“For how long?”
“At least another twenty-four, until we see what’s coming, if anything. A lot of the president’s advisers think it’s just bluster.”
“And then what, if nothing happens?”
“You can wrap things up out there, and go back to Atlanta a free woman, with the thanks of a grateful nation. There’ll be a Rose Garden ceremony and you’ll be asked to speak to Congress and there’ll be television.”
“I don’t want any of it,” Whitney said. And she sincerely didn’t. She wanted the anonymity of her lab. She had started to fall in love with her chief of security here, only he’d been shot dead trying to save her and the others when they’d come under attack. It would be a very long time, she’d decided, before she could even begin to heal. For now she wanted to bury herself in work.
“I’ll send a jet for you, and coordinate it with Captain Nettles. First thing in the morning, which’ll give you time to pack.”
Whitney wasn’t happy and she let it show. “All right, whatever you say, General.”
“Good,” Forester said, and his image on her computer screen was gone.
* * *
WHITNEY WENT downstairs to the computer center where Mulholland and a couple of other postdocs were closing down the experimental links to the power station and setting up the much simpler monitoring parameters. They’d already installed and tested the complicated program that would take biofeedbacks from the microbe colony in the coal seam and automatically adjust the output of the gadget whenever it was needed.
“Which if you ask me is a nifty bit of engineering,” Mulholland had told her.
“Makes the entire generating plant practically automatic,” she’d said. “And that’s the whole idea—or at least the last chapter.”
The three of them were huddled around one of the computers and no one looked up when she walked in.
“Do we have a problem?” she asked.
Mulholland glanced over his shoulder. “Come here and take a look at this.”
She joined them and looked at what was displayed on the monitor. At first it made no sense to her, and she said so.
They all looked a little pale, especially Mulholland. “We’re waiting for the next Tweet, but this might be it,” he said. He scrolled up several pages.
ARMEGEDDON IS ABOUT TO FALL ON YOUR HEADS. ARE YOU READY AMERICA?
“This is the Twitter page of the president’s national security adviser,” Mulholland said. “A friend of mine out in Maryland was a poli-sci major at Wisconsin, now he works for a lobbyist, and he sent this to me about five minutes ago.”
Something tugged at Whitney. A niggling fear at the edges. “That doesn’t sound like White House chatter.”
“No, but this does.”
THE NEW POLICY BILL IS READY FOR THE SENATE. WE NEED TO RALLY THE TROOPS.
Mulholland scrolled down past several more Tweets on the president’s new energy initiative bill, until he came to another in the vein of the first.
24 HOURS AND THE LIGHTS START TO GO OUT. WHERE SHOULD WE BEGIN?
“I don’t understand,” Whitney said.
“Somebody, somehow, has hacked into the NSA’s Twitter account and interlaced these messages. Could be a joke, but it isn’t.”
“Not too hard to do,” Pat Zobel, one of the other postdocs, said. At twenty-two she was the youngest on the team and she was their leading computer expert.
Mulholland scrolled down to the next message.
LET’S START IN L.A. AND HEAD EAST. SALT LAKE CITY. LAS VEGAS.
Whitney’s cell phone rang. “Yes.”
“Get to a computer and log in to Nick Fenniger’s Twitter account,” Forester said.
“I’m there. What does it mean?”
“It means that the hacker we think was responsible for the death of the lineman isn’t done. This is the next step I told you about.”
“The one that some of the president’s advisers think is just bluster.”
KANSAS CITY. CHICAGO. DETROIT. CINCINNATI. HOW ABOUT MIAMI?
“The same,” Forester said. “Get your things together, a jet will be on its way to Dickinson in less than a half hour. But I’m going to tell Nettles to hold you there at the Initiative until it touches down, and then you’ll be helicoptered over.”
“He means to start rolling blackouts. Cut power to those cities.”
“That’s exactly what he means to do.”
“But he’s given us another twenty-four hours, and I’ve got to take care of my people out here first. Send the jet in the morning.”
“I want you here.”
“They’re after the grid, not me. Anyway I’d actually be safer out here at Donna Marie.”
“First thing in the morning,” Forester said.
37
IT WAS A few minutes past four in Hibbing, and walking away from the forty-five-minute meeting with a man Osborne thought was among the smartest he’d ever met, he understood that catching the Amsterdam hacker was going to be next to impossible by ordinary means, and he voiced his opinion to Deb Rausch.
They were in the parking lot approaching the St. Louis County Sheriff’s radio unit when Deb pulled up short. “Our Cyber Crimes people are pretty good,” she said. “But what do you mean by ordinary means?”
“Our guys hunted Osama bin Laden for years, but it wasn’t until we got some Pakistani intel on the ground right there, that we were able to find him and send SEAL Team Six in to take him out. We didn’t ask for permission, especially not from the Pakistani military or intelligence service—we just went in, shot the bastard to death, and yanked his body out of there. In and out in a few minutes.”
Sheriff Stromback got out of his car and was looking at them.
“Is that what you think needs to be done with this guy?” Rausch asked.
“You heard what Lundgren said: the Dutch federal cops and intelligence agency people haven’t been able to shut the commune down.”
