Gridlock

by Byron L. Dorgan

  “Did he give you a name?”

  “No, but he thought he might have known the guy at MIT. German or Dutch, and now a part of some kinky group that does this stuff for the fun of it.”

  “Have you talked to your friend today?” Osborne asked.

  “The FBI ordered me to have no contact with him.”

  “I’m going up to see him,” Osborne said. “And I’d like you to get word to him that I’m coming.”

  “Good luck, Sheriff,” Wyman said. “And I sincerely mean it, because if Toby is right and this was just the beginning of something big—well, you can’t imagine how bad it could be.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ll let Toby explain it, if he’ll talk to you. And you might tell him for me, that I’m goddamned scared.”

  * * *

  ST. LOUIS COUNTY Sheriff’s Deputy Jay Stromback, a round-faced man with a buzz haircut and wire rimmed glasses, was waiting for them at the Chisholm-Hibbing Airport. It was about three in the afternoon. Rausch showed her FBI credentials and introduced Osborne and Ashley.

  “Long way from home, Sheriff,” Stromback said, shaking hands. “Might be able to help out if I knew what this was all about.”

  “I’d like to talk to a man who works at the MAPP Computer Center.”

  “That’s what Agent Rausch said on the phone. This concern my county?”

  “Not directly.”

  They went out to the sheriff’s radio unit. “Does he know you’re coming to see him?”

  “Yes,” Rausch said. “This is official Bureau business but it won’t show up in your log.”

  She and Ashley were in the backseat, and the deputy glanced at them in the rearview mirror but said nothing as they headed away from the airport. Fifteen minutes later they were on Highway 169 heading toward the tiny town of Kewatin and Stromback turned onto a narrow blacktop road into the woods that led to a gate in a tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire protecting a squat, windowless, one-story block house building that looked like a military bunker. The only notice on the gate was one forbidding entry by unauthorized personnel.

  Stromback called on the intercom. “Your visitors are here.”

  A moment later the gate swung open and they drove through, parking in the small lot alongside a dozen other cars, and were buzzed into a small anteroom where they had to sign in with a security officer. Osborne and Rausch had to surrender their weapons, but Stromback was to wait outside for them.

  Arthur Lundgren came to the door a minute later, blinking furiously behind his thick glasses. He was short, a little thick around the middle, and his face was scarred from acne as a teenager. He was dressed in jeans and a MIT hoodie.

  “I was wondering when you guys were going to show up,” he said when Deb Rausch showed him her FBI identification.

  “Is there someplace we can talk?” she asked.

  “Do I need a lawyer?”

  “No,” Osborne said. “Stu Wyman sent us, said he was scared, and he told me that you’d explain why we all should be.”

  “You’re a G-man?”

  “No,” Osborne said.

  Lundgren led them back to a small conference room, where Osborne explained who he and Ashley were and a little of why they’d come without mentioning Makarov directly.

  “Holy shit, so you actually listened,” Lundgren said. “But there had to be somebody with boots on the ground out there. The timing would have been all wrong with just my guy in Amsterdam.”

  “Yes, there was, but I want you to tell us how we’re going to catch the hacker, and the sooner the better because I think he’s not done.”

  “Not by a long shot,” Lundgren said. “You ever read one of those doomsday novels, end of the world shit? This could end up just like that.”

  35

  THE HAVEN, AS the area was known, was, in Barend Dekker’s estimation, a slum. Just off the Westerstraat west of Amsterdam’s city center the group of crumbling post–WWII apartment buildings at the edge of a run-down industrial park was home to squatters, some Roma who mostly stayed to themselves, and in one building the Group—more or less a dozen world-class computer hackers. The number varied as people tended to drift in and out, some staying a week or two, others much longer.

  Dekker, thirty-one, was a small man, with narrow shoulders, long, delicate fingers, and wide, deep black eyes that under a high, frowning forehead made it seem as if he was always pissed off at the world. Which in a large way he was, though he’d never tried to figure out why.

