“Well let me know, please. I’ll either be here, or walking back to Medora because I lost my ride.”
“I’ll call Captain Nettles,” Forester said. “Try not to irritate the man, he’s just doing his job.”
“Promise.”
Ystrimsky came back. “Sorry, ma’am. Captain Nettles has denied your request. He suggests that you phone someone for a ride.”
He swung the gate open to admit Whitney, but she shook her head.
“I’ll wait here,” she said. “General Forester should be calling any minute, and Ms. Borden can ride up to my office with me.”
The AP was clearly vexed. “Ladies, we’re just trying to do our jobs here. Keeping you and this facility as safe as possible.”
“And we’re doing ours,” Whitney said.
The civilian guard stepped out. “It’s Captain Nettles for you, Pat.”
Ystrimsky went back to the guardhouse and a half minute later came out again. “Doc, the captain says that Ms. Borden is your responsibility.”
“Always has been,” Whitney said. “Just like everyone else in this facility.”
* * *
EXCEPT FOR the two airmen at the front gate the rest of the Rapid Response team was guarding the perimeter in Hummers, plus two helicopters in the air out a couple of miles doing lazy circles around the project. Nettles and his staff worked from a command post set up in front of Donna Marie.
The Administration and Research and Development Center, housed in a two-story concrete block building, was in the personnel compound two miles from the power station. In addition to the R&D building were a clean room where Whitney had done the bulk of her on-site microbial research, a machine shop, several housing units and a sick bay, a dining hall, and Henry’s, which was a bar and restaurant modeled on a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
It was spring and after a tough winter a lot of the postdocs and technicians sometimes played softball on the quad, but it was empty when Whitney and Ashley, riding in one of the project’s golf carts, pulled up in front of R&D and went inside.
Lieutenant Rudy Doyle, the project’s new press officer, came out of his office, a sorrowful look on his long, lean face. He’d played basketball for Northwestern and still looked like a teenager who’d just stepped off the court, all arms and gangly legs.
“Am I ever glad you’re back, Doc,” he said. “Hi, Ash.”
“What’s the problem?” Whitney asked.
“I think we’ve the makings of a mutiny on our hands. Rog just left a couple of minutes ago soon as he got word that we could bring our generator online, but no one in your staff wanted to listen to him. He was trying to calm them down, but as soon as Captain Nettles and his people showed up all hell started to break loose.”
“Who can blame them after Christmas?” Whitney said. “I’ll talk to them.”
“They’re in the lab. Do you want me to come with you?”
“No. Just keep Nettles and his people out of here.”
“The ball’s in your court,” Ashley told her. “But if you need me I’ll be with Rudy. I think I should bring him up to date.”
Whitney nodded and headed down the hall to the main lab and computer center from where the scientific and technical work had been accomplished over the past six and a half years. As soon as the final bits of microbial tweaking were sorted out and their bacteria talker—the gadget—had settled in for the commercial production of methane and the bacterial scrubbers in the chimney which separated the carbon from the CO2 were fully up to speed, the function of the lab would become mostly a quality control station.
Once everything moved into its final mode, Donna Marie’s operation could be controlled by a handful of people. The only real work would be drilling new wells into the coal veins, introducing the bacteria and talkers, and running pipelines back to the power station.
Ashley followed Doyle into his office where he offered her a cup of coffee, but she’d been ready for a picnic in the park with Nate and Whitney; they’d packed sandwiches, fried chicken, a six-pack of beer, and a bottle of pinot grigio. She wasn’t ready for coffee.
Doyle perched on the edge of his desk. “All I’ve been told is that a lineman was electrocuted over by Dickinson, and the team suddenly showed up,” he said. “What’s next?”
Ashley took off her jacket and sat down. “I don’t know for sure, except that something is definitely heading our way again. Nate thinks it’s some sort of an opening shot for World War Three, and exactly what that means is anyone’s guess. But it’s my story and no one’s dragging me off it.”
“You got past the gate guards, that’s something,” Doyle said. “Don’t keep me in the dark.”
Ashley told him everything including the Basin Electric Co-op supervisor’s opinion that it was nothing but a stupid accident, caused by some idiot in the Sioux Falls Control Center.
They’d been standing beneath the pylon, the dead lineman’s body so gruesomely mutilated that no one wanted to look up at it, but couldn’t help themselves.
The image was burned into Ashley’s mind, a sight she knew she’d never forget.
“The bastard should be stood against a wall and let the firing squad finish the job. And I think Tony’s wife would be the one to give the order to fire.”
“But it wasn’t an accident,” Doyle said.
“No,” Ashley told him. She nodded toward the door. “What’s going on in the lab?”
“They want to quit. The experiment’s done, and anyway none of them think it’s worth getting killed for.”
Ashley used to think like that, but not anymore. Not after all they’d gone through. Not after Nate putting his life on the line for her and the others. “Maybe it is worth just that,” she said. “Maybe it always will be.”
