Gridlock

by Byron L. Dorgan

  “Just a minute,” Osborne said as Ashley came around the corner.

  “The truck is gone,” she said.

  “He’s taken my deputy’s pickup truck. Yellow Ford F150 extended cab, with a light bar on the roof and Billings County Sheriff’s Department logos on the doors. He’s out on the interstate somewhere, but he hasn’t had time to make miles. If you can get Nettles to put up two of his helicopters—one east one west, we can get this guy.”

  “Is he armed?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe Dave’s shotgun in the truck. But tell Nettles to go with care, this guy is good. Russian Spetsnaz. He’s had some of the best Special Forces training anywhere.”

  “Nettles is somewhere down at Donna Marie, I’ll round him up and get right back to you.”

  “Hurry.”

  “Do you need an ambulance?”

  “No,” Osborne said and he hung up.

  “Are Nettles’s people on the way?” Ashley asked.

  “Deb is working on it,” Osborne said. He glanced inside the barn toward the ladder to the hayloft. “I think Dave is up there. Go up and check on him, please.”

  She handed back his pistol and climbed up into the hayloft.

  Whitney had been holding the Weatherby so hard all this time that her knuckles were white.

  Osborne struggled to his feet, holding onto the doorframe for support, and he couldn’t help but grunt.

  Whitney looked stricken. “If you have a broken rib you could puncture a lung.”

  He managed to smile. “I know. But if you don’t put that rifle down, you might shoot me with it.”

  She looked down at the gun in her hands, and gave a little hysterical laugh. “I hit him with it when we thought he had killed you,” she said. “I couldn’t get it to shoot.” She walked over and propped the rifle up against the barn.

  Ashley came down from the hayloft, her face white. “He’s dead. I’m not sure but I think his neck is broken.”

  Osborne’s jaw tightened. He’d underestimated Makarov; he wouldn’t do it again. His phone rang. It was Deb Rausch.

  “I called out my people in Minneapolis, and I contacted the highway patrol and the acting sheriff over in Dickinson, and he promised to send units as quickly as possible. But Nettles needs authorization to move off station. His orders are to guard Donna Marie and until he’s told differently there’s nothing he or his people can do.”

  It was about what Osborne figured. “There’s a dark blue Camry parked in my barn that he probably rented somewhere. You might try Minneapolis and Denver.” He gave the license number. “We haven’t touched it, so get your forensics team out here as soon as possible. Maybe we’ll get lucky this time with some actual physical evidence we can use.”

  “But you doubt it.”

  “Yeah. Where are you?”

  “On my way.”

  * * *

  THEY WENT to the house where Ashley put on a pot of coffee while Osborne phoned for an ambulance to pick up his deputy’s body. Grafton wasn’t married, but he had a couple of sisters and his parents outside Minneapolis who would have to be notified later this morning.

  Whitney went back to the bedroom where she got dressed, and the three of them sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee, none of them much in the mood for breakfast, though Ashley offered.

  “Are we going to catch up with him this morning?” Ashley asked.

  “Probably not without Nettles’s help. Dave’s truck is four-wheel drive, so he could have headed out across country in just about any direction.”

  “It’s pretty empty out there,” Ashley said. “And he’s going to want to get to a big city where he can lose himself. If he makes Minneapolis or Denver or Kansas City he’s as good as gone.”

  “He’s going to be limited with what he can do if the blackouts actually happen,” Whitney said.

  “So will we be,” Osborne said. “So will the Bureau. Everyone will have to hunker down and ride it out. But this isn’t done. He’ll be back. Maybe not back here, but back somewhere. And once he finds out that I’m not dead I’ll become his top priority.”

  “But why?” Whitney asked. “I mean that’s just stupid.”

  “Because he thinks he’s smarter than me. Which he possibly might be, but that makes him arrogant which will be his undoing.”

  Whitney looked away. “Over electricity,” she said. “War.”

  “Yeah,” Osborne agreed. “And it might be one we’ll be hard-pressed to win. And no matter what we’re going to get chewed up a lot worse than nine-eleven.”