  Shit happened. It had always happened to him. When he was just a kid his mother had all but turned her back on him, and his father used to beat him with a leather belts, calling him the queer boy.

  MIT could have been different, but he was too young—fourteen when he graduated with his Ph.D. in computer science—to fit in. So he’d been an outcast. A freak. A supernerd among nerds. His thesis had been Quantum Effects Encryption for Secure Computer Algorithms that even his major professor and advisor didn’t fully understand, which had deepened the dissatisfaction he felt being the only smart guy in the room.

  IBM and GE and Boeing Aerospace Division hadn’t been much better, and finally one night he’d crashed the Cray Red Storm system at Sandia National Laboratories from a laptop in his bedroom in Brooklyn, just for the hell of it. That was in ’07, and within a year he’d discovered the Amsterdam Group and Karn Simula, his girlfriend from Helsinki, who was just as pissed off at the world as he was.

  But she had better reasons. From the age of seven until she’d stabbed her brother to death when she was fifteen, she’d been sexually abused by him, by an uncle, and by her father. The judge had sentenced her to two years in prison, after which she was supposed to undergo psychiatric counseling.

  She did her prison time, but the day she got out she left Finland, finding her way to the Group, because like the nerds here she was a genius. But she fit in.

  She was shorter than Barend, her breasts small, her hips narrow, her oval face and blond features Scandinavian-pretty and fresh. But she had a lot of tattoos—mostly of scenes depicting hell and the devil and the damned souls. And she had numerous body piercings; in her eyebrows, nose, tongue, nipples, belly button, and her shaved pudenda.

  She’d learned enough about computers and programming from the Group so that she’d become an expert at broad-stroke planning. She advised them what they should do, and sometimes they implemented her suggestions.

  It was her idea to use the Russian power grid virus to play with the U.S. Bring the arrogant bastards down a notch, while at the same time fulfilling their contract with the Iranians.

  Dekker had been working on one of his ten-dimensional string theory war game programs and he looked up when Karn came out of the bedroom where she’d been doing a little acid while listening to Madame Butterfly and masturbating. She was naked, a petulant expression on her full lips.

  He’d seen it before, especially lately and he was irritated. “If you’re bored again don’t take it out on me, I’m busy,” he told her and he turned back to his game.

  She padded into the dirty kitchenette, and came back with a couple of reasonably clean glasses and a bottle of Valpolicella. “Want a drink with me?”

  Dekker turned away from his laptop. “Sure, why not.” He couldn’t stay mad at her.

  She poured their red wine and then sat straddling his lap, her smell just then musky, her nipples erect, a thin line of sweat on her upper lip. “So what’ve you been thinking about the last couple of days?” she asked.

  “Same shit, different day. But you got something stuck up your ass.”

  She sipped her wine, a few drops running down her chin and to her chest, between her breasts. “What are we waiting for?”

  He knew exactly what she was talking about. They’d been cooped up here ever since he’d gotten the contract and the Iranian had delivered the flash drive almost two months ago. None of their friends had been over; his excuse was his string theory war game for which he still
hadn’t come up with a better title than 10-D. They’d not taken any drives into the country, or trips to the seashore, or down to Munich, a city he particularly liked. Even their sex had been off. Too much on his mind.

  “They told me forty-eight hours, it’s only been twenty-four.”

  She laughed, her voice husky, all the way from deep in her chest, and from smoking too much pot. “You gonna put that in your memoirs? Should make a whole chapter all by itself: The day the earth stood still and the Big D took orders from someone for the first time.”

  Dekker figured that he should be mad, she was teasing him, but he grinned. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Make ’em squirm a little,” she said. They spoke English as most international hackers did, and she especially had fun with substandard usage. It was, she said, like working crossword puzzles in a foreign language; speaking like real people did was the height of control.

  “Send them a warning?”