23
FORESTER’S CHAUFFEUR-DRIVEN CADILLAC limousine came up East Executive Avenue where it was admitted through the gate, the guard immediately recognizing the general. This entrance to the White House was the least likely to attract any notice from the media, and the president wanted his people to come this way today.
In his fifties, the retired Army two-star was a short, slender man with the erect bearing of a career officer, and always in crisp dress even now that his uniform had been exchanged for sharply tailored suits. But getting out of his car and mounting the steps, he felt more like a man ten years older. He was worried about his daughter, about the project, and how the latest attack was going to affect the extremely volatile relations with Venezuela and with Hugo Chavez who, after we’d struck his air bases just after the first of the year, had promised a total oil blockade against us—which he’d done—and total war, which everyone had taken as nothing more than the rantings of a crazy man.
The president’s portly, always charming chief of staff Mark Young was waiting for him when he checked in with the Secret Service agent on duty.
“You’re giving the briefing. Did you bring any notes?”
“No need, there’s not much yet, but what we do have is worrisome.”
“He’s not in the best of moods,” Young said as they walked down the hall to the Situation Room in the West Wing.
“It’s understandable. Has there been anything from Caracas?”
Since we had recalled our ambassador to Venezuela our interests in the country—where a lot of American citizens still lived and worked—had been handled from the Swiss embassy. In situations like this very often responsibility was claimed by some group or another.
“Nothing yet from the Swiss,” Young said. “But it might be too soon.”
“They’ve got nothing strategic for us to go after, and Chavez knows that we’d never invade, so if he directed this thing, he could thumb his nose at us and we’d do nothing.”
Just before they reached the Situation Room Young stopped. “There’s more to this, isn’t there?”
“I think so,” Forester said. “Are Walt Page and Ed Rogers here?” Page was the director of the CIA and Rogers ran the FBI
.
“Yeah, and they’ll have something to add.”
“Let’s hope so,” Forester said and they went in and took their places around the long conference table.
In addition to Page and Rogers the others at the meeting included Secretary of State Irving Mortenson, the president’s Adviser on National Security Nicholas Fenniger, Secretary of Defense Nicholas Trilling, Secretary of the Department of Energy Wayne Hathaway, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Air Force General Robert Blake, and Director of the National Security Agency Air Force Lieutenant General Samuel Voight.
Everyone around the table knew Forester and they understood what kind of news he was probably bringing them. Most of them seemed resigned, and there was very little talk.
Two minutes later President Robert Thompson walked in and everyone got to their feet.
“Good afternoon, Mr. President,” Forester said.
Thompson looked more like a small-town banker than the president of the United States, meek, almost a milquetoast. And despite the fact that he was actually decisive, a lot of people had begun calling him Herb—for Herbert Hoover. He didn’t like it.
He took his seat, and nodded to Forester. “What do we know so far?”
“Not as much as I’d like, but it does look as if the Initiative has come under attack again, to this point apparently by a lone gunman hired by a person or persons unknown.”
“Take us through it from the beginning. All I have are the bits and pieces, and from where I sit what happened out there had only an indirect effect on the project.”
“At approximately six fourteen this morning, a power line failure was recorded at the Mid-Continent Power Pool Control Center outside Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and a lineman for the Basin Electric Co-Op was dispatched,” Forester began. He went through the rest of the scenario up to the point when Nate Osborne had telephoned him just twenty minutes ago.
“The Bureau has some information about how the line was re-energized,” Rogers said, but the president held him off.
“What was the lineman’s name?”
“Tony Bartlett,” Forester said.
“A married man?”
“Yes, sir. Two young children.”
The president was seething. “If this turns out to be another act of terrorism, and not just some hunter or disgruntled rancher shooting out an insulator as I was briefed earlier, then we will do something for his family, just as we do for the families of soldiers falling on the battlefield.”
“Yes, sir,” Young said.
“There’s more?” the president asked.
“Yes,” Forester said, “but Ed has something to add.”
“That high-voltage line was carrying no power at the time the lineman began his work. But an order to temporarily restore electricity to the line was apparently issued from the console of Stuart Wyman, an area supervisor at the Sioux Falls Control Center, who dispatched the lineman. It’s something he’s denied, but he was immediately suspended and the investigation was turned over to our Cyber Crimes unit.”
This was news to Forester and he said so.
“The situation is extremely fluid, and there simply was no time to keep you in the loop. Sorry, Bob,” the FBI director said. “The supervisor went home from where he tried to get into the MAAP’s Computer Analysis Center; we got an emergency wire tap order and were in time to get into his ISP account. But by then his passwords had already been blocked. Within less than one minute, Arthur Lundgren, who is one of the chief analysts for MAPP, telephoned him. They went to high school and the University of Minnesota together and apparently have maintained their friendship.”
Rogers took a device about the size of an iPhone from his pocket. “Hansen confirmed that the energize order had indeed come from Wyman’s console. And then we got this.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“That was Mr. Wyman,” Rogers said. “The next voice is Mr. Lundgren’s.”
