After what seemed an interminable hike, the car appeared. But it was agony for the young man to get his right leg in the Prius. He pleaded with her to let him leave it out while she drove. That was inviting the foot’s complete ruin, but all Lana had to do was shake her head and, with a mighty howl, he used both hands to yank his leg into the car. More than his ankle had been broken, she saw now. It looked like the bones in his lower leg had also been snapped.
Lana rushed him to the nearest trauma center, Bethesda’s Suburban Hospital. Cars were already backing up.
“Tanesa, can you drive?”
“I’ve got my permit.”
“It’s an automatic. You take over. Inch along when you can. I’m going to get some help.”
Lana saw right away that the hospital had power, but it was from generators, she learned from an orderly; all electronic communications were down.
The orderly grabbed a gurney and followed her to the car. Tanesa rushed from the driver’s seat to Shawn’s side. With another grievous howl, the young man got his leg out and was wheeled away. Tanesa called back to Lana, thanking her profusely.
“I’ll see you later,” Lana yelled. “Promise.”
She had just paused for a breath when a cop rushed up and asked her to move the Prius, pronto.
In the scant minutes they’d been there, a massive lineup of cars had formed in back of them.
Lana pulled away, her thoughts turning to Emma immediately. “She’s all right,” she tried to assure herself. And when that didn’t work, Lana tried reasoning: The derailment and explosions were about a mile from their house. That was uncomfortably close, but the trains had fallen on the Bethesda side of the tracks, which meant the first responders would have accessed the disaster from Kressinger, where she and Emma lived. She figured the first line of defense for the firefighters should keep the blaze from spreading into her neighborhood. As long as Emma stayed put, she should be all right. That might be assuming too much, Lana realized at once. What she wouldn’t have given for a smartphone that worked. She tried her cell again anyway. No luck.
Driving home might take hours. CyberFortress, on the other hand, was just on the other side of Bethesda, and the company had emergency power.
That put Lana back on her original course to the bland-looking office park where she’d based her firm’s headquarters. The entrance bore no sign, no fancy logo toying with the “CF” that was the shorthand everyone used in intracompany communications.
She found about fifty employees, about a fifth of her workforce. She wasn’t surprised. Thankfully, they included Jeff Jensen, the crisply attired VP who handled internal security. He was running antivirus software of his own design on the company’s network, which he’d delinked from the Internet. That was in case a worm on the Web had set off a contagion that might lapse only long enough to deliver a second blow — in emulation of terrorists who set off a bomb to lure rescuers to a far more lethal strike.
The power came from generators that Lana had built into the system. You don’t work in the field of cybersecurity without having redundancy engineered into your power source.
“It smacks of a huge cyberattack,” Jensen said, looking up to acknowledge her.
Lana nodded, glancing down long enough to see Shawn’s blood on her leg and a small red smear on her sleeveless shirt. It had never occurred to her to change — a perk of owning the shop. Jensen, on the other hand, was in one of his dark blue suits. He didn’t change colors often — the kind of guy who would always love a uniform, even one of his own making. He was a tightly wound thirty-seven-year-old Annapolis grad and veteran Navy cryptographer who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Why do you think it’s a cyberattack?” she asked him.
“I can’t access any DoD networks.” The Department of Defense had three primary communication systems that escalated in security. But Jensen generally had few problems accessing the first two — as did far less benevolent hackers.
“Are you saying DoD is down?” Lana asked.
“Like a dead dog,” Jensen responded. “And we’re getting reports of some bad stuff in the District. Your friends at NSA could probably tell us a lot.”
His eyes practically pushed Lana back out the door. Since she started CyberFortress, Lana’s firm had done critical contract work on governmental counter-cyberterror. In each instance, she and her colleagues at the NSA had concluded that the U.S. was the single most vulnerable nation in the world to cyberattack because it was the most Internet-dependent of all countries, while having few effective defenses to fend off cyberwarriors, including the ones who might live down the block. CF’s warnings — contained in a series of reports classified “top secret”—had been received with much approval by Congress and the White House, but little had actually been done to bolster the defense of the country’s most critical communication systems.
Lana told Jensen and several other top staffers who had gathered near her about the Amtrak and Norfolk Southern collision, including a quick summary of the heroics of the Baptist choir. “Has anyone heard anything about that train wreck?” she asked those assembled. “Emma’s home alone.”
Phillip, a stylishly attired computer nerd, as odd as that sounded, said he had just driven by the edge of the suburb and had seen no evidence of the fire on the Kressinger side of the rail line.
“If Emma’s home, she’s in about as safe a place as you can find around here now,” Jensen said.
“So what are you hearing anecdotally?” Lana asked, wondering how much worse the news could be.
“Sheila came in from the District this morning. Tell her,” Jensen said to his younger aide, a Princeton Ph.D. who had bristled at times to find herself working for the Navy vet. (“Grow up, girl,” Lana had told her. Jeff had earned his stripes, even if he had the overbearing personality of a career-driven technocrat.)
Sheila rested her hip on the side of a desk and nodded at Lana. “There was a bad subway collision near the Federal Triangle stop.” Close to the White House. “I saw huge amounts of smoke coming up into the street, and people were staggering up the stairs. But the first responders couldn’t even get close because the stoplights were out and there was no getting through all the jammed-up cars.”
“Let’s get you over to NSA,” Jensen said. “We’ll keep our eyes on things in Kressinger. Emma’s probably more worried about you.”
Emma wasn’t worried about her mom. Emma wasn’t worried about herself, or anything, except maybe suffering a boring day alone at home.
Seconds after her mom’s car turned the corner, Emma had run over to Payton’s house to hook up with her classmate for a morning of heavy petting and hickeys.
“Stop doing that,” Emma finally said, pointing to her upper neck. “My mom’s gonna freak out.”
“Okay, okay,” Payton replied, nodding numbly.
He returned to simply kissing Emma, at least for a few seconds. Then he started right back up again.
“Get off me.” She shoved him away, stood, smoothed down her striped skirt, and announced that she was leaving.
It was only as she stepped outside that she saw the smoke. Most of the sky had turned black. And the sirens were wailing left and right.
Emma pulled out her phone to check for messages, but of course it didn’t work.
Now she was scared. On instinct, she started running for home. And that’s when she got her first whiff of ammonia. It burned her lungs and eyes and nose, and stopped her short. The second whiff dropped her to her knees. The third doubled her over.
Emma keeled to the sidewalk, coughing convulsively.