  50

  IN TOM RESSO’S estimation Los Angeles was nothing but a giant shithole. After five days here in exploratory talks with Venture Capital West to lend his company Circle Tool & Die a lousy five hundred thousand—without luck—he figured the people were no better.

  When he got back to South Carolina, empty-handed, he was going to have to face his fifty-five employees with the bad news. Circle Tool—a company that his grandfather had started before World War II—was closing. Permanently. They would lose everything, even their retirement accounts, which he had used to try to save the place.

  He was a large man, his doctor said obese, an opinion his ex-wife had also held, but he’d always thought of himself as nothing more than a big man with healthy appetites. And getting out of bed late, he was hungry now. Starved in fact, but not for food.

  His flight to Atlanta and from there Columbia didn’t leave until six this afternoon. He had been granted a late checkout, but it still gave him a half day to kill.

  Someone knocked at his door. It was one of the young Mexican girls who’d worked cleaning rooms on the twenty-fourth floor of the LA Live Hotels and Condominiums. Resso thought she wasn’t bad looking.

  “May I clean your room, sir?” she asked, her English badly accented.

  “I’ll be checking out shortly, darlin’, but if you want to come in and start now it’d be okay with me.”

  She smiled. “No, sir. Later.” She turned away and pushed her cart toward the end of the corridor, deserted at this hour, her legs nice, and ass great.

  Resso pulled on a polo shirt, grabbed his room key, and hurried down the corridor catching up to her just as the service elevator door was closing behind her. He blocked the door and slipped inside, letting it close.

  It was just noon Pacific Standard Time, and before Resso could hit the stop button, the power went out.

  The blackouts that had been in the news. He smiled at her, and he could see in her eyes in the dim emergency light that had come on, that she knew what was about to happen. But before she could call for help, Resso smashed a meaty fist into her face, snapping her head back, and knocking her cold.

  As she hit the floor, Resso was already yanking at the front of her blouse, ripping the material and tearing off her bra.

  * * *

  ALL AIR traffic across the entire continental U.S. had been grounded fifteen minutes before noon just as a precaution on orders from the FAA in case the rolling blackouts actually happened.

  The lineup for approach to the arrival gates at Salt Lake City International had been so long that at noon PST several aircraft including United’s 3538 from Atlanta, forty-five minutes earlier than its scheduled 12:37 arrival was stuck on the tarmac with only three empty seats.

  Lights all across the airport, including the modern terminal went out, and the passengers on that side of the aircraft sighed; the attack had really started, and a lot of them were frightened.

  Donald Huberty, seated with his wife Madeline in 24A and B had always been a white-knuckle flyer, ever since he was a kid. And now at sixty-seven he was even worse. He’d argued with his wife before they’d boarded at Atlanta that they were cutting things close.

  “I don’t want us to get stuck up there until we run out of fuel and crash,” he’d argued.

  She’d patted him on the arm. “The airlines know what they’re doing,” she said. “They’ll get us there in plenty of time. Anyway it’s probably a blu
ff. No one can turn off all the electricity to an entire city.”

  “Fourteen cities,” he’d corrected her. “Including Salt Lake.”

  The captain got on the intercom. “Sorry folks, looks like we didn’t beat the rush. The airport is shut down, probably not for long. But the good news is we’re here, and we’ll just have to wait it out until the power comes back on and the Jetway can be moved out to our hatch. The even better news is that the attendants will break out the refreshments again, and everything is on the house for the duration.”

  “It shouldn’t be too long,” Madeline said to her husband.

  A massive weight clamped onto Huberty’s chest and a blinding pain, worse than anything he ever felt in his life, followed. He reared back in his seat, unable to catch his breath. Suddenly he was drenched in sweat.

  Madeline was saying something to him, but he couldn’t quite make out her words.

  The lights in the airplane were growing dim, making it hard for him to see anything. At that point Huberty realized that he was having a heart attack and unless he got help right now he was going to die. Not in a plane crash after all. And he worried about how his wife would manage.

