From the suitcase he took out a gray pinstriped suit cut in European style, a white shirt and tie, and changed clothes, stuffing his old things, plus his small overnight bag of dirty clothes into the main compartment of the nearly empty suitcase, zipping it closed.
The man who’d brought the things had a full head of dark hair, streaked with gray. When he’d left, his hair was short, and nearly blond.
Makarov took the wig out of a zippered pocket and put it on. He checked through a crack at the edge of the door to make sure that the two men at the urinals were gone. At the moment no one was in the restroom.
He stepped out and went to one of the sinks where he quickly adjusted the wig in the mirror, straightened his tie, and went out. Rolling the suitcase behind him he headed toward the United gate at the other side of the terminal just as two armed airport security officers hurried directly toward him.
The corridor was busy but not packed, and the policemen were the only ones who seemed to be in a hurry. One of them was speaking into a microphone attached to his shirt on his right shoulder.
Makarov stepped to one side as they got nearer. It was highly unlikely that they were looking for him, but them being at this side of the terminal at this exact moment was too much of a coincidence for him to accept.
They were looking at faces and the one cop looked at him, his gaze lingering for just a moment.
Disarming the one talking on the radio would be simple, and using the cop’s pistol to shoot both of them could be done in a matter of a couple of seconds. He would be forced to return to the Great Lakes gate where he could get outside, and then into the baggage handling area.
From there he would improvise, though he didn’t think he would have too much trouble finding an airport employee who had an identification badge attached to his coveralls. He’d kill the man, switch clothes, and walk away.
Getting out of the airport where he could lose himself in the city could be problematic, but not impossible.
But the two cops passed him, and went directly to the Great Lakes gate, deserted for the moment.
Makarov headed toward the United gate. Once the cops talked to the flight crew, they would be coming to look for a dark-haired man wearing khaki slacks, a light turtleneck, and dark blue blazer, not a gray-haired businessman in a suit and tie.
But by then he would have reached the busier part of the terminal where he would merge with other business travelers like himself.
He was looking forward to getting home. The long Swedish winter was finally coming to an end, and he and Ilke loved biking in the countryside. Sometimes they would come upon a pleasant restaurant with tables outside during the good weather. Or walking along the paths in the Skansen or Tivoli on Djurgarden Island they would hold hands like young lovers.
And she adored shopping with him in Stockholm mostly, but whenever the press of his business wasn’t so important she would make him take her to Paris, which outside of Stockholm and Helsinki was her all-time favorite city in the world.
Four years ago she had learned in secret to speak French. She was a bright woman and a quick study, and when they went to Paris for the first time, she’d chatted in French with the cab driver, the desk clerk at the Intercontinental, and with the concierge there for dinner reservations at the Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower, delighting everyone. Including her husband.
At the time Makarov remembered being a little disturbed, because it had suddenly dawned on him that he was in love with his wife. He’d never felt that way about any other person in his entire life, and that day in Paris he’d never felt more vulnerable.
Since that time he never allowed himself to think that way about her until just this moment when he realized just how much he missed her.
19
AT FIFTY-TWO, STUART Wyman was one of the senior computer operators, not merely an area dispatcher in the Sioux Falls Center, so most of the other operators looked up to him. Steady Eddy. Old Mother Hen. Stickler for details. Nitpicker squared. But this morning, sitting at his board, he felt physically ill, as if he was the one who had killed Tony Bartlett. There wouldn’t be a lineman anywhere who would ever trust his judgment again.
He’d turned over his duties to Nesbitt, whose console was next to his, and he’d spent the last two hours going over every computer record second-by-second from thirty minutes before the outage—when every indicator showed normal for that line—until thirty minutes after the accident. The line had not been energized, and he would bet everything he owned on it.
But none of that changed the fact that Tony had been electrocuted, and from what he understood Stark County Sheriff Kasmir and maybe a young couple from a nearby cattle ranch had been shot to death. All of it pointed toward another attack on the Initiative’s Donna Marie generating station.
The other operators on duty left him alone, some of them working the dozens of issues that came up on every shift, including a pair of outages in central Nebraska, and a transformer issue in northern Wisconsin at the Superior distribution yard.
He’d been smoking all morning and his coffee cup was half filled with butts, but so far no one had challenged him, and there were other, bigger issues he would have to face when the shoe finally dropped.
Which it did a couple of minutes before one when the center’s chief operating officer, Dick Remillard, phoned his console.
“Are you about finished with your diagnostics?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Come up to my office, please.”
“Yes, sir,” Wyman said again and as he crossed the main control room he glanced up at the plate glass window where Remillard was watching him.