  “Like they know what’s coming but nobody can do a thing about it. Like watching the tube on nine-eleven in west bumfuck Iowa. The buildings coming down. Helpless.”

  “The president sitting on a stool reading to the grade-school kiddies.”

  “Cryin’ and prayin’ to God for a miracle. But He wasn’t home that day.”

  Dekker had worked hard at getting even for most of his life, but never with the kind of panache that Karn was suggesting. He’d always struck hard and fast, without warning. It was the main reason his handle was swiftlightning.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the convoluted image of one of his ten-dimensional branes. He thought that he was close, but the complete image, the final breakthough had eluded him for months.

  Karn followed his gaze and grinned. “You heard of three-dimensional chess? Three normal boards stacked one atop the other, with extra pieces on the two top boards? Deal is you can move certain pieces not just laterally across one board, but you can attack a piece from the board above or the one below. Position. Only this time you got ten dimensions. Maybe even a gateway or gateways to other universes. Hell, gravity is probably nothing but another universe’s force leaking through a couple of the extra dimensions. You know, down around the Planck length.”

  She waved her wineglass toward the screen, slopping some of the wine on him.

  “Send your extra-dimensional forces through the network. Cancel gravity. Turn it upside down. Hell, even make the universe expand faster than it should. Fuck with their heads, D. Loosen up. Have some fun.”

  He poured some of his wine on her chest then sucked it off her nipples. She arched her back in pleasure, just like a cat did when its back was scratched.

  “We’re drunk, so let’s screw,” she said.

  “You think?”

  * * *

  IT WAS coming up on eleven in the evening when Dekker left Karn passed out on the bed. He’d covered her with a blanket, pulled on a pair of shorts and a sweatshirt, and got another glass of wine before he sat down at his computer and brought up the Internet. His connection came up through a series of re-mailers, two of them in India, and was totally secure. Untraceable.

  Even in the middle of making love with Karn a part of him had been chewing on what she had suggested, turning the notion over in his head, loosening up, having fun.

  He opened a Twitter account under the name How About Them Apples and piggybacked it on Jane Fonda’s account. But he had another thought—have fun, Karn told him—and instead attached it to the White House Twitter account of Nicholas Fenniger, the president’s adviser on national security affairs.

  He’d love to be a little bird in the corner when the shit started to hit the fan.

  ARMAGEDDON IS ABOUT TO FALL ON YOUR HEADS. ARE YOU READY, AMERICA?

  He wrote in all caps which was the same as shouting out loud.

  A minute later he made another post.

  24 HOURS AND THE LIGHTS START TO GO OUT. WHERE SHOULD WE BEGIN?

  The Iranian who’d delivered the flash drive had told him to do nothing until he was contacted via e-mail. And he’d followed his instructions to the letter because he became motivated as soon as the five hundred thousand euros had actually been credited to his Luxembourg account. He’d never had so much money in his life. He’d never even thought about sums like that. And the five hundred Gs was only the down payment.

  LET’S START IN L.A. AND HEAD EAST. SALT LAKE CITY. LAS VEGAS. DENVER.

  People—actually in his estimation the vast majority of the population were sheeple—had to be led by the noses, step-by-step. Keep it simple stupid!

  KANSAS CITY. CHICAGO. DETROIT. CINCINNATI. HOW ABOUT MIAMI?

  Sometimes he wondered why he even bothered. Would they even get it? Not until the lights went out.

  NASHVILLE TURN OFF THE MUSIC. PHILLIE CAN’T FIX THE CRACK IN THE BELL TILL THE JUICE IS ON.

  He’d thought about making each message exactly 140 characters. But that’d be showing off. And why bother confusing the issue?

  HOW ABOUT BOSTON?

  He wanted to be there.

  HOW ABOUT WASHINGTON, D.C.?

  The newspaper and television and Internet headlines would be sweet—once they got their electricity back on.

  HOW ABOUT NEW YORK CITY?

  And this was just the beginning.

  HOW ABOUT THEM APPLES?