  Someone was looming over him, shouting, he thought.

  The last thing he remembered was the feeling of being lifted out of his seat and lowered toward the floor. But he never got that far.

  * * *

  IN LAS Vegas the traffic lights went out at precisely noon PST, but it took several minutes for the first fender-bender accident to occur. It wasn’t until 12:15 when Doris Sampson, driving a Cadillac Escalade, her two-year-old twins strapped in the back in their booster seats, was T-boned by a loaded cement truck. She and the twins were the first fatalities in the city.

  * * *

  ROGER DHALBERG had just reached the second floor of his home up near Nellis Air Force Base when the electricity stopped. He was a paraplegic and went up and down the stairs on a chair lift. He was among a large number of people across the country who thought the threat of rolling blackouts was just talk, nothing more. But he damn well wasn’t going to be stuck in the lift all day.

  He eased himself out of the chair intending to scoot back downstairs on his butt, but he missed his hold on the rail and tumbled down, breaking his neck at the bottom.

  In all, twenty-seven people died during the one hour the electricity was off in the three cities, including a pregnant woman carrying triplets in her eighth month, who was so nervous because of what was happening that she miscarried and died of a hemorrhage on the kitchen floor of her Los Angeles ranch-style house.

  The power came back on at one P.M. PST, but the disruptions to telephone service, to radio and television stations, but especially to computers was massive.

  * * *

  AT THAT precise moment it was two P.M. Mountain Standard Time in Denver, when the power went out across the city. The first reports from the west had come in and people here were a little better prepared to deal with the inconvenience.

  Except for twenty-eight-year-old Brandon Wilson, who’d fallen off his horse two years earlier and was paralyzed from the neck down. When he wasn’t in bed attached to the machinery that breathed for him, he was confined to a special wheelchair that was equipped to do the same thing—keep him alive.

  Unbeknownst to him or his sister, who he lived with in the suburb of Lakewood, and who had popped out to make sure her five-year-old was okay at the day-care center a half hour before the power was switched off, the battery pack in his wheelchair had developed a short circuit five days ago.

  When the power went out, he stopped breathing. A few minutes later he lost consciousness, and long before his sister Susan returned home, Brandon Wilson, who’d always hoped for more, was dead.

  By the time the power was restored at three P.M. MST, seven people in the Denver area were dead; some in car accidents, one electrocuted the moment the power was restored, and two who committed suicide because they honestly believed that this was the start of the End of Days.

  * * *

  IT WAS four P.M. Central Standard Time in Hibbing when Toby Lundgren watched the electricity fail in the three cities the hacker had warned about. He’d managed to get into the control center’s system for Nashville Electric Service, which distributed power to more than three hundred thousand customers in middle Tennessee, and switch the electricity back on after fifteen minutes.

  “How about them apples,” he muttered.

  But he wasn’t in time to save the lives of three people, one of whom was a cop who tried to stop an armed robbery of a convenience store. The thief, who believed that the lights would go out, figured that it would be the perfect time to rob the store and get away.

  Peter MacDonald, a ten-year veteran of the NPD, had just pulled up to get a cup of coffee and was getting out of his squad car when the thief, seventeen-year-old Ali bin Sharif, was coming out the door, the manager shouting something behind him.

  Before MacDonald could react, Sharif raised his .38 Smith & Wesson and pumped three rounds almost point blank into the cop’s face.

  But Sharif was the second fatality when the enraged manager came out of the store with a short-barreled 12-bore shotgun and put one round into the thief’s back. It took the young man nearly fifteen minutes to bleed out.

  * * *

  DEKKER HAD gone into the kitchen to grab a beer, pissed off that Karn had left a half hour ago to do some shopping, and when he came back to his computer he spotted the first glitch in his program. Somehow the lights in Nashville had come back on.

  “Fucker,” Dekker shouted, tossing the beer bottle across the room and sitting down at his monitor.