The COO was something of a legend in MAPP, working his way as a California lineman through MIT where he studied electrical engineering, and from there to Harvard where he earned his MBA. But instead of returning to California and setting up some sort of Silicon Valley high tech company, he’d gone directly to work for the Mid-Continent Area Power Pool right here as the number two man at the age of twenty-six two years ago. He was young (some of the old hands doubted if he had to shave more than once or twice a week), he was direct, and he was very smart and let everyone know it. All strikes against him, but he ran a tight ship and fairly soon, it was rumored, he would jump to a senior management position either at the Eastern or the Western Interconnect—the odds favored California, his home state. He was fond of complaining that he hadn’t found a decent place anywhere in South Dakota to use his surfboard.
Remillard was six-two, much taller than Wyman, who he motioned to have a seat across the desk. Except for a wall filled with flat-screen monitors showing the overall picture of the entire system, and a wide-screen monitor on his desk, the office was spartan. Several photos of him skiing in Aspen, sculling on the Charles River in Boston, mountain climbing somewhere in Alaska, skydiving in Florida, and surfing in Hawaii and California, adorned the wall behind his clear acrylic desk—and in all of them he looked young, fit, and tan, just about how he looked now. Except in the pictures he was smiling, his teeth movie-star white.
An easy man to hate, Wyman decided.
“What did you find, Stu?”
“It’s almost certainly the work of a terrorist or terrorists. The sheriff and a young couple who’d happened by were shot to death. And it was directed at the Initiative, just like the holiday attacks.”
“But those transmission lines are not owned by the Initiative, they belong to us.”
“Taking the line out shut down Donna Marie.”
“But Mr. Bartlett wasn’t shot to death. He was electrocuted.”
Wyman looked away for a moment, but he nodded. “I know.”
“How?”
“I can’t find a trace, but my best guess is Donna Marie’s relays somehow tripped, for just a second, energizing the lines just as Tony—Mr. Bartlett—was attaching the downed one to the insulator he’d repaired.”
“I spoke with Donna Marie’s chief operating engineer. I believe you’ve worked wi
th the man?”
“Roger Kohl. Knows his business.”
Remillard turned his computer monitor around so that Wyman could see the images on the screen. “These are four time/date stamped snapshots of his main board, showing the normal power level just before the line went down, immediately afterwards, and at the exact time of Bartlett’s death and immediately after that unfortunate event. No power was coming from Donna Marie.”
It was the same conclusion Wyman had come up with. “But the line was energized.”
“Yes.”
“Could have been a temporary malfunction of one of his programs. A shadow code or something like that. A line or two left over from one of their routine sweeps for viruses. A corruption of a code that somehow had unintended consequences before one of their safeguard programs kicked in.”
Remillard held his silence for a beat. “Or an operator error?”
Wyman shrugged. He really didn’t want to go in that direction. Kohl and his people were top notch. They’d been hired directly by ARPA-E, and like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that had been there at the beginning of the Initiative, only the best of the best in the business had been hired. “It’s possible.”
“It’s possible,” Remillard said. “For an operator error at Donna Marie, you’re suggesting.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Or an operator error here? A temporary lapse? Joking with a colleague? Distracted?”
“Anything is possible, but not likely. We have safeguards.”
“Perhaps while lighting a cigarette?”
“I’m the only one who smokes,” Wyman said, and it suddenly dawned on him that he was going to be the scapegoat. “No, sir, it’s not going to be that simple. The problem could have been operator error—but that is the most remote possibility. I’m betting just about everything that it was a computer problem.”
“Because?”
“Because of the timing. The line was not energized until the exact moment that Tony had his hands on it. Someone was right there, obviously. He killed the sheriff and the couple. Either he somehow manipulated a computer at Donna Marie or here, or he communicated with someone—a computer hacker somewhere—who did the thing.”
“Now you’re blaming the virus that either the Chinese or Russians have supposedly injected into the entire grid,” Remillard said, his tone insinuating.
“That’s more likely than an operator error,” Wyman replied hotly.
“Your error,” Remillard said. “Is that also possible?”
“Sure. But in that case I would have to be in league with the person or persons who shot out the insulator in the first place, then shot and killed those people out there.”
“Exactly the conclusion we came to,” Remillard said. He entered a few strokes on his keyboard, and the snapshots were replaced by the image of Teresa Dyer, the president of MAPP, whose offices were in Minneapolis. She wasn’t smiling, the set of her eyes stern. Like Remillard she was young, attractive, and bright. She also had the reputation of being a shark.
“Good morning, Mr. Wyman,” she said, and Wyman knew damned well what was about to happen. She was going to fire him because Remillard didn’t have the guts to do it himself.
“Ma’am.”
“Dick tells me that you’ve been working the problem all morning.”
“Yes.”
“A tragedy. The lineman left a wife and three children?”
“Two children,” Wyman said. “But a police officer and two other people were shot to death out there.”
“Their deaths, though just as tragic, are not a direct result of coming in contact with our equipment. Do you understand?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Doesn’t matter,” the woman said. “Our issue—actually your issue, Mr. Wyman—is finding out how and, perhaps more important, why the line became energized at the same moment the unfortunate lineman without the proper equipment was in contact with it. We don’t believe it was an accident.”
