Wait, he had his cell phone out. Did he take a… picture?
Phones aren’t working, remember, she told herself, giving herself a moment’s reprieve. But then she wondered: Maybe the phones don’t work. Maybe the Net doesn’t. But the camera? That’s an “internal function,” as her mother would put it.
Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.
She glanced at him. He was looking at her once more, but her face this time. And he was pretty damn cute.
Lana bolted from the massive NSA building and ran to her car, desperate to get home to check on Emma. Deputy Director Holmes had made sure that she was given a fuel allotment at the Fort Meade pumps, now powered by generators.
That put Lana back on surface streets within fifteen minutes, where traffic had lightened considerably. People had either fled their homes and businesses, or hunkered down for the duration — whatever that might turn out to be. Horrifyingly enough, Holmes had said that widespread power outages could, in reality, persist for months.
The nationwide blackout was scarcely four hours old, and even as she had conferred with Holmes and the others, disaster reports arrived from two Gulf Coast ports where supertankers, fully loaded with oil, had collided. And a container ship bound for China had crashed into the north pilings of the Golden Gate Bridge. The destruction had been well planned.
Panic had gripped the nation so quickly that it astounded her. All morning, reports were filtering in of widespread looting in more than a dozen metropolitan areas, including Washington itself, and in suburban towns with staid reputations. Gripping fear clearly knew few borders or socioeconomic barriers. And there was no way for the president, a consummate communicator, to speak to the American people: another first.
Besides, what could he say? Lana wondered as she sped onto the Beltway.
With a kinetic attack, Congress would be rushing to declare war, granting the commander in chief the right to bomb, invade, and absolutely level opponents who had inflicted even a tenth as much damage to the country. One hundredth as much: Look at 9/11. But with physical weapons — missiles, bombs, bullets — you knew who had attacked even as the weaponry took its toll. That hadn’t always been true — especially with terrorism — but in the twenty-first century it had been all but impossible for a country to escape responsibility for wide-scale violence directed against its enemies. Fighting a cyberwar, though, was like trying to tackle fog. There was nothing to hold on to, or even see. Nothing you could pound to rubble.
Lana made good time but passed so many fires that she felt certain the attackers had planned to maximize the visual impact of their otherwise invisible electronic firepower. The rising columns of smoke looked like the iconic photographs of Baghdad during the U.S. invasion.
The first Bethesda exit was still several miles away, but she saw thick black clouds filling the sky from the Amtrak — Norfolk Southern crash. Then, as she neared the beleaguered town, she caught grim glimpses of almost a mile of freight and passenger cars burning.
She planned to take an exit ramp one town past Bethesda, if she could, and loop around to her house. But she came to a crawl quickly as flaggers in orange vests directed all four lanes of traffic into one. It was the first semblance of traffic control that she’d seen since the church choir had held back cars near the train collision. She thought those kids should receive a presidential commendation of some sort, or at least front-page attention in the Post.
Lana didn’t know why she’d been squeezed into a single lane until she moved close enough to see that the ones to her right had been turned into a staging area. Bodies, neatly bagged in black plastic and lined up next to one another, were loaded into troop transport trucks — even as more of the dead were off-loaded from smaller Army vehicles.
Exits were blocked for another three miles. Then she spent forty-five teeth-grinding minutes navigating bottlenecked traffic; drivers, she guessed, who had plans similar to her own.
As she neared her house, the radio suddenly came alive. She thought, Oh, thank God! believing the outage was over—finally—and the attack withdrawn. But the invaders — that’s how she thought of them, even if they couldn’t be seen — had taken over the airwaves. A monotonic computer voice delivered a message:
“We are communicating to the American people directly. Not to your leaders. You are under attack. Count your blessings that we are not using bombs. We are more humane than your leaders. We are using your own technology to make your lives difficult…”
Difficult? Try deadly, asshole.
“We demand that the American people tell their leaders to remove U.S. military forces from its seven hundred and fifty foreign bases. Send home all your ships, tanks, fighter jets, bombers, and service people. Remove all your missiles. Stop all your invasions. Stop all your cyberattacks on foreign powers.
“This is your only hope, Americans. If your country does not return its forces to its own borders, we will burn you to the ground. Look around. Do not doubt our ability to turn you to ash. Look at what we are doing to you today.”
The message began to run again. It was on an NPR station, clearly powered up for this sole purpose. Lana figured the attackers had long ago inserted a “trapdoor,” software that allowed them to take control of the airwaves today.
On the third listening, she found only two noteworthy usages in the text: “blessings,” used idiomatically in “Count your blessings,” and the threat to burn the country to the ground, which suggested that the attackers’ aims did not include a complete conflagration — yet.
“Blessings,” she thought, certainly could be used by a secular entity, but more likely hailed from a religious person.
Or people who want to make it sound like it came from the mouth of a believer.
North Korea? she asked herself. The message had the crazy menace of the “Supreme Leader,” or whatever antic title the latest one had taken. And the North Koreans had been busy building a cyberarsenal — and using it: On July 4, 2009—Happy Birthday, America—Unit 121, reputedly North Korea’s slickest cyberattack team, with upward of a thousand warriors, had hacked into classified information on more than 1,350 hazardous chemical sites in the U.S. Some of those sites contained chlorine, a gas used to devastating effect in World War I.
That’s right — the chlorine in New Jersey. Deputy Director Holmes had told them that there were already releases of the deadly gas from chemical plants in the Garden State.
But after she made that unnerving connection, she reminded herself that releases of chlorine gas hardly nailed down the North Koreans as the culprits. There were numerous cyberwarriors in scores of countries—including our own, she reminded herself — capable of launching a new and very different world war.
Still, if you walk like a duck and quack like a duck, you’re a goddamn duck, and North Korea had already attacked the U.S., so it was not difficult to imagine that country doing it again. Moreover, Lana could not help but suspect the Stalinist state because of its underlying message in 2009: The great America is vulnerable to the mighty North Korea.
The subtext was not a complete exaggeration: To pull off its 2009 coup, Unit 121 had turned 166,000 computers into robots, or “botnets,” as they were called in the trade. The very word made Lana shake her head. Basically, it meant that the North Koreans transformed vast numbers of computers into zombies that carried out their commands.