“That’s pretty thin, just from the reflection in a windshield,” Urban said.
“It fit with what I knew about him, and the few people we could find who actually came in contact with him recognized him from the photograph.”
“He’s not done, is that what you’re telling us?” Urban asked.
That had been a tough one for Osborne to figure out, and he admitted it. “If it’s the same guy, simply shooting out an insulator so that he could cause the death of a lineman makes no sense. There’s more.”
“Do you think he’s somehow involved with the rolling blackouts?”
“Toby Lundgren, the MAPP computer specialist in Hibbing, was sure the hacker was part of a commune somewhere in Amsterdam. He was pretty sure that the same person who was responsible for restoring the power as the repairman was working on the line sent the Tweets. So there is some connection.”
“But neither you nor this Lundgren has any proof?” Urban asked.
“No.”
Dotty Hughes, who’d sat silent until now, smiled pleasantly. “You’ve made it abundantly clear in public that you know for a fact that Yuri Makarov is involved. Can you tell us your reason?”
“I want him to come after me.”
Urban started to say something, but the lady FBI agent held him off. “Why? Do you have a grudge, Sheriff Osborne?”
“Gerry Kasmir was a friend of mine. He didn’t deserve this.”
“No one does.”
A console phone buzzed on the table in front of Forester and he picked it up. “Yes.” He looked up. “A call is coming to your cell phone, Nate. From the Rough Riders Hotel. Do you want to take it? Cell phones don’t work in here.”
Osborne got up and went to the phone. “This is Osborne.”
“It’s Tina. I hate to bother you, but someone called here looking for you. Said he was with the FBI down in Denver. Robert Banks. But he sounded like a phony to me.”
“Did he leave a number?”
“No.”
Tina hesitated. “The president is coming on TV in a few minutes. Have anything to do with what you’re up to?”
Osborne forced a chuckle. “The president doesn’t consult with me. We’ll be back in the morning,” he said, and hung up before she could ask anything else. “Does Robert Banks still work with the Bureau’s office in Denver?”
“I never heard the name,” Deb Rausch said. She got up, took the phone from Nate, and made a quick call, mentioning the name and the Denver office. She hung up and shook her head. “No one by that name.”
“Is it him?” Ashley asked.
“I think so,” Osborne said. He phoned Whitney’s cell number, and she answered after a couple of rings.
“Hello.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m on my way to your house. If you don’t mind a guest for a couple of nights until we get past this blackout thing.”
“The general wants you in Washington.”
“One of the blackout cities,” Whitney said. “I think I’d be safer out here.”
“Key’s under the mat.”
“When will you be back?”
“First thing in the morning, maybe sooner if I can swing it. In the meantime I’m sending one of my deputies to be with you.”
“Do you think it’s necessary?” Whitney asked.
“Just a precaution.”
“Was that Whitney?” Forester asked after Osborne hung up.
“She’s on her way to my place. So I need to get back right away,” Osborne said. He phoned the home number for David Grafton, the youngest and brightest of his three deputies.
“Grafton.”
“Dave this is Nate, I need you to do something for me. Could be trouble coming our way.”
“Where are you? The caller ID is blocked.”
“I’m in Washington, but I should be back before dawn. Dr. Lipton is on the way out to my place. She’s going to stay for a couple of days, until this blackout thing sorts itself out.”
“Holy shit, are we involved again?”
“Could be. Anyway I want you to stay with her until I get back.”
“Take me fifteen minutes.”
“And, Dave, I meant possible serious trouble. So take one of the thirty-thirties and an extra box of shells.” The .30-.30 was a lever-action rifle that just about everyone in North Dakota owned, and that all the units in Osborne’s office carried in a rack between the driver’s seat and the computer. “Keep out of sight as much as possible. It’s just for overnight.”
“Gotcha,” Grafton said, obviously impressed.
“We can send backup,” Deb Rausch said, when Osborne hung up.
“He doesn’t know where I live.”
“Then why’d you send one of your deputies out there?” she asked.
42
WHITNEY STOOD ON the porch of Osborne’s farmhouse for a minute or two, listening to the distant sounds of what probably were trucks on the interstate highway. In the summer the cicadas and other insects were loud, and late at night sometimes the wolves or coyotes would howl. But at this hour, still daylight, the big bowl of the sky immense compared to what she could see in the Atlanta suburbs, she felt a deep sense of aloneness, and she shivered.
She found the key under the mat, and inside turned on the television to channel 7, the Dickinson NBC station, then dropped her jacket and overnight bag in the back bedroom. She went into the kitchen and poured a glass of red wine.
She felt at home here, and safe because of Osborne and even more so because of his and Ashley’s relationship. But in the living room, the president had just come on and he looked serious, and her mood instantly deepened. The blackout thing was certainly no joke, but seeing the president on television brought it up-close and very personal.
“My fellow Americans,” he began. He was speaking from his desk in the Oval Office rather than the press briefing room. He looked alert if careworn. “Those of you who follow my national security adviser’s Twitter account are already aware that United States has been threatened by a person or persons unknown. While many of you may have considered the messages a hoax, they are not.”
