McGivern, spry and nearing retirement, clicked the keyboard on her computer, and a flat screen came alive on the wall across from Lana. A huge fire bloomed as orange as a California poppy field.
“That’s a gas pipeline right outside Atlanta,” McGivern said. “It could turn into a firestorm, and it’s definitely heading toward my hometown.” The analyst lent a trace of her Southern roots to her voice. “And this”—she clicked her computer keys—“is the Miami harbor. Those are cruise ships, though you’d never know by looking.”
No, you wouldn’t, thought Lana. She’d used that terminal on her honeymoon, and now it was burning down, just like her marriage had when Emma was two years old and Lana finally realized that she had more than one toddler in the house. Three massive vessels were on fire, sending up smoke plumes the size of skyscrapers.
“We suspect that logic bombs were placed in the ships’ computer systems to overload the electrical circuits.” Logic bombs could lie in wait in a computer network until signaled. Then, after overloading electrical circuits, for instance, a logic bomb could erase all data that might make its presence known or even traceable.
“Were the ships full?” Lana asked.
“To capacity. And all the sprinklers and smoke alarms were disabled.” McGivern spoke without emotion. She’d been at NSA for decades and had seen a world of horrors. But Lana’s insides were twisting tight as hawsers.
“This is another pipeline explosion,” McGivern said. “It’s near Denver, but as you can see, it’s already moving through national forest land. It’s possible that it will turn into the state’s biggest wildfire ever, because heavy winds are expected for the next week and there’s not a drop of rain on the horizon.”
“Do we know how many fatalities we’ve got nationwide?” Lana asked Holmes, knowing he would be slated to make any comments about that sensitive issue. The extent of casualties was not in Lana’s purview, narrowly speaking, but after looking at pipeline explosions and those incinerated cruise ships, she had to ask.
“Minimally, just this morning? Tens of thousands would be a conservative guess,” Holmes replied. “That’s what we’re releasing to the media, the few who actually made it to our door to get answers. But in truth? We could easily be looking at more than a hundred thousand fatalities. This makes 9/11 look like a piker’s picnic.” Holmes cleared his throat, and his gaze took in each of them. “We’re at war.”
Hearing that from a man as serious as Holmes sent a chill straight to Lana’s core. For the first time in her life, real war had overtaken most of her country. Not with bombs or bullets or missiles, but with software written by anonymous hands and delivered in stealth and silence. Cowards with codes. She couldn’t wait to lock on to them in the cybersphere.
Whoever the hell they are.
“What galls me most,” Holmes said, as if reading her mind, “is that we don’t even know who’s attacking us.” He pointed to the screen. “But we’re sure seeing what they’re capable of.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s been two hours, and our homeland has already suffered more overall damage than in all its previous wars combined.”
What was notable, Lana thought, was that neither Holmes nor anyone else at the table was rushing to speculate about the perpetrators of the attack, though numerous suspects came immediately to her mind and, undoubtedly, to theirs as well.
“It’s going to get worse,” Tenon added with another nervous tug on his beard.
That wasn’t news in nearby Washington, D.C. Smoke was already drifting over the White House.
CHAPTER 3
Ruhi Mancur didn’t see the smoke rising above the city, much less the plumes drifting over the Capitol. Not yet, anyway. His eyes were on a smooth footpath that meandered alongside the slowly flowing Potomac River, his favorite part of the morning’s eight-mile run.
He heard sirens, but that wasn’t unusual in Washington. Neither was it unusual for him to ignore them. When he hit the trails, he paid little attention to anything but the American pop of his immigrant youth. His parents had brought him to D.C. from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, when he was seven, and he loved listening to his iPod. Right now it was filling his head with the exuberance of Cindy Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” He never tired of her anthem, always recalling her crazy dresses and hair, and the brightly colored bangles and bodices that made her look like an exotic tropical species with a rich plumage all her own. Living under the House of Saud, he’d never seen anything remotely like Lauper, that’s for sure. For him, the pop star had always personified the irrepressibly relaxed wonder of America.
But right now her music helped him ignore the world as he put his body through its rigors. He was a broad-shouldered veteran of fourteen marathons, and Lauper had made many of those miles bearable. So even on a bad day, the frenetic interference of the nation’s capital was a poor opponent of Ruhi’s amply armed iPod. And a brisk Monday-morning run was an altogether marvelous way to start his week, before going to work at the Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC. He liked to think that the organization got some “mileage” out of the irony that he hailed from a country in which oil accounted for ninety-five percent of its exports and seventy percent of its profits. Very much the lapsed Saudi.
But as Ruhi headed back to Georgetown, the sirens and alarms grew uncomfortably loud and vastly more numerous until they bled over one another and forced him to recognize that they were going off all at once. It was like cell phones in a crisis, which, from all appearances — a rush of ambulances, fire trucks, police cars — was taking place.
That’s when he paused and emerged from his endorphin fog. Traffic lights were not working — and they hadn’t been since he’d turned from the river. He’d been darting across streets on automatic pilot. But now he recognized a change in the city’s pulse. Cars were doing a fair amount of darting as well, slowing down and then blowing through dark intersections. Their scurrying reminded him of the city’s rats when headlights lit them up. But admittedly, he wasn’t a big fan of the country’s automobile culture, which was strike two against him as an expat Saudi, because his countrymen had long adored American muscle cars.
Moreover, he spied an urgency in the drivers’ faces that made him wary of sprinting across any more streets. Better to dodge and feint and take nothing for granted. As an urban runner — fleet-footed, but calm in demeanor — he was accustomed to the mindless quirks of motorists, but the gunning of engines and screeching of brakes was all out of proportion to the simple power outage that he observed. In short, he sensed a palpable panic beyond the measure of ordinary turmoil.
Everywhere he looked — cars, cabs, pedestrians — people appeared on edge. Nothing had power. No cheery welcome or open signs blazed in shop windows. And there was no Internet, either, to judge by the frustrated reactions of people staring dumbfounded at their suddenly not-so-smart phones.
Ruhi had left his at home, as he generally did for his daily run.
He turned down M Street, one of Georgetown’s main thoroughfares, and headed home, passing a Starbucks where the green-apron brigade was busy apologizing profusely as it ushered customers out the door—sans java.