Wyman felt a glimmer of hope. “Neither do I, ma’am.”
“No,” the MAPP president said. “We will be conducting our own investigation, of course. Power was not coming from Donna Marie, but it was coming from somewhere within the system, and we will find out how it happened. As for the other, the FBI has been called. Their advice was to suspend you until this matter is straightened out. Your suspension will be with full pay and benefits, of course, but I want you to immediately leave the control center. I also suggest that you remain in contact with Dick to let him know where you are at all times until the FBI talks you, which I suspect will be much sooner than later.”
Wyman found that he actually couldn’t blame the company. A lineman had been electrocuted when he came in contact with a line that was supposed to be de-energized. It was someone’s fault, and he had been the man in charge. The FBI had been called, because everyone agreed that whatever had happened out there had been another attack on the Initiative.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Will there be anything else?”
“Not this morning,” the company president said.
Wyman left Remillard’s office, got his things from his locker, and left the building. No one looked his way nor did anyone say anything to him, nor was he surprised to see that Nesbitt had moved over to the Area Desk Supervisor’s console.
* * *
HIS WIFE, Delores, was out of the house, probably having lunch with one of her friends. She hadn’t left a note, because she hadn’t expected him to be home so soon, which was just as well. He needed a little time alone.
He got a Bud Light from the fridge and walked to his little office at the back of their ranch-style house, sat down at his desk, and powered up his computer. When he got online he double clicked the icon for the MAPP’s Computer Analysis Center in Hibbing, Minnesota. When the home page came up, he entered his user name and password which brought up a directory, from where he found Arthur Tobias Lundgren.
He and chubby, geeky, pimple-faced Toby had gone to Denfeld High School together in Duluth, Minnesota—the school for the kids from the wrong side of the tracks. They went to the University of Minnesota at Duluth for their degrees in computer science, and Toby went on to the main campus in Minneapolis for his Masters and his Ph.D. But they’d kept up their friendship not only because they were in the same field—though Toby was much smarter—but because Stu had been his only friend through high school. In many ways they were like brothers.
“Twins,” Wyman used to joke.
And Toby would laugh from the soles of his size twelves. “In your worst nightmare.”
They’d had some good times together, and still talked by computer at least once a week.
Lundgren didn’t respond, and Wyman’s computer showed an error message. But a moment later the phone rang. It was Lundgren.
“There’s some serious shit going down up here, and you’re right in the middle of it.”
“I’m at home now, they suspended me,” Wyman said. “Have you any idea how it happened?”
“I know exactly how it happened,” Lundgren said.
Wyman was relieved. “That’s good.”
“You weren’t listening to me, Stu. I know exactly how it happened, because the order to override the shutdown, and allow a momentary back surge from the Bismarck Switch came from the Sioux Falls Center computer system.”
“Impossible. I spent the last two hours looking for exactly that, and found nothing.”
“The order came from your console.”
“Goddamnit,” Wyman said, but then he stopped. “But I didn’t do it, I swear to God, Toby. And even if I did, the transaction would have showed up on someone’s log.”
“On mine.”
Wyman sat back, his entire body slumping. Maybe he had done something wrong. Maybe he had been distracted. Maybe his head had been planted firmly up his ass as his ROTC instructor at UMD was fond of telling him and the other recruits. Most of them had made it through their four-year degrees in
to the service, but Wyman hadn’t. Toby had talked him out of it: “Being a GI ain’t in your future. No way, man. Not a chance in hell.”
But he would never make such a mistake, no matter how distracted he was. And in fact he’d not been the least bit distracted this morning until after the accident.
“It wasn’t me,” he said.
“I know that,” Lundgren said. “Which leaves a damned good hacker somewhere who wants to play games.”
“Maybe it’s another attack on the Initiative.”
“I think that’s exactly what’s going down.”
“Can you find him?”
Lundgren laughed. “Keep your pecker up, Stu. I’ll get back to you.”
20
OSBORNE GOT THROUGH to General Forester just as the BCI crew was finishing with Sheriff Kasmir’s car, and the coroner gave one of the ambulance crews permission to remove the body to the morgue at St. Joseph’s in Dickinson. They headed across the road to the pickup truck. The crime scene beneath the pylon would be the most difficult to sort out, so they were saving it for last.
“I’ve ordered the Rapid Response team back to the Initiative just until we get this new mess straightened out,” the general said.
“I was going to suggest that you do just that, because this was no accident. But someone’s going to have to figure out how the lineman could have made such a big mistake.”
“The FBI’s Cyber Crimes unit is on it. Best early guess is that someone hacked into the computer system either at Donna Marie—my people are checking on that—or at the transmission company’s control center outside Sioux Falls.”
“Something like that would have to be fairly sophisticated,” Osborne said. He didn’t know much on the subject, but after being around Whitney Lipton and some of her bright people, it stood to reason that plenty of safeguards would be in place. Passwords, security codes, probably encrypted programs, and he told Forester just that.
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