Fort Meade sounded like a sanctuary as Lana dodged pockets of traffic in Bethesda before jumping on the Beltway. She found relatively few cars on the famed thoroughfare, but the warning light for her gas tank came on. A single expletive slipped past her lips; even in a Prius, that red light was unnerving. It sent stress straight to her shoulder blades, where she carried it like a Sherpa. She hadn’t seen a single open gas station. She also knew that if she found one, the line would be so long that she’d end up having to push the Prius to the pump.
She thought she had enough range to make it to the Army base, barring the unforeseen, though the morning was filling with the unexpected. Far more important, in the next few minutes she spotted commercial airliners heading toward both Reagan International and BWI, the Baltimore airport, which meant that if this was, indeed, a cyberattack, the aggressors had spared civilian airlines. Those big jets were fatally dependent on the Internet for information vital to safe flight. Their presence in the skies suggested that the attackers had a base level of civility and were not completely insane, though colliding trains and horrific fires proved hollow consolation. While airliners were landing, only fighter jets were taking off.
Kinetic war is not going to help, she said to herself as an F-15 streaked across the skyline. “Kinetic” was the designation that cybersecurity experts used for traditional warfare.
With great relief she pulled up to Fort Meade’s broad entrance, knowing that she would at least make it to the NSA. The guard stations resembled a big drive-through bank with a series of slots for mobile customers. The 9/11-sharpened procedures at the massive base were thorough but efficient, and within minutes she drove toward the arena-size parking lot that surrounded three sides of the agency’s enormous black building, one of more than fifty structures that made up the intelligence complex. All of it was secured by heavily armed guards, electrical fences, antitank barriers, and a full panoply of security cameras and motion detectors. That was what you could see. Copper hidden inside the walls and one-way windows kept electromagnetic signals from the prying eyes — and instruments — of the outside world. A white structure that resembled a sheet cake sat atop the largest building, the one to which Lana was headed.
She gave thought to throwing on her skirt and top in the car, but as soon as she shut off the Prius, the unrelenting summer heat started baking her.
The moment she entered NSA headquarters, security staff escorted her up to Deputy Director Robert Holmes’s office. His stout assistant, Donna Warnes, greeted her with a welcoming smile, an unspoken acknowledgment of Lana’s key role in vacuuming up a particularly nasty bug that had attacked the agency’s counterintelligence files three months ago. The bug wasn’t the only thing that had been nasty. She’d had to butt heads with several in-house forensic stars to get the job done — territorial disputes in the cybersphere — but she’d prevailed and had received a commendation from Holmes himself.
Donna led Lana into her boss’s large conference room, where he’d gathered five members of his top team at the end of a long table. Lana wasn’t the only one in mufti; Ronald Wilkes, who oversaw much of the agency’s liaison with congressional intelligence committees, was still in his tennis whites, which matched the color of his hair.
His blue eyes were all over her, moving from the blood on her long legs to the dabs on her cheeks, making the most of any excuse to gaze at her. He’d told her several times that he thought she was beautiful, loved her “jet black hair,” “great cheekbones,” “bee-stung lips.” Lana considered it fortunate for the country that his work for NSA was more creative than his comments about her body.
Holmes, always the old-school gentleman, gave no obvious notice of Lana’s gritty appearance. Unlike so many power brokers in Washington, the deputy director assumed the best about the people he surrounded himself with. If Lana Elkins had smoke smudges on her arms and blood on her leg and face, then she had her reasons. He confirmed his confidence in her in the next few seconds with an offhanded acknowledgment of her unusual condition.
“I think our trusted consultant here has already been fighting the good fight. Donna, please bring her water, coffee, and a damp cloth.”
“It was bad out in Kressinger,” Lana said. She explained what had happened to the Amtrak and freight trains.
“We heard about that,” Holmes said. “Rail switches and signals have stopped working everywhere.”
“Do you know if the fire has spread into Kressinger? I’m worried about my daughter.”
“No, but an ammonia tanker exploded, and they’re trying to evacuate everyone within about a mile of the track,” Holmes replied.
“Jesus, that might include us.”
“They’re letting people know. Is your daughter inside your house, windows closed?”
“Yes,” Lana said, with only a little confidence regarding Emma’s whereabouts.
“She should be okay, then. And if you’re too close, they’ll evacuate her,” Holmes added. “I wish our response to every crisis in the country was unfolding that smoothly. What else do you know about the overall situation at this point? Have you been at CF?”
“Yes. I understand the Web is down, and Jeff Jensen said the military networks have failed.”
“That is correct. We’re getting our information piecemeal, and it’s worse over at DoD.” He shook his head. “Go ahead, tell her,” Holmes said to Joshua Tenon, a more immediate contemporary of Lana’s.
Tenon tugged nervously on a salt-and-pepper beard that hid his recessed chin and gave her a quick nod. “The Eastern and Western Interconnects are down.” The two big grids that covered the U.S. “Texas is down, too.” The Lone Star State had its own grid. “So all of the U.S. has lost power, along with parts of Canada and northern Mexico.”
That made sense to Lana: The power links among the North American nations did not have a strict respect for borders.
Donna set coffee, water, and a facecloth on the table for her. Lana wiped away the blood on her leg. Holmes pointed to her cheek, and she cleaned that off, too, as Tenon went on:
“China cut itself off from the rest of the world immediately, and has suffered very little damage, if any. All of their electric and rail systems have switched to non-networked control systems, and they’re using backup radio.”
In the parlance of the spy trade, China had “pulled up the drawbridge.” China could do that because it was a far less open society than the U.S. Moreover, from a cybersecurity standpoint, it was notably ahead of much of the world, so it could cut itself off from the Web.
“But what’s interesting,” Tenon said, “is that China might not have even been targeted. Russia, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, Africa, and the Middle East are hardly affected at all, compared to us.”
Lana nodded. “And I saw commercial aircraft.”
“That’s right,” Tenon replied. “That unwritten rule has not been violated.”
“What about banks?” she asked. Another unwritten rule. The U.S., for instance, never launched a cyberattack on Iraqi banks during its wars, though the U.S. had the capacity to ruin that country’s financial system.
“There’s no sign yet that the banking community is subject to a direct attack. Of course, they can’t operate without the Web.”
“But we’re not seeing the wholesale destruction of bank records?” Let’s cut to the chase, she thought.
“No, but again, we should add a big ‘yet’ to any assessment of that nature,” Tenon replied.
Holmes leaned forward. “But there’s plenty of bad news, because a lot of other systems have failed. We have train wrecks in more than fifty locations, including downtown Chicago and Los Angeles, pipeline explosions in Michigan and Wisconsin, and there are reports of chemical plants in New Jersey releasing massive amounts of chlorine.” Another deadly gas. “We’ve got miners stuck underground, and people stuck in elevators.” He shook his head. “And without power, evacuation is a nightmare in most of those places. There’s more.” Holmes nodded at Teresa McGivern, a veteran NSA analyst. “Show Lana what we’re seeing on our own network.”