  36

  WHITNEY LIPTON WAS at her desk when she got the encrypted video call from General Forester. It was a little after three in the afternoon and she’d finished briefing her staff less than an hour ago. The experiment was a complete success. The microbe talker—the gadget—which guided the coal-eating bacteria to not only continue to do their jobs, but continue to reproduce, was working well within its design parameters, and just about everyone on the research staff, her included, was about ready to go back to their university positions and new research projects.

  Amidst all the hustle and bustle over the past several months—even during the attacks on the Initiative, and the horrible killings—she’d had time to think about what might be coming next for her. She’d been assured that she could have her old job back at the CDC, heading the pure research bacterial lab that she’d begun what seemed like a million years ago. It’d been from the lab where she’d developed the microbial Esperanto she used to train her bugs.

  She’d thought a lot about training colonies of microbes to cure individual human diseases. Six hundred different species of bacterium in the human mouth worked in concert to produce dental plaque. Maybe if they were taught a different language they could prevent plaque.

  Maybe a tailor-made army of microbes could cure a specific cancer in a specific patient. Open a blocked artery. Rid a joint of arthritis. Strengthen the bones in an eighty-year-old woman. And beyond that maybe the millions, even billions, of different species of bacterium already present in every human body could be taught different languages for different maladies.

  When she’d brought that idea up with Lee Mulholland, her postdoc from UW, he’d tossed his head back and laughed out loud. “Way rad, Doc,” he’d said. “You’re talking about Dr. McCoy.”

  Whitney hadn’t known who he was talking about.

  “Bones, from Star Trek. He had a medical analyzer that he’d run over the patient’s body, and voilà, the guy was cured. No barbaric cutting into a patient’s body with a scalpel. All that was in the past, because his device was talking to the microbes, telling them to get to work.”

  “I don’t think it’ll be quite that simple—”

  “Why not?” Mulholland had asked, and it had gotten her to thinking about some dazzling possibilities.

  “How’s it going?” Forester asked. “Have there been any security issues?”

  “Nothing so far, other than the power line,” Whitney said. “But Nettles wants to keep his people here for at least a week, maybe longer.”

  “I agree, because this isn’t over by a long shot.”

  Something clutched at Whitney’s gut. “Have you heard something?�
��

  “Has Nate Osborne talked to you today?”

  “No. What’s going on?”

  “I’m sorry, but you’re on the firing line and you should have been told yesterday,” Forester said, concern written on his face, and he told her about Chavez’s forty-eight-hour ultimatum that had been delivered to the White House. “Leaves us twenty-four hours.”

  “Or what? What’s supposed to happen?”

  “No one knows, except that your downed power line was not the only attack on our grid. There’ve been others. Somebody has been systematically probing our system. And now that they’re done with that phase something else is coming our way, but the tough part is that no one knows what that might be. And it’s totally impossible for us to even begin to guard all of the high-tension lines, or even the transformer yards.”

  “Do you think they’ll try to hit us here again?” Whitney asked, and she tried to read something in Forester’s stern expression. “Are you warning me because you know something else? Something specific?”

  “You’re important.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Donna Marie no longer matters, but you’re a national treasure we can’t afford to lose.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Bob.”

  “I want you here in Washington until this is settled. The FBI will set you up in a safe house with an armed guard.”

  Whitney was shaken. “What about my staff?”

  “No one’s going to come after them, or you probably, but if they’d feel safer they can sit tight and Nettles’ people will provide security.” Forester leaned closer to the camera. “Listen to me, Whitney, I may be acting like an old mother hen, but I want you out of there this afternoon, or first thing in the morning at the latest. And at least for now you’re still working for me, so I’m going to insist.”

  “If I’m going anywhere it’ll be to my lab in Atlanta.”

  “I talked to Charlie Donovan a half hour ago, and he agrees with me.” Donovan was the director of the CDC’s Druid Hills headquarters outside Atlanta.