“That’s because these guys probably haven’t committed any crime against the government,” Ashley said. “They most likely even pay their taxes on time. And nobody wants to mess with them.”
“I think that’s exactly the case.”
“You can’t be suggesting that we send another SEAL team in to find him and take him out,” Rausch said.
“We might have to,” Osborne told her.
Rausch got a phone call and she stepped aside to take it, at the same moment Toby Lundgren came to the computer center’s door and called to them.
“Hey guys, you gotta come back and see something.”
“What is it?” Osborne asked.
“Your hacker has struck again, and this time it’s way cool.”
Rausch turned back, an even more serious expression on her normally severe face. “This was headquarters. They want to know what I’m doing up here. Something is going down in Washington.”
“The hacker?” Osborne said, and Rausch nodded.
Lundgren, obviously impatient, waited at the open door.
“According to Lundgren he’s struck again,” Osborne said, and he walked back to the deputy. “You might as well go back to town, we’ll find another ride to the airport. Something’s come up we have to deal with.”
“Anything I need to know?” Stromback asked. “It’s not often we get the Bureau up here.”
“Believe me, you’ll be the first to know, you have my word on it,” Osborne said, and he and the deputy shook hands.
“I’ll hold you to it, Sheriff,” Stromback said, and he got back in his patrol car and drove off.
* * *
LUNDGREN LED them back to his office instead of the conference room where they’d met earlier. A half-dozen large flat-screen monitors were arrayed on the front wall of the room that was about the size of a two-car garage. Desks and workstands on which stood a variety of monitors and keyboards enough to provide for a half-dozen workstations were arrayed in some random order. But this was Hansen’s personal space; no one els
e worked here with him.
He sat down on the only chair and scooted over to one of the monitors on which was displayed a series of what at first looked like one-line messages.
“Looks like someone’s Twitter account,” Ashley said, looking over his shoulder.
“Exactly what it is,” Lundgren said. “Belongs to the president’s national security adviser, Nicholas Fenniger.”
Osborne leaned in.
24 HOURS AND THE LIGHTS START TO GO OUT. WHERE SHOULD WE BEGIN?
“Is it him?”
“Yeah, and the dude is damned good, but he’s made a big mistake this time.”
“I don’t understand,” Rausch said. “Did he hack into the NSA’s Twitter account?”
“That’s exactly what he’s done, and that’s how I’m going to find him,” Lundgren said. “He’s interlaced his own Tweets in amongst Fenniger’s. And he’s given us a warning.”
“Blackouts?” Osborne said.
“You’ll see.”
ARMAGEDDON IS ABOUT TO FALL ON YOUR HEADS. ARE YOU READY, AMERICA?
“This was the first, just a few minutes ago,” Lundgren said. “Yesterday I set up a couple of search and recognize programs, to look for any sort of a threat to our grid. I tried to think like this bozo and I actually used the word Armageddon.” Lundgren looked up, grinning. “The guy’s a bigger jerk than me.”
“I need to call Washington,” Rausch said.
“Hold on a minute,” Lundgren said. “Anyway cell phones don’t work in here.”
“There’s more?” Osborne asked.
“Not a lot, but enough,” Lundgren said and he scrolled down several Tweets, past the twenty-four-hour warning to the next one.
LET’S START IN L.A. AND HEAD EAST. SALT LAKE CITY. LAS VEGAS. DENVER.
“He’s telling us that he’s going to shut down electrical power to those cities in that order.”
“Can he do it?” Ashley asked, as Lundgren scrolled farther.
KANSAS CITY. CHICAGO. DETROIT. CINCINNATI. HOW ABOUT MIAMI?
“I could,” he said.
“From here—” Rausch began, but Lundgren shook his head.
“From my laptop. It’d be easy if you had the virus, which I think this guy probably has. Could have gotten it from friends in Russia.”
“I think that you’ve gone far enough for now,” Rausch said. “I’m going to call this in, get a team out from Washington.”
“Hang on to your panty hose, ’cause there’s not much more to see, and anyway we’re going to be damned busy coordinating with the other control centers around the country to see if we can head him off, or at least slow him down.”
“What else is there?” Osborne asked.
Lundgren quickly scrolled through the remaining four threats, plus the last Tweet:
HOW ABOUT THEM APPLES?
“What’s next?” Osborne asked. “You said he made a mistake and that’s how you were going to find him.”
“Might not be in time to stop the rolling blackouts he’s warned us he’s going to do, but I’ll nail the bastard, because he’s arrogant.”
“What’s his mistake?” Rausch asked.
“Piggybacking on an existing Twitter account, especially one that has more than a million hits every week. He’s bound to have left crumbs. He’s hiding behind a bunch of offshore re-mailers, so all we have to do is peel back the layers.”
“I can get you help here,” Rausch said. “We have some damned good people on the payroll.”
Lundgren looked at her. “I know about your people. No disrespect, Agent Rausch, but I work best alone. And right now my first priority is protecting the grid from a total meltdown. Because if it happens, if even a little part of it happens, there’re going to be a whole lot of people in this country who’re going to find themselves in really deep shit tomorrow.”