“I believe you. 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.”
“What’s your take?” Thompson asked.
“My Cyber Crimes people were skeptical at first. Those computer systems are for the most part fairly well protected. But Lundgren called back, and this time the area supervisor’s wife was apparently listening in. This is a version edited for brevity and clarity.”
“… the order to re-energize did come from your board, but only after your program had been shut down for about a millisecond. Lets you off the hook.”
“A hacker?”
“… I’d say someone way off shore.… and I’m thinking it has the signature of a guy I knew back at MIT. Dutch or German … if it’s the same guy last I heard he was part of some commune of superhackers who screw with any system then can get their hands on, mostly for the fun of it.… sometimes they do it for money.”
“… How do you know?”
“That was Mr. Wyman’s wife,” Rogers said. “But the next part possibly has the most relevance to our problem. It’s Lundgren first, then Wyman.”
“Because I used to be just like them.”
“Do you know where they are?”
“Amsterdam, last I heard.”
“Can you get to them?”
“… if I’m right, and I usually am, this is something a hell of a lot bigger than merely taking out some poor lineman, or getting you canned. I don’t know what yet, but I’m telling you guys, this is damned interesting.”
Rogers switched off the device. “Our guess is that Wyman and Lundgren are telling the truth. And if that’s the case we believe that someone is taking another run at the Initiative.”
The president was grim. “But they hit a transmission control center, which would suggest a computer attack on our grid. The Chinese or Russian virus we’ve lived with since ’oh-nine, maybe earlier.”
“Either that or Lundgren and Wyman are working together,” Forester said. “Could be they said what they did because they knew their phones had been tapped.”
“It’s possible,” Rogers said. “We’re looking for any out-of-the-ordinary transactions to their bank accounts, or evidence that either of them have offshore accounts somewhere. But it still leaves us with who directed the operation.”
“There have been several other minor outages in the past week,” Hathaway, the energy secretary, said. “All of them due to unexplained minor computer glitches.”
“Any other deaths?” the president asked.
“No, sir. But the other outages involved the Western and Texas Interconnects. This latest was on the Eastern Interconnect. Seems to me that our grid is being systematically probed.”
“By whom?”
“Unknown,” Hathaway said.
“Ed?” the president asked the FBI’s director.
“I wasn’t aware that our Cyber Crimes people were involved with the other incidents, but if they’re connected it could point to a systematic testing of us.”
“Nate Osborne telephoned me while I was on the way over here from my office,” Forester said, even more worried than he had been before the meeting began. “He’s convinced that this morning’s attack was the work of a professional, who in all likelihood monitored not only the local law enforcement radio channels, but the communications with the MAPP Control Center in Sioux Falls.”
Everyone in the room knew about Osborne because of his direct involvement stopping the attacks against the Initiative over the holidays. A few of them, including the president, had met him afterward, and they were all aware that he had won the Medal of Honor in Afghanistan. His opinions, even though he was only the sheriff of a very small county, were respected.
“Osborne gave us a fair description of him this morning, and we traced him to a flight from Dickinson to Denver,” Rogers said. “But we missed him by ten minutes. And if he is a professional he’s long gone by now, and the chances of finding him are
nearly zero unless he strikes again.”
“It could be him working with the hacker in Amsterdam,” Forester said.
“Do you think these people will strike again?” the president asked.
“Osborne is sure of it,” Forester said.
“If the attacks—if that’s what they were—on the other two Interconnects are related, then I’d say this is just the beginning.”
“Of what?”
“Of an all-out energy war,” Forester said. “It was my first thought when I heard the news this morning, and Osborne agrees with me.”
“Chavez can’t be that crazy,” the president said.
“He just might be,” Walt Page, the DCI, said. “He promised to retaliate for Balboa. But it’s possible he might not be working alone. Our people on the ground in Iran believe that Chavez met with Ahmadinejad again two months ago, but this time in secret. Though we don’t know what was discussed at their meeting, we think it’s possible Chavez was asking for help with his nuclear program.”
“In 2010 he was asking Moscow for a pair of twelve-hundred megawatt nuclear reactors plus a smaller one for research. And he’s signed more than a hundred different letters of agreement,” the president said. “I’ve been briefed.”
“Yes, sir,” Page said. “But Mr. Chavez has also visited North Korea.”
24
MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD’S AGUSTA-BELL 206A Jet Ranger flared over the landing pad and touched down lightly at his extensive personal palace outside the city of Amol just eighty miles northwest of Tehran. It was ten in the evening under a star-studded sky which matched the president of Iran’s mood to a T.
Everything was going strictly according to the plans he and his friend Hugo Chavez had been working on since after the first of the year, and he effusively thanked his personal pilot and boarded a golf cart that took him to the main residence not fifty feet from the Caspian seashore. It was all he could do to keep himself from dancing across the rear courtyard, under the arches, and through the double-wide glass doors that one of the ground floor staff opened for him.
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