Whitney sat down.
“We have been warned that sometime within the next twelve to eighteen hours a series of rolling electrical blackouts will sweep across the nation. Although we don’t know the exact timetable, or how long the loss of electrical power will last, we believe that the outages will be brief.
“Beginning in Los Angeles, the outages will spread east to Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and Denver. The power may fail in ten other metropolitan areas as well, including Kansas City, Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, Boston, here in Washington, and finally New York City.”
The president looked directly into the camera. “The outages will cause some inconvenience, but there is no need for panic. I repeat, there is no need for panic. The United States is not under direct military attack, this is just an act of computer terrorism.”
Someone knocked at the front door and Whitney practically jumped out of her skin.
“The Emergency Operations Centers in each of these cities have been alerted, as have the local, county, and state law enforcement agencies, the National Guard units, along with hospitals and other important elements in our infrastructure that will need to go on backup power.”
Whoever it was knocked at the front door again. “Ma’am, it’s Deputy Grafton, the sheriff wanted me to come out to make sure everything’s okay.”
The president was saying something about computers, cell phones, and clocks as Whitney went to a dining room window and carefully parted the curtains.
A youngish-looking man in a Billings County Sheriff’s uniform was standing on the porch. She vaguely recognized him as one of Osborne’s deputies and went back out to the living room and unlocked the door as he knocked a third time.
“You gave me a fright,” he said, stepping back.
“Me, too,” Whitney admitted. “Are we expe
cting trouble?”
“I don’t know, Doc, but the sheriff asked that I hang around until he shows up. Said he’d be here sometime in the morning.”
Whitney stepped aside to let him in, but he shook his head. “I’m going to wander around out here for a while. So you just go back to whatever you’re doing.”
“Do you want something to eat?”
“Already had my dinner, thanks,” Grafton said. He looked beyond her to the television set. “Looks like they’re trying another nine-eleven on us. But it won’t work this time.”
“Why’s that?” Whitney asked, despite her bleak and deepening mood.
“Because it’s no surprise this time.”
Whitney didn’t know what to say to that, and Grafton touched the brim of his cap, turned, and headed in the direction of the barn. He was carrying a rifle, and that bothered her.
“Deputy,” she called out.
He stopped and turned. “Doc?”
“Should I be worried?”
“About what the president is saying?”
“About why you’re here tonight.”
“Far as I see the sheriff has a great deal of respect for you and the work you’re doing. He just doesn’t want a repeat of what happened over the holidays. Not that something like that is likely to happen out here again, he’s just being cautious.”
“Okay,” Whitney said, again not knowing what else to say. But she was spooked, and she felt like she was becoming a paranoid old woman hearing rats in the attic.
The deputy disappeared in the darkness and Whitney closed and locked the door.
The president was just finishing and he was smiling now. “To quote a predecessor of mine: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
“Right,” she muttered, and she went around inside the house to check every window and door lock then went to see if she could find where Nate kept his guns.
43
URBAN WAS NOT impressed and he said as much. “I think Dotty will agree with me, that Makarov, if he’s the contractor you think he is, wouldn’t have anything to do with the rolling blackouts.”
“That’d be something the Amsterdam hacker could manipulate through the long-distance transmission-line control centers,” Dotty Hughes said. “Lundgren is right so far as that goes, but the Dutch federal police are not interested in helping us until or unless some local crime is committed. As far as they’re concerned the people in the commune can do anything they want to do.”
“So as you see it, Sheriff, why would Makarov come after you?” Urban said. “Assuming that he is working for someone, what would they have to gain by eliminating you? You’re just a small-town sheriff. No offense intended.”
“None taken,” Osborne said, and it came to him that they were frightened. Very possibly their jobs were on the line because the White House was deeply concerned. No one wanted another 9/11. “If you’re talking about Venezuela’s SEBIN and Iran’s VEVAK, I don’t have the answer. But for Makarov’s sake he needs to maintain his anonymity.”
“Traipsing out to North Dakota and assassinating you would hardly keep the man anonymous.”
“We only have one photograph of him, the rest of what we know is in my head.”
“You’ve given us your report, we have a copy of the photograph, and we have eyewitness accounts from Delta Airlines and Hertz in Minneapolis, plus the truck stop waitress in Dickinson. Killing you wouldn’t make all that go away.”
Forester sat forward. “I think what Sheriff Osborne is talking about are his gut feelings. He was stationed with the man in Afghanistan. They fought together presumably.”
Osborne nodded, but didn’t amplify.
“Fight together in just one battle and you get to know things about each other that can’t be learned in any other fashion,” Forester said. “Were you with him before you lost your leg?”
“He and his sergeant disappeared about two months earlier.”
“What’s your point?” Urban asked. He was irritated.
“Might give us an advantage if Makarov doesn’t know that the sheriff is…”
“Handicapped, you can say it,” Osborne said. “But the Makarov I knew was thorough. Never went into a situation he wasn’t prepared for. He knows about me.”
“Where you live, too?” Urban pressed.
“That’s a matter of local records, a lot harder to hack into because they’re on paper, but he knows the town.”
