurance. If the attack is large enough, there wouldn’t be enough to cover all claims. Which means the banks fail and the avalanche buries millions of American businesses and private citizens.”
Not a sound in the room.
“Cyberhackers come in all shapes and sizes,” continued Schoeffel. “One-man operations all the way up to nation-states that want to do damage to the U.S. economy. Our status as the premier superpower rests on the dome of an economy that has become increasingly fragile. Cybercriminals of all stripes continue to attack and exploit our online financial and market systems, particularly those that interface with the Internet. The Automated Clearing House systems, or ACH, card payments, and market trades are all vulnerable to these kinds of attacks. The attacks happen at all levels, from the individual citizen with an ATM card and an online banking login to the biggest banks on Wall Street. When it comes to cybercrime, no one is too small a target to bother with or so big that they can withstand any attack. A scenario of perfect security does not exist. Fraudulent monetary transfers and counterfeiting of stored value cards are the most common attacks. We in the FBI are currently investigating over five hundred reported cases of corporate-account takeovers in which cybercriminals have initiated unauthorized ACH and wire transfers from the bank accounts of U.S. businesses. Ten years ago, that kind of theft was in the range of two hundred and twenty-five million. Last year it was eighteen billion that we can absolutely prove, and it’s entirely possible the number is much higher.”
“You have documentation on this?” asked Goines.
“Reams of it,” said Schoeffel. “I wish proof wasn’t as easy to come by, but it’s everywhere. They are stealing data, they are destroying systems, and they are clearly learning how to effectively and easily disrupt critical financial, military, communications, power, and medical services. Think about that, and then see if my phrasing doesn’t fit.”
Even then, the members of the panel looked unconvinced. Schoeffel wanted to hit Goines.
“The bureau already has substantial funding to combat these threats,” said Albertson.
“We have funding adequate for responding to the threats perceived when the last budget proposal was approved,” said Schoeffel. “The cyberworld changes faster than the budget process, and it’s capable of unpredictable exponential growth. I want us to get way ahead of it. Besides, one agency cannot combat the threat alone. The National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, which the bureau heads, coordinates with twenty law-enforcement agencies and with the intelligence community—the IC—which includes the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Security Agency. We have cyberstaff in other IC agencies through joint duty, but that is a very large bureaucracy. It’s not nearly nimble enough. We need to create smaller strike teams, specialized groups that can react quickly, turn on a dime, go where the fight is without having to carry the whole infrastructure with them. That is what I want you to fund. Teams like that will, we hope, be able to counter or quickly respond to zero point attacks like the Chinese Titan Rain assaults in 2003, the attacks during the 2011 Paris G2 Summit, and the monstrous 2015 hacking of the Office of Personnel Management, where information—including Social Security numbers—on eighteen million Americans was stolen. Sadly, the list of serious cybercrimes is so long that we would be here for a week, and that alone is frightening.”
“But hardly apocalyptic,” said Goines dryly. Some of the others on the panel chuckled. Schoeffel kept her temper, though.
“Senator,” she said evenly, “it’s fair to say that the nation-states that are at odds with our country are unlikely to declare open war. Even the hard-line Russians led by Putin aren’t likely to remake that country in the image of the Cold War–era Soviet monster, and China, though a growing threat, may be able to put more men in the field, but they know that any war they might fight with us would be between ships and submarines, and we have a serious advantage there. North Korea can’t even see the subs we have off their coast. But every single one of them, and the next forty antagonistic nations behind them, can engage in computer warfare on nearly equal ground with us. We saw that in 2009, when hackers breached the security at Google’s Chinese headquarters to gain access to corporate servers and steal intellectual property. Part of that theft was to obtain access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists. Since then there have been several significant hack attacks of major corporations and government agencies, including private power companies, medical research, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes for Health, FEMA, NASA, hospitals, communications and cellular-phone companies, and more. In 1990, Kevin Poulsen managed to use his computer to block phone lines so that he could rig a contest to win a Porsche. In 1998, Iraqi hackers launched a cyberattack that allowed them to temporarily seize control of over five hundred government and private-industry systems. And let’s not forget that in 1999 a fifteen-year-old boy, Jonathan James, hacked into the computers of a division of the Department of Defense and installed a back door on its servers that allowed him to intercept thousands of internal emails from different government organizations, including ones containing usernames and passwords for various military computers. Hackers have become steadily smarter and more resourceful since then. Iran’s Operation Cleaver is a perfect example; it allowed that government to target critical infrastructure organizations worldwide and yet maintain official deniability. That is the most insidious part of it, too, because they can come at us in ways that are actually more destructive than bullets or cluster bombs and still maintain enough deniability so there is no chance for a declaration of war that would be acknowledged by NATO or the U.N.”
She paused to take a drink of water and to consider her next words.
“You call me on my use of the word apocalypse. Then tell me which word I should use when it is within the short reach of possibility for hackers to take down the power grids, disrupt the computers running the cellular networks with aggressive malware, and reveal our most confidential military secrets to our enemies? What should we call it when hackers can use viruses and tapeworms to destroy the medical records of hundreds of millions of Americans and then corrupt the data stored in the computers of hospitals, health-care companies, and trauma centers? What word would you give it when information on how to construct weapons of mass destruction are stolen and mass-released to the Taliban, ISIL, and others? Tell me, ladies and gentlemen,” said Schoeffel, “what word would you prefer that I use? I ask, because each and every one of those things is not only possible but likely.”
When no one spoke, she leaned closer to the mic.
“Or,” she said, “perhaps the more precise and accurate word is inevitable, and that’s why I went out to visit the DARPA camp. Everything I’ve seen, from the new generation of WarDogs to their WhiteHat Internet security program—they are our next best line of defense. I think we need to give them access to funding and to our integrated national-defense, banking, and infrastructure computer systems, because they are ready to fight what we know is coming.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY
SAN DIEGO COUNTY
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 5:39 PM
As I drove home to pack I ca
lled Mr. Church at the Hangar, the DMS headquarters at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. There are two lines I can use to reach him; one is for “when the world is about to end” crisis situations, and the other is for everything else. There were no missiles inbound and no one had released a global pandemic, so I used the main line. It was a coin flip of a choice, though. I’ve heard that he has a special ringtone for me, and I’ve tried lies, bribes, and threats to wheedle what it is from his staff. So far, no luck.
When Church answered, I told him about the weirdness in Baltimore.
“Sean called you?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“He knew why to call you?” There was the briefest of silences. It’s understood that no one gets admitted to the DMS circle of confidence without Church or Aunt Sallie’s blessing. It’s bad enough that too many members of the government know about us, but friends and family were not part of our calling plan, if you know what I mean.
“More or less,” I said, and explained that my dad told Sean a little, and that Sean had probably worked more of it out on his own. He really is a good detective. Church offered no rebuke; it was damage done, and lingering to bitch about it was counterproductive. He didn’t ask if my brother was sure about the nanobots.
When I was finished, he asked the same question Sam had asked: “Are you starting a file on this?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Kind of like to take a look at what he has and then make the call.”
“The nanotechnology may demand that it’s ours,” he said. “And there is the double connection of Prague and sex workers.”
“I know, which is why I’m going to take a look myself rather than hand it off to the Warehouse. Can you send a science tech down from the Hangar to process some samples?”
“Done. However, I have to caution you about waiting too long to decide if this is our case.”
“I hear you, believe me, but let’s face it, boss, we’re not flush with active field teams. I don’t want to make this into a big thing until I know that’s what it is. That could pull resources away from something else that’s more important.”
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