“I only heard about it fifteen minutes ago,” Cameron said. He managed not to sound as if he should have heard about it sooner, one more thing Heather owed him for.
“I read through the liaison’s notes earlier this afternoon,” the colonel from Cyber Command said. She shrugged. “Not with the attention I should have; I thought it was interesting, not urgent for me.”
Heather sketched it out in a few brief sentences—a leaderless, directionless-on-purpose anti-movement, built around the idea that with enough small, self-replicating bio- and nano- sabotage carried out simultaneously, the Big System—the modern world, really—could be taken down so that it never arose again. She took full blame for not alerting people earlier. “Just this morning, Graham Weisbrod himself had to corner me and tell me that we needed to talk to the rest of DoF, and while we were doing that my chief researcher on the project discovered that Daybreak had started.”
Nancy Telabanian from NSA, said, “Lenny, I’m guessing you didn’t see how vital this was going to be.”
“I gave Heather as much support as I could out of the amateur section,” Lenny said. “But Daybreak uses continuously modulated one-time keys for their ciphers—the same basic tech that spy agencies and armies use nowadays all over the world—and what they were using was good enough to keep us weeks, sometimes months, behind Daybreak’s key changes. We usually read their traffic five to nine weeks behind, till just this week when we identified what they were using as their modulator key.” He pushed his big, soft flop of black hair off his forehead, distracting Heather for an instant. “I’m afraid I was every bit as blind as Heather—”
Edwards glanced around the room. “I am quite certain my office would have done no better with this, Mr. Nguyen-Peters. We all claim to expect the unexpected, but it’s a lie we tell to protect our budgets. We don’t need to analyze how we missed Daybreak. I don’t think that’s productive. I do think Ms. O’Grainne almost certainly has to be right—Daybreak and this attack on the Vice President are linked, or it is the greatest coincidence in history.”
“Does everyone agree?” Cameron asked.
Nods all around the room.
Cameron leaned forward, resting his hands on the table. “Unless someone dissents, Heather O’Grainne is now the head of Working Group Daybreak, and you’re all members. Your mission is to find the Daybreak link to the seizure of Air Force Two; no action plan just yet, we’ll decide what to do once we know what we’re looking at. Heather, bring over whoever you need from OFTA and DoF for the duration of the crisis; I’ll message Graham Weisbrod and square that. Are there any crypto resources that NSA can spare for getting caught up on Daybreak’s communications?”
“I’ll get them for you, Lenny,” Telabanian said.
“Good.” Cameron stood back up and said, “You’ve got this room any time you need it, but I imagine you’ll want to work mostly from your desks in the main room. Any objections to anything I’ve just decided?”
Edwards said, “I’m very glad we’re finally giving Assistant Secretary O’Grainne what she needs to do the job right and quickly.”
Heather realized then that Cam had more or less forced a buy-in on everyone in the room, especially Edwards. Now they’re on record that whatever I did wrong about Daybreak before, it was because I didn’t have the resources. Now that I do have the resources, the price of keeping my job is that I really have to do it. The only way Cameron could throw me a line was to give me enough rope to hang myself. That’s the nature of friendship in this town.
ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES LATER. GILLETTE. WYOMING. 4:38 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
It looked like a weather station. An anemometer on a waist-high tripod turned slowly around in the light breeze; a wire from its base went to a telephone-sized aluminum box, connected by a short wire to a black box the size of a matchbox—a cellular wireless server.
Inside the aluminum box, a computer continually compared the time and the windspeed. Decisions about time took priority, and up until recently had been very simple: The program said do nothing until 4:00 P.M. or later, so every second, right on cue, the computer woke up, saw it wasn’t 4:00 P.M. yet, set a timer to tick off another second, and went back to sleep, like a child on Christmas morning who checks every five minutes to see if it is time to get up yet, and then dutifully goes back to bed before checking in another five minutes. At the speeds at which computers operated, that was less than a billionth of its working time.
After 4:00 P.M., the computer began to consult its rolling record of the windspeed across the last twenty minutes. This was more complicated. On the plains close to the Rockies, a strong west wind tends to rise in late afternoon, almost every day, as the shadowed east faces of the mountains cool and pour a torrent of cold, dense air down to where air warmed by a whole day of sunshine is still rising off the ground. The wind blows strong and flows across hundreds of miles; it’s a perfect medium for dispersing anything in the air.
Zach had written the program to detect the point when the strong evening wind was well-established; it took windspeed readings every second and kept a back file of 1200 of them, twenty minutes’ worth. Each second after 4:00 P.M., it averaged the list; when the average windspeed across the last twenty minutes was more than thirty-five kilometers per hour, it reviewed the list to make sure that there had been no more than ten consecutive seconds below 25 kph, Zach’s test to make sure that this was the real, strong mountain breeze, not just a stray gust.
At 4:42 P.M., those conditions were all met. The computer sent 750 phone numbers to the server, which dialed the triggers in all 750 of the bottles filled with black powder. As each came online the computer told it to arm and check; all were armed and checked in less than four seconds. The computer sent a signal to fire; a hundredth of a second later, when the 750th call dropped, the computer fired a small charge to destroy itself. People on the street thought it was a gunshot, looked around, and concluded it was something else.
Davidson resented like hell the way he had to be out there on collection days from fucking three thirty till goddam well six fucking o’clock sometimes, because although he had a great team with Howard and Isaac, and a tolerable one with Dorothy and Juan, the team of Fred and Annie was just absolutely not to be trusted at all. Sure enough, they came in late because they’d stopped to check on their kid in the day care, and they gave him some routine about how it smelled so bad they had to take showers, because it would never’ve occurred to numbnuts Fred or his fat slobby wife that maybe they should wait till they were done to shower instead of just getting all stunk up again.
Now they were busy telling Davidson their whole fucking life story, which was something they often did on the clock. He could have told it for them: Fred used to drink and party, and Annie did too. They got Jesus after their firstborn baby died, and he must have been sent from heaven to straighten them out. I’m sure that comforted the shit out of the little fucker, drowning in the bathtub while you idiots got stoned. But Davidson didn’t say that; people who would at least show up weren’t all that easy to find.
So he let them ramble on about how bad it stunk, and take him to the bin to show him. It was about three-quarters full of plastic bottles, a good week, but son of a bitch, this was like putting your head up a constipated cheesemaker’s butthole, and the slimy look of the plastic was weird too. And—hadn’t it been in the middle of lunch? Erin had just been doing the red lingerie number—Howard had called him, something about—