“I found APTs.”
Nothing like posting the headline right away, Lana thought. APTs were “advanced persistent threats,” virulent bugs generally Chinese in origin. “How bad?” She drove impatiently through the outskirts of Bethesda.
“Bad. They’d set up shop some time ago, though. We’re talking at least a few months.”
“And we’re just finding them?” Lana sounded annoyed — for good reason: She was.
“These are very slick,” Jensen replied.
“What were they going after?” She spoke about the APTs as if they possessed volition of their own. Easy to see why: They were canny enough to extract data and leave. Sweet — if you weren’t being pillaged.
“I don’t know what they wanted, and I don’t think we ever will. For all we know, most might have already returned to the mother ship. But if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say Defense Department secrets. The takeaway here is that they came well before the attack on the grid.”
“So you’re pulling the weeds?” she asked him, meaning extracting the APTs.
“I’ve started on it.”
“Use as much of the workforce as you need. We want them out of there ASAP.” Not telling him anything he didn’t know, but adding urgency to whatever sense of purpose he might already have felt.
Lana was now making great time on the Beltway, which at this point in her life had become more familiar to her than her own backyard.
“This puts us in company with Cisco and lots of others,” Jeff said, perhaps to contextualize the violation of the system whose security was his domain.
Lana agreed. Cisco was just one of the many marquee names of western technology companies that had been targeted by Chinese hackers. In one of their biggest coups they stole Cisco’s innovative router, a device that forwarded packets of data to parts of a network system.
“Their fingerprints are showing up everywhere,” Jeff said, “so they were bound to target us sooner or later.”
“The point is they have fingerprints.”
Which had also been found on defense contractor Lockheed Martin’s own highly classified government work. The Chinese had even been brazen enough to copy information right off the Secretary of Commerce’s laptop when he was in Beijing. That attack had been dubbed “Titan Rain.” More like a monsoon when it was over, because the data from the secretary’s laptop was used to gain access to Commerce Department computers, which proved vital to the exfiltration of upward of twenty trillion bytes of data from the Pentagon’s unclassified network.
“So let me know if those prints show up at NSA or anywhere else,” Jeff said.
“You’re covered,” she told him. “Now go play exterminator with those bugs.”
Twenty minutes after she hung up — while charging across the vast NSA parking lot — she received a furious call from Irene Johansson vowing that she would never, “under any circumstances,” watch Emma again. Then she informed Lana that her daughter had kicked her in the stomach after she’d caught her sexting “filthy pictures.”
“What?” Lana exclaimed, still rushing toward the monolithic headquarters, struck almost numb by the fact that she was having to deal with this kind of total crap while the fate of the country was up for grabs. She tried desperately to think of a way to ameliorate the situation between the two antagonists. She knew Emma was unhappy about having Mrs. Johansson at the house, but kicking? And sexting?
“Yes, both,” Irene bellowed. “She kicked me because I caught her red-handed with her dirty little pictures on the phone. I saw them.”
“Of her?”
“Yes, she had her dress pulled all the way up. She was showing off her undies. The Dora the Explorer ones. I’ve seen them under her bed for months.”
At least she wasn’t naked. But “sexting” a picture of herself in Dora the Explorer underpants? Unless there was something super-kinky going on that Lana simply couldn’t fathom, that didn’t make any sense. Dora the Explorer and sexting sounded like an oxymoron — not that she wanted Emma having her panty pictures on the Web.
“So is she still in her bedroom?”
“I don’t know. I’m at home.”
“Oh, please, don’t do this to us, Irene,” Lana said as she paused before undergoing newly fortified security at the agency entrance.
“Good-bye,” Irene said. “You have raised a bad girl.”
Lana stared at her phone, shaking her head, then speed-dialed Emma. “Are you all right?” she asked immediately.
“Yes, but—”
“Stop! Don’t say another word. Can I possibly trust you to take your medicine on time and stay home with the doors locked?”
“Of course, Mom,” Emma said in a hoarse voice. “Why would you think—”
“Because you’re in this mess because you didn’t do that yesterday.”
“Oh. Right. Yes.”
“Do it. Stay ahead of the pain. I’ll be home as soon as I can. I love you. Now good-bye.”
Lana handed over her phone, briefcase with laptop — everything — to hard-eyed security agents. After undergoing an intense screening, she headed up to Deputy Director Holmes’s office.
Donna Warnes, his efficient executive assistant, directed her to a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. SCIFs — pronounced “skiffs”—were large secure rooms that prevented all electronic surveillance while eliminating the threat of any data leakage.
But before entering, Lana had to check her laptop and personal items with blank-faced security personnel. She also had to be “read in” by an official who announced that the world would crash down around her shoulders if she ever breathed a word of what she was about to learn.
“Do you understand?” he asked her.
“Got it.”
But it wasn’t over. “Sign this,” he ordered, handing her a form that acknowledged that she had been fully briefed and understood the strict nature of the security demands.
It wasn’t Lana’s first time in a SCIF, not by a long shot. But each time she entered one she was taken aback by the absence of windows and the appearance of utter impregnability that came from being encased in masonry. The room also came equipped with motion detectors in the corners of the ceiling to catch anyone entering the facility during off-hours.
Lana took a seat about halfway around a large conference table. Holmes thanked her somberly for coming, adding, “We’ve just started reviewing the damage. We have our internal communications up, so after a quick look at the toll, we’ll turn our attention to our list of suspects, which I trust you’ll help us with.”
“I heard the ‘commentary.’” She made air quotes with her intonation. “Any accuracy to the claim of fifty thousand dead?”
Holmes nodded, raking his white hair. “It might even be worse, but we’re not confirming anything right now. A huge problem at the moment is the wide-scale looting and rioting. It’s taking place in more than a hundred cities and suburban areas. That number could be greater, too, but our reporting is still terribly hampered. The social upheaval is exactly what the enemy was planning on, we think. By putting the power back on, and then threatening to cut it off any second without warning, they set off waves of panic. The Army and National Guard are deployed virtually everywhere.”
Holmes used a remote to bring a large flat screen to life against the solid white wall. “So let’s look at all the suspects now — nations, rogue players, terrorists, and our own domestic enemies.”
The screen showed a list of nations along with a multicolored globe. “There’s no consensus on a culprit; let me say that at the outset. But if we can winnow the wheat from the chaff at this stage, we can focus our efforts more efficiently.”