  It took him less than a minute to realize that someone was screwing with him, and less than another minute to turn off Nashville’s lights again.

  The electricity came on again, and this time stayed on until five minutes later when Dekker placed a worm of his own design into the program. Whoever was interfering would get a nasty surprise if he tried again. His worm, which he called Brunhilde, the Valkyrie warrior, would infect the bastard’s computer crashing its hard drive.

  The lights in Nashville, along with those in Kansas City and Chicago, stayed out, and another fifty-three died—making a total of more than one hundred in the three cities.

  * * *

  IT TOOK Lundgren the rest of the afternoon and well past dinnertime before he could find and totally remove the virus from the backup computer he’d worked on. He’d expected something like that, so he’d used one of his old laptops.

  Although he wasn’t able to prevent the rolling blackouts in Detroit, Cincinnati, Miami, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, and New York City, he did learn for certain that the hacker was Barend Dekker, the same guy he’d known at MIT, and pinpoint his approximate location outside Amsterdam.

  * * *

  THE LIGHTS in the seven Eastern Standard Time zone cities went out at six and stayed out until seven. Sections of each of those metropolitan areas became virtual war zones, the police versus the criminals who watched what had happened to the west, and were prepared for an all-out spree of looting, rape, murder, and arson.

  In addition to several dozen traffic fatalities, a half-dozen industrial accidents, and from various other causes, two hundred nineteen people died—many of them police officers—during the crime spree.

  * * *

  BY MIDNIGHT the toll had reached three hundred ninety-seven dead and five times that many injured, some critically. The estimated cost of the damage and disruptions caused by the outages in the fourteen cities, plus the nation’s air-traffic control system, topped the three-billion-dollar mark.

  The president called a meeting of his Security Council for eight P.M. A council of war.

  PART THREE

  WAR

  Forty-Eight Hours Later

  51

  IT WAS LATE in Amsterdam, nearly midnight, and Dekker was getting pissed off to the max. Karn had left around eight and wasn’t back yet. No phone call, not
a blast on his computer from the Internet café where he figured she’d gone to be with her friends, nothing.

  He got up from his computer where he’d been doing some more work on his 10-D war games program and went to the window and parted the dirty blanket they’d nailed in place when they’d first moved in here four years ago. The apartment was on the tenth floor of the crappiest building in the complex. Only three other apartments were occupied, all of them on the ground floor where they figured they could bug out in case the cops ever showed up here.

  From here he could just make out the spire of the Noorderkerk, which was built in the early 1600s, and which in Dekker’s estimation was way cool, not because of the God thing, but because of the bird market every Saturday in front. Karn loved to go down there whenever they had a little extra money, and buy a few birds—canaries, doves, wrens—and set them free.

  He supposed he was a little worried about her this evening, though he found it hard to admit. But he had come to depend on her, and not just for the sex, but for her sometimes really good advice. Like with his war game. He’d stacked up a 10-D board, and tonight he’d wanted to show her the game, and maybe figure out a rad name for it.

  “Goddamnit,” he said, half under his breath.

  Nothing much moved in the huddle of the complex where no lights shone from any of the windows, and only a few small campfires from the Roma side. He and Karn had gone over there a couple of times to listen to the music and watch the dancing, but those people, in his estimation, were totally whacked out. Made him nervous.

  From the start Karn had agreed with him that they would never snoop on each other.

  “If it comes to that there won’t be anything left for us,” she’d said.

  He went over to his iPad and brought up a GPS program that allowed him to track the SIM card he’d placed in her cell phone a couple of years ago. It not only showed her present location it also left cookie crumbs along each route she took.

  At 8:07 P.M. she’d walked out of the building and headed north eighty meters toward the Roma encampment, where she stayed for nearly an hour, before she moved again, this time to the square in front of the church, where she stopped until 9:30 P.M. This time she moved very fast to the east, and then southeast. Too fast for her to be still on foot, at times nearly sixty kilometers per hour, but then slowing down and stopping for a minute or so.