38
NICHOLAS FENNIGER RACED down the corridor from his corner office in the West Wing, his laptop under his arm, his jacket off, his tie loose, and burst into the Oval Office as the president was speaking to someone on the phone.
“It’s begun,” he practically shouted, though he was out of breath.
Mark Young, the normally affable White House chief of staff, turned around, a look of irritation on his round features. He came toward Fenniger. “He’s talking to Xi. What the hell are you doing here like this?”
This morning Fenniger had urged President Thompson to call Xi Jinping, to update the Chinese president on the situation between us and Iran and Venezuela.
“Tell him to make his excuses,” Fenniger said, keeping his voice low, but he couldn’t hide the urgency he felt. The fear. He hadn’t expected the situation to develop to this point. No one had.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Fenniger opened his laptop and thrust it at Young. “Look.”
The president, who’d had his back to them, swiveled around and glared at them. “I understand, Mr. President,” he said.
Fenniger had brought up the first hacked Tweet:
ARMAGEDDON …
“What are you trying to show me?” Young asked.
“This is my Twitter account. The bastard’s somehow hacked into it.” He scrolled down to the other eight.
“It’s not possible, is it?”
“That’s what Jack Dorsey told me five minutes ago.” Dorsey was Twitter’s chief of security. “I finally convinced him that we weren’t playing some kind of a stupid joke, and he said that he would look into it.”
“I hope you told him to shut down your account.”
“Yeah, but it’s a little late now, don’t you think?” Fenniger said. “But that’s not the problem.”
“Exactly what is the problem?” the president demanded, putting the phone down. He was angry.
“Sorry to barge in but it’s something you have to see,” Fenniger said, and he set up his laptop on the president’s desk, and scrolled up to the ARMAGEDDON Tweet. “This was on my Twitter account about fifteen minutes ago.”
“I don’t understand, Nick.”
“Someone hacked into my White House account—something that’s supposed to be impossible to do—and inserted nine separate messages, this was the first.”
“Who did it and why?”
“I think it’s the hacker who’s been probing our electrical grid,” Fenniger said. He scrolled down to the next Tweet that gave the twenty-four-hour warning before the lights started to go out.
Thompson looked up.
“The son of a bitch has told us—and everyone else who logs on to my Twitter account—that he’s going to shut us down. A series of rolling blackouts across the country starting in Los Angeles and ending here and up in New York.”
“The message from Chavez gave us forty-eight hours, and this fits,” Young said. “It’s the ‘or else.’”
The president went back to the top and slowly scrolled through the nine messages again.
“What do you want to do, Mr. President?” Fenniger asked.
“Do think this is a credible warning? I mean can he actually do this to us?”
“If he has the virus, yes, I believe he can. Or at least he thinks he can.”
“He managed to bypass all the safety systems to electrocute the lineman in North Dakota,” Young said. “So we have to consider the possibility that he has the means to do this and that he’s not bluffing.”
“I’m not going to the U.N. to apologize for Balboa. The Chavez government had it coming because of their hand in the attacks against the Initiative.”
Fenniger knew what he would do, but he wasn’t the president.
“I want to meet with my National Security Council as soon as possible. But no later than eight this evening.”
“The full council?” Young asked.
“No,” Thompson said. “Just the target members.”
The entire council, which acted as a forum to advise the president on national security and foreign policy affairs, consisted of twenty principals th
at included, in addition to the president and vice president, Mark Young and Nicholas Fenniger, the secretaries of state, of defense and of energy, the chairman of the joint chiefs, the directors of national intelligence and of the National Drug Control Policy, plus others.
The target group whose existence was top secret included less than half of the full council whose identities were also top secret. The group’s primary purpose was to authorize assassinations. They’d met to authorize the killing of Osama bin Laden. But its most sensitive job was to authorize the killing of U.S. citizens. There was no record of its existence or how it operated, nor were its infrequent meetings ever recorded, nor were minutes or even notes taken.
Only the handful of members knew exactly what role the president himself played in agreeing to or ordering the kills. And it was one of the things the sitting president briefed the president-elect on after the November election, usually between Christmas and New Year’s Day. It was fairly common knowledge that the president-elect going into the meeting was a completely different, more solemn person afterward. Only presidents ever knew why.
“I’ll see to it immediately, Mr. President,” Young said and left the Oval Office to begin making the encrypted calls.
Fenniger gathered up his laptop and started for the door.
“Do you think that we’ll be in time, Nick?” the president asked.
“I hope so, sir,” Fenniger said. “But in case we can’t find this guy and take him out, we’d better be prepared for the blackouts.”
“He didn’t say how long the outages would last.”
“No, but even a few minutes in each city would play havoc with a lot of stuff. Computers, clocks, phones, even a large part of the Internet—a lot of servers don’t have big enough backup generators.”
“I hear a but in there,” the president said.
Fenniger nodded tightly. The Washington Post called him the nation’s cynic. A sobriquet he’d never denied. “It’s what might be coming next. After the probes, after the blackouts. Because if this guy actually does have the virus he could do even greater harm.”
The president had no reply.
“He could send us back practically to the horse and buggy days. And I mean it literally.”
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