Not far from his apartment, Ruhi ran right past the location of Alexander Graham Bell’s first switching office more than one hundred years ago. That irony did not elude him, either.
As he bounded up the granite steps of an old, distinguished townhouse, long ago converted into a tony fourplex, he had to step aside for Candace Anders. She’d moved into one of the upstairs units last month — and shot right to the top of Ruhi’s list of desirable neighbors. That was saying a lot about Candace’s blond, ponytailed appeal, because Ruhi’s leafy street had lots of eye candy of the female persuasion.
“Do you know what’s going on?” Ruhi asked Candace, as casually as if they had shared much more than passing nods on those steps.
“It’s definitely a power outage,” she said, which, of course, added little to what Ruhi already knew.
But he had gleaned a fair amount about Candace from the Web, once he learned that she was a recent hire of her conservative Indiana congressman. That made her one of “them,” in Ruhi’s world: a climate-change denier and tool of Big Oil and Big Coal. It was hard not to peg them quickly when you were the director of research for the NRDC. Ruhi knew the congressional roll call as well as the sergeants-at-arms of the House and Senate.
Before he could riff on power outages and the nation’s insatiable appetite for energy, Candace went on:
“It may actually be a lot more than a glitch in the grid. Somebody running by said the blackout is all across the country.”
“Really?” That stunned Ruhi. It would be a first, according to everything he had read about power outages in his adopted country, which was voluminous. “A total blackout?”
“That’s what I heard—” She sounded like she’d cut herself off.
“What?” he asked.
“Well, there was a rumor flying around the Capitol that a cyberattack had been launched by jihadists.”
“Oh, no,” he groaned. As a dark-skinned Middle Easterner who had endured his share of open hostility in his adopted country after 9/11, he was mindful of what that rumor could mean.
“It’s not confirmed.”
“But it was the first one to come up, I’ll bet,” he replied.
She didn’t disagree.
He hoped to God his countrymen hadn’t done anything now. They’d had a notorious role in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The last thing he wanted to hear was that more religious zealots had claimed the mantle of Mohammed to serve their own earthly needs. He just wished he could convey his harsh judgment of extremists to a dark-suited guy in a Lincoln Navigator who was giving him the stink eye as he drove by.
He and Candace paused at the top of the steps to look down the street. Neither said a word for several seconds. He wanted to see if she’d continue the discussion. In truth, he figured Candace probably held deep suspicions about Muslims, even lapsed ones like him. That was strike three, in the view of most Saudis.
A man in a pinstripe suit swore loudly as he hurried past them, working his phone with both thumbs. Then he looked around and declared, “Nothing’s working,” before jamming the device into his pocket.
“I can’t get online, either,” Candace said. She looked at Ruhi expectantly. “You?”
“I don’t have it with me.”
“That’s a first for this town. I’m not saying it’s jihadists, but it does smack of a cyberattack.”
“What makes you say that?” It hadn’t occurred to Ruhi, but the possibility sure grabbed his attention. He knew plenty about energy consumption and distribution in the U.S., and if this was, indeed, a nationwide problem, cyberattack made grim sense.
“I guess it could be a Martian invasion,” she said, “but short of aliens, nothing else explains it.”
“Bombs would. A tightly coordinated widespread attack might.”
“We’d know about the attacks,” she replied. “We’d have instant reports, instead of an instant loss of power.”
“If that’s the case, we’re in serious trouble,” he replied. “This could go on and on. Do you know about ‘just-in-time delivery’?”
She shook her head.
“It’s a wonkish kind of thing.”
Happy to have her attention, he explained that the U.S. was highly dependent on centralized power plants that replaced broken parts — even the most vital ones — on the so-called just-in-time delivery principle.
“It’s just the opposite of ‘in stock,’” he went on. “It means that if a cyberattack on a power plant forces a big turbine to spin so fast that it tears itself apart, it could take six months before anybody can build the replacement and put it in place. You can thank deregulation for that.” Starting with your boss, he almost added.
Candace shook her head and lifted her eyebrows, which Ruhi found an endearing way to disagree with him. In fact, it made him wish that he’d left out the jab about deregulation.
“If it is a cyberattack,” she said, “we’d better start thinking about China. Or blowback for our cyberattacks on Iran. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they’d decided to retaliate massively and anonymously.”
He was surprised to hear those words coming from a staffer for a congressman who’d supported every war the U.S. had engaged in for the past four decades.
“Have you had a chance to tell your boss that?” he asked mischievously.
“No! I like my job.”
She smiled, and it occurred to him that he might be cultivating a source on a conservative congressman’s staff.
Or she’s cultivating you.
Jarred from their conversation by a boisterous crowd of about fifteen young men — late teens, early twenties — racing around the corner. They spotted him immediately and yelled “raghead.”
Oh, shit. That’s also when he spotted huge funnels of smoke rising into the sky from the heart of the nation’s capital.
“What’s going—”
Ruhi interrupted Candace by taking her arm and hurrying her to the door of the converted townhouse. Locked, of course.
The young men were stampeding now, perhaps spurred by his own rush to get inside. He looked back and found them only two townhouses away, fury contorting their faces. They had closed the gap to within a hundred feet. He heard Candace swear under her breath as he fidgeted with his key. He looked again.
Fifty feet.
He knew he was going to get severely beaten, at best. He didn’t even want to consider what might happen to an ingénue from the drought-stricken cornfields of the Midwest who was audacious enough to consort with a “raghead.”
Twenty-five feet.
He managed to work the key into the old lock, but it was catching on something.
“Come on!” she whispered.
He hated that lock. He jiggled it frantically…
Ten feet.
… and the lock slid open.
She rushed inside. He followed a breath behind, slamming the door and locking it just as the thick wood thundered from pounding fists and boots. Unseen hands grabbed the handle and tried to force it open. He thought he heard a gunshot.
“My place,” she shouted. “Upstairs.”
They raced past Ruhi’s first-level apartment and up the broad stairs that rose from the grand old entryway. He heard the door rattling behind them and looked back as an elderly neighbor stepped out of her downstairs apartment.
“Go back inside,” Ruhi stopped to yell. He gestured wildly at the front door. “And lock up!”
“What?” she said, slowly inserting her hearing aid.
A loud crash turned their attention to the front door. The mob had split the top part right down the middle. Two gunshots plowed into the handle and lock. Ruhi was sure about the shots this time, but the door still didn’t give.