“Phone, IRS?”
“Phone’s unlisted, the IRS and everything else by mail comes to a PO box.”
“You’re saying that a thorough guy like Makarov hasn’t found out exactly where you live?”
Osborne had given some though to that as well. And he’d come to the conclusion that in a way he’d been hiding out on his parents’ ranch since Afghanistan.
“A slight post-traumatic stress disorder, but nothing debilitating,” the military shrink at Bethesda had told him. “With time that’ll fade, especially if you stay away from high-stress environments.”
Which for the most part he had; being sheriff of Billings County was hardly a high-stress position, and living outside Medora—itself a town of only one hundred people—was even farther away from the battlefield. After less than a year his wife, Caroline, had not been able to stand the isolation, and she’d taken their daughter to Orlando, where before long she’d sent divorce papers.
Afterward he’d burrowed even deeper, nesting, going to bed and pulling the covers over his head. He’d never even bothered transferring the ranch out of his parents’ names. As long as he paid the property taxes on time, no one out there cared if every i was dotted and every t crossed.
In fact it wasn’t until Ashley showed up in his life a few months ago that he had begun to come out of his shell.
“Maybe.”
“And you’re betting a scientist’s life that you’re right, and that either your deputy will stop this guy, or Makarov won’t be able to find out where you live,” Urban said. He looked at the others around the table. “Yet you don’t want the Bureau’s help. Pretty fucking shortsighted—arrogant—if you ask me.”
Osborne had thought of almost nothing else. He got up. “I didn’t ask you,” he said. “Your charter is ops outside the U.S., so go catch the hacker.” He turned to the FBI Cyber Crimes agent. “The most likely way to stop him will be online. I suggest that you people get together with Lundgren. He’s the only one who seems to know what the hell he’s doing and not bothering to cover his ass in the meantime.”
Ashley got up and stood next to him.
“Now if you people don’t mind, I’d like to get back to my county, and to Dr. Lipton who figures she’s safer out there than here where you’re facing a blackout sometime tomorrow.”
* * *
AIRBORNE OUT of Andrews aboard the Bureau’s Gulfstream, Osborne used the aircraft’s phone once they reached ten thousand feet to call Dave Grafton’s cell. His deputy answered on the first ring.
“Sheriff?”
“What’s your situation?”
“It’s been quiet. I’m in the hayloft. Good sight lines on the driveway and the house.”
“I’m on my way back in an FBI jet. We’re making a stop in Minneapolis but then we’ll continue on to Dickinson. I’ll be there before sunrise. Did you talk to Dr. Lipton?”
“Briefly. Seems like she can take it.”
Grafton, in Osborne’s estimation, was just a kid. He’d never served in the military, but like a lot of guys his age he had a distrust of anyone over thirty. And especially if it was a woman. He’d once explained that his mother, who’d dabbled briefly as a rodeo cowgirl and then a stunt pilot, had set the bar pretty high for him when it came to judging women. Seems like she can take it was a pretty good compliment.
“Keep your eyes open.”
“Will do,” Grafton said.
Osborne phoned his own home number, and Whitney answered after only two rings. She seemed breathless, as if she had just finished a fifty-y
ard dash.
“Yes?”
“It’s me. How’re you doing?”
“Other than being just a little freaked out that you sent one of your deputies to ride herd—I think that’s one of the terms you guys out here use—I’m just dandy. Next question?”
“His name’s Dave Grafton, and he’s a great shot. Right now he’s in the hayloft riding herd, as you say, to make sure no one sneaks up on you.”
The line was silent for just a moment or two. “Sorry, I’m just a little bit uptight after listening to the president.”
“I didn’t see it. What’d he say?”
“We’re under attack, but not to worry, don’t panic, we know it’s coming and we’re dealing with it,” Whitney said. She was brittle.
“We’re on our way. Shouldn’t be more than a few hours, so try to get some sleep, okay?”
“Okay,” Whitney said. “Is Ashley with you?”
“Here she is,” Osborne said and he handed the phone to Ashley. “She’s scared.”
“No shit.”
44
FOUR AND A half hours later, but well before dawn, Makarov pulled off the interstate onto a dirt road that led north, the opposite direction from Fryburg, making sure that no one was coming from either direction before he doused his headlights.
The morning was crystal clear, and once he got his night vision he had no problem seeing well enough to keep on the road, and pulled up just below a shallow rise a quarter-mile from the turnoff to Osborne’s ranch.
Earlier, just before he’d reached Fargo, a program on his iPad had intercepted two phone calls; one to Osborne’s deputy hiding in a hayloft, and the other to Dr. Lipton waiting at the ranch, and he’d heard everything Osborne had said to them.
It was a stroke of luck. Dr. Lipton was not on his hit list, but her presence out here made it certain that Osborne would come directly home to her. And knowing about the deputy was also a piece of good fortune, though it had never been his intention to simply barge in.
Even allowing for favorable tailwinds and a quick turnaround in Minneapolis he figured he had at least one hour, probably two, before Osborne and presumably Ashley Borden, the newspaper reporter, showed up.
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